Well, he did confirm that Loras and Renly were lovers. But I see your point.
I’ll have to find the passages again. I never twigged to a physical similarity between them.
Well, that certainly had a lot of needless filler. Daenerys and Tyrion should have gotten the same treatment Martin gave to Arya and Bran. Main characters whose personal development is important but don’t have a lot to do.
The third of the book we spent in Meereen should have been trimmed to about an eighth. We’ve been given no prior incentive to care about the peoples or goings-on in Slaver’s Bay, apart from Daenerys herself, so why all the politics and hundred different characters whose names I can’t remember? It’s almost like Martin realizes how monotonous it got to be and jokes about it in one of Quentyn’s chapters:
It really doesn’t. Let’s move it along, George.
I enjoyed the rest of the book. I thought Asha’s brief appearance was a short but effective way to both move Stannis along and depict the harshness of the winter and its effects on the people. For some reason, I even found myself oddly interested in Victarion’s story, despite the involuntary groan produced by yet another character seeking Daenerys. I thought Quentyn was superfluous - Areo’s one chapter told us all we needed to know about Dorne’s plots and motivations, and the dragon-releasing could have just been relayed to Selmy to get it to the reader.
Hopefully it won’t be another 5 years before we find out if Jon is alive or “alive”, if Aegon is a fake, and if Ramsay is a liar. No more book-splitting nonsense, please!
I liked it, but I didn’t love it. It took me nearly 2 weeks to finish it too. There were quite a few bits that I liked, though.
He really needed to have more plot advancement in the book, and less pointless point of views. The Dornish plots in particular could use some heavy pruning. I couldn’t care less about Aegon or Quentyn, and I hope it’s not the real Aegon. Sometimes it feels like George spends too much time reading fan speculation on things, and then adjusts the plot just to screw with people. Aegon came out literally from nowhere.
I was optimistic when it was revealed that Tyrion would join up with Daenerys. Combining those two plot lines would have been a perfect way to make them more interesting. I guess I rejoiced too soon. I usually like Tyrion, but he was mostly boring in this book. I was never a huge fan of Daenerys, and she was even worse than before here.
It feels like George has fallen too much in love with building new worlds, and not enough on building plots. He’s spent so much time on the different slaver cities and sellsword companies, but the result hasn’t been very interesting. The only city on the other side of the sea I care at all about is Braavos, and ironically it has had a lot less focus than the others. Cersei continued to be one of the few POW characters to become less interesting and less sympathetic after getting chapters focusing on her. Can we have her strangled and move on to more interesting characters already?
I liked most of the Westeros chapter, though there could have been one or two fewer Theon chapters. The battles of Winterfell and Meereen really should have been in this book, as now it felt like there was no climax to the buildup. It won’t be the same getting it 5 years from now in book 6 either. If Stannis died offscreen, there will be book throwing. The Melissandre chapter was a pleasant surprise, and I liked it a lot. It also made me like Melissandre a bit more.
There’s no way he’s going to end the series in a satisfying manner with just two books. Just looking at the different plotlines and POWs we have running right now:
- Arya at Braavos
- The Braavos bank subplot
- Tormund going to Hardhome
- Jon, Wildlings, Melissandre and the Watch at the Wall. These might end up split into two if Jon survived!
- Bran beyond the wall
- Stannis, Asha, Theon at Winterfell
- The Boltons and others at Winterfell
- Davos going to rescue Osha and Rickon
- Hound, Brienne, and Jamie with Lady Stoneheart. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the Blackfish join her.
- King’s Landing with Tommen, Cersei, Margaery, Varys etc.
- Littlefinger and Sansa
- Aegon landing at the Stormlands
- Doran Martell
- The other Martells
- Samwell and the Citadel plots
- Victarion sailing to steal some Dragons
- Euron who knows where
- Aeron doing who cares what
- Tyrion as a sellsword
- Barristan ruling Meereen
- Daenerys with Drogon, and now an old Dothraki khal too
It’s too damn many even without adding more characters. I probably forgot a few, and I only care about half the ones listed. I heard a POW for Aeron Damphair and Arianne Martell were cut from this book, and added to the 6th book instead. I’m beginning to fear he’ll die long before there’ll be a satisfying conclusion to anything.
The book felt like it was written over several years, with the author dropping it and then coming back to pick it up again. The story does not really flow overall, but the way I read it, he, the author has decided that its no longer convienent for the men of the black to remain neutral in the overall game.
I doubt Jon is dead, but his time as commander of the night watch is done. Forgetting the vows he was babbling about for half the series, especially when he essentially abandons Robb, but now supposedly going after Arya in winterfell is convienent. That screams king of the north.
While I love Arya’s character, her Bran and Rickon are essentially useless, unless Martin is able to wrap up the current generation and extend the story to ten years from now. Concidering his (GRRM) age, their story arc’s may actually dead end.
I liked that Hitler parody and kinda agreed with it, Jon having plot armor.
Declan
Finished it today and was a lot happier with it then most here. Thought it was pretty good - I can see where people are coming from with it being a static book, but it was miles better than a feast for crows in this regard. Actually makes FfC look worse in retrospect.
