Agreed. My suspension of disbelief suffered a lot.
It’s not at all how it is depicted.
ETA : in the show, I mean.
That’s true, but that was years ago. Excitement was high, but it’s cooled down.
And, not allowing them to be mentioned *still *has spoilers, but also endless junior modding and screaming at posters who dare to mention the “B word”. Pages are wasted on what is or not a book mention.
The policy hasnt worked properly.
In any case there are already rules for spoilers- all that is needed is fro them to be enforced just like any other thread. . No need for special rules.
Good point there, I agree.
GoT is unlike anything else because of the way the viewing audience is so split between people who have and people who haven’t read the books.
I agree that the no-mention-of-books rule isn’t perfect, but a more perfect rule which allowed disussion of the books only when it was 100% unambiguously clear that no future developments could be spoiled by the mention, would be incredibly complicated to create and enforce.
What I really don’t understand is why you get so upset about the rule. So it’s not perfect. So what? It’s pretty good, and most people are pretty happy with it. How does it interfere with your enjoyment of anything?
I thought I’d expand on this a bit.
Here’s a situation in which, on the surface at least, using book knowledge would have been reasonable: way back in the pilot episode, we met Robb, Jon and Theon. And it was a bit confusing who they all were, particularly Theon.
If someone posted in the TV thread “so who are those three teenage-y boys, I can’t keep them straight”, it would ALMOST ALMOST certainly have been harmless and in fact helpful to say “well, one of them is Robb Stark, the trueborn son of Ned and Cat Stark, and heir to Winterfell. One of them is Jon Snow, Ned’s bastard son (with a quick explanation of the surname). The third one is Theon Greyjoy, who is unrelated, but has been raised as Ned’s ward.” But there are two problems with that:
(1) At the time, we didn’t know if there was going to be some interesting bit of storytelling in a later episode in which Theon’s backstory was introduced in a neat way… some little mislead that would be interfered with by clarifying what appeared to be harmless and useful background information
(2) How do we ever really differentiate between this kind of information and actual spoilers? Leave it up to each individual person?
In addition, what happens if you post that and someone says “oh, who’s Jon Snow’s mother?”. Suddenly, your answer to that, or your refusal to answer that, is going to start people thinking in a direction that maybe they otherwise wouldn’t have thought in, etc.
Rather than have this thread become about the spoilers/books/shows debate, let’s take that discussion to ATMB if anyone wants to hash it out more…just so this topic doesn’t become just about that and can get back on topic a little.
YMMV and all that.
I have read the separate stories and the World of Ice and Fire. Those are the things that excite me about the world.
I haven’t read any of the separate stories. Are they from the same world? Any of the same characters?
I had thought they were only distantly related at best.
Same world yes. Same characters no. The most famous, the Dunk & Egg are, I believe, 100 years before the War of the Five Kings. And then the Dance of the Dragons (not to be confused with the Song of Ice and Fire’s “A Dance with Dragons”) was a few hundred before that.
D&E = ~90 years before GoT
DoD = ~170 years before GoT
Aegon = 298 years before GoT
Cool, thanks. I’ll check them out. Maybe I’ll understand more of the history if I read them.
If you want a one stop shop of understanding the history, “The World of Ice and Fire” is your best bet.
But the stories are quite a bit of fun.
[quote=“thelurkinghorror, post:71, topic:717539”]
D&E = ~90 years before GoT
Just how OLD is/was Maester Aemon then? 125? He was Egg’s (Aegon V) OLDER brother and refused the Iron Throne.
Something like that, yeah.
The Dunk & Eg stories go for a huge premium, they are rare. There’s a decent graphic novel for one, reasonable priced.
- Looks like he was 11 at the time of the Hedge Knight and Aegon was 9?
The thing that makes me cranky is that I don’t understand why, given that there’s enormous interest in the whole shebang through the wildly popular TV series and that GRRM won’t be cranking out The Winds of Winter until next year (PLEASE let this be accurate), they haven’t reissued the Dunk & Egg stories, in whatever format they wish, straight-up books or graphic novels or both. I want to know what happens in the second book, but I want to experience it as written, not in Wiki recap form, and I don’t know why the publisher wouldn’t want my money for that. Grrr.
I read a rumor that the D&E stories will be packaged and published after a fourth story is finished. I know there are electronic versions of the three D&E stories available online if you know where to look. I suspect they are pirated versions (not exactly sure how all that works). But don’t get me wrong, I’m certainly not encouraging illegal activities.
The D&E stories being published separately on October 6:
But also, they aren’t really rare. You can easily find the short story anthologies of which each of the stories were published. If you buy used, it’s fairly cheap:
The Hedge Knight is found in the Legends anthology:
The Sword Sword is found Legends II:
The Mystery Knight is in Warriors: