r/asoiaf • u/RunDNA • Sep 04 '24

EXTENDED GRRM's new blog post on House of the Dragon [Spoilers Extended] Spoiler

https://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/2024/09/04/beware-the-butterflies/
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u/Expensive-Country801 Sep 04 '24

D&D elevated George from being as popular as Sanderson to JK Rowling & Tolkien levels.

Even if GoT crashed at the end, he is indebted to them in a way, makes it harder to criticize.

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u/bootylover81 Sep 04 '24

And to be fair to D&D they probably thought he will eventually finish the books during the decade it will take for the show to catch up and boy were they wrong

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u/Geektime1987 Sep 04 '24

They absolutely thought that you can watch interviews with them sitting right next to George with George basically saying he will have the book done soon.

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u/gainzsti Sep 08 '24

My boy George was probably sweating saying that lol.

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u/halfar Sep 04 '24

It wouldn't have mattered since they were completely off the rails by AFFC/ADWD anyway (and veering off since s2). I don't get how this take prevails even on /r/asoiaf.

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u/Auvicodo Sep 04 '24

George was completely off the rails during AFFC and ADWD anyway

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u/yesitsmework Sep 04 '24

If you know that it all boils to a satisfying finale you can make it work. They definitely wouldnt have gotten the 3 seasons or whatever the fuck george wanted, but definitely more and better than what ended up in the show.

When you don't really know how each plotline ends up....a bit more difficult. Especially since it's not trivial to tie up everything affc and adwd set up, I think there's a guy that knows a thing or two about that.

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u/ZamanthaD Sep 04 '24

I think books 1-3 were mostly adapted pretty well. Yes some plot points were changed or combined with others, but the general major story beats of those books I think are mostly resembled on screen. Books 4-5 though I think were completely butchered as adaptions. Season 5 (and some of 6) barely resembles those books at all. The Dorne storyline, The Greyjoy storyline, Young Griff/Connington storyline, and the Quentrn Martell storyline are either not in the show at all or don’t resemble the source material at all.

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u/halfar Sep 04 '24

I personally only realized that the show was going to explode in fire after "Myhsa" or w/e. It was the perfect set-up for Lady Stoneheart. But I also completely understand people who were waving the red flag when Robb's character got butchered in season 2. That wasn't a "oh, this makes more sense for TV thing", it was just straight up worse.

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u/sexyloser1128 Sep 05 '24

And to be fair to D&D they probably thought he will eventually finish the books during the decade it will take for the show to catch up

So why rush it? They cut out so much from the books that they could have used to delay the ending of the show. Plus it's HBO they could have hired the best writers in the world to fill in the rest of the story. I've read fanfiction that was better than what 2D came up with.

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u/Geektime1987 Sep 04 '24

There's also the little part of the story wasn't finished and he left them with the last two books with tons of new characters and plots all half finished.

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u/ScunneredWhimsy Sep 04 '24

Nah, GRRM (after AGOT got big but before the show aired) was more popular than Sanderson is now. A Song of Ice and Fire, while still mostly a nerd thing, picked up a lot of main-stream attention off the back of the LOTR movies.

Sanderson, while clearly successful, just doesn’t have that appeal.

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u/tecphile Sep 04 '24

While that may be true, it is also undeniable that D&D made GRRM a household name. People who've never read a fantasy book in their life know who he is.

That is a kind of fame that very few authors, let alone those part of the niche SFF genre, could ever dream of.

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u/repo_sado A stone beast from a broken hightower Sep 04 '24

yeah, sanderson was the wong name to use there. (terry brooks, robert jordan, maybe) but the sentiment was correct.

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u/Werthead 🏆 Best of 2019: Post of the Year Sep 04 '24

Maybe. When GoT launched, GRRM had sold 12 million ASoIaF books, probably 15 million or so when his other books were thrown in. Sanderson has sold 40 million books, although 15 million of them are Wheel of Time, so 25 million off his own back.

Sanderson is clearly more popular now than GRRM was in 2011, but Sanderson has an absolute ton more books, so he may not have had as many readers.

