[Illuyankas]

piccccccccccccs





e: few more





e2: oh one more why not

This post has been edited by Illuyankas: 06 June 2013 - 02:25 PM

[Terez]

Tapper, on 06 June 2013 - 07:42 AM, said:

With Talisa's death, does that spoiler that Jeyne Westerling + baby are now also formally of no consequence whatsoever for the books?

Jeyne wasn't pregnant in the books, if I recall. I think her parents made her drink moon tea or whatever they call it. (Not tansy tea; I think that's an abortifacient.)

[Terez]

The show said they were going to visit the Umbers, didn't they? Which is not Skagos.

[polishgenius]

I think there's some suspicion over what's going on with Jeyne Westerling in the books because when Jaime sees her he describes her very differently to Catelyn when she does. To what end such a switch would occur, who knows.

[Agraba]

Did anyone find it weird that Jojen told Bran he's the only one who could warg humans? From Varamyr's PoV in DwD, we know that other people can clearly do it. I just remember that Varamyr reflected that the guy who taught him to warg told him that it's considered anathema to try and control a human, no matter how simple they are.

[worry]

It's what I gathered from that scene in the books actually. Varamyr flashes back to that meeting of various skinchangers, the vast majority of whom are strong enough for an animal or two. Which is what makes Varamyr Sixskins so special even among skinchangers. And when he finally tries to warg into a human, she repels him (not easily mind you, but pretty definitively). And then Bran wargs into Hodor at will (and from what we gather from Bran's impression, Hodor does try to resist it instinctively). It's probably slightly more "possible" in the book world, but it appears extremely difficult, and even the attempt (forcing someone to struggle that way) could be shamed among the warg community. Alternately, it could be a taboo that arose to cover the inability/shame. Plus of course Jojen, show and book, is just a well-educated lordling who himself hasn't been north of the Wall either...his information is bound to be incomplete.

[Agraba]

If that's so, then Jojen's response was a little arrogant. IIRC it went:

-"They can't do that north of the Wall?"

-"They can't do that anywhere."

When it should have been,

-"I don't know about north of the Wall, but they sure as hell can't do that anywhere else."

Also, Varamyr attempted to skin change into a regular intelligent woman. Bran does it to Hodor. Doesn't intelligence play a factor?

[worry]

I apologize, but I have no recollection if intelligence plays a role, but we haven't seen Bran warg any other people (IIRC). Hypothetically, Hodor might be the perfect first vessel for Bran because he's simple, or on the other hand, a simpler mind might be able to fight a takeover even more purely, who knows? We don't have much means for comparison in the books, and more pertinently, we have zero on the show.

So all I'm getting at is that in the books, from what little we've gotten, warging a person is extremely difficult and pretty much never done, due to the taboo and/or because it's so difficult. In the show, Jojen (perhaps arrogantly, perhaps not, we don't know) states its historical impossibility outright. In both cases, the gist is that what Bran did was levels of magnitude more extraordinary than warging a non-human animal.

This post has been edited by worry: 07 June 2013 - 04:25 AM

[amphibian]

So Tree-boy now exists in the past, present and future and can warg into people.

Anyone smell a time-travel rearranging of things?

[QuickTidal]

amphibian, on 07 June 2013 - 03:53 PM, said:

So Tree-boy now exists in the past, present and future and can warg into people.

Anyone smell a time-travel rearranging of things?

Oooo. Good one!

[Overactive Imagination]

GRRM is pretty cool. I wish he would spend more time actually writing though. in the last 10 years Erikson has put out like 15 books while GRRM has put out what, two?

Good to hear him say he'd been writing fast though to keep up with the TV show! I'm expecting Winds of Winter to be pretty good.

This post has been edited by Overactive Imagination: 07 June 2013 - 07:15 PM

[polishgenius]

Overactive Imagination, on 07 June 2013 - 07:14 PM, said:

I wish he would spend more time actually writing though. in the last 10 years Erikson has put out like 15 books while GRRM has put out what, two?

This is such a bullshit line of thinking.

[Overactive Imagination]

what, wishing he would write more? there's something wrong with that?

[polishgenius]

No, but there's something wrong with the notion that because write x does this writer y should also be doing this (because they come off a production line you know), and with the implication you're making that because he's not pumping books out, he's not working on them.

If anything, he should have taken longer over Feast and Dance and gotten them right, rather than caving to pressure and publishing an unfinished novel like he did with Dance.

Erikson could also have done with taking a touch more time over the second half of the Malazan series, mind.

[Overactive Imagination]

I agree with you.

I'm curious to know exactly why it takes GRRM so long to finish his Song books. He was pretty quick with the first three, so it would be nice to hear him explain what changed. It is possible that he actually just doesn't spend much time on them.


Also, I had no idea that the dunk & egg hedge knight thing was a series. I thought Hedge Knight was just a one-off he wrote before Game of Thrones. Definitely gotta check those out

Screw it, just ordered Dreamsongs Volume II which includes the Hedge Knight! I already have the first one so might as well complete the set lol

The dreamsong volumes are pretty cool if you're a GRRM fan. And the hardcovers are quite good quality.. stitched binding and all that jazz.

This post has been edited by Overactive Imagination: 07 June 2013 - 08:00 PM

[polishgenius]

Overactive Imagination, on 07 June 2013 - 07:57 PM, said:

He was pretty quick with the first three, so it would be nice to hear him explain what changed.

