Brynden, AKA Lord Bloodraven, is one of the most interesting characters in the series - son of a king, Hand of the King and most feared man in the Seven Kingdoms, Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch and now a living avatar of one of the three real forces in the world; I want as much of him as possible.
I only learned of him from the wiki about the series…I guess I have to read the short stories Martin published to read his story?
And while I agree there’s potential in what Bran has/will become, it hasn’t paid off yet…and we had three God-damn books of it not paying off…aside from Theon hearing his name whispered on the wind, what has Bran done for the rest of the world? I mean…didn’t The Three Eyed Crow/Brynden/Bloodraven basically say he can only watch? At least Arya’s journey has interesting stuff happening…Dany’s is pretty boring too, but got a little better at the end.
But yeah, there are all sorts of side/smaller characters that are none-the-less interesting, that I want to know about, but fear we never will.
Why does Hodor only say Hodor? What does Hodor mean? Is it just a nonsense word, or some sort of ancient language? And Patchfatch…he seems to make eerily accurate predictions…does he know he’s doing it, or is it just that classic trope (ugh, hate using that word) of someone with a near death experience gaining a “second sight” of sorts?
There’s significant evidence that Bran has eaten Jojen, so I can agree with this.
I am sure Bran has potential but you didn’t need hundreds of pages of filler in order to bring out that potential. If a character has to go from point A to point B it’s not obligatory to describe in excruciating detail each step of the journey. It’s acceptable, in fact preferable, to skip a long journey in order to get ahead with the story. Note the way Game of Thrones skipped ahead with Cat’s trip from Winterfell to King’s Landing.
Basically I think Martin had a clear vision for the first three books which is why they came out quickly and were of such high quality. After that he lost control of his overarching plot which shows in both the time he took to write the books and how slowly the main plot has moved forward . He is reduced to devising incredibly long journeys for his characters, Brienne, Bran etc. which he can describe in tedious detail. His other strategy is to add more and more characters and settings which again allows him to fill the book without much forward movement.
Wow, I totally missed this. I’m another skimmer of Bran’s chapters though…
It is not significant at all, it is actually a pretty silly and almost completely unsubstantiated theory. Bran has eaten humans as his wolf though.
Jojen says that he’s afraid after repeatedly saying he’s not afraid because he knows when he’s going to die (aka, I’m about to die), then Bran eats something that tastes like blood, then Jojen is nowhere to be seen. Hardly a crackpot theory.
I’ve read the theory, there’s really nothing there. And Jojen has been wrong in his predictions before, Bran was supposed to die too but it ended up being fake Bran.
Jojen has never been wrong in his predictions. Like Melisandre, he just misinterprets the visions sometimes. He saw Reek skinning the faces off of two boys who he thought were Bran and Rickon because they had been dressed to look like them, and then he saw them in the crypts, which is true, but they were hiding there, not dead. Bran eating Jojen is not airtight, but it’s supported by some substantial evidence and is not pure crackpot.
Wait - what did I miss? When did Jojen go missing? The last I recall he was gazing longingly out of the cave entrance, and Meera was saying he wants to go home. Did I skip a chapter?
And are you sure you’re not confusing Bran’s warging with Sixskins’? I recall Summer eating a rotting bear, but not people. I don’t get a lot of uninterrupted reading time though, so I could be confused. . .
I’m pretty sure that Bran has eaten people as Summer, but I can’t quote anything right now. I’m also pretty sure that Coldhands brought the group some dead ranger meat and told them it was a pig.
Fucking hell, there goes one of the best scenes in the whole series.
Which one?
Arya killing the tickler.
Ah, yes. It’d be really hard to set it up properly though. It’s absurd that each book, so far, gets 10 hours and easily leave another 5 that was cut.
You might likethis.
Who has Needle and when is Arya going to get it back?
Polliver, who will probably take the place of the Arya killing the Tickler scene–it robs us of her screaming “IS THERE GOLD IN THE VILLAGE!” as she stabs him, but I’m sure they’ll come up with a line for her that will work. The Tickler only asked about gold in the village once on screen, so that line probably wouldn’t have had the impact in the show that it did in the books.
I loved everything about Qarth. Pyat Pree is so perfect that I spotted him in last week’s episode and instantly knew it was him, even with no lines. Feral Rickon cracked me up too. It’s like he’s autistic or has attachment disorder or something.
Seems like a lot of the newbies (here and elsewhere) are not happy with the “arbitrariness” of the Shadowbaby and its killing of Renly. I never saw it as arbitrary in the book, perhaps because at first we don’t know what it is. It’s odd. By not seeing the context until the later Shadowbaby birth at Storm’s End, somehow that gives the first Shadowbaby more context in retrospect. So by making the first one arbitrary, it makes that part of the slow build for reveal of the second. Hmm… and here I thought that showing the Mel/Stannis sex and showing the birth of the 1st shadowbaby would make the killing of Renly less WTF-inducing, but it seems to have had the opposite effect. weird.
I missed the detail about the wildfire room being constructed with collapsible sand ceilings in case of fire.
Geek alert!
Noodling around on Wikipedia, and just realized that Julian Glover, the guy who played Gen. Veers in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, is the same guy now playing Grand Maester Pycelle in Game of Thrones.
http://images.wikia.com/starwars/images/6/61/DRow4-MajorGeneralVeers-ESB.jpg
