You could write a book about all the hatred the final season of “Game of Thrones” received, and it would still come out sooner than George R.R. Martin‘s “The Winds of Winter.” Even Littlefinger actor Aidan Gillen had some unpopular opinions about how things wrapped up in the closing chapter, and Gwendoline Christie believed that season 8 was “designed to break” the cast.
It didn’t have to be that way, though. In fact, the creator of the Seven Kingdoms himself revealed that requests were made to HBO to stretch “Game of Thrones” beyond its eighth season, which ended with only six episodes instead of the typical 10. Speaking to The Wall Street Journal about past negotiations that didn’t go as planned, Martin recalled, “I was saying it needs to be 10 seasons at least and maybe 12, 13. I lost that one.”
The responsibility of condensing the story was instead left to showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss,…
