I think the problem is in part the problem that many long-running fantasy stories face where they become TOO big so the story gets dragged down by the sheer vastness of the world and number of characters, and the writers want to give all these characters a good amount of screentime but there's too many of them so the plot never moves because we're too busy dealing with side character #40493050350's relationship issues. HW and ShB were heavily focused storylines featuring a very small cast of characters, and any side characters only existed to serve a narrative purpose and promptly exited the plot the moment they were no longer relevant. Which is how it should be.

So now here we are in 6.1 after saving the universe and I'm dealing with helping sort out Thavnair's poverty issues and coming up with bloody tax policies. Did G.R.R. Martin write this? I;m sorry, I just don't care about this. It's not interesting. It's not imporant. It's not relevant to my character's interests. It doen't advance the plot in any way, or deal with character I give a remote shit about. It's just boring.

The writers need to understand that a story needs to be engaging start to finish. If you have a scene that's boring and doesn't add anything, and worse grinds the plot to a halt, than you should remove it. Every single scene should either move the plot forward or develop the main cast of characters in some way. Otherwise it's worthless. I had thought they got over this issue after ARR but they've gone several steps back with Endwalker. Considering the person who wrote ShB wrote EW, I don't understand what happened here.

But what I really think is the issue is they don't fundamentally understand what is and isn't a useful scene. Or, if I'm being more jaded, they are deliberately injecting so much filler into the plot to draw it out to make the content last longer.

I love the story, but this these parts are very, very difficult to sit through and I really want the writers to sit down and start trimming the fat from their plots and telling much more focused narratives like HW and ShB. Stop trying to world build so much, stop focusing on countless side characters (which they keep introducing making the problem worse), and stop wasting screentime on dry, boring segments that don't add anything, don't involve characters that are even remotely interesting, and grind the plot to a halt.

At the end of the day, just tell a good, engaging story. Stop wasting my time with hours and hours of boring, useless filler. The story is suffering from very serious pacing issues right now and the writers might need an editor or sombody to come and reign the team in. They're getting way too lost in their own sauce, so to speak.

(2/2)