#i don’t have much of a stake in this adaptation to tell u the truth

[emmriches]

i will say

[him-e]

Hi, I'm the anon who wrote the 5 asks about the Dany plotline and GRRM. I'd like to apologize to u for lashing out, it was uncalled for and u have every right to state those opinions regardless of what I (or anyone else) think. Feeling hurt by the show wrt Dany's story made me react badly to the idea that it was actually acceptable, especially coming from someone whose ideas I appreciate so much and have spent hours invested on. You can answer them, delete them, idk, I just wanted to say sorry.

No need to apologize, anon! I’m currently on semi-to-full hiatus and that’s why I’m being so slow at answering messages—and yeah, I understand the frustration completely, and I don’t blame you for it. ;))

I’m going to answer your ask anyway. Long reply after the cut:

I hope this doesn’t come off as offensive or confrontational bc that’s not the point, I’ve enjoyed reading your ASOIAF/GoT and TB metas for years and would not reply to them if I weren’t invested on them. That said, I’d like to ask why do you insist on 1) arguing that Dany’s dark turn was reasonable if you don’t hate her and 2) defending D&D and blaming GRRM for what happened on the show. When it comes to 1), sure, Dany might *accidentally* burn KL, but to willingly choose to burn thousands of innocents? She may accept that some casualties would have to occur, but not in the way that the show presented (in that she had the choice to not kill anyone but did). You argue that that direction was valid of because of the recurring theme of how power corrupts, but then I’d argue, what if it were Sansa, another character very much involved in the world of politics? Would you be ok if people argued that it’d make sense for her to give up her ideals and become just as power-hungry and cynic and bitter as Littlefinger? Probably not; what’s the point if those characters become their worst possible selves? Dany was made a villain, was implied to be mad and was called “your satanic majesty”. I really can’t see how you could call those writing decisions valid. When it comes to 2), I’m not saying GRRM is perfect, he’s been quite callous in the book series and especially in F&B when it comes to social issues, but D&D are also professional writers with critical thinking skills and moral values of their own who could have tried to alleviate the problems in the books and not made things even worse. That’s why I don’t get why you’re blaming GRRM for what D&D wrote when the former wasn’t even involved in the ending’s writing process aside from possibly giving them an outline of what happens. GRRM should be criticized for what he wrote and will write, and the finale may have feel been a product of his ideas, but he still has no (moral or legal) responsibility in helping to make the TV show better or worse.

The reason why I maintain that the show’s ending is a (badly written) version of GRRM’s ending is that I can 100% see Martin’s blueprint in the climax+anticlimax structure of the season. The way it twists the audience’s expectations and delves into what happens AFTER the final battle is won, the way it subverts the most reliable narrative conventions and, instead of building up in a crescendo towards a final spectacle where the heroes would sacrifice their lives to save the world in a blaze of glory, it shifts gears almost unpleasantly, slows down to show what happens to them once their heroic purpose is fulfilled and zooms in on their identity crisis, their depression and isolation and sudden lack of purpose… it’s all too deliberate, and IN MY PERSONAL OPINION it’s done with a vision in mind—something I don’t believe d&d would spontaneously put any effort in, especially not if GRRM had already served them a perfectly fine, crowd-pleasing endgame involving Dany’s heroic sacrifice against the Others.

I understand my stance might come across as “defending d&d and blaming GRRM”, but I’m really not? I’ve often repeated how I believe d&d messed things up and that GRRM’s version will make infinitely more sense and be infinitely better written, and I’m sure he will avoid the pitfalls of cynical, circular storytelling, because he’s ultimately a better writer and someone who believes in idealism and true heroism even as he deconstructs it. How can the overall narrative remain uplifting & give a message of hope and faith for humanity while still telling a story that ends with Dany’s descent into “true villainy” (but haven’t we repeated ad nauseam that heroes and villains are too reductive categories for asoiaf?), I don’t know, but it’s not my job to figure it out, and I ultimately trust & respect Martin’s vision and ability to tell the story HE wants.

sure, Dany might *accidentally* burn KL, but to willingly choose to burn thousands of innocents? She may accept that some casualties would have to occur, but not in the way that the show presented

1) I’ve always conceded that, while I think the gist of the storyline is Martin’s, there’s absolutely no guarantee that the battle of King’s Landing will go as we’ve seen in the show, or even happen at the same point of the story (for one thing, Young Griff & JonCon will probably be involved, and that seems more likely to happen before, and not after, the war for the dawn);

