What TV SHOWS are you watching?

Back around 2009 or so, I got frustrated at how long it was taking Martin to finish A Dance of Dragons. I mean, he banged out books 2 and 3 in just two years each, so I didn't understand why it took so long to get out book 4 and then book 5. So after checking the usual sites for an updated estimated publication date, I did a google search: "finish the book george."

I got a direct hit. A couple of frustrated fans had created a blog titled Finish the Book George, and they alternately posted amusing rants about Martin's slow writing and updates on his various non-writing activities, like going to conventions or collecting miniatures. At some point, they said that George threatened to never finish the series if people like them kept harassing him. So maybe that's why George still hasn't finished the last two books, 13 years after publishing A Dance of Dragons. I mean, he might have writer's block, but it's hard to believe that the writer's block lasted 13 years and somehow permitted to write other books in the meantime. Or maybe he was just unmotivated to finish once he saw how fans reacted to the finale of the tv show, which was likely quite similar to how he planned to finish the series.

He's never going to finish those books. As an amateur trying to write an epic story of my own, I can tell you that it takes passion to stick with. And part of that passion comes from the desire to get your story out into the world. George found another way to get the story he wanted to tell out of him. Everyone even knows the ending of the series already not just the next book. His passion has surely moved on from it at this point.

He has done a lot of other work in other genres and mediums so it's not like this is his life's work in his mind, even though to fans it undoubtedly is. I say this as a big fan of the series but knowing it won't be finished.

I have a hard enough time finishing much shorter projects so I get it, though it is too bad.

I appreciate that he has the guts to not work on it if he doesn't want to work on it. He could churn out some piece of shit just to get fans off of his back, but he doesn't do that. He's got fuck you money and if I had that, you can bet I'd be telling some people "fuck you".

hotseatgames wrote: I appreciate that he has the guts to not work on it if he doesn't want to work on it. He could churn out some piece of shit just to get fans off of his back, but he doesn't do that. He's got fuck you money and if I had that, you can bet I'd be telling some people "fuck you".

Never underestimate the power of fuck you money.

He's also 75 years old. I know I don't want to be working that hard when I'm 75 years old, especially if I have a Scrooge McDuck style vault of money to roll around in every day. So yeah, I get it. It's weird though. He's had a long and varied career, but through all of it, he was always a professional, banging out the content on deadline. It's only now that he got crazy rich and famous that the work ethic appears to have all but disappeared. At this point, I don't really care anymore. If he writes the book, I'll read it. If he doesn't, I'll read something else. It's just sad, because those first three ASOIAF books were so damned good.

I wouldn't even call it a change in work ethic. Sometimes stuff just doesn't speak to you, like Chris was saying. The story is there, but the drive isn't. I totally get that. It's something I still struggle with occasionally, as we're trying to get a webcomic going and I'm two dozen pages into the script and I'm like: "Yeah, this isn't what I want to be doing right now." But then you push through and it (usually) turns out OK. But doing one comic script is much different from doing a seven-novel epic. It was probably more feasible before he let it grow to the size it has. Now it just may not be. Whatevs.

I kinda liked Fire and Blood. There are enough snippests of what I like to think of as "GRRMisms" to make it more interesting than the relatively dry World of Ice and Fire book. That House of the Dragon seems to be determined to drive all the salaciousness out of the story, even the multiple versions presented in F&B, is bizarre to me. HotD could have been waaaay more sexy, perverse, and violent than GoT.

I think the writers thought Alicent and Rhaenyra could carry the story themselves as a sort of "two women making it in a mans world" allegory, but unfortunately as a WAR story there is just too much that needs be done and those 2 do very little of it. Condal should have either broken away from F&B way more than he has or just accepted that he needs some (male) characters to be more decisive and instrumental in events.

