ADWD: Prologue, Tyrion I

Introducing a new feature from the "why didn't I think of this sooner" department, I will be blogging my way through my first read-through of A Dance With Dragons, one or two chapters at a time.

Sploilers, obviously.



So our character for the Prologue this time is Varamyr Sixskins.  Now, my copy of A Storm of Swords went AWOL but I remember Varamyr being a bit of an asshole. And since this chapter contains a scene where he tries to take over the body of the spearwife tending to his wounds, I'm going to go ahead and say my memory is correct. And since every Prologue character in this series dies, I'm kind of glad he's an asshole so I don't have to even pretend to care about him. I mean seriously, people are assholes to each other throughout this series, but trying to bodysnatch the one person attempting to take care of you? Honestly, I had more sympathy for Viserys Targaryen.

Once the attempted rape warg fails, Varamyr dies.  But not before he does successfully warg into a one-eyed wolf. Who promptly comes across the zombified corpse of the woman he tried to bodysnatch earlier.

I've noticed that the Prologues for all the odd-numbered books involve Wights and Others, and that they are in fact entirely absent from the even-numbered books. But because the scope of this series got wildly out of control I'm going to just have to chalk that up to coincidence. Besides, book six is going to be called The Winds of Winter and it would be freaking dumb to have a title like that and not start the zombie apocalypse in that book. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

As I mentioned above Varamyr is an asshole. I keep using that word because normally I'd use "bastard" in this situation but that would be an insult to Jon Snow. Anyway, I think this is the first time the Prologue character has been totally unsympathetic. Let's see. Will was all right, Cressen was old and doddering, Chett was more stupid than evil (I actually really liked Chett's prologue because of how different his narrative voice is compared to pretty much anything else GRRM has done), and Pate was just kind of pathetic. Yup, Varamyr's the first complete asshole to become a POV character. Milestone.

Now, the question is, will that actually set up anything this time? Will's prologue kind of failed, I thought, because the Others were so secondary to the main plot of A Game of Thrones, and the TV show only exacerbated its failings by turning the first seven minutes of a medieval political drama into a supernatural horror show. In contrast, Cressen gave us our first look at Stannis the Completely Inflexible, Chett clued us in to both the Others' attack on the Fist of the First Men and the fact that there was a mutiny against Lord Commander Mormont in the works, and Pate... well, Pate set up things nicely for Samwell's final chapter in that book. Also Pate got killed by Jaqen H'ghar, so that automatically makes his chapter awesome. So, um... yeah, the Others are still around. And skinchangers can warg into people not named Hodor. That's about all I learned here. Oh, and the stuff he said back in Storm about wargs living on in their beasts after death is true. So the only way to ensure a warg is dead is to kill his animal as well. But I'm guessing the Freys already knew that...

Oh, and Varamyr thinks at one point that if Mance Rayder dies (by the way, Mance Rayder has the coolest damn name in this entire saga), then all the free folk are screwed and quite probably so is the rest of the world. I agree with him insofar as the free folk are concerned. Mance is the only guy (other than Renly, maybe) who actually got people to make him King by forging alliances. Joffrey, Stannis, Balon, Robb, Daenerys, they were all either the offspring of somebody or too stubborn to know when to quit (or in Stannis's case both). Mance has actually got a grasp of this whole "leadership" thing. Too bad he's got the worst tech tree in the game, and his army was just smashed by the guy who only had slightly more of a ghost of a chance than he did.

On the Narrow Sea, Tyrion Lannister is a drunken wastrel looking for whores. Hang on, I'm going to have to be more specific. He's drunk this time for reasons other than the fact that drunkenness is one of his three natural states of being, the others being "snarky" and "magnificent SOB." He's looking for Tysha, who is not a whore, but good luck finding her, so he's just looking "wherever whores go." Apparently he's hoping whores go to Dorne, because he entertains the notion of helping Myrcella win the crown (which seems like a pointless venture, but the current King on the Iron Throne literally rubber-stamped arrest warrants for both his wife and his mother), but he ends up in Essos, which is a whole different continent. And we meet Illyrio! Remember him? He was in like two Daenerys chapters way back in the first book! Hope you were paying attention. He's the upstanding citizen who sold her to Khal Drogo. And now he's telling Tyrion that he's on Dany's side. You have a funny notion of allegiance, buddy.

That's what Tyrion's up to.  Next up, the Mother of Dragons realizes she forgot an important step in dragon-training, and the 998th Lord Commander of the Night's Watch sends Sam off on a mission. That we already know about.