My wife will be glad to see him back. She was so bummed when Ja'qen switched faces at the end of Season 2. She looked confused at the switch. I explained about the Faceless Men: "'Pera aí. Então eles trocaram aquele bonitão com esse feinho? De jeito nenhum, pelo amor de Deus!" ("Hold up. So they traded that hot dude with this little ugly thing? No way, for the love of God!")
can't believe how much I forgot. Arya just casually kills Dareon on the streets and takes his boots!??! I've been too hard on the book, its not as bad as I remember. But I am skipping the Brienne chapters.
I'm not so keen on it. I suppose it's standard practice in adaptations to consolidate characters to avoid confusing viewers with a million different faces. But, one of the things that makes the book series so cool is that it has a large cast of characters, all with some depth of personality. Everyone has a story to tell. It makes the story feel vast and intricate. When you close the loop for the show and contain the story in a much smaller set of characters, it loses some of that epic quality.
Feast for Crows was so underrated I think. If I had to give a reason it's because it was almost like a new story. We still had Kings Landing but no Tywin, Tyrion, Little Finger or Varys. So many of the chapters were at Dorn or the Iron Islands with new characters that we as readers had no history with. No Jon chapters and the wall. It was almost like a new story throughout most of the book. I think if we had not been anticipating updates on all of our favorite characters (at least those left alive) it would have been considered a terrific book. Maybe not on the level of Clash of Kings or Storm of Swords but damn good regardless.
I think the problem was that it could have been told in 1/4th of the pages and GRRM started his new setup to where he split the characters into different books. I believe that A Feast for Crows, Dance With Dragons, and Winds of Winter are supposed to take place during the same time period but each emphasizes different characters. The previous books had a nice mixture of different characters.
I was somewhat disappointed the first time I read it as well but on a second reading when I knew the characters I enjoyed it much, much more. What is so great about ASOIAF is how vast and complex the story is. You can see how the characters in AFFC will impact the outcome significantly.
In my opinion you are doing yourself a disservice. Brienne is a fantastic character that is one of my favorites.
It looks like the LSH story arc is going to have little bearing in the books to come. I was hoping she'd play a bigger role outside of killing a few freys.
I mean, I've already read it once, know that she goes looking for Arya/Sansa and ends up getting captured by Beric/SH somewhere along the way. I didn't really get much out of reading her stuff again so I just skipped it.
Why don't they make it longer then 10 shows a season(10hours) seems like you could do 20-40% more and flesh the story out more.
"A Feast for Crows" runs concurrently with the first two thirds of "Dance with Dragons". In the last third of DwD, you pick back up with characters from Westeros. "Winds of Winter" simply continues with the story, no concurrent anything. I liked a lot of the "Feast" material but felt it needed some trimming here and there. I like a good long read but with so many characters, locations, and setup, the paragraphs and exposition and such just keep piling up. From what I understand the show is sometimes really sucking on budget. Just to get his 66 minute last episode to include Arya and the ship the director pretty much had to go for it, and plead with the producers that it was all necessary, so they "moved some money around" and such. Which might explain why a few episodes were more talky, less "action-y". You had to save money for episodes 9 and 10.
Yeah, there was a similar story in season two with the Battle of Blackwater. Neil Marshall decided he really wanted to show that battle in a way that it deserved, but they simply did not have the budget, so they went back to HBO to ask for more money. I'm glad they did because that episode was glorious.
Blackwater rocked. Ironically, it was a low-rated episode. It's why the last two seasons have skipped showing a new episode on Memorial Day weekend. It just kills ratings.
What the show writers consider "important" doesn't really mean much for the books considering how much they have changed already. It means LSH isn't on the iron throne in the end and that's about it.
2 questions: Is it confirmed that Hizdahr fed the poisoned locusts and is the Harpy? Was Ramsey lying and is Stannis really alive? (we got the WoW Theon passage but I don't know if that preceded the Ramsey letter to Jon)
