A Song Of Ice And Fire

I don't know about you, but I for one defeat my murderous impulses by exploring the possibility of Perfect Crime and not finding any, finding it's too much of a bother, or finding a simple and effective and even Poetic Justice way of murdering someone and then reasoning myslef out of it anyway through the Golden Rule (seriously, what would the world be like if everyone killed people who pissed them off at the first opportunity of doing it with zero risk of punishment?).

Sometimes I think I just don't try hard enough and some day someone will really make me want to kill them and I will find a way. In the USA it would be far easier: the vast majority of murders by fireweapon remain unsolved!

Aaaaaand, done with Feast for Crows. Damn that's a good series. I liked Storm of Swords the best and I suppose Crows the least, although I even enjoyed that one, regardless of what people say. Yes, it's more boring than the others, but it's still damned interesting.

I love all the characters, except Bran, who's so annoying that sometimes I wish Jaimie had killed him. How fantastic would that be? Start the series by murdering a child, instead of just crippling one. It would set the tone pretty well, at least.

Anyway it's fantastic, and the list of great things about it is so impossibly huge that there's no point in getting into it here. And the show's going to be absolutely brilliant, at least for the first season. Later on they're going to need a massive budget to do justice to some of it. I have faith though, it's HBO after all.

Winter is coming.

edited 4th Sep '10 6:25:41 PM by AceofKnaves

I'm most of the way through A Storm of Swords. I must say I really wish the Freys to all die really horrible deaths for what they did at the Red Wedding.

I must say these books are the best read I have had in a while, and I must say I wouldn't have found it if I never went on TV Tropes. *thinking* You know tvtropes does enhance one's life.

edited 4th Sep '10 9:35:19 PM by EldritchBlueRose

In one book she thinks nothing of killing a woman who pays her too little for a horse, only abstaining because there would be no way to conceal the killing.

I'm going to have to stick up for her here. The woman in question not only pays her too little for the horse, but threatens to have her hung for horse stealing if she complains. Idily thinking about killing her instead is pretty understandable.

Listen, Arya doesn't play by normal rules anymore: don't try to judge her like Ned would, as if she was a normal person. Arya is a freaking badass. As such, killing that womand wouldn't only have been normal for her, it would have been one more fuckawesome scary dark thing to Wangst about for coolness factor. She's not human anymore, she's a vehicle for awesome. Accept it, respect it, don't get in her way.

I wonder what will happen with the Stark kids, 'cause what we have with them now is, mhm, awesome instant, like, just waiting for some hot water. Every one of them, single, could be enough, and we've got, dunno, four (five, if counting Jon) of 'em.

^ If so we will probably see that instant awesome first with Bran and Jon. For one Bran is beyond the wall, and is probably going to be taught how to better use his warg abilities. Not to mention Jon is now Lord Commander of the Wall, and is soon going to face King Stannis for choosing Lord Commander of the Wall over Lord of Winterfell.

I say that A Dance With Dragons will be well worth the wait.

Oh, it had better be.

Agreed on both counts. Although, I haven't been waiting for that long, really, having found the series this year.

edited 21st Sep '10 10:23:10 PM by Zizoz

I discovered the series about when the first paperback edition of A Game of Thrones was released. Took it with me on my first trip to Hawaii, a place that's about as thematically inappropriate for the series as it's possible to find, but one which holds good memories nonetheless. A few years later, when A Clash of Kings was released, it was my airplane reading on my second. That was ten years ago.

So yeah, I've been waiting a while. It's not like I'm entitled to more Ice and Fire, though — it'll happen, or it won't. I just hope it'll happen.

edited 21st Sep '10 11:25:57 PM by Nornagest

Listen, Arya doesn't play by normal rules anymore: don't try to judge her like Ned would, as if she was a normal person. Arya is a freaking badass. As such, killing that woman wouldn't only have been normal for her, it would have been one more fuckawesome scary dark thing to Wangst about for coolness factor. She's not human anymore, she's a vehicle for awesome. Accept it, respect it, don't get in her way.

See this is where I disagree. Arya's a badass obviously but I don't think she's a the child sociopath people make her out to be.

I mean obviously I would worry about a 21st century western girl who acted like her but within the constraints of the amoral, vicious, dog eat dog medieval world she lives in she seems remarkably restrained and pleasant. Certainly in comparison to the rest of the cast, anyway.

I think only Sansa and Bran have less blood on their hands and that's only because they've been kept off the front in a way Arya hasn't. She's no more ruthless than Ned or Davos or Tyrion or any of the other mains.

edited 22nd Sep '10 8:29:49 AM by Cestrian

Here's the theme that comes to my mind when I think of Arya:

I know it's anachronic, but you need a Three Hundred mentality for this sort of thing.

edited 22nd Sep '10 10:02:27 AM by RawPower

I don't really care how long it takes for the rest of the books to come out, as long as they do all come out properly written. Martin is 62 years old, I'm concerned that he won't live to finish the series, or perhaps that his writing abilities will enter a serious decline before he does so. Most authors have their best work well behind them by eighty.

I think Martin bit off more than he eventually found he really wanted to chew with the series. Look at his bibliography and you'll notice that from about 1996 his non-ASoIaF output dropped off, and then picked up again around 2000 (right when the ASoIaF delays began.) Perhaps he was having a lot of fun the first few years, but then became disenchanted when he realized “Oh God, I'll probably be writing nothing but this for a decade straight.” He really just needs to balance things better, so that the second half of the series doesn't take 3-4 times longer than the first.

I don't care that much about how long it takes. I've discovered better books since I finished A Feast Of Crows. I just hope he doesn't pull another Robert Jordan on us.

edited 4th Oct '10 3:46:44 PM by gentlemanorcus

I am halfway through A Feast For Crows, and I must say I feel zero sympathy for Cersei. Even with her having point of view chapters I can't help but think of her as a mad queen that wants everyone to bow to her every will. Does everyone else think approximately the same, or are there sympathetic qualities of Cersei that I am overlooking?

Well, I never found her sympathetic.

I find her issues understandable and somewhat interesting, but no, not real sympathetic.

Cersei is a good illustration of the pitfalls of the "to understand all is to forgive all" principle. Most of the time, people who do apparently cruel, malicious, or evil things turn out to have entirely understandable if not perfectly thought out reasons for them, and this tends to lead to sympathy. But every so often, knowing the reasons and the thought process doesn't dispose you any better to the actor; it just gives you more reasons to dislike them.

Cersei's POV, and to a lesser extent Theon's, show the latter. Most of the other villainous POVs show the former.

edited 4th Oct '10 11:23:03 PM by Nornagest

I actually liked Cersei better before we got her POV. Yes, she did some bad things, but she's in a medieval court intrigue setting; if you want to live, you've gotta break a few lives.

Once we got inside her head, though, everything she does is so petty and, above all, stupid I just couldn't bring myself to like her anymore.

Well ... except for the parts where she funds a Mad Scientist to turn Gregor Clegane into an even-more-unstoppable killing machine. That was neat.

edited 5th Oct '10 4:32:11 AM by RavenWilder

Does he become an undead raping machine, too?

^ That remains to be seen.

No. His genitals were lost in the reanimation process, making him that much angrier.

@ Nornagest:

That makes sense, though I have to say that it helps that "villainy" is rather gray in the books (most of the time at least). Jaime Lannister is a prime example of this.

edited 5th Oct '10 6:45:20 PM by EldritchBlueRose

Yeah, Theon and Cersei become less likeable due to Internal Monologue. We already knew Theon was a backstabber and a slut, but he became truly unlikable when we learned he was emo too.