2) That said, what I’m relatively confident of, at this point, is that Dany will NOT die in the WftD as a self sacrificial hero (this is entirely FANON SPECULATION, and people treating it like a fixed point in the universe, something the narrative is “inevitably” building towards, is one of the reasons the fandom seems unable to critically analyze show!Dany’s evolution without going hysterical about it and resorting to no true scotsman arguments. I’ve often complained about the dangers of elevating fan theories to canon status, and trust me I never wanted to go full cassandra about this, but here we are). The details and plot points leading up to this might be wildly different from the show’s version, but I think Dany will survive the WftD, which will leave her directionless and purposeless and doubting the truth of her heroic destiny for the first time in her life after she hatched the dragons, and that she’ll cross the ultimate moral horizon in a hail mary to restore that sense of self, that sense of purpose, completing her parabola from princess in rags, to breaker of chains, to conqueror, to savior of humanity, to conqueror again, to TRAGIC HERO. How can this be a valid writing decision, you asked—well, why shouldn’t it? Is something only valid as long as it pleases the audience? What screams tragic hero more than the hero turning into the very thing she swore to eradicate, and realizing it only when it’s too late? There’s something genuinely chilly in Dany’s “if I look back, I’m lost” refrain. This is the mantra of someone who thinks the only way to stay alive is to cross one threshold after the other. So far this coping mechanism has brought her higher, and higher, and higher. But what if it will be her downfall? “I tried to grasp a star, overreached, and fell”, indeed;

3) Dany’s burning KL *accidentally* is like Stannis burning Shireen “but only if the circumstances are dire enough / the stakes are high enough”. No offense, but this is typical stan logic: you admit the possibility that your faves might go through a dark phase but you don’t want to have to unstan them, so you want them to do bad things for good reasons, or because there’s no other choice, or because “they didn’t know”. That’s understandable, but I don’t think Martin is the type of writer to give his character free passes or soften the blow of their moral crucibles like that. This is NOT to say that the show did Dany’s dark turn WELL, because it DIDN’T—her motivations were all over the place, the turning point (the bells) wasn’t believable because it lacked connection to her character arc, the narrative backed away from showing the attack from her pov which betrays the writers’ inability to make sense of this psychological downfall from HER perspective, etc. But to say “Dany will NEVER! BURN! INNOCENTS! ON PURPOSE!” sounds very, very premature to me.

(re: Sansa, hasn’t power corrupted her too, to an extent? Hasn’t she lied, schemed, manipulated, spilled secrets, in order to restore & secure the Stark hold on the North? Isn’t she queen, in part, because the rest of her family was scattered at the four corners of the known world? I’m not particularly happy with the way she was written this season, and I think some of her choices were questionable; but at the same time I reject the idea that a character ending up more flawed, or morally ambiguous, or less likeable than they were at the beginning must necessarily be bad storytelling)

I’m not saying GRRM is perfect, he’s been quite callous in the book series and especially in F&B when it comes to social issues, but D&D are also professional writers with critical thinking skills and moral values of their own who could have tried to alleviate the problems in the books and not made things even worse. That’s why I don’t get why you’re blaming GRRM for what D&D wrote when the former wasn’t even involved in the ending’s writing process aside from possibly giving them an outline of what happens. GRRM should be criticized for what he wrote and will write, and the finale may have feel been a product of his ideas, but he still has no (moral or legal) responsibility in helping to make the TV show better or worse.

Martin is not responsible of the show’s writing, but he is responsible of the outline he gave to the showrunners, and right now I have no reason to believe they didn’t follow it, at least for the most part. For years I’ve been told that “the show is not the books”, and while that’s certainly true, I can’t, and won’t, separate the show from the books when it comes to book speculation, because the show is still for all intents and purposes an ADAPTATION of the book series, and while it’s irresponsible to expect it to be a 1:1 transcription of what will happen in TWOW and ADOS, it’s also equally (imo) irresponsible to act like the two canons have nothing to do with each other and that it’s stupid to use the show as a resource for book speculation. If people want to pretend the show never happened, good for them, but that’s not the way I think, personally. I don’t blame GRRM for the show’s faults, and my reservations are actually 90% about the EXECUTION of the plot which is ENTIRELY on d&d, but there’s a 10% of my concerns that is about the IDEA in itself, regardless of context and execution—the idea of the story ending with a bittersweet anticlimax involving the death/downfall of the MOST PROMINENT FEMALE HERO OF THE SERIES, who is also the carrier of the most subversive anti-establishment political message in the story.