The show is just so sterile in season 2, the entire Rhaenyra/Daemon relationship was tossed aside and I think that could have been a lynchpin character dynamic instead of this Rhaenyra/Mysaria thing. Aemond as a villain could have worked if they had bothered to have him do anything actually villainous. Instead Criston Cole seems to have been skewed that way. The show seems hellbent on showing the Blacks as being "in the right" but they aren't really committed to it so we get this wishy-washy Alicent who started all this but now seems like a hand wringing woman who didn't think it all through instead of a shrewd political operator who is making choices to protect her kids against a childhood friend who unfortunately has made some bad choices of her own and is now married to an object psychopath.

Anyway Cobra Kai season 5 part 1(?) is pretty good. With no movie villains to bring back the Eagle Fang/Cobra Kai/Miyagi-Do dojo war has sorta stalled but the 'kid' actors have grown enough to start shouldering more of the story burden. They can almost legit act now.

I'm halfway through Cobra Kai half-Season 6. Someone on reddit called this show a 'live-action anime' and that seems the best description. I hope they go out strong as the show overall is a fun ride even if it has some rough parts.

The Brothers Sun was kind of a mess. There was a lot of great stuff especially in Michelle Yeoh's performance and at least one standout action scene every episode, but it lacked focus, especially tonally, and the courage to follow through on some of the ideas it raised.

The tonal problems are most apparent in TK. He's introduced as weed-dealing comic relief with underground connections. He undergoes not one but two surprisingly explicit torture scenes just to come back to sit on Bruce's car, demanding to come along on the next adventure. Breaking Bad could bounce back and forth across that line. The Brothers Sun can't.

Unexpectedly, it's willing to ask whether the gang life is worth the violence, both inflicted upon the members and those caught in its orbit. Charles remains traumatized by his first kill, and the Boxers aren't wrong. But all that is washed in the final scene. Maybe the tong can be legitimate? Whatever. Commit to it. Either go all in on the excesses of the gang life or call them out. Just don't raise the question just to ignore it.

I'd be willing to check out the creators' next series, assuming they can find a partner or producer willing to ride them to hone it to an edge.

The DECAMERON (Netflix) is an adaptation of the Renaissance novel. Pretty luscious sets and costumes, but it ends up feeling a bit by-the-numbers.

I read the book many years ago and recall it being kind of Canterbury Tales: a framing story, with the characters telling each other stories to pass the time -- in this case, to amuse each other while they wait out the plague in a countryside estate. The show ditches that, and instead portrays the wiles of the various nobles and servants. The plotlines and tone range from erotic to comic to tragic to intrigue. Lots of lying and false identities and so on. It's all fine I guess, and it's hard to argue that it's not well-done. Maybe I'm just spoiled by prestige TV generally.

House of the Draggin' season finale was a total snooze. God, this show is frustrating.

I read that HBO cut the show's budget, so they could only make 8 episodes instead of 10. But they clearly didn't restructure the story to fit into 8 episodes. You can see that the 8th episode is all the setup ... presumably episode 9 would have been a banger, showing the "Battle of the Gullet," and then episode 10 would have been the aftermath. But without eps 9 and 10, we get the setup, and then it just ... stops.

The showrunner has confirmed that the show is going 4 seasons, which is insane. There's so much story yet to go, and at the pace they're going, it'll take 20 more seasons to cover it, not 2!

Game of Thrones, for all its faults, was entertaining as hell. HotD is none of that. They seemed determined to remove all the pulpy genre stuff that made GoT so much damn fun to watch.

I was in shock at how bad that season finale was. And I'm out. They can get fucked.

As the clearly lone voice of reason here, I liked it well enough.

I canceled my Max subscription, and they have been pretty relentless with emails, begging me to come back, but they have yet to give me a financial incentive to do so. Just now I completed a survey for them, and at the end, left this comment:

House of the Dragon season 2 sucked, hard. You should be embarrassed.

Yeah, I canceled almost a year ago; after the first season ended and was for shit. Once Discovery took over and started flooding it with all kinds of "reality" TV crap, I was done. I have zero interest in any of that and it was drowning out all of the genuinely good writing that HBO had for many years been famed for. It's too bad.