I assume that it’s been proposed that the prophecy refers to all three heads of the dragon? Either it can apply to all of them, or sections can apply to each of them as appropriate.
Dany may have been reborn in fire, but I don’t recall there being all that much salt involved, for example.
As for rereading Quentyn’s chapters, no thanks. I was bored once by them already, and that was when I thought there was potential they were actually going to go somewhere.
-Joe
I believe he will be reading from one of the chapters pushed back from DWD.
There was another interview somewhere where he admitted he won’t start writing again until 2012.
I’d be fine with the author dying before finishing the series, and having the final seasons of the TV show tell the rest of story. 4 and 5 were a thankless slog. The HBO creative team will doubtlessly have to overhaul those books for watchable TV. Nobody is going to watch an entire season (book four) where we get no Tyrion and most of the other interesting main players. It’s ludicrous.
“Daario…”
Was there ever a more perfect name for an idiotic girl to moon over ad nauseam?
Theon as The Gimp got old very fast. I don’t want to know that guy’s thoughts. Hey, what’s his name rhyme with? Who gives a shit. Does suicide not exist in Westeros, because he had every reason to want to die and ample opportunity to slit his how throat.
Can he just not get some fan to finish it?
they would probably have a better idea of how to please their audience.
I really hope George Martin has some decent plot twists… I can see it now:
Sandor Clegan is walking in a dark wood. He falls in a hole and dies.
Arya is walking past a canal. She falls in and drowns.
Bran gets a weirwood splinter. It goes bad and he dies.
Theon gets his head stuck in a honey pot. Suffocates.
Tyrion gets a dragon and goes on a holy mission of vengence. Gets hold of a dragon and kills all 2,650 people in line to the Iron throne and becomes king.
End of the series
Well, the fact of matter is that four and five were supposed to run concurrently. Which, of course is just a load of crap, because if that was the case the books would start and end at the same time.
Instead, four and five start at the same time, four ends, and then five continues with all the characters again.
Really sloppy.
-Joe
I’m glad we got a little more than just the missing characters from AFFC. It will be pretty amazing if he brings it all back together in the next book, though. He’d have to have about 20 different POVs and near 1500 pages.
I was glad too, but it kind of shown the light on “It was so big I had to split it in half and divide up the characters” line of BS.
Really, George, don’t even try to pretend there was any planning behind it.
-Joe
I will repeat what has been said already many times in this thread, I was sorely disappointed with the lack of story progression, and particularly how the character of Dany regressed.
I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but at the end of SoS, she:
Cool! That shows some balls! The equivalent of buying a gun, stabbing the gun shop owner with a dagger hidden inside the bills you used to buy the gun, using the gun to kill the security guards of the fruit and vegetable stores on the other side of the street, and moving into the territory and selling protection by competing with the existing “families” that ruled the street previously.
In DwD all her storyline which wastes 25% of the book can be summarized as follows:
"Dany is sad that the previous rulers of the city keep killing her allies inside Meereen, and instead of killing the hostages that she has taken - for the purpose of preventing this sort of thing - decides that the best course of action is to lock away her competitive advantage, her dragons (but also managing to lose one in the process as it flies away) marry a scion of the former ruling families to placate them, and during the festivities following her marriage fly away on the dragon that she had lost when it appeared to ruin the festivities only to find herself facing the khalasar of her previous husband during her period following an exciting bout of smelly diarrhea.
Oh, and in the meantime, she spurned the advances of a foreign prince, who died suddenly of terminal stupidity just as suddenly as he had appeared, so no harm done there.
Have I missed something?
Also, I’m pretty sure Jon is dead (at least until his resurrection), and will certainly not return as Lord Commander of the Watch. His removal was necessary in order to allow (hopefully) the invasion of Westeros by the Others. He had taken all the steps required to keep the wall standing (that prophecy thingy that as long as the wall in manned, the Others cannot cross, or something like that).
I’m guessing the wildlings and the Night’s watch will exterminate one another, causing the Wall to no longer be sufficiently manned and thus allowing the Others to cross.
