Amph A Song of Ice and Fire Discussion Thread

i don't know, to me the fourth and fifth books are a pretty huge step down from the first three. that the show people will fail in trying to improve upon them is a given, but i can't really blame them for trying. they're sort of in a no-win situation at this point.

 

They're slower paced. That's all it boils down to. It's a jarring transition at first, but I've come to appreciate the latter two books a lot more. Maybe it's because they're Shakespeare compared to the show. **** the showrunners. I'd have sympathy for adaptation difficulties if they deserved it.

 

yeah, i mean i will likely stop watching too. i can't imagine this being very good. it's just that it's no surprise at all that they're going to cater to show fans who expect twists and turns in every episode. book readers make up a minority of the viewers of the show, and what hooked most viewers is the pacing established by the material from the first three books. the fourth and fifth books will largely be unrecognizable to the point where complaining about the particulars of every change will be pointless. i don't see how they'll get it back on track once the winds of winter is released, if they would even want to, so this is probably the point where the two things completely part ways, never to meet again.

 

During my reread (I'm well into DOD now) I've come to like the 4th and 5th books both more and less. Lots of great stuff going on in the background, and it's one heck of a table that GRRM has set. But it needed some rather drastic editing, too many chapters just drag on and on and on.

EDIT: Anyone not agree that this article is absolutely spot on? Not necessarily new but nice to see the proper overall picture given.
We Need To Talk About Tyrion: How HBO Failed George R. R. Martin’s Iconic Character by Ilana Teitelbaum

 

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All I have to say is after the Red Wedding it seems everyone has collectively given up on 'guest right' as a concept.

And Ramsay plays a Westeros Joker very well.

And where the heck are the Glovers?!

 

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Yeah I offered it and he declined, in hindsight at that moment you should call in your guard to be safe, but how the heck did the Whitehill soldiers get through the gate? Did my men just get bought off?

Yeah I think Ramsay never intended anything else but killing Ethan. That said him killing Lord Whitehill as well if you make a better argument would've been nice. Whitehill called him 'Snow' after all.

Yeah but Foresters are sworn to House Glover, Bole, Branch, Forrester, and Woods are their bannermen. I guess if Asha(Yara) still controls Deepwood Motte they may no longer be heeded but the game made it seem like Forester directly served House Stark rather than House Glover

 

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I think they said the Ironborn will be an element so maybe they will acknowledge the Glovers are the normal liege lords for the Forresters, but at the same time the game really feels like it's saying the Forresters are the same rank as the higher houses like Glover. Which given the game is based off the show isn't that absurd what with the changes

I'm betting you'll get an option to try and kill Ramsay as Asher and it will end badly. Whitehill and his son hopefully you can kill, that said I'm guessing Whitehill is going to make a move on Lady Forrester, the way he backed off and apologized when she showed up, something is going on there.

Could be, or maybe it was whichever person you choose not to be your adviser who gets very petty. Hopefully not that. I have a feeling it won't be explained though. Or we just assume they had orders from Warden Bolton to enter the castle

 

Stop with the spoiler tags pls.

tom, you handsome moustachioed bandit, and Darth Guy, you um... guy

Have you read Joe Abercrombie's First Law trilogy?

 

Say one thing about Joe Abercrombie, say he churns out books.

 

No, I have not. I don't read a lot of fiction.

So is this Telltale game good? The show license makes me wary.

 

Telltale know how to do well with licensed games though. The game is getting good reactions.

 

Make an exception for First Law.

You will thank me for it.

 

i haven't read it either. i will check it out when i'm over my current murakami kick.

 

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I suppose it's possible. Imagine he'd be lame after that though. Still I guess it depends on the mood the Freys were in, from my reading in the books it seemed they aimed to kill all the northern heirs like Dacey Mormont, Smalljon Umber, Wendel Manderly, then take the Rivermen heirs as hostages.

 

Oh! I have that 1Q84 lying around. I should read that?

 

it is so good.

 

So, um, I feel kind of guilty barging in on this thread--I'm quite ashamed of it, but I've never managed to get past the middle of A Game of Thrones, although I do keep up with the TV show.

I've been working on studying the early storyline of George Lucas's 1988 fantasy movie Willow, which was apparently conceived at first as a much darker and more adult film than what was ultimately made. Doing this made me realize that the outline for this early version of the film was likely passed around Hollywood in the early 1990s... and one of the people who read it, it seems, was George RR Martin, who was a TV writer at the time, and who published the first book of ASOIAF in 1996.

It's my guess that a heck of a lot of ASOIAF derives from the early Willow. (In other words, GRRM has been well repaid for GL's theft of the design of Chewbacca from one of his short stories back in 1975!)

This influence on Martin's books runs extremely deep, from what I can tell. So much so that, at this point, I could probably predict the ending of the Westeros saga with a fair degree of certainty. (With the caveat that this is subject to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle: a moving object once observed may still change course.)

Based on the Willow connection, I have some quite detailed theories for how Books 6 and 7 will play out, and who will ultimately sit on the throne of King's Landing... despite never having read past two-thirds into Book 1.

So, is anyone up for some wild theorizing that might very well be spoileriffic?

(Incidentally, another major Nineties fantasy work that shows clear signs of being influenced by the early Willow is Neil Gaiman's Stardust, which he began in 1993 and finished in 1999.)

 

This should be good.