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A Song of Ice and Fire


Flare4War
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  • 4 weeks later...

I'm just finishing up the first book and I have to say...

it's not easy to stomach. Like wow... this might be the first book to make me literally feel like puking. Not that it's a bad book. It's just that the resolutions are all a bunch of middle fingers wagging in front of my face.

I am sadz.

EDIT: Oh thank god, a happy chapter. Just a couple more..

EDIT2: dragons n' shit!

Edited by Modus
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  • 5 months later...

So they're back and we're in a few episodes. What does everyone think?

Seems like they are straying a little more from the books in this second season. Still they are staying surprisingly close. Theon Greyjoy's reunion with his family at Pyke was a lot more humorous in the books. HBO didn't even take it in a humorous direction. Dummies.

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So they're back and we're in a few episodes. What does everyone think?

Seems like they are straying a little more from the books in this second season. Still they are staying surprisingly close. Theon Greyjoy's reunion with his family at Pyke was a lot more humorous in the books. HBO didn't even take it in a humorous direction. Dummies.

Yeah, they're straying a lot farther from the books this time around... but most of it is in keeping with the lore of the book, which I'm okay with. Like, the whole "I know you really want to sleep with my brother" thing with Renly - not in the book like that, but in keeping with the lore well enough.

As long as they remain that true to the lore, I'm happy if they want to make some small changes... although I AM sad that they've been taking some of the humor out, like you mentioned. Then again, they took out some of Tyrion's best lines last season, so it's not like it's a first.

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Yeah, I wish they would capture more of the humor into the Television series that you get as a reader, because; there was quite a bit of it.

I must say though I'm very impressed that they answered back this season with the visuals of the Direwolves. I was really worried about that aspect because it is a favorite angle of mine (I'm a dog owner, have a husky and a German Shep) in the books. Good job on that HBO.

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To be honest, I'm happy they've decided to omit/change some of the more boring parts. Like Arya's journey before Harrenhal, which I thought was a real drag in the book. But then again, Arya's one of my least favorite characters, so maybe it's just me.

I'm kind of disappointed that Daenerys doesn't get that much air-time. I know her presence in the book was also rather limited, but still. If they can come up with stupid additions involving spanking whores and gay-understanding wives, they could shoot some more of Daenerys' scenes as well.

I agree about the direwolves, though! That was a nice surprise.

The new cast is pretty awesome, too. Melisandre, Brienne, and Davos are spot on.

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It felt that way with Dany in the first season too but later on in the season her character was given due screen time.

Joffrey looked like a big enough overpowered spoiled ass hole as it was. Not really sure why they had to add the whipping the hell out of the brothel team into it. Non of that happened in the books as I recall. All the stuff with Sansa did though.

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Joffrey looked like a big enough overpowered spoiled ass hole as it was. Not really sure why they had to add the whipping the hell out of the brothel team into it. Non of that happened in the books as I recall. All the stuff with Sansa did though.

Honestly, partially suspect they did it just to get the required amount of female nudity into the episode to make HBO happy. :-P

Besides which, if anyone in the audience was on the fence as to whether Joffrey was an a-hole or just a creature of his circumstances, it's pretty obvious now: He is a pure a-hole. One of the people I watch the show with was still trying to rationalize some of his behavior ("Just look at the way his adult role models act!") but after that scene, even she agrees that he's evil beyond that.

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I just finished the first book, and now I'm considering supplementing that with the series, AKA want to be entertained while seeing lots of medieval tits.

So how do the timelines of the book series and TV series parallel? What episodes would I be safe to watch having only ready the first book??

The entire first season... maybe with the exception of the final episode, because I think there's one thing in there that's technically not revealed until the second book. It's not a huge deal-breaker if you want to watch that episode, too, though.

Although I could be wrong - it's been more than a year since I last saw the final episode, so there might be another scene I'm forgetting. But yeah - I'd say definitely 1-9 are safe. And the one scene I'm thinking of is a couple of chapters into the second book, so like I said, not a huge spoiler.