In order to keep the storyline moving, he really needs to trim the herd of POV characters even further in the following book.
There was some really weird stuff going on in the scene where Jon got stabbed. I’m not sure the significance of the first attacker immediately backing off and saying something like “it wasn’t me.” My thought was maybe the skinchanger wilding was in his body or something. Jon’s last word was “Ghost,” and given the prologue of the book I think we can be quite certain that Jon is now in Ghost.
You pointed out Dany’s character 180, but Jon’s was almost just as bad and it happened very suddnely. He went from being completely devoted to the Wall and not getting involved in outside affairs to saying, “Fuck it, I’m going to Winterfel.” That bugged me.
Hopefully some of the POVs will tell the story for multiple characters, like Brienne & Jaime, Theon & Asha, Selmy & Tyrion, etc.
That was by far the most unsatisfying thing about the book. It was bad enough that Tyrion didn’t do much of anything, and took a fifth of the book to do it. But at least he seemed himself.
On the other hand, Dany was unrecognizable. The most shocking and surprising thing in the series has not been Ned’s execution, or the loss of the Kingslayer’s hand. It was Dany marrying the guy that anyone over six could see was intimately involved with the Sons of the Harpy. Even Sansa would have roasted him over a slow fire, but Dany, the ruthless warrior princess, just wrings her hands and meekly lets him fuck her, in hopes that those meanies will stop killing the complete strangers whom she has inexplicably put far ahead of her life’s goal.
Complete, utter bullshit. Who cares what she does from now on? Who is there left to root for, or even against? Jaime is now the nicest and most stable guy in Westeros, Tyrion isn’t doing anything, all the Stark men are dead (except Bran, who in another huge disappointment will apparently just grow roots from now on, and Rickon, whom GRRM has scarcely mentioned in the last 20 years), Arya and Sansa seem content to let others tell them what to do. Who’s left that’s still interesting? Melisandre and Littlefinger, maybe.
Not another nickel, George.
Yeah, the prologue should be something like the twelve days of Christmas:
On the first day of winter, a raven brought to me,
Word that Theon was struck by lightning and killed.
On the second day of winter, two ravens brought to me,
News that Jaime and Brienne were eaten by wolves,
Word that Theon was struck by lightning and killed.
And so on.
I was undecided about reading the book before I read this, but now I have to know how it ends!
True, true. Now that you mention it and I think about it a bit more, Jon’s about-turn is actually worst than Dany’s as it is completely pointless. While there is some internal logic to the book in having Dany act the way she does - somehow GRRM needs to justify her doing nothing for the entire book, and pad the pages - Jon’s decision to go to Winterfel has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on the plot. He decides to become a completely different person, and before this decision has had the chance to affect the storyline, in the next paragraph he dies.
I mean, really? He could’ve just as easily been stabbed doing his morning rounds, on his way to Mellisandre, whatever. Completely pointless reversal of character personality.
That is simply brilliant! 
You’ll be happy to know that GRRM took the time to explain that at sunset her stool was probably still relatively solid but getting loose, and that by the time the moon came up, she was shitting brown water. I shit you not (pun intended - sorry). There’s still some more in the passage about her diarrhea, but I don’t want to spoil it all for you.
Maybe Davos? But now that he too has been afflicted with the “go and seek someone else in Westeros or Essos” curse, I fear we will be treated on page upon page of digression about his pointless voyage from point A to point Z, in his POV chapters.
Let’s look at it another way…what characters are, at this point, doing something we actually care about?
Jon Snow - Currently laying there bleeding. Presumably inhabiting Ghost. Because of his abrupt and nonsensical about-face, the Wildlings and Watch are going to kill each other to death. Maybe JonGhostSnow will take a trip down to Winterfell and become leader of Ramsay’s dogs and they’ll kill the Boltons from the inside or something like that. Still, not likely to do anything meaningful.
Arya - Maybe something worthwhile. She’s going to have to murder someone meaningful at some point. Are any of our characters knowingly headed to Braavos? Something that will allow her to somehow actually affect the story?
