A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones Spoiler-Filled Discussion

[Ayelbourne]

I can easily see AFfC and ADwD being condensed into one season with 10 episodes.
Just throw out the Ironborn crap, reduce Dorn to some scenes with Ariane and cut at least half of Jon's, Tyrion's, Brienne's and Dany's chapters and you're there.

As for the chapter:
I like it. It angers me though, that it was moved from ADWD to TWOW while ADWD got pretty much an entire chapter dedicated to the Nightswatch's food supply.

[Shurik]

It angers me though, that it was moved from ADWD to TWOW while ADWD got pretty much an entire chapter dedicated to the Nightswatch's food supply.

It also had a chapter about river turtles, 5 chapters about a completely useless POV who dies without any consequence to the story and several chapters of Dany thinking about sex with some sellsword.

At least Night's Watch is from the interesting part of the story.

[Ayelbourne]

Yeah, but not the part about the food.

Honestly, 2 lines of dialogue would have sufficed:

Jon: So, how does our food supply look?
Bowen Marsh: It's not gonna be enough.


The end.

[JD]

Shurik wrote:

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Well, I loved the first three books (though Bran's and Arya's stuff in ASOS got really boring at some points). I liked the majority of AFFC and the parts of ADWD that were in Westeros. IMO, Theon's chapters in ADWD are some of his best writing in the entire series.
I can live with his ramblings, as long as they are somehow connected to the story he's trying to tell at the moment. I hate it when he goes on a whole page description of what's everyone wearing and eating or when he writes whole chapters where people just go from one place to another and nothing happens in them.

So in the end everything boils down to the need to get him a much better editors, someone who will tell him that releasing an unfinished book is bad.

Does this stuff start more in the later books? I'm about 600 pages into AGoT and so far haven't noticed much of the stuff you guys are complaining about.

[Colonel Midnight]

^ Yes... He (GRRM) definitely starts suffering from loquaciousness more and more as you get later on into the series.

Cheers,
-CM-

[JD]

I noticed that actually seems to be pretty common for these kinds of long running series, at least judging by the reviews on Amazon. Which makes sense, I guess, after a while authors probably start running out of good ideas, or feel more free to get carried away with unnecessary stuff.

[Colonel Midnight]

^ True. Although, in GRRM's case, I personally tend to think he has too MANY ideas and likes to wander off the path of the primary plotline(s) too easily, or invent/create yet another new character...

But, that's just IMO. YMMV, of course.

Cheers,
-CM-

[Shurik]

JD wrote:

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Does this stuff start more in the later books? I'm about 600 pages into AGoT and so far haven't noticed much of the stuff you guys are complaining about.

AGOT is the tightest written book in the series so far. Not the best - that's A Storm Of Swords - but the one that has the least food, clothes and traveling descriptions.
An example (if you are 600 pages in, I think it won't spoil anything) - Catelyn goes from Winterfell to King's Landing and her entire journey there is skipped. One chapter she's in Winterfell (it's the chapter with an assassin's attack on Bran) and the next she's entering King's Landing and that's it. In later books this entire journey would have taken at least 3-4 chapters, where most of the text would be a descriptions of what's going on around her, what is she wearing, eating, what's the story behind every tree, stone and ruin on the way.

[JD]

Ugh, I'm not a big fan of that kind of stuff. Hopefully it won't be bad enough to ruin the books for me.

[Klaus]

Well fortunately for GRRM, some of us like the further detailing of the world... But as I noted upthread or somewhere similar, I'm a bit out of step with the attitude of most fen I know about this sort of thing. I'm quite willing to wait and see the whole thing before I decide what was a waste of time and what wasn't... but that doesn't seem to be a common approach these days.

Hell, I like Stephen Donaldson!

[Colonel Midnight]

^ Holy Guac... I thought I was the only person around here to admit that!!
Although it is handy to have a dictionary nearby with him.

Cheers,
-CM-

[Klaus]

^^There are a few of us, not many... though the books sell quite well. And the Gap series makes Covenant look like a Sunday School picnic!

[Shurik]

JD wrote:

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Ugh, I'm not a big fan of that kind of stuff. Hopefully it won't be bad enough to ruin the books for me.

Depends on how sensitive are you to this sort of stuff. I don't mind it that much even if I complain about it a lot. It didn't ruin AFFC and ADWD for me, it just made those books somewhat less exciting than the first three.

[OdoWanKenobi]

Off the Onion, today:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/the...ge-rr-m,26934/

Sadly, I could see that becoming not a joke.

[Yoda]

^"My son knows how to spell most of the characters' names, so maybe I'll let him wrap the whole thing up."

Ok, I usually just stare angrily when someone links to The Onion, but I got a laugh out of that.