AGOT: Prologue, Bran I, Catelyn I: Winter is Coming... Eventually

Right! So! Having finally finished all five extant A Song of Ice and Fire books, I have decided that there's nothing for it but to start the series again. Because it is just that good.

Well, mostly.

So before I get into this, let's get some important things out of the way.

• At this point I am only committing to blogging my way through the first book. That said, I am committing to blogging my way through the first book. I will discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the writing, the foreshadowing, and my initial reaction at the time to various events (and to get this out of the way, That Big Thing That Happens in 65 Arya V was spoiled for me beforehand, so I'm not going to pretend to have been surprised).
• Actually let's just get this out of the way right now: I knew going into this about That Big Thing That Happens in 65 Arya V (thanks, TvTropes). I knew that [the guy who starts writing in the White Book at the end of ASOS] would be rehabilitated later on, but I didn't know the specifics (I honestly don't know what spoiled this one for me). And I knew that there was something about a wedding and a certain color, but again none of the specifics (thanks, io9).
• The spoiler scope for each post will be different. I will discuss things that happen both in this book and in future books. I'll make sure to post the scope before the jump.
• In direct contrast to the other reviews I've done, these posts will not be recaps or synopses.  I may recap the plot from time to time, but that's not my main objective here. 

With that in mind, the spoiler scope for this post is as follows:
I will not be getting into specifics of what happens beyond the first three chapters, but I will mention just how far along the Others plot has gotten by the end of ADWD, and I will also mention a fairly minor other detail in ADWD.  So there aren't really any spoilers here...

Okay, you're still here.  Let's jump in.

Prologue
As I said in the relevant Game of Thrones review, this would have more weight behind it if the Others had, y'know, shown up more than once after this point.  We the readers understand certain constructions of storytelling.  If you put a gun on the mantle in Act 1, that gun must be fired by Act 3. If you introduce a huge freaking Wall made of ice in the prologue, and said Wall is the only thing keeping supernatural horrors from terrorizing your characters, then that Wall had better come down before the series ends.  Hasn't happened yet. Now, the Prologue kinda works with respect to just this book, because it involves the rebirth of magic in a plotline unrelated to the events in the south (kinda like the last chapter of the book). But what it's mainly there to do is tell us that Anyone Can Die.

We learn a little bit about this world, namely the punishment for poaching is either losing a hand or being forced to man the Wall for life and losing half your extremities to the cold. We also learn that some guy called Robert is important. Wildlings, Others, some people called Mormont and Aemon.  And there's a little bit of humor, with that line about Ser Waymar being prepared for his occupation in the Night's Watch "at least as far as his wardrobe was concerned." So there's a little bit more information presented here than in the TV counterpart, but not much.

Bran 
We learn a little bit more about the Wildlings, and the King-Beyond-the-Wall, and we find out who Robert is - the First of his Name, King of the blah blah blah you know all the titles. We learn that even though King Robert is a Baratheon, the kings before him were all Targaryens. (Now, truth be told, this confused me for a chapter or so.  All Ned really does is mention "the Targaryen kings before" Robert. And somehow that lodged itself in my head as meaning that the name of the kingdom is Targaryen. It's not. I was disabused of this notion before long.)

"Our way is the older way." The Starks have the blood of the First Men in them.  Ned mentioned earlier that Robert was king of the First Men, Andals, and Rhoynar.  GRRM did a good job at picking out nonsense words that don't sound like they're part of the same language.  It gave me a sense of how big and (probably) diverse this kingdom is. Or perhaps Robert is just really pretentious. Anyway, whatever the dominant culture in the kingdom is, it's clear that the Starks don't hold to it.  We also learn that there are seven hells, or at least Theon Greyjoy believes in seven hells. (Huh.)

And we get the Bastard Explanation.  And the bit about the sigils, although we still don't know that a stag is the Baratheon sigil... so on a re-read, you pick up on the fact that a direwolf got killed by a stag...

Catelyn
Okay, you know how to make me instantly hate a character? Have them express distaste for something in their very first line. Quentyn Martell does the exact same thing in ADWD; the very first sentence in his very first chapter is "Adventure stank."  (Now, there it turns out that he's onto something because Adventure is a slaver ship.) Anyway, the first line of Catelyn's first chapter informs us that she never liked the godswood.  GRRM goes on to tell us about some of the differences between [Andal/southern] culture and Northern/First Men culture - godswood versus sept.  By the way, it took me forever to realize that GRRM chose the word "sept" for all the southern religious bits because it's "seven" in half a dozen Romance languages.  It sounds like a religious word anyway.

But anyway, I didn't particularly like Catelyn. Nothing against her personally. Just that in all of the fiction I've been exposed to, I've found I generally don't like the older-woman-defined-by-her-relationship-to-her-family character type. (Probably the worst offender - and definitely the reason I single this character type out - is Amanda Graystone from Caprica Betty Draper on Mad Men. I always felt that she slowed the story down by forcing us to cut away from the main plot to catch up on what she's up to...)

We learn that Cat's sister is/was married to Ned's foster father, which strikes me as a bit... odd (but the next chapter pretty much explains what's what as far as arranged marriages go...).  And Cat and Ned obviously love each other despite their rather enormous cultural differences. Here I think the TV show got everything it needed to get across. And on re-reading, I miss Ned's line to Cat about "it's your gods who have all the rules."

More backstory is introduced here. The previous king was the Mad King, and Jon Arryn rebelled against him to protect his foster sons, Ned Stark and Robert Baratheon. Then somehow Robert became King. It's even described as "Robert's cause" near the end of the chapter, when Catelyn's inner monologue is helpfully explaining that Ned hates the Lannisters because they didn't pick a side until victory was already certain. Ned and Robert are good friends but haven't seen each other for years.

And the King is coming up to visit! More characters to meet next time!