Just kidding, there aren’t going to be five “Game of Thrones” spin-offs

We’ve been struggling to come to terms with the fact that in just two very short seasons, Game of Thrones is coming to an end, so when we HBO announced that they had deals with a possible *five* different writers to continue the A Song of Ice and Fire world, we were ecstatic.

However, HBO has clarified that they don’t intend to actually produce five different ASOIF shows. While our gut reaction is to ask “Umm… why not?” — the clarification doesn’t come entirely as a surprise as ASOIF creator George R.R. Martin wrote in a LiveJournal post that the network was just testing story ideas.

While we’ve been following these GoT followup ideas like it’s our day job,  HBO programming president Casey Bloys revealed to Entertainment Weekly that the new ideas are still in early stages so we shouldn’t be making too assumptions (we’re TRYING not to, we promise).

“I want to put the prequels in context. It should go without saying I love having a show with this much intense interest around it. Even the smallest bit of information is a big deal and I appreciate that," Bloys said. "But I wanted to make sure fans know this is a really embryonic process. I haven’t even seen outlines. In the press at large, everybody said, ‘there are four spinoffs’ and they assume that means each one is happening and we’re going to have a new Game of Thrones show per quarter. That’s not what’s going on. The idea is not to do four shows."

While we’re still recovering from the sadness that HBO won’t suddenly dedicate itself to solely airing ASOIF content, Bloys went to praise GoT showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss for setting “such a high bar” for a series of that caliber and George R.R. Martin for creating such an expansive universe.

"You couldn’t do this with a lot of shows. In talking with the drama group here, and the nice thing is George has created an entire universe," Bloys said. "The fact that there’s enough material to even contemplate making different prequels is crazy when you think about it. George has all these histories he’s thought about and that’s one reason why the books are so good."

We hate to say it but Bloys has a point. It is amazing that there’s so much ASOIF material that HBO is already looking at four possible replacements to the massive Game of Thrones. While we *never* want to say goodbye to Jon Snow and our beloved Daenerys, at least the next ASOIF show will be killer.

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