tldr: I’m not criticizing GRRM for what he hasn’t written yet, but I can certainly criticize him for what I think is a (however botched) adaptation of his outline, if the main selling points of said outline are questionable in themselves. No one can convince me that GRRM told d&d that Jon and Dany would die heroically to save the world and they ARBITRARILY decided to fuck it up for shock value or whatever, and just accidentally stumbled onto a more subversive and provocative ending than what Martin HIMSELF was planning. (that would make them two geniuses, even if the execution sucked, lol)

and if i’m wrong about it, well:

but until then…

[galadrieljones]

Hello. As I've told u, I'm currently struggling a lot with my ongoing chapter. (Context : It's my first fic !) I was wondering whether you had some chapters of the dead season that you absolutely hated, and did you manage to come to terms with it eventually ? Luv u, xo

Hey Amburu!! (*^_^*) xoxo

First of all: Yes, yes, yes. Writing can feel like a struggle sometimes, especially when  just starting out. Part of this is because we just don’t always know what to expect out of our writing process yet, and so we’re often left wondering, “At what point will this start to feel right or finished?” It’s hard to trust ourselves, as writers, and this can be discouraging, but just like with any skill, we can’t get better unless we persevere. I like to think that writing improvement exists like a series of plateaus. It is not incremental. It’s like, you are on one plateau for a really long time, and then one day, you sort of hit critical mass. You’ve written so much, a pattern has struck. You’ve figured something out, even if it is not conscious, and suddenly, you’re just better. This process never ends.

Now, to your question: In terms of the writing process, it can take a long time and a lot of words to hit the point where you feel like you can actually trust your instincts. Or, at least it did for me. In fact, The Dead Season is my first project in which I feel like I’ve actually honed a writing process that works, and I have been writing fiction for a long, long time. Part of my writing process is experiencing a great deal of doubt, at some point in the week, as to whether or not the chapter is going to come together at all. This makes me anxious, as it would many of us, and certain chapters have made me more anxious than others. I wouldn’t say that I’ve ever hated any of my chapters themselves, but there are certainly chapters that have given me a lot of stress and self-doubt, and this is a feeling that I very much dislike.

For example, my early chapters, ie: about 1-7, feel super experimental and are very small. I’m not terribly happy with them by any stretch. But I have, over time, found small things that are working, and things that, in the long run, I actually like very much and would not change. For example, there are some rare, very strange and dark moments in the Fade, and we don’t actually go to the Fade all that often in TDS, so this is good. This is important. There are also some early seeds planted per Solas’s complex friendships with both Sera and Dorian, and Sene and Sera as well, plus Sene and Cole. These are big relationships that I was already investigating early on, and so while those chapters certainly aren’t perfect, I feel good about the fact that this has ALWAYS been a story about friendship, first and foremost, and that’s something I have not forgotten.

I’ve also accepted the fact that I was still new to the story back then and still feeling my way through and figuring out what was to come. So of course my early chapters weren’t going to be as careful and multi-layered as chapters that would come much later. This is a serial piece, which makes it feel, to me, a little like writing for TV, in terms of methodology. It took me a minute to figure out my formula, my process, my characters, but once I did, things started to take shape much more quickly and reliably.

Writing is hard, and it can be a struggle, but that is normal. The most important thing to remember, especially when writing more or less publicly, like for a fandom, is to not compare yourself and your writing to others and their writing. That is a toxic beast that we all fall prey to from time to time, but it will hamper your creativity more than anything. Also, and more practically, a lot of the time, when a chapter is causing problems, it might just be that you need to step back, locate the problem, and solve it in the quickest way possible so that you can move forward. Can’t get a transition to work? Then fuck it. Take the transition out and just put in a page break instead. Writing is sometimes just grunt work. It’s just problem-solving. Getting from point A to point B. The art we read on any brilliant page of any piece of writing we love takes many gruelling drafts to complete. It is a process. No writing comes out perfectly on the first try.

UNDER THE CUT: I go through some specific chapters in TDS that I really struggled with, mostly to give you some concrete perspective on the fact that YOU ARE NOT ALONE in your struggle to bring a chapter together. This is for anyone who’s interested!! (It was no bother and actually very productive!

Chapter 10: Hallelujah

I wrote that entire chapter while sitting on a bar stool at a cafe in my hometown in Wisconsin. I pulled a Patrick Weekes on this chapter, and it was hard, ie:  For all the Fade stuff with Sene and then Sene and Cole, I adapted the meter of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, hence the title. Looking back, it’s a little precious, per my aesthetic, but I’m glad I gave it a try and somehow made it work. It was just a blatant nod to Weekes and his brilliant writing in DA:I.

