FanArt: Game of Thrones

Season 3 of HBO's Game of Thrones starts this Sunday and I am super excited! To celebrate, here's a post of a sketch I once did of our favorite Master of Coin from the smallest of the Fingers, portrayed by the talented Aidan Gillen. Enjoy!

 Littlefinger by Mogsy

From A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin

FanArt: Lannister Gold

asoiaf: Lannister Gold by ~MathiaArkoniel

From A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin

A Dance with Dragons by George R. R. Martin

A Dance With Dragons by George R.R. Martin

At the end of A Feast for Crows, GRRM excitedly informed readers that it and the subsequent A Dance With Dragons were actually a single book, separated due to length. He promised that missing characters would be present in Dragons and that the stories would catch up and proceed onward. For this reason, I will often be referring back to Crows.

I feel that separating the books was an unfortunate decision and Dragons suffered for it. I wanted to love this book as much as I loved the previous, but I feel like reading it so closely following Crows hurt my enjoyment of the series. From the beginning of the book, I concluded that the people who read Crows years before and had waited so long for Dragons were at the advantage. They didn’t have to read chapters that literally repeated things word for word from Crows where the books overlapped and those readers were filled with years of anticipation, allowing them to overlook many of the flaws.

What I loved in Crows failed to follow through in Dragons and as a result, I have come to refer to Dragons as “Killing Time Until I Figure Out Where The Hell This Is All Going,” by George RR Martin, featuring the following chapters:

A Feast for Crows by George R. R. Martin

A Feast for Crows by George R.R. Martin

After 400 pages or so, "nothing" was happening in this book, and yet I could not stop turning the pages and had already rated this book at four stars. By the time I was done, I'd upped the rating to five stars and determined that this was my favourite book of the entire series.

I can see why many people would not like this book. As I said, "nothing" happens for a thousand pages. After the Battle of Blackwater, the Red Wedding, the War of Five Kings and various other violent and magical events that have taken place over the last three books, this book is stark change, but it is the book that proves just how atypical a fantasy series it is. I cannot think of a single fantasy trope that Martin uses in his storytelling. I cannot identify any tropes, for that matter. From the moment he chopped off the apparent hero's head, Martin made it clear that we are not to expect anything but the unexpected. Don't try to guess what happens next and to whom because you are very likely to be wrong.

No, that's not true. If you guess that someone is going to die, then you'd probably be right. Where, when and how, you won't guess, but it's pretty safe to assume that everyone's going to die in A Song of Ice and Fire. Don't get attached. There is no shortage of death in this book, but, interestingly, a lot of it happens offstage. A lot of everything happens offstage, actually, with information passed on through rumours and the occasional crowmail.

The reader is just as much in the dark about many occurrences and there is no such thing as dramatic irony to rely on. Keeping in mind that A Feast of Crows is only half the story Martin wished to tell in this part of the series, this shouldn't be a surprise. The prominent characters missing from this book are a part of the next and presumably, the rumours we are reading about here will be made more clear in A Dance with Dragons. Not that there are no prominent characters here. There are many, many characters in Crows, with several new ones being introduced, as well as new plots and twists. It may seem as though this would make the series too convoluted for its own good, but the beauty of Martin's epic is that it is so realistic. Of course all these plots and characters would exist in such a world, under such circumstances. It is absolutely amazing that Martin threads it all together so coherently and completely such that a reader paying attention simply can't get lost, despite the magnitude of characters and plotlines.

Crows takes the time to delve very deeply into these characters and plots. This is where many may complain, because the book does not seem to move very far forward. It is filled with characters conniving, searching, plotting, whining, grieving, coping, and most importantly, changing. Several major characters undergo some intriguing transformations throughout this book. Some don't realize they are changing, while others have recognized the changes in themselves and their relationships and look further inward as they grow and learn to survive within the game of thrones. Others change literally, becoming someone else, even as they try to stay true to who they were.

Final verdict:

4 of 5 stars