To call Game of Thrones' final season divisive would be an understatement. Many longtime fans downright hated it, hence why there are still campaigns for those last batch of episodes to be remade. That won't happen, but salvation could be found in the form of George R.R. Martin's next novel in his A Song of Ice and Fire series, The Winds of Winter.
That's been hit by numerous delays, and while the author has said before that the ending of his books will differ from the HBO Max series, it sounds like the differences will be significant across the board.
In a new post on his Not A Blog page, Martin says: "What I have noticed more and more of late, however, is my [writing] is taking me further and further away from the television series. Yes, some of the things you saw on HBO in Game of Thrones you will also see in The Winds of Winter (though maybe not in quite the same ways)...but much of the rest will be quite different."
Explaining that these changes are inevitable, the writer would go on to explain that the biggest reason for that is the books being so much more in-depth and complicated. Remember, there are dozens of characters in those who never made it into the TV show, not to mention others who did that are basically unrecognisable when compared on the screen and page.
"One thing I can say, in general enough terms that I will not be spoiling anything," Martin would add, "[is that] not all of the characters who survived until the end of Game of Thrones will survive until the end of A Song of Ice and Fire, and not all of the characters who died on Game of Thrones will die in A Song of Ice and Fire."
The last book in this series was released way back in 2011, so this next instalment has been a long time coming. There was a huge amount of backlash to the decision to have Bran Stark end up ruling over Westeros, not to mention Jon Snow's decision to kill Daenerys Targaryen. If Martin has taken note of that, there's every chance he'll have changed his books to avoid a similar level of backlash (if indeed that was ever how he intended to end this story on the page).
There's still no release date for The Winds of Winter, but with the author hard at work on this novel, fingers crossed we get a positive update sooner rather than later.