Ceda Cicero, on 23 August 2011 - 01:49 PM, said:
Tyr, would you say this is a fairly accurate summary of your issue with DANCE:
-Bronn doesn't show up. Is mentioned only once, in passing.
-Dany gets a lot of chapters.
??
While I'm firmly more in FastBen's camp and hold the book around 3.5-4 stars, one thing I will say is that this book threw fuel on the fire where Dany-haters are concerned, and for someone like me who was always fairly optimistic about Dany, this book made my views of her take a big, big downward spiral. Which I know it was sort of supposed to do. But the whole "she has briefly forgotten how to be a dragon but will return to the Dothraki sea and live with Drogo for a while and remember how" angle wasn't really pronounced enough for it to be effective, and instead a lot of the Meereen chapters where we're supposed to be super-concerned over the fact that she's losing her way and invested in her re-embracing her Aegon the Conqueror roots just wound up feeling like filler.
Funny. I finally thought that she was stagnant as a character and that in a way, this represented growth as she
finally doesn't succeed in something she sets out to do. I'll agree that if you don't like her to begin with, this book will make yuo hate her more.
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Daario could be out. Period. Unless there's some major climax to their relationship in the next book (and even then, I really just don't care to see it, even if it involves a Martin-esque twist), he could just go. We've already had the "Dany can't trust men or, now that she's the Mother of Dragons and Queen of Meereen, ever have a functional relationship with one again" trope, why did we need it again, and so MUCH of it?
I personally think he has a much bigger role to play. Daenerys thinks Brown Ben Plumm one of her prophecied traitors when a) there was actually zero effect from his defection
she has no more emotional investment in him than she has in Fat Belwas or random dude X c) he'll likely return.
I bet Daario is going to pull some major nasty stuff on either her or her age old companions (Missandei, the hand maidens, perhaps even on Selmy, although he is far too boss for that to happen). For now, only Daario seems the likely person to really mess with her groove.
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This was really my only MAJOR qualm with the book, and as I said, I still enjoyed it on the whole. Take out 90% of Dany's languishing in Meereen and banging Daario and instead shift either the Meereen climax, the battle in the North, or hell, even just Tyrion coming face-to-face with Dany up from the beginning of the next book, and the whole thing would've been improved.
Some more headway here or there would have been appreciated, yeah. Considering Martin's sometime admission that some characters have started lives of their own in his head rather than firmly sticking to his original purpose for them, I guess he wanted to postpone making decisions on their futures for another round. For Jon, Jaime, Tyrion, Stannis, Baelish, Varys, Daenerys and the Starks, this is probably not so: he has a plan for them, but with Asha, Theon, Selmy, Hota, Brienne and others it may well be that this is holding him back from giving us content instead of cliffhangers.
Everyone is entitled to his own wrong opinion. - Lizrad