“[The book’s ending is] going to be significantly different,” Martin says in the interview. “Some characters who are alive in my book are going to be dead in the show, and vice versa.” He says later in the article, “I was going to kill more people. Not the ones they killed [in the show]. They made it more of a happy ending. I don’t see a happy ending for Tyrion. His whole arc has been tragic from the first. I was going to have Sansa die, but she’s been so appealing in the show, maybe I’ll let her live …” The show, which saw Martin cede more control to showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss by the end of its run, did largely avoid killing its most consequential figures during episodes like “The Long Night,” which doesn’t seem like something Martin would do. The series’ divergence from his own plans for his ending is part of what has prevented sequel series, like the proposed one about Jon Snow, from happening; he doesn’t want the stories to diverge further before he gets to put his stamp on the story’s ending.
Of course, it doesn’t actually sound like Martin is any closer to finishing The Winds Of Winter than he was the other times this topic has come up. When he does make progress, he describes second-guessing himself or just scrapping it. “I wrote a Tyrion chapter I just loved,” Martin says of his pandemic-era retreat to a cabin to write. “Then I looked at it and said: ‘I can’t do this, it will change the whole book. I’ll make this into a series of dreams. No! That doesn’t work either …'”
Given the slow pace of Martin’s progress, some fans have speculated that a different author may ultimately be the one to finish out ASOIAF. (The profile references a moment in August when a fan asked him this directly because he’s “not going to be around much longer,” to which Martin says, “I really didn’t need that shit.”) This sounds out of the question. “If that happens, my work won’t be finished,” he says about the event of his death. “It’ll be like The Mystery of Edwin Drood.” But that’s not something Martin wants, either. “I would hate that,” the author says when asked if he’d ever consider just giving up. “It would feel like a total failure to me. I want to finish.”
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