However painful that final season might have been for fans, readers have also held out hope for a new ending in George R.R. Martin’s final two books in the “A Song of Ice and Fire” series. The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring have been in the works for a while, but the author is finally revealing whether or not his books will follow the same storyline as the series.
While Martin had previously given a pretty vague answer on whether or not his final two books would follow GoT (his direct quote in 2019 was: “Well…yes. And no. And yes. And no. And yes. And no. And yes.”), his new interview with German newspaper Welt shows that fans will in fact get a totally new ending.
“People know an ending—but not the ending,” Martin said. “The makers of the TV show had overtaken me, which I didn’t expect.”
This is probably a little bittersweet for fans to hear, because if the GoT show had had Martin’s work to go by, we probably wouldn’t have gotten that terrible final season that launched a fan-made petition called “Remake Game of Thrones Season 8 With Competent Writers.”
Martin also confirmed that there won’t be a Game of Thrones movie, but the decision wasn’t in his hands:
“At this point in time, it wouldn’t be for me to decide, because HBO controls the film rights for Game of Thrones. David Benioff and D.B. Weiss actually wanted to end the saga after the seventh season with three big movies…The executives said, ‘We produce TV shows, we are not in the cinema business.'”
This article originally appeared on Men’s Health