Blue Eye Samurai, a Netflix animated series about a revenge quest set in 17th-century Japan, was unquestionably one of the streamer’s best TV shows of 2023. Among those who took notice was Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin, who praised the show on his blog over the weekend for being the rare streaming gem that “sinks its claws into you and won’t let go.”
From there, Martin pivoted to his own animated aspirations. The writer of the beloved A Song Of Ice & Fire fantasy series revealed not one but three Game of Thrones-related animated projects in the works. “None of them have been greenlit yet,” Martin cautions, “but I think we are getting close to taking the next step with a couple of them.”
Martin goes on to clarify that he’d previously had four animated Game of Thrones projects in development at HBO, two of which have since been abandoned. As for the three current projects he referenced, the names and plots of two of them are being kept close to the vest. One of the three, however, is Nine Voyages, about the legendary voyages of the Sea Snake.
This show had previously been pitched as a live-action series. “Budgetary constraints would likely have made a live-action version prohibitively expensive,” Martin explains, “what with half the show taking place at sea, and the necessity of creating a different port every week, from Driftmark to Lys to the Basilisk Isles to Volantis to Qarth to … well, on and on and on. There’s a whole world out there. And we have a lot better chance of showing it all with animation. So we now have three animated projects underway.”
Game of Thrones fans, meanwhile, continue to despair at updates like these from the writer, given that they leave out the latest word of a much more highly anticipated Martin project — finishing his sixth novel in the Game of Thrones series, titled The Winds of Winter.
At this point, it’s been 13 years since he published a book in that series, and the last fans heard in October 2022 was that Martin had only a few hundred pages left to go. For now, fans will have to content themselves with Season 2 of House of the Dragon, the next Thrones-related content that’s set to arrive on HBO later this year.
