Game of Thrones spinoff pivoting to animation, says Blue Eye Samurai stan George R.R. Martin

polygon.com:

Though the end of Game of Thrones in 2019 dovetailed directly into news that HBO was in development on a slate of spinoff series spearheaded by source material author George R.R. Martin, 2024 only feels like the beginning of a GoT onslaught. House of the Dragon, the only show that’s gone before cameras (besides an entirely different pilot that was shot and scrapped), will return for season 2 this summer. A Knight of Seven Kingdoms: The Hedge Knight, adapting Martin’s Dunk and Egg story, has a greenlight with lofty goals of arriving before year’s end. A Jon Snow series might still be in the works? Easy to believe, but there are no officially announced plans.

But Martin, a writer who loves to tease epic conclusions, continues to pique fan interest with updates on everything else that may or may not be happening in HBO’s Max-driven Westeros universe. And the most recent update concerns a show that is apparently moving at a clip: Nine Voyages, a naval warfare-themed spin following Lord Corlys Velaryon that was previously referred to as The Sea Snake, which was planned for live-action but will now take the form of an animated series.

In a post on his personal site, Martin notes that Nine Voyages was planned on the scale of Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon, but as development went on with showrunner Bruno Heller (Rome, Gotham), it was clear the vision was prohibitively expensive. “The necessity of creating a different port every week,” Martin writes, “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.”

The animated version of Nine