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Game of Thrones author George RR Martin has described his "wild ride" after the finale of the television juggernaut aired yesterday.
"Game of Thrones" star Emilia Clarke said she watched recordings of Adolf Hitler and other historic dictators to prepare for her epic speech as Daenerys Targaryen in Sunday’s series finale.
Clarke’s
character, also known as the Mother of Dragons and about a half-dozen
other names, delivered a warmongering speech in two fictional languages,
Valyrian and Dothraki, which the actress had to learn over the course
of the eight-season series.
Emilia Clarke watched speeches by Hitler, other dictators to prepare for 'Game of Thrones' and MEdia Dragon finale ...
HBO revealed almost 20 million people tuned in to see the conclusion of the nine-year saga, making it the network's most watched episode ever.
Reflecting in his blog on the show that turned him into a worldwide celebrity, Martin said he couldn't believe it was over.
"The years have gone past in the blink of an eye. Can it really have been more than a decade since my manager Vince Gerardis set up a meeting at the Palm in LA, and I sat down for the first time with [showrunners] David Benioff and DB Weiss for a lunch that lasted well past dinner?" he said.
Martin singled out HBO for special thanks.
"Any other network, and GAME OF THRONES would not have been what it became. Most other networks, this series never gets made at all," he said.
The author did not dodge the questions about how the show will eventually compare to his books.
He has been working on the next instalment of the series, titled The Winds of Winter, since 2011.
"I am working in a very different medium than [showrunners] David and Dan, never forget. They had eight hours for this final season. I expect these last two books of mine will fill 3,000 manuscript pages between them before I'm done... and if more pages and chapters and scenes are needed, I'll add them."
Earlier, your Westerosi correspondents Pete Marsh and Dan Miller hosted a live blog to reflect on the series and see how the world reacted to the finale.
You can look back over it below.
In a Q&A with the NY Times back in October, George R.R. Martin connected the goings-on in Westeros with the challenges raised by climate change here in the real world.
The people in Westeros are fighting their individual battles over power and status and wealth. And those are so distracting them that they’re ignoring the threat of “winter is coming,” which has the potential to destroy all of them and to destroy their world. And there is a great parallel there to, I think, what I see this planet doing here, where we’re fighting our own battles. We’re fighting over issues, important issues, mind you — foreign policy, domestic policy, civil rights, social responsibility, social justice. All of these things are important. But while we’re tearing ourselves apart over this and expending so much energy, there exists this threat of climate change, which, to my mind, is conclusively proved by most of the data and 99.9 percent of the scientific community. And it really has the potential to destroy our world. And we’re ignoring that while we worry about the next election and issues that people are concerned about, like jobs. Jobs are a very important issue, of course. All of these things are important issues. But none of them are important if, like, we’re dead and our cities are under the ocean. So really, climate change should be the number one priority for any politician who is capable of looking past the next election. But unfortunately, there are only a handful of those. We spend 10 times as much energy and thought and debate in the media discussing whether or not N.F.L. players should stand for the national anthem than this threat that’s going to destroy our world.
That message has always lurked in the background of the HBO show but seemed closer to the surface in the latest episode — mild spoilers! — which finds several factions that were formerly set against each other in various configurations all working together to defeat a much more threatening common enemy. It is quite difficult, nearly impossible even, to imagine a similar coalition of Democrats, Republicans, Democratic Socialists, Libertarians, and everyone in between allied with each other to combat climate change, but we’re going have to get there somehow. We either do it soon and get the world we want or we continue to do very little and pay a much heavier price later for a world that no one wants.
UPDATESee also Democratic Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren’s recap of the first episode of the current season of Game of Thrones. Wait, what?!
And as much as Dany wants to take on her family’s enemies and take back the Iron Throne, she knows that she must first fight the army of the dead that threatens all mankind. This is a revolutionary idea, in Westeros or anywhere else. A queen who declares that she doesn’t serve the interests of the rich and powerful? A ruler who doesn’t want to control the political system but to break the system as it is known? It’s no wonder that the people she meets in Westeros are skeptical.