He was going to do a time-jump of several years but then decided to go back and fill that gap in with one book, but then one book got too big so he split it in two and rewrote them and Feast didn't come out too good and then on top of trying to deal with the structural problems he'd caused himself by attempting to divide them by region rather than time he also realised that eliminating the time-gap caused him big timing problems with bringing certain characters to Meereen in a timely fashion without using silly contrivance and what order to get them there in (the famous Meereenese Knot. Not the one in the show). Supposedly, he wrote three or four different versions of substantial portions of Dance varying on who got there when.

Is what changed.





I managed to get in on the initial UK publication of Dreamsongs which is one hardback. Even printed on bible paper it's FUCKING MASSIVE!

[Overactive Imagination]

crazy. was that info taken from an interview?

[polishgenius]

Overactive Imagination, on 08 June 2013 - 12:13 AM, said:

crazy. was that info taken from an interview?

I think a lot of that info is taken from his blog, and also comments he made at public appearances, there's no specific source. Here's an interview where he talks about the Knot, specifically.

[QuickTidal]

You know what, the more I think about it, the more I feel his initial plan (books 1-3 and then time jump to age the kids up for book 4, and then onto books 5-7) was the right path....even though his reasons for not doing it (an over-reliance on flashbacks) are sound-ish...I still feel a book with both current (read: future) events, and flashback chapters would have been a FAR better idea than what happened with trying to write it all out in AFFC and ADWD. We'd probably already be near the end of the series coming out if he'd stuck to that plan. I think it could have worked.

And I'm still utterly and completely unswerving in my belief that splitting AFFC and ADWD VIA POV is probably THE BIGGEST mistake in a book series that's ever been made. And I now have proof. A friend who has been slowly reading the books as the show's been on, finished ASOS and wanted "the next book" to borrow...and I gave her both AFFC and ADWD and told her to vary chapters from each so she could get EVERYONE'S stoylines during that time. And she says that it works just fine that way. The cool events in AFFC are slim, and the cool events in ADWD (the 1st 3/4 anyways, before the time catchup) are also slim...but together they make up a better overall read. Thus GRRM should have split them down the middle of the STORY and not VIA POV.

This post has been edited by QuickTidal: 08 June 2013 - 12:33 PM

[Werthead]

Terez, on 06 June 2013 - 10:00 PM, said:

The show said they were going to visit the Umbers, didn't they? Which is not Skagos.

Indeed. My guess of Castle Black was also out They're going to the Last Hearth. Hopefully that means that they're not just going to vanish and we get Clive Mantle back as the Greatjon (unlike the books, the Greatjon was not present at the RW and has not been captured), but I wouldn't put money on it.

Quote

I'm curious to know exactly why it takes GRRM so long to finish his Song books. He was pretty quick with the first three, so it would be nice to hear him explain what changed. It is possible that he actually just doesn't spend much time on them.

I think Polish nailed most of it. One point to make is that the first three didn't take quite as fast as they appeared: he started A GAME OF THRONES in 1991, took a year off to work on a TV show, and finished it in 1995, publishing it the next year. However, he had half of ACoK done when he finished AGoT, and a large chunk of ASoS (including Tyrion's entire ASoS stoyrline) when he finished ACoK. Certainly he was working faster than now, but he didn't bash out those three books in five years, more like eight. He also originally planned AGoT-ACoK-ASoS to be ONE book, and had an outline and plan to that effect to work from.

After ASoS, he planned to jump ahead 5 years and spent 18 months working on the next book with that in mind. This book, then called ADWD, opened with events from late in both AFFC and ADWD and we then get the previous events filled in using flashbacks. GRRM found that didn't work and scrapped 18 months and hundreds of pages of work to start again from scratch, giving us AFFC and ADWD as it was eventually published. He also struggled with a major timeline problem on ADWD, the aforementioned Knot.

Taking out ADWD, he's actually averaged a bit over 3 years per book, which isn't too bad (slow by Erikson or Sanderson standards, but they are ridiculous outliers in terms of speed). However, TWoW will take longer than that because of these other side-projects he's been doing. As GRRM said himself, he was so relieved at finishing ADWD that he took on too much other work and it's taken much longer than planned to get through them (though he has, more or less, finished them now and is back to working on TWoW, and apparently writing quite fast at the current time).

Quote

You know what, the more I think about it, the more I feel his initial plan (books 1-3 and then time jump to age the kids up for book 4, and then onto books 5-7) was the right path

I wonder if it would have worked better, but then I remember the new(er) BSG, when they took a one-year time jump between Seasons 2 and 3 and it threw the entire series out of whack. Characters behaved completely differently and weird things just happened, and it was all handwaved by, "Oh, it's been a year, things have changed." It felt like a lazy way of skipping the 'dull stuff' in the middle of the big story when the 'dull stuff' is often necessary for character development explaining motivations.

To be sure, AFFC and ADWD could still have been better, but I think jettisoning the gap was a good idea. GRRM's also said a factor was that he'd set up the Others as a relatively imminent threat in the first three books and suddenly it's five years later and they still haven't shown up? That would have damaged the tension and pace of the series.

This post has been edited by Werthead: 08 June 2013 - 01:10 PM