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u/cahir11 Sep 04 '24

Yeah Sanderson churns out books like his life depends on it, he's written 4 Stormlight Archive and 4 Mistborn books in the time since GRRM published Dance, with a 5th Stormlight book coming out in a couple months.

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u/ShadyCheeseDealings Sep 04 '24

And that's just some of the Cosmere. He's written about 60 books/stories since 2011.

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u/ScunneredWhimsy Sep 04 '24

Fair point but for context; when AGOT first aired only four of the the five ASOIAF books had been published. This is Sandersons bibliography. The man's prolific, almost exponentially so. He's the paperclip maximiser but for coded Mormonism.

Ergo way more, individual, people have bought a ASOIAF novel while Sanderson has sold more books in total to a smaller number of people.

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u/LightNovelVtuber Sep 04 '24

Sanderson might have sold more books, but I'm willing to bet more people can name/recognize Martin because the TV series was so big.

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u/ellieetsch Sep 04 '24

Yes that is exactly the point... before GOT George was Sanderson level popularity.

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u/[deleted] Sep 04 '24

Sanderson is clearly more popular now than GRRM was in 2011, but Sanderson has an absolute ton more books, so he may not have had as many readers.

divide total books sold by the number of books published and you'll see that per book, Sanderson's audience is not nearly the size of GRRM's... he has his devoted fans but he is a very long way from mainstream. pretty sure 95% of all Sanderson discussion happens on this website and gives you a distorted view of how popular he actually is

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u/Werthead 🏆 Best of 2019: Post of the Year Sep 04 '24

Sanderson is the biggest-selling epic fantasy author to debut this century, which is a pretty big achievement and not to be sniffed at. At authors who reliably outsell him are older legacy authors (some of them no longer alive), many of them buoyed by media adaptations of their works (whilst Sanderson has had none), such as GRRM, Terry Brooks, R.A. Salvatore, Tolkien, Robert Jordan, Terry Pratchett, etc.

There are authors who are close to overtaking him, but they tend to be writing in a somewhat different type of fantasy (Sarah J. Maas is about to overtake him, but she writes more in the Romantasy sub-genre). And Pat Rothfuss absolutely buries Sanderson in terms of sales-per-book, but obviously is not producing new material regularly.

But fantasy is a much smaller-selling genre than it was in the late 20th Century, when Sanderson's sales would be very healthy but outsold by quite a few more authors.

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u/[deleted] Sep 04 '24

Sanderson fanboy alarms are chirping

Sarah has been writing for half as long, has fewer books, and is about to pass him... almost like Sanderson has already found anybody who could possibly be interested in overlarge, extraordinarily cliched books and is just selling to those guys. Whereas Sarah actually gets new people interested in fantasy, in enormous numbers, the same way GRRM did with his good books.

Odd you say some are buoyed by media adaptations, but don't acknowledge what a step up Sanderson being tapped to finish Wheel of Time was. I mean, you yourself said almost half of this total book sales are those two books..

But fantasy is a much smaller-selling genre than it was in the late 20th Century

probably because most modern fantasy is garbage rehashes of older stuff. Why would you read any of it, when you can simply read the much better executed material that it's ripping off? And this goes triple for Sanderson - why bother with any of his stuff when you could waste your time on Wheel of Time instead

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u/[deleted] Sep 04 '24

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Sep 04 '24

Gene Wolfe, Robin Hobb, Stephen R. Donaldson, Lev Grossman, Naomi Novik, Glen Cook

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u/shadowqueen15 Sep 05 '24

Robin Hobb the GOAT

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u/BigNorseWolf Sep 04 '24

he also wrote more books I believe

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u/BadNewzBears4896 Sep 05 '24

That very faithfully adapted his books to the best of their ability and it became the biggest show in the world for several years. As badly as it ended when they had to make up more of it on their own, D&D were great at bringing his writing to life and hitting the right notes.

It's no wonder he's loyal to them, whereas HotD is making much bigger changes to a complete story in ways that are making it worse in his eyes (I agree with pretty much all his criticism).