Maybe George R.R. Martin knew all along that ending Game of Thrones with eight seasons was going to be a bad idea. During its run on HBO, Game of Thrones had dominated as one of the world's most popular television shows, pulling in fans from everywhere as people grew more invested in the story with each season. By season eight, which would be the final season of the series, Game of Thrones was more popular than ever, but most of those same fans were quick to turn on the show by the time the last episode had aired.

So, what went wrong? There's probably no one single answer, but one of the chief complaints fans had with the final season was that it just felt so rushed. Too many loose ends needed to be tied for any of them to really be given the proper time they needed, and after years of intense buildup, a lot of this just seemed very disappointing for fans. And that could be the very thing George R.R. Martin was fearing when he was meeting up with HBO to do all he could do make sure Game of Thrones had enough time to play out properly on HBO, with the original book's author hoping to see 10 seasons with 100 total episodes.

The revelation comes from the new book Tinderbox: HBO's Ruthless Pursuit of New Frontiers by James Andrew Miller. In the book, Martin's agent, Paul Haas, said, "George would fly to New York to have lunch with [former HBO CEO Richard Plepler], to beg him to do ten seasons of ten episodes because there was enough material for it and to tell him it would be a more satisfying and more entertaining experience."

Many fans might agree, and as it turns out, so did HBO. The problem was not that the cabler wanted to bring Game of Thrones to a close, as the series was still a tremendous hit with seemingly a lot of mileage left. Series showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss had actually been deadset on ending the series with eight seasons, even insisting that it be a shortened season. At that point in the production of the popular series, they had apparently just grown so eager to branch off into different projects, and there was really no convincing them to stay.

"Dan and Dave were tired, rightfully so," Haas is quoted as saying in the book. "They were done, and wanted to move on, so they cut it short and then negotiations became, how many seasons can we stretch this out? Because of course HBO wanted more. George loves Dan and Dave, but after season five, he did start to worry about the path they were going because George knows where the story goes. He started saying, 'You're not following my template.'"

In Tinderbox, George R.R. Martin also added of the show's end, "I wish it had run for ten years. I think that would've given us a little more time in the later seasons to end it. But that might be just because I'm still trying to end it in these books here. I'm working on The Winds of Winter even now as I have been for the best part of a decade. And hopefully I'm going to get to that end soon and then people can argue about which ending they like better."

The Winds of Winter doesn't yet have a release date. As for HBO's live-action universe, Game of Thrones will expand with the upcoming spinoff series House of the Dragon. The quotes above come to us from Insider.