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suburban virgin
Jul 26, 2007
Highly qualified lurker.
I still don't get why the three knights of the Kingsguard were chilling at the Tower of Joy during the rebellion. At first I thought it was something to do with new baby Jon being next in line for the throne and them having to defend him but he'd still be a bastard and succession would pass to Viserys. Is it really just a "gently caress you, we're not running" thing, even if they'd be running to defend the new, actual, eight-year-old King?

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suburban virgin
Jul 26, 2007
Highly qualified lurker.

Thulsa Doom posted:

Targaryens were polygamists on top of the whole incest thing, so it's not unreasonable for Rhaegar to have married Lyanna, probably in front of a weirwood so Bran can see it.

No weirwoods in the south :colbert: (except at the Isle of Faces. What is up with the Isle of Faces?).

suburban virgin
Jul 26, 2007
Highly qualified lurker.
Patrick Mcgoohan would've made a great Roose Bolton.

suburban virgin
Jul 26, 2007
Highly qualified lurker.

Contra Calculus posted:

I'm curious about the TVIV literacy rate.

I'd spend a lot more time in TVIV if all the posts were "mAD MaEN NO sCUCK DIK. U SuK DIK!" written in bright crayon.

suburban virgin
Jul 26, 2007
Highly qualified lurker.

ace_beef posted:

Aren't those the words of House GRRM?

There are over one and a half million words of House GRRM. And counting.

suburban virgin
Jul 26, 2007
Highly qualified lurker.

LoG posted:

Dragons are the reason for the season.

Dragons are the motion in the ocean?

But yeah, don't think too hard about literally anything to do with the erratic seasons. It will never make sense.

suburban virgin
Jul 26, 2007
Highly qualified lurker.

Blade_of_tyshalle posted:

I'll be honest and say as much as I enjoy GRRM's writing, he's just a fairly middling author who stumbled into something awesome and has been drowning in it since.

As much as this is the Bad Thread and we shouldn't say poo poo like this, you haven't read nearly enough middling authors if you're calling GRRM a middling author. He is Genuinely Very Good At Writing. Whether he can plot and pace as well as his ambition demands is up for debate but he's been at his craft a long time and it shows.

suburban virgin
Jul 26, 2007
Highly qualified lurker.

equity posted:

He's a middling erotic author.

Granted. The boners are all shameful.

suburban virgin
Jul 26, 2007
Highly qualified lurker.

emanresu tnuocca posted:

AFFC is a pretty good book aside from myrish swamp and fat pink mast.

Ayup. I'm rereading the series right now and Feast is what I'm looking forward to. First time I read it I was all "WHAT THE gently caress GORGE WHY IS NOTHING HAPPENING" but now I think I'm ready for several hundred pages of slow-burning plotting and Everything Is poo poo. The first time it's all about your Ned Starks and your Red Weddings but after that's all old news you can really get into your sand snakes in the myrish swamp.

suburban virgin
Jul 26, 2007
Highly qualified lurker.
Given TVIV's burning hatred of women I can't wait for the bile that'll be spilled over Cersei once they get around to Feast. I'm rereading it now and am in love with how mental and paranoid she's written. Believing Kevan Lannister, possibly the most high-functioning and dedicated member of the Lannister clan remaining, despite the loss of his brother and the near-crippling of his son (and the loss of another son somewhere?), is on the Tyrell's payroll even while he gives her the most sensible and honest advice of anyone is just golden.

suburban virgin
Jul 26, 2007
Highly qualified lurker.
I wouldn't worry. Nobody seems to have the faintest idea how Lost ends. The discussion seems to be "It's Purgatory." "Nuh-uh!" "Uh-huh!" ad infinitum. Nothing is ever answered and nothing is ever addressed. That's how I understand it anyway, speaking as someone who gave up around season 2 - 3 because there were just. So. Many. Jack. Episodes. Jesus Christ that man was duller than a sack of teeth.

suburban virgin
Jul 26, 2007
Highly qualified lurker.

Junkenstein posted:

Entering 10 characters into a computer from the 70's every 8 hours? Isn't that how GRRM writes?

:golfclap:

suburban virgin
Jul 26, 2007
Highly qualified lurker.
Just finished re-reading Feast.

quote:

..characters you love or love to hate will be along next year (I devoutly hope) in A Dance with Dragons...

-George R. R. Martin
June 2005

Oh that old familiar rage.


How I've missed you.

suburban virgin
Jul 26, 2007
Highly qualified lurker.

Chinston Wurchill posted:

I'm still working through the Feast/Dance combo, and the writing for these two (not just the plot) seems markedly worse in comparison to the first three. We've got "she didn't know who had the cock and who the oval office," "their arousal was arousing," and "she didn't know if he was inside her or she inside him," among other gems.