EDIT: Did the math, and "more than a year" is really wrong. :-P 8ish months.

Edited by Melbu Frahma
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I just finished the first book, and now I'm considering supplementing that with the series, AKA want to be entertained while seeing lots of medieval tits.

You're a few years behind the curve, Ecto-gee.. jemimah.

My brother hounds me for only reading two books so far. I'm doing the same to you because it makes me feel better.

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  • 1 month later...

Well, from what reviews I've read, the consensus seemed to be that the first three books are excellent, which I agree with, and that books 4 and 5 are kinda stagnant and bloated. This being the last real vacation from grad school I'll have for the next 3 years, I just want to make the most of my free time. Between diablo 3, writing more music, and continuing with this series, I'm just not sure where to focus my time, hence asking for some opinions on the latter 2 books.

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I'm just about done with the third book. Holllly shit, this has been a fantastic read so far. I hear the fourth and fifth suck, though. Without spoling anything, can anyone give me some good reasons why I should or should not continue reading?? I'm just not looking to waste any time reading a crappy 1200 page brick :P

I think a lot of the long time series readers ragged on AFFC and DWD mostly because of how long it took the two of them to come out, a combined 11 years since ASoS, and then it felt like nothing was really settled by either of them. Well, you're not supposed to settle things in the middle of a 7 book series. The first 3 have gone in this kind of progression:

AGoT - Introduction

ACoK - Build up

ASoS - BLAM!

And then you get to AFFC and DWD, which were supposed to be one book of build up after a time jump of something like 5 years. GRRM found that he couldn't just explain the events of those 5 years in flashbacks and memories and exposition dialog, so out went the time skip and he just picks it up where it left off. But because it started getting too long between books and he was getting stumped with how best to really proceed with half of it, the one book was split into two, and AFFC was the stuff he was happy with, and he went back to tinkering with the rest.

Obviously by this point, there's a lot going on all over the place, and given how GRRM writes, which is knowing major plot points he wants to hit, and then writing to meet those points, he had to rewrite a lot of it over and over to make sure he not only liked the ending, but liked the journey to that ending as well and made sure it jibed with any of the other related storylines. This is why DWD took so long. He had to untangle the "Meereenese Knot," of plot threads, as he called it on his blog.

What I'm getting at is to not expect "BLAM!" from either of these two books. They both have their moments though, where you're like "oh...oh wow, this changes things" and then you want Winds of Winter in your hands to see where it's all going next, to answer those questions that they've raised.

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Haha, seriously?? I was considering starting that trilogy next. What don't you like about it?

I read a lot more today, and I'm starting to enjoy it. The style really threw me off at first but now I "get" what he's trying to do. I'm pissed off he termed mages as arcanists though. I was going to do exactly that for my novel..

dammit.

Edited by Modus
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I'm just about done with the third book. Holllly shit, this has been a fantastic read so far. I hear the fourth and fifth suck, though. Without spoling anything, can anyone give me some good reasons why I should or should not continue reading?? I'm just not looking to waste any time reading a crappy 1200 page brick :P

I wouldn't say they suck - especially not the fourth. I actually would put the fourth above the first in my personal preferences; for me, it wasn't slow at all, and had a lot of interesting things going on.

I will grant you that the fifth one isn't quite as good as the others, at least imho, though. It's hard to put my finger on what's off about it, though; it certainly has all the elements of what made the other four good. If I had to really point to what makes it slow, it's that the first two or so hundred pages feel like a recap from alternate perspectives of the previous book (which Martin readily warned readers would be the case - the beginning of ADoD is occurring simultaneously as AFfC). I think, too, the other thing that made me enjoy it less was that several of the characters show up, tease you with their storylines, and then vanish - two of the more interesting POV characters, one of whom is new, only get two or three chapters apiece. One of them gets his last chapter a third of the way through, and then just vanishes the rest of the book.

The fourth one's definitely worth reading, though, if you ask me. And there's far worse books than the fifth out there; you'll just have to grin and bear it and push through four or five of the chapters.

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  • 8 months later...

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