A Thread of Ice and Fire...

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Okay... since I don't have HBO or friends, let alone friends who have HBO, I've devoted the last few weeks to getting caught up on the books. I just finished A Feast For Crows--thoroughly enjoyed it--and started A Dance With Dragons.

I read somewhere, The Guardian, I think, that the series peaked with A Storm of Swords, and the reviewer expected the book series and TV series to decline and disappoint from here on out.

This really puzzles me. I haven't seen season 4 of AGoT, so I cannot comment on that, but as mentioned above, I just finished AFfC and thought it was great! I really enjoyed seeing Cersei self-destruct and suffer and I'm interested to see if Jaime actually turns into a decent human being.

I'm also enjoying Sam Tarly's arc... and WHO DOESN'T love Arya Stark's story? There's just something so perversely appealing about a pint-sized, revenge driven, murder machine!

I am a bit worried about whether GRRM is actually going to be able to wrap this thing up, but, right now I'm still having a lot of fun.

So, what do you guys think?

Has the series peaked?

Has GRRM lost his way?

Will he be able to deliver a worthy ending with the next two books?

And, just as important, will he be able to finish the series before he/we die[s] of old age?

I've watched season 1 and 2 and am saving up for 3. Love it! Arya rocks, Sansa handles things differently, but she is strong in her own way.

I didn't start reading the book series until after I'd seen season 1 of GOT. Now I am in the midst of reading it too and am one of those people eagerly awaiting the next book. I have been amazed at just how closely the tv rendition sticks to the book, often using the exact same dialogue. They did change the order of some things around in the tv series, mostly altering the order that some scenes are shown in.

I don't think so. At least I hope not. But I haven't yet seen any downhill slide in either the books or tv show.



Hopefully he has some sort of story arc in his head. Daenerys seems to have lost her way and is rambling from one citadel to the next freeing slaves. It's a worthy mission but does seem like stalling before getting her to Westoros.



This is the tough one. So far the tv series has been faithful to the books but that was easy enough when the books were already written. If GRRM doesn't hurry up, the tv series will run out of his existing material and the series writers will have to come up with their own ending. At last count, this show has surpassed The Sopranos as HBO's most popular so there is considerable pressure on the writers to deliver. IF GRRM hasn't yet written the ending book(s), the series writers will have to take matters into their own hands and then the stories will diverge. Sometimes shows will just end without a written ending (X-Files---boo!) but there is pressure now for a proper ending and all eyes are on the series (book and show) so I think that a lot of thought will go into the ending(s).

That's how I got started as well.

Re:OP--

-I do not think the series has declined. Unfortunately, a lot of the readership miss all the subtleties, skim when there isn't a major set piece going on, and can't handle non-traditional narratives.

-If the showrunners catch up to George, then I have no issues with them doing their own thing, and letting George take his time with the books. Though, I suspect George is a lot closer to completion than he lets on.

-Arya is psychologically not much different from a child soldier, and she is a danger to a lot of good people. At Arya's chapter headed, "Cat of the Canals", It seemed to imply a SH chapter. It was a great way to draw our attention to the parallels between Arya and her mother. They are both pitiless revenge seeking bastards with many parallel formative experiences.

I hope the show hasn't dropped SH. Her SOS book epilogue was left out of S-4. Briene's interactions with her are some of the dramatic high points of the series. I hope Jaime doesn't get flayed by her or something. Bran could always intervene...

Last edited by Stannis on 17 Jun 2014, 11:10 pm, edited 14 times in total.

I'd agree that A Storm of Swords is the peak of the series so far, but only because a number of very large chickens came home to roost in the back half, and the two subsequent books have felt a little light on momentous events in comparison, thought I wouldn't say the quality has declined. I remember reading it the first time and just getting happier and happier as my least favorite characters all met with unfortunate ends, even the ones I thought were going to stick around forever just to spite me (in particular, I thought the Tickler had entirely gotten away with it when he got *by far* my favorite demise in the series, which was so cinematic that I'm shocked it didn't make it into the show). Really, book three should have been titled Horrible Things Happening to Horrible People - with some collateral damage. Really though, I wasn't even too upset by the Red Wedding, as I didn't find any of those characters very interesting and was bored with their POV chapters, I was more offended by the breach of hospitality law than anything, plus the sheer pettiness of of it. Hopefully something awful will befall Walder Frey before old age claims him, or George R R Martin for that matter.

As much as I enjoyed watching Cersie's half baked schemes unravel in the later books, I'm not sure what the show is going to do for it's next season, as the scope widened considerably at this point, with less major events occurring that could be arranged into a coherent TV season. I'm trying to think of anything particularly climactic that occurs that a season could build towards, but am drawing a bit of a blank.

A Feast for Crows-Briene VIII

The word is "Sword".

