A Song Of Ice And Fire

It's a little bit creepy since she's, like, 14 or something.

I think the age thing was a real misstep. I know he was going for "kids grew up quicker back then", but at least in Dany's case when the character is meant to be a beautiful queen and all the (equally deconstructed, non Courtly Love-ish) middle aged men around her are going to be perving over her, you're basically making the reader think of he as "sexy", only to squick them out when they are reminded how old she's supposed to be.

Though it does make her characterisation more sensible. "Why the HELL would y- oh right, 14 year old girl."

ROFL.

Really hope they introduce her in the tv show, would be a nice way of lending some emotion/humor to tv!Roose.

Roose and Fat Walda is best ship. A horrific manipulative monster and the adorable fat lady he wubs. I hope they end up happy in the end, with Roose a normal guy and Walda his wife.

Something about how wonderfully fat and bubbly Walda is makes me want her to be Roose's morality pet.

These house sigils are all sorts of awesome. The artsy photographs of the pages don't really give a good view though, here's some standouts.

Best. Ship. Ever.

This sounds about right.

... SDFHJSDASHGIUASDGHASIKHDGMAAAARRRTIIIIIIIIIIIINN D:<

"For the Watch" my butt!

We all know that the true villain of ASOIAF is the ground. It was the ground that crippled Bran, it was the ground that killed Lysa, the ground killed Cleos Frey, and it was the ground that killed Balon Greyjoy.

Truly, what needs to happen is all the major characters getting together to defeat the ground.

Actually, it was the sea that killed Balon Greyjoy.

The sea is just the ground in drag/disguise.

Hmmmmm, now that I think about it, a suspicious number of ASOIAF deaths have happened on ground. There's something fishy about that if you ask me.

The Others are just distractions from the real enemy!!

edited 10th Sep '12 12:03:18 PM by Patty

So, earlier today I was reading through Leigh Butler's read of ASOIAF over at Tor and caught up to the latest entry, which is the end of A Clash of Kings. Tucked away in there was this little bit:

... oh boy.(I gotta admit, the first time I read that, I didn't make it to the last sentence before breaking out into a round of truly evil cackling. I'm not exactly sure why I take such a wicked pleasure in seeing people's reactions to big twists and such in stories, but I do.)

Dramatic irony is my favourite kind of irony.

x5

"The ocean is a desert with its life underground."

The way I see it with Cersei is that she's got George Lucas syndrome. She worked best when she had people around to keep her more destructive impulses in check. Once she was on her own, we get Jar-Jar Binks on the small council, she blows the royal budget on too much CGI, and uncle Kevan get digitally replaced with Hayden Christensen.

It isn't that she's gotten dumber, it's just that her position has outgrown her talents.

Promoted to incompetence, basically?

I think I'd agree. She was much more effect pretending to be the (for men at least) charming and flirty face of House Lannister and working as part of that team than being her own boss.

edited 18th Sep '12 12:26:21 PM by TheWanderer

Oh. My. GOD. Dead. Just dead.

I think I finally realized some of my problems with this series.

In the first book, we had a sense of structure and dualism. Eddard "Youidiotwhywouldyoudothat" Stark was the King of the North; while Robert "Goodgoshhowdidyougetsofat" Baratheon was king of the South. Their respective queens were Catelyn and Cersei, and their respective capitals were Winterfell and King's Landing. The characters, as well as the focus of the story, start in Winterfell and move to King's Landing.

The dynamic between the Stark-Tully Clan and the Baratheon-Lannister Clan is what fuels the story. The basic narrative structure leads to a well-balanced Protagonist-Antagonist system. Stories are about conflict and change; at the beginning, all is well, the two clans are allies, and Edd and Rob are the best of friends, closer than brothers. At the end, both of the leading characters for the powers that fuel the story are dead, and not only that, their friendship is unchanged.

If the story is to be a tragedy, it should be the actions of the protagonist and dueteragonist that lead to their downfall, not the sly manipulations of the villain.

With Eddard and Rob dead, the ties binding the story and characters are broken. Instead of the two settings being Winterfell and KL, we have Arya running around all over the place, in addition to Jaime being useless in a dungeon and then proceeding to run around all over the place.

With A Clash Of Kings, we have Robert "Notapointofviewcharacter" Stark, Stannis "cheapshotassassination" Baratheon, Renly "soabsurdedlyoversupportedthattherecanbenotensionunlesshedies" Baratheon, Balon "nobodycares" Greyjoy, and Joffrey "slimebag" Lannister.

Too many central characters, too many opposing forces. Too much going on at the same time.

In retrospect, it is inevitable that the storyline should get in a chaotic muck of nothing happening, that we should have characters running all around the world, and that what was once the protagonist force is now just as gray as all the others.

GRRM had too many characters, too many sides, and too ambitious a story to tell. Of course it ended up like it did.

My other problem with this series is the undertones of ephebophilia and how a 12-year old is apparently the most desirable woman in the world. But that's another post altogether.

That's a really good post. I think that in addition to the problematic role of master manipulators, an issue (especially noticeable in ADWD), is that while Martin intends to present characters who are done in by their flaws, in practice, it seems more like the worst possible outcome of a decision will always take place- which is problematic, because that actually isn't realistic.

It is still a tragedy, but it is more like a "tragedy of fate" than one where someone is done in by a Tragic Flaw.

Re the ephebopilia, I have a big problem with that. I think/hope that this is a consequence of the (as far as I know historically inaccurate) presentation of "Medieval" people being grown up at much younger ages. So, while because of that aspect, Sansa is supposed to be 12 and Dany 14, I think/hope that when Martin uses them for fanservice, he's thinking of them as somewhat older than that.

I believe he's on record as saying he wished he'd made the characters older, though that's more about giving them time to mature and acquire skill sets than anything else.

He wished he made them five year older because their ages were decided on with a five year Time Skip after ASoS in mind.

Incidentally, many of the problems talked about in the series are things that I consider to be positives, not negatives... >.>

The way I see it is, there are essentially two stories going on - there's the "Wars Of The Roses with the serial numbers filed off" war story, which is essentially structureless because that's what real wars are like, and there's the Myth Arc which is heavily fantastical and gives structure to the rest of it. The latter hasn't developed very far just yet, but I'd bet it's going to provide us with the climax of the overarching "story", because the civil war storyline itself can't have a natural end that isn't entirely arbitrary.

(Basically, I'm imagining this series is going to be one enormous Decon-Recon Switch on the fantasy genre)

edited 19th Sep '12 2:53:31 PM by johnnye

From the article L Mage shared:

"I had a toy castle set up near my bed, made of tin, and the courtyard was just big enough for two turtle tanks, and I had five or six turtles who lived in the castle. I decided they were knights, lords and kings, so I started writing this whole fantasy series about the turtle kingdom and the king of the turtles.

“And these particular turtles seemed to die very easily. I don’t think it was really a very good environment for them. Sometimes they would escape and you would find them under the refrigerator a month later, all dead. So my turtles kept dying, which was very distressing but it also made me think, ‘Why are they dying? Well, they are killing each other in sinister plots.’ I started writing this fantasy about who was killing who, and the wars for succession. So Game of Thrones originally began with turtles, I think.”"

This explains everything.