5 Comments
Oct 5, 2021Liked by Erik Kain

I definitely soured on HBO's Thrones series after the wreck of Season 8 (and Season 7 didn't exactly hit it out of the park either). That would be hard to get past no matter what.

But I think I've overdosed on A Song of Ice and Fire in general and I can't get back into it. I read all the books (most twice), watched every season of the show, bought and read that atlas/history thing where GRRM named some of the characters after muppets, read the Dunk and Egg novellas, and embarrassingly spent years listening to two (two!) podcasts on the books. Nothing can live up to that kind of over-saturation. Shit, I'm not even interested in clicking on that TRAILER. The idea of watching it makes me queasy.

I tell myself that I'll still read Winds of Winter when and if it's finally released, but I probably won't. I read Dance With Dragons years ago and don't remember any of it. I'm sure not going to invest the time to reread the series, and whatever else it does, the series requires and rewards close reading. Trying to squint my way through the WoW chapters that George released online didn't exactly fill me with excitement either.

So definitely not going to watch the show, particularly since we'd need to resubscribe to HBO to do it. I'm genuinely not being cynical when I say I don't imagine it could be very good: the series fell apart when it went past the novels in the timeline and House of Dragons will have the same lack of solid source material. More, prequels are just rough to begin with. We already know how the story ends.

Expand full comment