A Game of Thrones Bran III, Catelyn IV, Jon III: Enter Littleprick

There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. … Clearly, it is this second part, the missing, which presents the difficulties.

Oh, sorry, where was I? Right. Bran is falling to his doom along with a bowl of petunias and a whale. No, wait. There's a crow. A three-eyed crow. And the first two pages of this dream feel like something out of a Douglas Adams books, with the crow nonchalantly asking for corn as Bran plummets towards a ground that's "coming up to smash him." This is so tonally different from the rest of the series that I wonder what George (and/or his editor) were thinking.

Anyway then Bran's dream turns prophetic because he sees his mother on a ship, and Sansa crying herself to sleep, and so on. And then he wakes up and takes the whole cripple thing...

...er, well, wait 'til next time.

So there it is. The last non-annoying Bran chapter. For the rest of the book, his chapters really could be summed up as "meanwhile back at Winterfell, Bran was feeling sorry for himself. Oh, and Osha showed up."

Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was Oh no, not again. Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the Universe than we do now.

Bran III is also our first look at GRRM's amazing ability to drag something out forever. He'll have perfected this to an art form by the time we get to Cersei's walk of shame in Dance. As that is everything positive I have to say about this chapter, I will now move on.

Catelyn IV: Cat has taken a ship called the Storm Dancer down to King's Landing. You know that Captain Moreo isn't a particularly good guy because he and Cat keep arguing over whether she'll tip the crewmen herself or trust him to do it. And Cat's instincts are invariably right whenever it doesn't matter. Speaking of, someone goes and blabs her location to Littlefinger, and she blames Moreo for it. Littlefinger, of course, blames Varys. And then tells her a fake story about losing the dagger to Tyrion.

So yeah this is our first introduction to both Littlefinger and Varys, and the thing I recall most clearly about the first time I read this was that this was the source of one of my two big character mix-ups: I thought that Littlefinger was Varys's nickname. I knew that Petyr and Varys were different characters, but I thought Varys, not Petyr, was Littlefinger. (For the record, the other mix-up was me somehow confusing Stannis Baratheon and Barristan Selmy.)

Jon III: Jon turns into a whiny brat. Donal Noye was a great warrior before taking the black, but Jon has to do it before his life's even begun. ...dude, you chose this.



Continued schedule rejiggering: I'm delaying the publishing of a post I've given the working title of "Mass Effect And Me" until November 7, to coincide with N7 day. Something else will be up Saturday.