Vowed to find both Stark girls and avenge Renly Baratheon.
Stumbled across BOTH Stark girls. In the whole world…just ran across both of them. And as for avenging Renly…Stannis came to her! She’s just standing there 24/7 looking at a tower…oh there’s Stannis! And rather than fight to get to him, Well lookie lookie, he’s incapacitated. When Brienne of Tarth sets her three brain cells to doing something, it gets done damnit!
“I am Brienne of Tarth! I beat The Hound , Jamie Lannister and Stannis Baratheon in single combat!”
Well, that’s what you get when a TV show takes a finely-crafted tale and rewrites huge chunks of it to make it more palatable for the TV show (combining characters, shortening plots, etc). In the novels she doesn’t come across the Hound (except in passing) or Arya, doesn’t find Sansa, and is nowhere near Stannis last they left off. If anything a common complaint about her plotline in the last two books is that it’s somewhat meandering and pointless.
But it’s not really meandering and pointless - it, more than any other plot line, aside from perhaps Jaime’s, shows the death and devastation the War of the Five Kings has wrecked upon the common folk. They are war is absolutely hell for the people chapters and indicates why the Faith has gained so much power (they were the only ones who were actually trying to protect the people). In addition, it may also indicate that the common folk are just simply tired of Lannisters, Baratheons, Starks, etc. and are more than ready for the Targaryens to come back and make them safe as it was before Robert’s Rebellion.
I love Brienne - one of the most honorable and admirable characters in all of ASOIF. Her storyline is no more or less farfetched/coincidental than any of the other major characters, though, I’d say. That’s just how Martin rolls.
Yup. I admit that the first time I read through, I was in the “meandering and pointless” camp. Still might be, actually… but I say that know and admitting that there’s an obvious point to it, even if not much “big picture” events actually happens and it’s mostly just to show how bad things have gotten. I think that might say something about me as a person and that I’m interested in the movers and shakers as opposed to the “little people.”