A humble suggestion for GRRM

is that before he gets too far into The Winds of Winter, he visits this subreddit thread and learns that nobody's "favorite very minor character" lives in Meereen.

Redemption follow-up

Addendum to the comparison between Jaime and Theon's redemption arcs. 

There are three points in Jaime's story (on the boat, "Sapphires," and the bear pit) where Jaime has absolutely nothing to gain by helping Brienne, but he does anyway.

In contrast, Theon's ability to escape Winterfell is entirely dependent on his role in rescuing Jeyne.

So no, they really don't compare.

Cliffhangers Cliffhangers Everywhere and Not a Plot to Think, Or: Why A Dance With Dragons is the Worst Book in A Song of Ice and Fire

A Song of Ice and Fire Book Five: A Dance With Dragons was the greatest disappointment since my son.

No, wait. That's been taken.   

Why A Dance With Dragons seems horribly unfulfilled

Let's take a look at how all the POV characters in all the books end up, and see if something's a bit... amiss... with the most recent entry.

Spoilers all, obviously.

You may have noticed that my blogging of "A Dance with Dragons" has stopped

and is not likely to resume.

As you probably know, Books Two and Three contain several chapters in which Arya wanders about the war-torn countryside and various characters opine about the effects of the war on the little people. Book Four does the exact same thing with Brienne. So far no problem, because this trend was in place before the War on Terror. And yes, nothing whatsoever happened in the Brienne chapters, but it wouldn't be A Song of Ice and Fire without one character dragging us away from the main action and dicking around in the middle of nowhere (Bran in AGoT*, Dany and Arya in ACoK, and Jaime in ASoS - not saying these chapters are bad, just that they do not move the main plot forward, at all).

*After his second chapter, obviously. Getting thrown out a window and paralyzed for life because you saw the Queen shagging her own brother is a pretty important plot development.

But I cannot read another Daenerys chapter in A Dance with Dragons. It's so blatant in its political subtext that it is in fact text.

A quick refresher: a foreign ruler with a foreign religion and a foreign custom has conquered a backwater city in the middle of the desert and is trying to bring some semblance of civilization to it. The ruler's greatest weapons are unavailable because they're too destructive and would make everyone hate the ruler. Meanwhile, in A Dance With Dragons, Daenerys (the USA) conquered Meereen (Iraq) and now has to try to hold it against its own population without the help of her dragons (nukes) which would just eat (nuke) everyone.

Look, I have no problem with political subtext per se. I like Battlestar Galactica and the Third Doctor's run on Doctor Who. I have a problem with political subtext springing up where it did not previously exist. As I said, the travelogues in Books 2-4 showed us the sort of collateral damage endemic to all wars. If there were suddenly security checkpoints where the Red Priests of R'hllor found a way to look at you nekkid, then yeah that would be different. But there wasn't any political subtext directed at one specific event until ADwD. Surely there was some other way of demonstrating that Daenerys was completely inept at learning how to be a queen.

Let me put it this way. If Tyrion Lannister had spent the entirety of A Storm of Swords building a railroad from King's Landing to Casterly Rock and then defending it against a corrupt government aided by his own family, would you still like the book?

So yeah, in a nutshell, my problem is that GRRM decided to turn Dany Targaryen into Dagny Taggart. 

I will keep reading. But already this one has found its way into last place in the series.

ADWD Reek I, Bran II

Good news and bad news, everyone. The bad news is that Theon Greyjoy's still alive.

ADWD Jon III, Daenerys II

Up in the frozen northern wasteland, the nice priestess Melisandre has lit a fire to help the poor, desolate wildlings keep warm.

ADWD Tyrion III, Davos I

Tyrion and Illyrio part ways. Still don't know what the cheesemonger's ultimate goal was, considering that he can't imagine Daenerys owes him squat at this point. Tyrion meets Duck, alias Ser Rolly Duckfield, the Unimaginative Knight. Y'see he was knighted in a field and there were some ducks nearby. He's traveling with Griff. Tyrion adopts the alias of Hugor Hill, because let's face it, when you're on your way to meet the Dragon Queen, you really don't want to mention, "Oh by the way I'm the son of the guy who had your niece and nephew murdered and also the brother of the guy who killed your father. Yeah, I hate them all now, but... no, nice dragon, nice yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrhrhrhghghghghhgghhgghghgh!"

Griff has a son, Young Griff. His hair is dyed blue because Essos is Japan. (There I go again with my ethnocentrism. Last time it was calling a half-Jamaican half-Trinidadian English actress "black," now I'm saying everyone in Japan has Anime Hair.) He's in roughly the same age bracket as Daenerys, so I think her suitors are piling up rather rapidly. Griff himself doesn't take much of a liking to Tyrion and basically keeps him alive just so he can write down all he knows about dragons. Hey, remember those books Tyrion was reading back in A Game of Thrones? Good job on that.

Davos wound up on the Sisters (a trio of islands near White Harbor) after Salla finally got tired of waiting for payment. Really not a lot happens here. Lord Manderly has pledged his allegiance to the Iron Throne, so Davos's mission to recruit him for Stannis seems doomed to failure before it even began. And we already know from Feast that Davos is going to end up on a spike (or do we?), but if he does, I'm going to be annoyed, because GRRM already jerked us around pointlessly with another character in the last book.