Sansa - Will continue to sit there and do nothing. I know some people speculate that she’s going to learn from Littlefinger and become a master manipulator, but I don’t see it. If nothing else, she’d have to go through him, and if the guy who has been making Westeros dance on his strings is taken down by a semi-retarded shell-shocked nitwit, well, that’s just lame.
Bran - Looks like he’ll be able to do SOMETHING, but it kind of seems like he’ll just be a super-voyeur. Maybe he can do something interesting, but I’m betting he’ll just be an exposition gatherer so that we can learn things that are happening without George having to actually have a POV character inserted just for exposition.
Dany - Unlike most of the people out there, I actually always liked her chapters. Now, she seems to have basically given up. I mean, really, she’ll happily let people get slaughtered outside her walls, not to mention let entire cities die, but she won’t take any offensive action. Reconquering Westeros is going to be REALLY GOD DAMNED DIFFICULT if you’re unwilling to actually go on offense.
Reek/Theon - Oh my god, just let him die. As soon as he broke off from Robb and forced us to endure the whole “WE. ARE. IRON. MEN” schtick he became intolerable and more than a little unnecessary. If he really wants to die so badly, maybe he should have just jumped off of one of those hundred foot walls he’s always walking on.
Asha - Pfft. Who cares? Like Theon she’s a professional prisoner. She’s a completely ineffectual character who exists just for her POV. Let Bran take over from his tree.
Selmy - One of the few characters I have an interest in anymore, but like everyone else he seems to be suffering from do-nothing-itis. He should have guaranteed that Dany’s husband died during his capture. Still, looks like he’s probably going to force Dany’s hand and actually break them out of Slaver’s Bay. Maybe he’ll do some serious ass kicking so that once Dany returns with her khalasar she’ll have the Slavers already defeated. More likely she’ll have to bail him out of a bad battle with Drogon, though.
Brienne and Jaime - Listed together since they’re sitting together. I assume these two will involve some big, public middle finger toward Cersei. Maybe at her trial or something. Other than that…who knows?
Victarion - Going to burn down the slavers’ navy. Prooooobably not going to manage to marry Dany. And then? Probably be a big dick for a while until Strong Belwas or Selmy chop him into fish bait.
Tyrion - Formerly a favorite, of course. Now he’s doing…what? Probably going to hook up with Selmy and help root out the sneaky bad people hanging around Dany. Intrigue is his specialty, and Dany doesn’t seem to have anyone on her side that can help with that.
Davos - Side quest time! Woot! Everyone loves a FedEx quest! We’ve only had Brienne running the same quest since book two!
Griff - Seriously? I’m listing him? Another pretender to the Iron Throne. He’ll make progress and then be betrayed and killed. But the question to ask is…who will care? We used to have five attempted kings running around - IIRC, we only got POV time spent on one of them, and that was the guy whose family were were invested in!
What’s left, and who did I miss?
-Joe
Sam and the dragonglass candles at the Citadel? Tommen and his interesting cats?
Actually, the Sand Snakes have the potential to be interesting, and I’d like to know what the Martell clan is up to. And Frankengregor, of course. Everyone loves Frankengregor.
You’d think the Martell clan would fold when they learn that Quentyn couldn’t close the deal with Dany. That would actually suck because it seemed like Doran had quite the master plan set in motion, but it seemed to rely quite heavily on Q’s success, which was obviously a huge blunder.
I’m also mildly interested in Varys. Was he in with Connington all along? Where do Illyrio and Dany fit in there?
The situation at Winterfel is intriguing, too. Is Stannis dead? Is Mance really captured? Was it really Ramsay who sent that letter?
There are plenty of things I’m interested to see where they go, I just want them to GET THERE! Let’s make a little headway on this plot.
Winterfell
Not a dig at you, personally, Barkis…I’ve been seeing that spelling for about the last page and don’t know where it came from.
Yeah, but I’m lazy.
"The sand turned red. This was because she was bleeding on it. Blood - ruby-red blood, her blood. Blood… and piss and shit. This was the worst day of her life. "
Quick, without looking it up – is that quotation by George R. R. Martin or by Garth Marenghi (author - visionary - dreamweaver)?