Along with a remarkable increase in mummer's farts (mummery's everything, really), nipples on breastplates, and at some point between Storm and Feast George learned about using "horned" as a euphemism for cuckoldry and decided to use it everywhere as clumsily as possible. The faux-medieval slang didn't bother me before, but it seems to be spiralling out of control the longer the series goes on. I expect the manuscript for Winds of Winter is just "nipples nuncles neeps mummers farts words are wind MANSTAFF".

edit: Can't wait to read about Darkstar's manstaff

suburban virgin
Jul 26, 2007
Highly qualified lurker.
I'm sure manstaff was in there somewhere. Don't make me go look. :(

suburban virgin
Jul 26, 2007
Highly qualified lurker.

rypakal posted:

It's almost like he's the Mary Sue.

Mary Sue isn't quite accurate though. A Mary Sue would be fawned over by everyone else as being totally wonderful and would succeed though simply being so much better and smarter than all the other characters. Sam has achieved something special: the books are completely honest and upfront about what a useless, pig-poo poo thick, cowardly, gluttonous, friendless lump he is, about how he is only capable of engendering the emotions of hatred, disgust and pity in those he encounters, but always have him succeeding due to dumb luck and the sacrifices of better people. He will outlive everyone else, but through no ability of his own. Heck, he may even try to kill himself a couple of times but fail at that too. He'll just bumble in glassy-eyed terror from one situation from the next as GRRM cackles madly from his throne of pizza.

suburban virgin
Jul 26, 2007
Highly qualified lurker.

Blind Sally posted:

Jaime, Stannis the Mannis, and Victarion. That's the money, right there.

All of these people will die in the next book.

j/k there will be no next book

suburban virgin
Jul 26, 2007
Highly qualified lurker.

Zalakwe posted:

I actually quite enjoyed the ride in Mereen but as some have said in recent pages the ending? What was the point? Does he now need to write another 1000 pages of Dany taking over a Khalazar, maybe she could take Mereen afterwards, gently caress me.

Hopefully the next Dany chapter will start with "Dany and her new Khalasar burned Mereen to the ground, succesfully resolving all plot threads and charcters therein".

suburban virgin
Jul 26, 2007
Highly qualified lurker.
I guess when you spend like a month rowing back and forth for every day you spend raping and pillaging you have to pass the time somehow. Impromptu rap battles are as good as anything.

suburban virgin
Jul 26, 2007
Highly qualified lurker.
Reminder that the Gorge could give up at any time and hand the series over to a less perverted more reliable author.

The Hate Must Flow.

suburban virgin
Jul 26, 2007
Highly qualified lurker.

Blade_of_tyshalle posted:

Currently airing shows better than HBO's Game of Thrones:

Coronation Street

This is actually true btw

suburban virgin
Jul 26, 2007
Highly qualified lurker.
I like the theory that he's stuck writing himself up a lot of blind alleyways. As a writer he seems to have a pretty general idea of where the plot is headed, but on a page-to-page level he writes from a perspective of "what would it make sense for this character for these motivations to do/attempt". Which is great for writing compelling characters and complex plotlines (because everyone naturally starts bumping heads with each other following their own objectives) but becomes geometrically more difficult to write the more characters and objectives you add.

ASoIaF is now a huge world, with thousands of characters. A close page-by-page analysis like that done by the huis clos guy suggests that it's not quite all smoke and mirrors, he really tries to include all the little wheels turning against each other. So now when he starts writing a chapter and seeing where it takes him he might get all the way through it, discover it doesn't make sense from someone else's perspective, scrap it and start again. Over and over and over.

This is assuming of course that he still is enjoying writing for the sake of writing. I suspect from the volume and detail of the work so far he really does enjoy getting lost inventing his fantasy armoured barbiedolls and making them kiss, so I lean heavily on him getting stuck in the process rather than abandoning it.

Having said that, him having gotten completely sick of the project and given up is also pretty likely.

suburban virgin
Jul 26, 2007
Highly qualified lurker.

mind the walrus posted:

Well Brits still call the US "the colonies" even though the vast majority were established after the War for Independence was won, so it's not wholly unprecedented.

Nobody actually does this unironically except lunatics and the extreme upper class and frankly if you have a lot of dealings with them it's your own drat fault.

suburban virgin
Jul 26, 2007
Highly qualified lurker.
As far as finishing the series is concerned, Roy Dotrice is the least of your worries.

suburban virgin
Jul 26, 2007
Highly qualified lurker.

kcroy posted:

-arrogant young man taking credit for what he did ( save the city / deliver the city to rebels )
-a bit emo ( pointing a self recriminating finger at what he just did - kill his king / betray his oath / choose family over king ( ? ) )
-a bit of King of the Mountain / my family runs poo poo
-at least at some level toying with the fact he probably COULD be king

All of this poo poo. Remember Jaime is not a guy who thinks thinks through, even when we meet him fifteen years later. At the time he would've been dumb and rash and full of misguided pride and shame at having been the one member of the Kingsguard man enough to put down a rabid dog. He probably expected that whoever walked into the throne room next would be coming for his head. And knowing Jaime, he likely wouldn't have cared.

suburban virgin
Jul 26, 2007
Highly qualified lurker.

