In defence of Martin

People who are familiar with HBO’s critically acclaimed TV show ‘Game of Thrones’ know that it was adapted from author George RR Martin’s epic fantasy series 'A Song of Ice and Fire'. Despite being fawned upon by viewers all across the world during its starting years, the show’s popularity ebbed down quite significantly in the later years of the series. What also does not help is the fact that Martin’s book series is not completed either.

'A Song of Ice and Fire' has five epic fantasy books until now and Martin has promised two further books to complete the series. It seems that the promise has remained a promise because the sixth book is yet to be released and no one can speculate when the seventh volume will come out. The fifth book 'A Dance with Dragons' came out in 2011, so we are currently waiting past a decade for the final two volumes to get published!

The first book of the series 'A Game of Thrones' came out in 1996, followed by 'A Clash of Kings' in 1998 and 'A Storm of Swords' in 2000. 'A Feast for Crows' was published in 2005 and its successor was released six years later. The HBO series also began in 2011 and up to the fifth season, it relatively followed the books. The problem which started was from 2016, when they were about to release Season 6.

There were no further books to follow up so the showrunners David Benioff and DB Weiss (popularly known as ‘D&D’) decided to proceed with the TV series on their own. Martin gave them the freedom to take on the story onwards the way they like it, while also giving them scraps of ideas here and there to make the plot go more interesting. Season 6 turned out decent and didn’t disappoint but seasons 7 and 8 ultimately ended up being a disaster. The scriptwriting quality also significantly dropped and the showrunners were being heavily criticised from all sides for ‘ruining’ Martin’s great work. Therein came a succession of ‘rantings’ from fans all across the world, trolling and sharing memes of D&D in the internet, even to this day.

While criticism is certainly understandable, we have to remember that this failure of the series was totally anticipated. How on earth can you go on to make a good storytelling without a proper source material? The fact that it went past the book series has to be given credit for, let alone the fact that Season 6 did pretty well. Furthermore, we have to remember that ASOIAF isn’t your regular ordinary story. It is a complex genre of medieval war and fantasy with a cast of over a ‘thousand’ characters so to tackle it in TV in the first place is by no means an easy feat, putting aside the fact that they had to do the final three seasons without a proper, complete source version. Of course this should not by any means be an excuse but we have to remember that Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings were successful because they had complete book series a.k.a. source materials so all they had to was to adapt it besides just adding some extra flavors of their own to make the spice appear tasty.

The hate banter that D&D gets, despite being understandable, often gets over the top which goes on to say that becoming a fanatic can sometimes cloud our sense of rationality which causes people to forget to bring up logic and reasons behind our statements. So, is the Martin the one to be blamed here? Well, if we see the aforementioned released dates of the books, the final two volumes took a way longer period to come out than the first three. It can definitely be seen that Martin’s pace had slowed up a bit. Both - 'Feast and Dance' – are quite passive in terms of plot moving as well, centering more on world building and filled up with heavy description of towns, villages and lives of smallfolk.

While readers certainly can find it to be quite tedious, this is by no means an example of bad writing. On the contrary, it is more of a necessary set up for the showdown and endgame that’s about to come storming into the last two books. In addition, a good world building is imperative when you are trying to tell a story that’s going on in a fictional, fantasy world. Also, these books put a great deal emphasis on character development and ASOIAF is well known for creating brilliantly written characters.

Overall, this would explain why Martin’s writing dropped pace but not in quality. So even if one gets angry with the author, it would be unfair to blame him either. However, an alternative solution for him could have been to finish the entire series before allowing it to be made into TV series. Perhaps this is where his flaw as a writer was, not to foresee that he would be able to complete the last two books soon enough.

The author has also admitted in an interview that he regrets the show going past the books. If we look at the first three books, there is a lot of action going on, political backstabbing, war and violence, adventures through unknown lands among many other intriguing plotlines. May be the readers were a bit frustrated to wait for a long time and see so ‘little’ plot movement? Perhaps that would explain why readers are so desperate for the sixth and seventh volumes to come out. At the end of the fifth book, fans are left with so many cliffhangers for so many of their favorite characters that it feels like a swinging pendulum. In the world of ASOIAF, anything can happen to any people, even if it is your favorite character.

However, the good news is that Martin has indeed given us updates the recent months, even back in previous year. In 2020, the sage fantasy author went on to say that he had written ‘hundreds and hundreds of pages’ of his sixth volume! However, like his literary works, even Martin’s message also has a bittersweet ending as he went on to say later on that he ‘still has more hundreds of pages to write to bring the novel to a satisfactory conclusion’. So we are now two years after that and still no signs of the book coming out! What also doesn’t help is the fact that George will turn seventy-four this year and many fans are questioning his health and long he will be able to keep up. Back in 2014, George said he finds these questions ‘extremely offensive’ but another famous author Stephen King has also voiced the same concerns. King is a great fan of Martin’s work and he too hopes the books will be completed.

*Chowdhury Taoheed Al-Rabbi : Student of BUP (Bangladesh University of Professionals)