I don’t think George is in a position to openly criticise the show. I don’t place the blame for the catastrophe of the show’s finale on him, but the show wasn’t ever supposed to overtake the books. His failure to finish the books in time means that his hands are rather tied as far as criticism goes. The argument will inevitably be: if you wanted a representative ending, you should have finished the books as promised. Not to mention his future projects with HBO as mentioned by the previous ask.

That’s not an excuse, though, for several reasons that have been stated over and over again by myself and others:

1. The show began going off the rails and in its own direction looooong before they “ran out of source material.”

2. They all but skipped two entire books (AFFC & ADWD), cramming its mutilated corpse into one season, when they could have wrung AT LEAST one more season out of source material (it took two seasons just to get through ASOS ffs).

3. Both GRRM and HBO wanted more and longer seasons, but D&D refused. Yet they have the nerve to complain about “time and budget constraints”.

4. GRRM gave them an endgame outline, which they clearly threw right in the trash along with Feastdance.

5. They could have had GRRM HIMSELF at their disposal to help craft post-ADWD storylines, but they had become increasingly resistant to any suggestions or guidance from him, which is (partly) why he hasn’t written for the show since Season 4. I’m sure he would have been happy to stay involved for as long as they would let him.

He’s not any happier about not having finished TWOW yet as we are, I can assure you. He’s not doing this on purpose or out of spite (though he has stated that people constantly hounding him about it is NOT a great motivator). Should he have waited until the books were done before selling the rights? In hindsight, yes. Should he have sold those rights to D&D in particular? In hindsight, no. GRRM has certainly made some mistakes here, but for the reasons listed above, the crash-and-burn of GoT is solely on D&D.