(Photo: Nick Briggs, HBO)

Suggesting that George R.R. Martin does not answer to the beck and call of the Internet, the Song Of Ice And Fire author recently gave another interview—and what’s more, in this interview he discussed how he’d stopped reading Game Of Thrones message boards, after he discovered certain fans had already figured out his saga’s ending. During a talk at the Edinburgh International Literary Festival, Martin told the crowd that, while he’s still unsure of the fates of certain minor characters—“I’ll make that up as I go along,” he said, subconsciously smashing beetles with a rock—the deaths of major characters and the broad strokes of the ending have all been planned, just as he reportedly laid out for David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. And he was dismayed to learn that others are already way ahead of him, in a sense beyond having finished A Dance With Dragons ages ago:

“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. 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, of course, wouldn’t say which of the theories that have been floated are correct and which are just the amusing bullshit, because that would negate the need to write the books at all—something he’s certainly not looking to get out of, ever. He also reiterated that Game Of Thrones is “not a democracy,” and if it were, he claims even more characters would have been killed off already, presumably leaving you with, like, Tyrion and Podrick hitting up various brothels. Also, they would be having way more gay sex: “I’ve had letters from fans who want me to present particular explicit male sex scenes. Most of these letters come from women,” Martin said, adding, “I don’t pretend to understand this, I just read my email” in yet another argument for not looking at the Internet.

Meanwhile, Martin is still writing the final two books in the series, which we theorize will conclude with two male dragons having gay dragon sex so hot, it roasts everyone alive.