Game of thrones is awesome, I have not started reading the books yet but I have seen all the seasons thus far and all the episodes aside from the most recent one which I plan to watch later.

^

I don't really think you could base a whole season on building towards that though, it's just one of many cliff hangers in books 4 and 5, and there's another much more plot critical one up north. You just don't have any Tyrion and Tywin in the privy or Daenerys sics her dragons on slavers kind of moments in there, though my vote for season 5 would be Cersie's plotting going awry with regards to the High Septon...

The worst Miss-step on the show so far was the failure to have Jaime tell Tyrion about what happened to Tysha. Tysha makes the privy scene far more powerful, and it keeps Tyrion's rage at his family visceral throughout Dance. With this revelation, Tyrion comes to believe that the only true friendship that he's ever had in his life (Jaime) is a fraud. Believing Tysha is a whore is what made Tyrion think that nobody could ever love him and set set him in his self-destructive whore mongering ways. The lie also directly lead to Tyrion failing to protect Tysha, and to his taking part in her rape. Finding out it's all based on a lie, more than anything else, is what makes him want to burn the Lannister house to the ground, and adds dramatic tension throughout Dance as we wonder whether he is actually helping or hindering Lannister enemies. Show Tyrion would never harm Jaime, Tommen or Myrcella directly. With book Tyrion it's a a distinct possibility.The Tysha revelation would have significantly added drama and nuance to Tyrion's storyline, but the show runner's derailed it.

Last edited by Stannis on 18 Jun 2014, 2:22 am, edited 2 times in total.

I wouldn't call it the worst misstep, but I would definitely call it one, and a stupid one at that, as their was literally no reason at all not to include it, they wouldn't have needed extra actors or anything, just a minute of dialogue. Bonus for using The Rains of Castamere as a stinger for the scene though.

I also didn't like that they softened Tyrion's encounter with Shae, as in the book it was a straight up murder, but they managed to make it more like self defense for the show, which I think robbed it of some of it's power. Lot of complaints about how they handled Shae throughout, come to think of it...

I won't get too spoilery since I don't know how far along you are in the books, but...

I'm just a few chapters into ADwD and it looks like at least three plot lines are racing toward Daenerys to bring her into the main conflicts... Also, her dragons are just now getting big enough to be menaces.

If this is really going to be an epic, elemental conflict, she's got to be a major force in the last two books.

A few non-spoilery guesses about revelations later in the books (extrapolated entirely from information in books 1-3):

-Varys and LF were at some point in cahoots and trying to set up a constitutional monarchy.

-LF was working under orders from the Iron Bank of Braavos when he deliberately bankrupted the royal treasury when he was master of coin.

-Westeros is some kind of inverted earth where our landmasses are their sea and our sea is their landmasses.

-At some point Ironborn skinchangers are going to enter the minds of Kraken.

-Someone with greenseeing abilities is going to end up being the fictional author of ASOIAF, much as Frodo, and Sam were the authors of Lord of the Rings.

-I think Dany's child to Drogo is alive, and was whisked off somewhere for its own protection. The reason I say this, is because the demon like description Dany is given of her stillborn fetus, is similar to the description Cersei gave as to Tyrion's appearance when Oberyn visited kings landing in his youth. It is almost as if they both are borrowing from the same well of superstitious motifs. If Ser Jorah felt the need to lie about it, one plausible reason is that the child lived.

It?s going to be hard I think to wrap up the story that quickly because he has so many plotlines running at the same time and so many characters. Somehow I just don?t see them all coming together in the end but then that?s what makes his style. Characters get killed off mid plot without even coming to fulfill their plans so I foresee many characters dying before the end. I do hope that Daenerys survives and invades Westeros with her dragons though.

As for the series hitting it?s peak? No. Unless he suffers a severe breakdown and looses the ability to write it has not peaked yet in my opinion.

After finishing A Dance With Dragons and going back to rewatch the series, I'm getting the impression that Littlefinger and Varys are THE master wirepullers of the tale. I think that, in the end, they will be the only real players in this game of thrones.

PS

As a general comment:

Apparently they have already released season 4 on instant video in the UK but not in the US....

What the heck is up with that!?!

My guess is that the series will have peaked when it catches up to wherever GRRM happens to be in writing the story at that time. After that the producers will be going off of outlines at best of what GRRM thinks will happen, and since it seems clear that in the past the stories he's written didn't turn out quite as he thought they would when he started, the show will for sure begin to deviate from the books. In any case at the rate he's going he may die of old age before he finishes. I'd be more re-assured if he'd devote more time to writing and less to contributing directly to the show - the other people working on the show seem more than capable if they have good source material.

If I'm reckoning correctly, they just finished A Storm of Swords, so they have two books and easily two seasons worth of material before they could possibly catch up.

Surely GRRM can squeeze out at least one more book in the meantime.... Book 6 should be done by the fall.... maybe.... give or take another year.