ADWD Jon II

I just finished Davos I. Gave myself a bit of padding there. Hopefully I can cover Tyrion III and Davos I in one post tomorrow (when I read Jon III) and then do Jon III and whatever comes next on Friday and then I'll be all caught up.  On the one hand I like having padding in my schedule just in case I have a heavy reading assignment some night and can't give as much time as I'd like to reading and posting for pleasure. On the other hand, I'm trying to remember stuff I read on Monday.

Fortunately, I have A Feast For Crows and Sam I to help job my memory a bit. Yes, we're five books in and only now does George finally pull a Rashomon on us. But I'll get to that in a moment.

ADWD Tyrion II, The Merchant's Man

Tyrion II
Tyrion is journeying to meet up with Illyrio's friend Griff. Illyrio is going along for the ride primarily to give Tyrion someone to talk to and be infodumped on.  Important things to note here:

• Viserys tried to rape Daenerys on the night of her wedding.  I take back what I said in the prologue about Varamyr Sixskins being less sympathetic than Viserys.
• The Golden Company used to fight against the Targaryens. Not during Robert's Rebellion but back in the good old days when some bastard son of one of the Aegons claimed the throne. And then someone else in his family did the same thing.  Oh hell, the wiki of ice and fire has an entire page on it, just go there. Anyway so Griff's team fought against the Targs way back when, so Tyrion is naturally suspicious of their motives in wanting to help Daenerys. Then again, Jorah was pretty suspicious of Illyrio's motives in wanting to help Daenerys too, and anybody who wants to question Ser Jorah's suspicions... well, two words. "Wine merchant."  Point is, this entire thing is sketchy as hell and Tyrion's smart to not trust Griff as readily as Illyrio would like him to.
• Barristan Selmy is about as useful politically to Dany as Ned Stark was to Robert. Though it's Illyrio who says this, it's probably still true.
• Speaking of Ser Barristan, he's the guy who extinguished the Blackfyre line (the rebels that the Golden Company fought for). (I don't think that's actually in the chapter but it is on the wiki page I linked to. Oops.) Can't wait to see what he thinks of the Golden Company.
• The Golden Company always pay their debts. No wait that's not it. The Golden Company always keep their word. Only now they've broken it. For some reason. Dun dun dunnnnnnnnnn...

Then they talk about gods for a moment, and Tyrion remembers Shae and Tysha, and that's about it for Tyrion's chapter. Oh, and there's food. Whenever GRRM starts listing foods, I skip ahead a paragraph because, well, it gets kind of ludicrous.  (Drinking game rule #5: drink whenever GRRM starts listing food.)

I'm giving it the short shrift, I know, but what I do here is gripe and there's not much to gripe about. I would offer praise - in the form of saying "I'm hearing all of Tyrion's dialogue in Peter Dinklage's voice" - but that's probably praise more of the casting department or Dinklage himself than of Martin's writing.

The Merchant's Man
Quentyn gets off to a great start by complaining about how the ship he's thinking of buying passage on stinks. Now it turns out that he actually has a point, in that the ship is actually a slave ship, but yeah, the guy starts off by complaining. There's some funny stuff about how he sucks at acting, hence why he's playing the role of "The Merchant's Man," because his friend makes a more convincing merchant than he does.  His companion is the sort of comic relief character you know is going to die, probably very suddenly and horribly, just because it's GRRM writing it.  So they wander around a bit and get mocked by some sellswords they'll have to end up fighting eventually because said sellswords are going to war against Meereen, and then Archibald Yronwood, probably the smartest guy left alive on Team Quentyn (they were ambushed by pirates earlier on), tells them some sort of secret path that they'll be taking to get to Meereen faster than the road and safer than the slave ship. We don't get to figure out what it is because the chapter ends.

ADWD Bran I

In which Bran runs across a still-alive one-eyed wolf. Hey what? I thought Prologue characters actually freaking died at the end of the freaking prologue. I want my money back.

So as somebody on the internets was kind enough to point out, the odd-numbered books begin with someone north of the Wall getting killed by Others/wights, and the even-numbered books begin with a maester (or apprentice maester) in the south being poisoned. Again I'm not sure if that's entirely deliberate due to the trilogy creep and the fact that Feast and Dance would have been one book if GRRM had found a binding thick enough, but it's worth mentioning.

It's also worth mentioning that despite the massive snark in the previous posts (and the epic hate you're about to witness), I actually do love this series. Look at the column on your right. It says "I criticize because I care."

ADWD Jon I

So in my mad quest to penny-pinch, I have the international trade paperback version of A Dance With Dragons, whereas I have the US paperback versions of all the other books. So I don't know if Dance has a different map, or if the international versions have had different maps this whole time.

But I hate the style of the new map, is what I'm getting at. I'm almost at the point where I'll flip to the map in A Storm of Swords because I'm so used to the old style.

ADWD Daenerys I

I was most of the way through this chapter before I realized that there wasn't a five-year gap between books 3 and 4/5.  I just need to get that out of the way, because Dany's suddenly a world-weary queen who skipped school on the day she was supposed to teach her dragons not to roast children. Because they taste better lightly seared! Hoyo!

That's this chapter in a nutshell, folks, but for those who want more, read on...

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.