It’s been suggested that George R.R. Martin wasn’t blown away in the most positive way by the Game of Thrones series finale. If so, he isn’t alone, but (of course) Martin has a reason to take what materialized a bit more personally than the casual dragon viewer. And Martin, who is still heavily involved in adapting his many Westeros-based stories at HBO, isn’t afraid to air his general feelings on adaptations, although to be fair to HBO also, they didn’t exactly adapt an ending to the A Song Of Fire And Ice books because an ending doesn’t yet exist.
Yet Martin regularly renews his feelings on the subject, and a few years ago, he and Neil Gaiman indulged in a delightful onstage discussion in which Gaiman coaxed Martin into discussing Tywin Lannister’s bodily functions. In that conversation, the pair also discussed the potential horrors involved with seeing your literary babies be adapted for better or worse, and the subject still clearly weighs heavily on GRRM’s mind. In a recent Not-a-Blog blog post, Martin reflects on that conversation and doubles down, but don’t worry, he’s got a point coming as well:
“Everywhere you look, there are more screenwriters and producers eager to take great stories and ‘make them their own.’ It does not seem to matter whether the source material was written by Stan Lee, Charles Dickens, Ian Fleming, Roald Dahl, Ursula K. Le Guin, J.R.R. Tolkien, Mark Twain, Raymond Chandler, Jane Austen, or… well, anyone. No matter how major a writer it is, no matter how great the book, there always seems to be someone on hand who thinks he can do better, eager to take the story and ‘improve’ on it. ‘The book is the book, the film is the film,’ they will tell you, as if they were saying something profound. Then they make the story their own.
“They never make it better, though. Nine hundred ninety-nine times out of a thousand, they make it worse.”
Martin goes on to point out which new series makes him feel differently about adaptations. That would be FX’s Shōgun, which GRRM binged and fully adored as an example of “[o]nce in a while, though, we do get a really good adaptation of a really good book, and when that happens, it deserves applause.”
Well, it’s a good thing — for widespread TV viewers along with GRRM — that there will be much more Shōgun coming. In the meantime, Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is currently filming, and House of the Dragon will return to HBO on June 16. Hopefully, GRRM will be much happier with the way those series end than he perhaps felt with Game of Thrones.
(Via GRRM’s ‘Not A Blog’ Blog)
