This is gonna be unpopular because he’s not dead, but George R. R. Martin.

The man is brilliant and spends a lot of time thinking. His love for his work is evidently in the fact that he’s telling something like 6 stories simultaneously and only 2 of them are obvious. Some of his best highlights to his work were the twists, the turns and the surprises.

I think the wind got taken out of his sails for GoT not just because the show caught up, overcame and ruined the ending of the series by doing it wrong, but because the fans of the show and books figured everything else out.

Being the author that outsmarts everyone is great, but this means that all his twists, all his secrets, all his surprise plots, all his upcoming shocks became the target of collective international groupthink. GRRM is smart, but he’s not smarter than millions of people with literal years of time and a rabid thirst to consume more of the world.

His Mad Queen got figured out, L+R=J got figured out, the Three Eyed Raven stuff got figured out. There’s further theories out there that are vast, detailed, pull evidence from other books and are debatably better than what he’s likely got on paper. I can’t imagine what it’s like to try to produce something - anything - that would satisfy my fans after they’ve quite literally figured everything out and then some.

I’d likely lose all love and desire to write anything further. I’d likely spend most of my time playing in the parts of my sandbox that haven’t been excavated by fans who’ve studied my psychological blueprint like their lives depended on it, like a new show or video game or project that deals with a different period on the timeline.

With all the vitriol and eye-rolling that gets flung his way with every non-update, I become more convinced he’s just given up and is doing what he wants because that’s what he’s got time for. If I’m his age, I’m too fucking old to try appealing to an audience that doesn’t trust me. I can recgonize he’s done himself no favours by making his promises and moving his deadlines, however, he’s just a human. WoW will never be what people want it to be, especially after all these years; it’s only saving grace will be that it came from GRRM and that grace won’t save him from some of the shit people will say about it.

I just don’t want to wait until the guy is dead to read people saying, “yeah maybe we were a little too mean and harshed his mellow and that’s why he spent his last 10 years focusing on dunk & egg while we waited to find out wtf was going on in the Vale.”

I think he’s just old now, knows it’s a losing battle and has decided to focus on what he likes before he croaks. Someone else can finish GoT and deal with the fans, he’s obviously decided 1-2-3 not it. I don’t approve of it, I have many nasty things I can say as a fan, but I also on some level completely understand it.

So, yeah. Resentfully, GRRM.