The Danaerys line was tolerable - had it’s internal drama that worked well enough. I guess I share the general dissatisfaction that he’s building such a massive world and that slavers bay is just not that interesting, but I can live with that.
Good shout on the false dragon - Illyrio’s son is a nice theory. Also - nice touch on the banker’s hat. Only one man in fantasy lit can legitimately wear a three-tiered hat, namely Cugel the Clever, but I’m pretty sure GRRM knows that and was paying homage.
So is the Ghost in Winterfell Theon’s split personality?
You mean the one who keeps killing Bolton’s men? That’s Mance Rayder (Abel) and his women.
I enjoyed reading it, but was ultimately frustrated by the lack of overall movement of the various plots. As so many others have already noted.
I could tolerate this and even enjoy it, if GRRM was cranking out the books every year or two. At his present pace, not so much…
Why? That would jeopardize their mission considerably. Any evidence for this theory?
When Theon meets the hooded man, Mance is playing music in the great hall, so he’s not Mance. Although we don’t know if that man is the same as killer.
If I recall correctly (which I very well may not), when the little boy (a Frey, I think?) is killed, the spearwives deny killing him, and are quite emphatic about it. I don’t remember them confessing to killing the others, but I don’t think they denied it either.
Yeah, that’s the impression I got.
What are supposed to get from Little Walder’s death? Are we supposed to guess that Bran is somehow responsible? Or maybe that Big Walder is a shitty brother?
There were also a couple references to swords missing from the tombs under Winterfell. Were those the words that Bran/Osha/Hodor took, or are those more recent thefts?
Bran and his pals take Brandon’s, Ned’s, and Rickard’s swords in ACOK, and those are the ones mentioned by name as missing in ADWD. But that doesn’t prove that others weren’t taken later.
Finally finished it. If you knew me, the fact that it took me a month to slog through it would be enough to tell you it was a huge disappointment.
Tyrion had always been my favorite character. In ADWD, his chapters were consistently the most boring, and IMO the book would have been better without them. The only thing of significance (maybe) that happened was the introduction of Aegon, and since it was completely out of the blue, that might as well have happened in Grif’s chapter.
Dany was equally boring. It’s kind of stunning to look back and realize that SHE RODE A FUCKING DRAGON, what everybody has been waiting for since the first book 15 years ago, and it couldn’t have been less exciting. Pages and pages of descriptions of turtles, clothes, and food, and what, two sentences about riding a dragon?
The whole thing was just too long and bloated, even if something eventful had happened, which it didn’t until the very end. It’s almost as if that was just tacked on as a last minute thought, after some editor had the guts to ask GRRM, “Seriously, is that all that happens in a thousand pages?”
Given the pace of the plot and the writing, I don’t expect this to wind up in two more books, and I don’t expect GRRM to live long enough to finish even those two. He has just sucked all my enthusiasm for the series from me. I used to recommend this series to anyone who asked; now I’ll warn them about it.
At least I’m congratulating myself for not ever starting the Wheel of Time.
I’m surprised the guy didn’t die a long time before if he bit every coin that was paid to him.
Hey, I forgot about that. Pate is killed in the prologue of Feast, but then he’s alive at the end. I was thinking ADWD would do something with that, but there was no resumption of the Sam thread.
So what’s the deal with Pate? Why kill him, why bring him back with no explanation, and why go 12 years (if we’re lucky) between mentions of him?
But isn’t that a pretty clunky way to kill someone? It’s probably the first gold coin Pate ever had, so how did Jaqen know he would bite it? And in the case of the underwriter, unless the poison is only good for a few hours, what’s to keep someone else from getting killed by the same coin?
Pate didn’t come back to life. That’s the Faceless Man (Jaqen, if the theories are correct). He took Pate’s place, I assume to be at the center of whatever research the magic Maesters were doing about the magic coming back.
Replacement Pate also has the key to every door in the Citadel thanks to Dead Pate, which is a pretty useful thing to have, but who knows to what end. There is Tyrion’s musing on the “Blood and Fire/ The Death of Dragons” book, the only surviving copy of which is supposed to be locked up, where else, underneath the Citadel.
Over in the other thread there’s a discussion about the Tyrells setting up Cersei, which I agree is hinted at. There’s a bit before Cersei’s (lingering, uncomfortable) humiliation where she asks whether Margaery has already had her trial, and the one church lady says “Soon, but her brother…” before getting cut off. So OK, that suggests Loras could be available to fight in the trial, which he’d pretty clearly win against whoever the Tyrells think the other champion is going to be (they couldn’t have known about the Magic Mountain). One thing I wonder, though, in that case - what’s up with the moon tea? If the whole thing is a setup, with Taena as a triple agent all along feeding information to the Tyrells, why is Pycelle making moon tea for Margaery? He doesn’t seem the type to have been in on it, and it doesn’t really seem like he was necessary to the scheme even if he were.
Pycelle is told to provide it, so he provides it?
He might not be in on anything. He even thinks it’s a lever to have against her at some point. But what if she’s not? What if she’s got some serving girl who really needed it and Margarey was just being all noble by taking the hit to her honor to provide it to some poor commoner? All to make the peasants love her more and love Cersei less…
-Joe