What Will Become of Game of Thrones In The Long Run?

Oh hi there, Kotaku. Welcome to the Wednesday night open thread!

For tonight’s open thread, a single prompt, brought on by a great article over at Pajiba. What will happen to Game of Thrones, long-term?

Brian Byrd lays out a number of big challenges for the show, including the fact that “There’s no way HBO can continue to fund Game of Thrones for another six-plus seasons.” In fact, he puts the chances that that problem kills the series at 20%. The bigger potential problem? That George R.R. Martin takes too long to finish the books (or just doesn’t finish them), and it kills the series.

Martin is not James Patterson, shitting out paint-by-numbers fiction twice a year. The dude writes like a tortoise on Ambien. After three books in a period of four years, Martin apparently decided, for whatever reason, to viciously and repeatedly sodomize the concept of deadlines. The gap between “Storm” and “Feast” was five years; “Feast” and “Dance” six. This pace becomes a problem when, say, a hugely popular television show is dependent on your source material to exist.

No release date currently exists for “The Winds of Winter,” the sixth book in the series. All anyone knows is that some of the chapters are written and that in an April webcast Martin mentioned that the final two books will weigh in around 1500 pages … each.

I gotta agree, that’s a real potential problem.

Before I turn you loose in the open thread, here are a few of my thoughts on the second season.

Loved:

Harrenhal

The scenes between Arya and Tywin

A lot of the changes they made to the books, actually

Literally every single scene involving Tyrion

How far they took Joffrey’s villainy

Cersei becoming a more interesting character

The casting of Davos

The casting in general, actually

Worried About: