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

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!

 

^ 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-

 

^^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!

 

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.

 

Off the Onion, today:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/these-last-two-are-gonna-be-real-turds-george-rr-m,26934/

Sadly, I could see that becoming not a joke.

 

^"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.

 

I say Martin has nothing on Robert Jordan's endless, mind numbing, pointless chapters of useless information.

 

Is there any long running fantasy series that maintains the pace of its first two or three books?

I can't really think of one off-hand.

A Dance with Dragons felt almost identical to the later Jordan WoT books, in terms of pacing and overly flowery digressions and descriptions.

How can any series with over a dozen POV characters and hundreds of other characters be expected to move as lightly and freely as it did at the beginning?

 

Have an editor who knows when to break out the Valyrian steel.

 

I haven't read any of the series yet myself, but the reviews for the Brandon Sanderson WoT books are much better than the last few Robert Jordan ones. So it looks like he might have managed to get the series back where it started quality wise.

 

Sanderson's WoT books are pretty good, I'm not sure if I would say they equal the earlier WoT books though. Certainly not in pacing. But we are invested in the characters and stuff is actually happening again. Huge world ending things.

And I am never going to see changing authors mid-series as optimal.

 

Man, if "Eye of the World" is one of the 'good' books in that series... I dread to think of what comes later!

 

I've managed to finish Eye of the World, but it was a very difficult struggle. The second book was even more boring, so I abandoned it somewhere in the middle.

 

Eye of the World is rough in a lot of ways, and introduces way too many characters and settings too fast. I can understand not liking it.

But if you don't like the second book than yes, the series is not for you. Outside a few isolated moments in later books("Asha'man rolling ring of earth and fire!") I would say books 2, 3, 4, and maybe 5 are the consistently best part of the series.

 

I enjoyed The Eye of the World quite a bit. Even though it started out as a fairly basic fantasy story (young man goes off on a quest to save the world after his rural home is destroyed), I really liked the world Jordan created. I remember liking The Great Hunt, too, but for some reason I stopped partway through The Dragon Reborn and never got back into it. That was nearly ten years ago, though, and I think the big reason was I'd gotten kind of disenchanted with the series because of what people were saying about the later books. Now that Sanderson is wrapping up the series, I might finally give WoT another chance.

 

Here's the list of directors for the second season:

Episode 1: Alan Taylor
Episode 2: Alan Taylor
Episode 3: Alik Sakharov
Episode 4: David Petrarca
Episode 5: David Petrarca
Episode 6: David Nutter
Episode 7: David Nutter
Episode 8: Alan Taylor
Episode 9: Neil Marshall
Episode 10: Alan Taylor

Alan Taylor directed "Fire and Blood" and "Baelor" in the first season and he's been hired to direct Thor 2. Neil Marshall is the director of the films Dog Soldiers, The Descent, Doomsday and Centurion. This is the first time he's directed for television. His episode is "Blackwater".

 

Any idea of where the filming of Thor 2 will fall into this schedule? I honestly figured he'd be too busy to do any more AGT for a while.

 

All the episodes of season two have already been filmed.

 

Do we have episode names to go with that?
Really curious what these are.
On this show, bookwalkers usually can tell what's gonna happen from the title alone.

And he's getting the bic mac right away? The producers must have had a lot of faith in him.

 

"Blackwater" is the only episode title that's been revealed so far. GRRM wrote the episode and announced the title.