It’s official: Game of Thrones season 8 is going to be the shortest season of the series!

HBO recently announced Game of Thrones season 7 premiere date and many fans weren’t happy and it’s understandable as the 6th season finale had aired on 26th June 2016 and Game of Thrones season 7 will premiere more than a year after season 6 got over. To make things worse, the 7th season will have only 7 episodes, instead of the usual 10. However, that’s not the end of bad news. Till now we were hearing many rumours about the length of the final season, but there was no official confirmation from HBO or the showrunners but now we have it, and you are not going to like it a bit.

While speaking at SXSW in Austin, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss said that they are working on the final season of Game of Thrones and they mentioned that it consisted of 140 pages. Pages that would decide how our beloved TV series is going to end. While answering a question, Benioff replied, “Dave Hill will write the season premiere, Brian Cogman will write 802 and then we’ll write the other four.”

You read it right, Game of Thrones season 8 will have only 6 episodes and the showrunners are going to write 4 episodes, which will be divided equally between them. Benioff further said, “Dan and I just pick halves; we fight over who gets to write which half, who gets to kill Sansa …”

He also mentioned how it was difficult dividing the episodes between them this time. “Usually it took two minutes to divide the halves, this time it was 18 back and forth emails: ‘I’ll take this scene if you take that scene, because we realized it was the last time we’d be doing this for this show.” Benioff said.

We are at the part where the series is going to end soon and having two short seasons makes things worse. However, it’s good to know that the showrunners are ready to disappoint the fans a bit by reducing the episodes and making sure that the story is told in the best possible way, rather than trying to please the fans with extra episodes and ruining the end.