Chapter 21: It’s Raining in Val Royeaux, Chapter 22 & 23: Man of Faith, Pt. 1 & 2

These chapters were logistical nightmares. This was also my first go at using the stakes and politics of the world, plus a quest in the game, to really propel the plot AND Solas’s character forward. At first, what was so difficult, was navigating Josephine’s plan and introducing the “game” in a way that felt like it was informed by Wicked Eyes and Wicked Hearts without piggy-backing it completely. This would be an innocent affair. No murder, only sly quips and earning the favor of the Comte and Comtess Berrande. Plus, romance. Also, this whole thing was me building toward Solas’s diplomatic charm, which is HUGE per his history with Mythal, and then I just had to get to that scene with Blackwall like…I had been working toward that scene for weeks. So a lot was at stake. All told this was a LOT of writing, and I had a really bad head cold when I did it, and I was very very worried about these chapters for a LONG time. I still have not gone back to read them. I assume they’re okay?? Lol.

Chapter 25: The Mother We Share

This is the purple chapter, and I still think there is probably TOO MUCH purple and TOO MUCH mother imagery dumped in. This chapter took me FOREVER and was the moment I realized Solas had become too soft, and that he needed a shove in the other direction. So I had to introduce Abelas, and also, at this point, my stuff with Mythal/Flemeth disassociating began to take shape. Bleh. Thinking about this chapter feels like wading in molasses sometimes.

Chapter 30: Dust of My Dust

This chapter was hard, because it was transitional. I had to get us OUT of Crestwood, and Sene and Solas were in two different places, which had never happened before. Sometimes it is SO HARD to just get from one scene to the next. And so in the end, to save myself more pain, I ended up just splitting the chapter up into a couple separate sections and skipping the transition altogether. This was so useful that I ended up using the section format in multiple future chapters and will most certainly do it again. Half of writing is just problem-solving, it turns out.

Chapter 34: The Elves are Asleep

This is the chapter that comes after Sene learns the truth about Solas as an ancient elf, which comes right after he finally tells her about the miscarriage. This chapter was VERY hard, as it starts in the Fade, and then they come back hard to reality. Huge tone shift. Dorian is there, etc. I’m still a little unhappy with this chapter, especially the ending. It was difficult to find the thesis, ie: what is the ultimate goal? I knew it had to be something with Sene’s character, as this is when her flaws and fears truly start to take shape, but I just couldn’t get a grip on the ending. I probably wrote 14 different endings until I finally figured out what her state of mind needed to be and even still, I’m a little unsure, because I just couldn’t mess around with it anymore. I was going nuts. So I just published it and moved on. Moveon.org. Sometimes you just gotta. Bleh. Oh well.

Chapter 36: Hey, Morrigan. Spin me a tale.

THIS CHAPTER KILLED ME. Lol. Looking back, I am actually very pleased with it, but at the time, it was so much that I had to delay publishing, because I just could not get it right. In the end, it just ended up being a series of impressionistic, almost paratactic scenes, all with very oblique titles. Again, problem-solving. Though I love writing like this. It’s totally my wheelhouse. But to earn this kind of thing, I knew I needed to establish a really strong thematic drawstring to unite all the pieces. I had like thirty metaphors going at once with the knitting and the gloves and the hands, and then creating that sense of confusion in the end, between what Solas is experiencing NOW and what he is remembering–that was really fucking hard. This chapter took me two weeks to draft, and I remember publishing it at 2am and then dragging myself to bed like TIS FINALLY COMPLETE.

Chapter 38: Assassins

This chapter was another logistical nightmare. I don’t typically write a ton of consecutive, immediately chronological scenes, or scenes where the tension completely shifts based on real-time action. But in this chapter, I had to locate Sene’s state of mind with Mythal, coordinate the accidental reveal of Solas’s identity, then cue the assassins, trigger Sene’s response, locate Mythal’s state of mind, and then get everyone down to the brig. FFFFFF. Like this is NOT my strength as a writer, and so this chapter was a huge challenge and I feel like I actually learned a lot. Also, I remember I initially wrote past the ending of this chapter by like 2500 words, only later to realize I needed to save all that for later. So yeah. :deep breath: This chapter, in my mind, feels full of sharp knives.

@thevikingwoman, per your interests.