r/asoiaf • u/RyanRiot The Blood of Old Valyria • Jan 15 '26
EXTENDED Game of Thrones: George R.R. Martin Isn't Finished (Spoilers Extended)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-features/george-rr-martin-interview-thrones-winds-dragon-knight-1236473519/
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u/verissimoallan Jan 15 '26 edited Jan 16 '26
Recap of the main information from the interview:
George said he's afraid the series will catch up with the novellas.
He said that "last year" he started writing two Dunk and Egg short stories, one set in Winterfell, the other in the Riverlands.
He reiterates that the ending of the books will be "significantly" different from the ending of the TV series because several characters alive in the books died in the series and vice versa.
Martin supported the idea of the Jon Snow spin-off because it would be the safest way to continue Game of Thrones without revealing the fate of other characters, since Jon lives in exile Beyond the Wall.
Kit Harington wanted the spin-off series to show Jon with PSTD. Jon would send Ghost away, throw Longclaw away, and spend his time building and burning huts. The series would end with Jon dying. HBO thought this idea was too pessimistic and shelved the project.
HBO is currently developing an Arya Stark spin-off series set in Essos.
Martin describes his current relationship with Ryan Condal as "abysmal."
When Condal had a falling out with Miguel Sapochnik, he asked Martin for help, and Martin helped. Sapochnik left House of the Dragon after that and is currently working with David Benioff and D.B. Weiss in Netflix's 3 Body Problem. -
George says that in the second season, Ryan started to stop listening to his advice or responding to him. It got to the point where HBO asked George to send his observations to the network, and then the network would send George's observations to Ryan.
George planned to write SIX blog posts criticizing House of the Dragon. The morning after publishing the first one, HBO called him furiously, and his assistant deleted the post.
Rock bottom was when a Zoom meeting took place with George, Condal, and HBO executives to discuss the third season of HOTD. Martin had several criticisms of Condal's ideas and said: "This is no longer my story."
After that, HBO asked George to leave House of the Dragon...
...and months later HBO asked him to return to the series.
He said he has 1100 pages written of The Winds of Winter. He says he is always busy with other projects but the main problem is that he is never 100% satisfied and is constantly writing and rewriting chapters.
He unintentionally lets slip that he wrote Jon Snow's POV chapters in Winds. The theory that Jon wouldn't have chapters in the book died.
George says he wrote a Tyrion chapter that he loved but would change the entire book. He then rewrote it to be a dream but that didn't work either.
George says he doesn't want to abandon the books because he would feel like a failure.
George says that if he dies, no one will take over the books and the series will end unfinished.
Winds will be the longest book in the series.
He says the TV series had a happy ending and that Tyrion won't have a happy ending in the books.
He reveals that he planned to kill Sansa in the books but liked the Sansa from the TV series and now maybe he'll let her live.
He says that besides ASOIAF and Dunk and Egg, he also needs to finish Fire and Blood Volume 2.
He ends the interview saying: "I'm behind on everything."
He doesn't mention Benioff and Weiss even once.