me personally i think asoiaf should be adapted again and again. if we lived in a world where works entered public domain sooner we could all see tv shows and books and plays and graphic novels of people, all trying their hand to adapt the stories, just like how they do for the iliad and shakespeare. most of them would be shite, many of them cashgrabs, but the ones that manage to pull off a good adaptation would make it all worth it.
but how do you adapt a work so big? you dont, not in full. you take snippets and stories, make spinoffs with your own characters or expand upon parts of the plot with familiar characters in much greater depth. this is how fanfiction works now, and this is how the civilizational epics of millennia past survived the ages: retold and re-adapted, they found new life in the stories they were told. the story is changed in the retelling, but it is also found in it too.
the mahabharata, the great Epic of india, is about 1.8 million words--10 iliads in length, or about as long as all the current asoiaf books put together. no one's read all of it, but everyone* knows it--how? because people (well, a large percentage of the population) has heard the retellings, from the laps of their grandmothers and the screens of their tv's and the movies they see and from the songs and the comics they read growing up (see: amar chitra katha).
obviously, asoiaf is not a Civilizational Epic, but i think that theres a lot of cool parallels in "fan culture" around those previous works and asoiaf, and i think unlike a lot of other modern works which have been told and retold (frankenstein, dr jekyll and mr hyde, etc) asoiaf has so much volume as a text which so many characters that it becomes its own sort of beast. also because i really really want to get my mutuals into the mahabharata and the ramayana so we can talk about intertextuality
*ok not everyone but a decent proportion of the population, even across religions
also if any of this is sounding interesting to you i have homework which is to read 300 Ramayanas by AK Ramanujan
and finally to leave off with a quote thats relevant
"Fanfiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk." --Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Media Fans and Participatory Cultures
EVERYONE TALKING ABOUT THE MAD KING PLAY MUST NOW READ 300 RAMAYANAS AND MEDITATE UNDER A BODHI TREE
