Thrones showrunners aren't the only ones who
know how A Song of Ice and Fire will end.
Apparently, some exceptionally perceptive fans do
too.
While speaking at the Edinburgh International
Literary Festival, Martin noted that some readers
have correctly puzzled out the ending to the saga,
which consists of two more books, The Winds of
Winter and A Dream of Spring.
"I've wrestled with this issue, because I do want to
surprise my readers. I hate predictable fiction as a
reader, I don't want to write predictable fiction,"
Martin said, according to The Telegraph. "I
want to surprise and delight my reader and take
them in directions they didn't see coming. But I
can't change the plans. That's one of the reasons I
used to read the early fan boards back in the 90s
but stopped. One, I didn't have the time, but two
is this very issue.
"So many readers were reading the books with so
much attention that they were throwing up some
theories and while some of those theories were
amusing bullshit and creative, some of the
theories are right," Martin continued. "At least
one or two readers had put together the extremely
subtle and obscure clues that I'd planted in the
books and came to the right solution. So what do I
do then? Do I change it? I wrestled with that issue
and I came to the conclusion that changing it
would be a disaster, because the clues were there.
You can't do that, so I'm just going to go ahead.
Some of my readers who don't read the boards,
which thankfully there are hundreds of thousands
of them, will still be surprised and other readers
will say: 'See, I said that four years ago, I'm
smarter than you guys.'"
Martin's decision not to change the ending falls in
line with the author's aversion to fan service as a
whole. As he also explained at the festival, he
won't decide whether a character lives or dies—or
include gratuitous gay sex scenes—simply because
fans are calling for them. "I'm not going to do it
just for the sake of doing it," he said. "If the plot
lends itself to that, if one of my viewpoint
characters is in a situation, I'm not going to shy
away from it. I don't think I can insert things just
because everyone wants them. If it was a
democracy, Joffrey would have died much earlier
than he did."
You hear that, people? Might as well quit
your Change.org petition for a Jon Snow and
Jaime Lannister love scene. (But we can always
dream.)
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