Kylaer posted:

But there's only like one Summer Islander in the whole first book :notch:

One drop rule.

suburban virgin
Jul 26, 2007
Highly qualified lurker.
That would be pretty hilarious. Lancel spends a fortnight fasting and praying and Zombie Gregor pastes him with one blow. Cersei walks out smug as gently caress.

suburban virgin
Jul 26, 2007
Highly qualified lurker.
Goddamn it I want to know how this dumb series ends and I don't want it to be via some indecipherably-accented Littlefinger monologue set to a pair of bouncing tits. :mad:

THREE YEARS YOU FUCKER! THREE YEARS IS WHAT YOU TOLD US!

suburban virgin
Jul 26, 2007
Highly qualified lurker.
"A Dance With Dragons" was released on July 12, 2011.

July 12.

TICK-TOCK, MOTHERFUCKER.

suburban virgin
Jul 26, 2007
Highly qualified lurker.
Arya: Alright, tell me what to do.

Hound: You giving him an injection of Needle, straight to his heart, but he's got a breastplate so you gotta pierce through that. What you gotta do is, you gotta bring Needle down in a stabbing motion.

Arya: *confused by Hounds stabbing* I gotta... I gotta stab him three times?

Hound: No you don't gotta loving stab him three times, you only gotta stab him once! But it's gotta be hard enough to get through... through his breatplate into his heart, and then, then once you do that, you gotta press down, press down on the... on the Needle.

Arya: And then what happens?

Hound: Well, I'm curious about that myself.

suburban virgin
Jul 26, 2007
Highly qualified lurker.
Magic in the GRRMiverse works on narrative lines, as all great magic does. Magic based on mechanical rules n' poo poo was invented by grognardy D&D players with lice in their beards. You cast a fireball when it's the right time for something to burst into flame, not because you have a +3 to the roll from your wand of gonorrhoea.

suburban virgin
Jul 26, 2007
Highly qualified lurker.
What was that Davos chapter where he goes to the island of shipwreckers, pirates and bastards but they make really good clam chowder?

suburban virgin
Jul 26, 2007
Highly qualified lurker.

savinhill posted:

That was one of his first ADWD chapters, I think the same one where the crooked lord guy gave some disinfo about Jon's mother

Man. That chapter was some bullshit. All I remember is a whole lot of text about how great the chowder was. Like, it had saffron and everything, which is probably worth more than gold on bumfuck island. Hey guys, turns out Davos is still alive and touring the isles of Westeros looking for the best clam chowder. Stannis? What sort of fish is that? Does it go well with saffron?

suburban virgin
Jul 26, 2007
Highly qualified lurker.
I really like Preston Jacob's videos, and whilst he's completely bonkers a lot of the time (my personal favorite WTF is his questions over the Tower of Joy. "How did Ned and Howland, the only survivors, bury all the bodies and tear down the whole tower by themselves? It was only Lyanna and the Kingsguard and Rhaegar who ever went there!" Motherfucker they were royalty. They didn't go ten feet without a hundred servants and servants don't count as people. Ned could take the baby, wipe away a manly tear, then order the loving peasants to do all the hard work, secure in the knowledge that no real person would ever know what had taken place) there's a lot of stuff he picks up on that other people miss.

Which was why I was surprised he seemed to miss one really obvious connection in the last video that I hadn't made before. Ice and Fire is almost certainly lifted or inspired from the Robert Frost poem Fire and Ice, at this point PJ goes on a nice long derail about how these represent hate and desire and the "Song" represents collective memory or collective experience, so it's all this big revenge tale et cetera. The point he seems to gloss over is that Fire and Ice is a poem about the end of the world. It's another hint towards the shaggy dog story conclusion, that we get to see all these different perspectives of people scheming and praying and trying to survive as the world falls to pieces around them.

When these books don't get finished, don't worry, you're not missing much. I don't think any of these characters have long to live.

suburban virgin
Jul 26, 2007
Highly qualified lurker.
Really loving terrible song lyrics are Tolkien as gently caress though.

suburban virgin
Jul 26, 2007
Highly qualified lurker.
I like Preston Jacobs, I really do, but I fear he's not yet realised his precious book version, so superior to the show, will never exist.

He will learn.

suburban virgin
Jul 26, 2007
Highly qualified lurker.
Hell we could do that now. "What part are you up to?"

"The part where nothing happens."

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suburban virgin
Jul 26, 2007
Highly qualified lurker.
Bull-sized swamp rats? I don't think they exist.

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