Daenerys I
Daenerys goes to the ball and meets her Prince Charming.
The first chapter to demonstrate what is, depending on your perspective, either Martin's gritty realism or Martin's overblown determination to rub nasty, creepy behavior in the reader's face. “I’d let his whole khalasar fuck you if need be, sweet sister, all forty thousand men, and their horses too if that was what it took to get my army." Ah, Viserys; unlike Joffrey and Ramsey you were a short-lived Aristocratic Grotesque (not to be confused with Lowborn Grotesques like Rorge and Biter), but you did you best to make up for low quantity with high quality. But what I always remember about this chapter is the sentence "All that Daenerys wanted back was the big house with the red door, the lemon tree outside her window, the childhood she had never known," which is, as unsubtle attempts at pathos go, right up there with "The Poor Little Match Girl."
I did also note that, for all the cluttery exposition in this and other chapters, plenty of stuff goes unexplained, like the mention of the Unsullied. It's interesting (and depressing) to think that when Martin first wrote this chapter, he probably intended Dany's purchase of the Unsullied to take place in the same book. But anyway, my point was that, despite all the infodumps and Martin's generally workmanlike prose, there's enough unexplained to create that sense of mystery that a certain kind of fantasy fiction depends on.
Eddard I
The fat king arrives. Did I mention he's now fat?
Not much to see here. More exposition, the first signs of how compromised a ruler Robert is, and the first bit of evidence regarding Lyanna and Jon, a topic in which I have zero interest at this point. The last lines certainly beat the drum of cheap foreboding pretty hard. A possible small inconsistency: in the first Catelyn chapter Ned has seen Tommen (and Cersei) within Tommen's lifetime, but here he hasn't seen Robert since the Greyjoy rebellion, which was before Tommen was born. I suppose there could have been some circumstance under which Cersei and Tommen would have been traveling without Robert, but it's hard to imagine. I'm sure there have been multiple threads on the Westeros.org forums about this, but at the moment I'm too lazy to look.
Jon I
Jon whines a lot, and Tyrion whines a little too.
I hate to break up the pity party Jon and Tyrion are having here, but I do think it ought to be pointed out that they both lead lives of unimaginable privilege. That people are occasionally mean to them only rankles because otherwise they can expect deference and stability. So no, "not all bastards need be dwarfs" doesn't move me as it once did. Otherwise, the only noteworthy thing in this chapter is Jon's exchange with Benjen, which foreshadows Jon's arc with the Watch a lot better than one could have guessed before A Dance with Dragons came out and revealed that Jon's part in George R. R. Martin Explores Medieval Leadership was going to be another chapter in the "Don't Let This Happen to You" section.
Catelyn II
Catelyn feels a good ache, and gets some bad news.
Aw, we're already up to our first ineptly-described sex scene! I don't care if the setting is cod-medieval; "Her loins still ached from the urgency of his lovemaking. It was a good ache. She could feel his seed within her." is not something you should inflict on your readers, even as a transition to a point about her desire for dynastic stability. This isn't a bad chapter, though. It does confirm my earlier suspicion that Martin sees even this, his one stable arranged marriage, as shadowed by the fact that it was arranged. The part where Catelyn wonders if Ned is punishing her by separating her from the children is especially grim. But Cat shows the first signs of the canny strategic mind that so many fanboys (some of them TV producers) have overlooked. In contrast Ned seems slow-witted, and self-pitying to boot: "It was all for Brandon, boo hoo hoo." That's something I think we'll be seeing more of. Martin wants Ned to come across as tragically world-weary, but he often seems whiny instead. All that grief and loss in the rebellion doesn't come through. With the possible partial exception of Catelyn, I don't think Martin ever writes about the immediacy of grief in a credible way. Cersei's grief for Joffrey in Feast is virtually non-existent, though I imagine it's meant to be a factor in her psychological breakdown.
Arya I
Arya starts a fight, and then she watches one.
People like to say Sansa is dim, but in this, her first meaningful appearance, she hits the nail on the head: "Poor Jon... he gets jealous because he's a bastard." That's not very nice, and Sansa seems to follow Catelyn in a certain coldness toward Jon (even in Feast, when she thinks he's her only surviving relative, he's still just her bastard half-brother), but it's not wrong either. And after setting up the Arya/Sansa conflict, this chapter gives us another round of "Poor Overlooked Jon Snow," for which I have not very much patience. Also, Joffrey's still a jerk. Actually, this is the first real sign of his personality, and here it is, like the squabbling between Arya and Sansa, only on the level of ordinary childish nastiness. Even transplanted to a fantasy version of the Middle Ages, the sibling feud here is a little banal, but it does give an emotional baseline that makes the later onslaught of horribleness more meaningful.
Bran II
Bran goes for a climb and watches a peep show.
The second real dose of grimdark. The evocation of a child's mind is intermittently better here, including the mixed response to leaving home, and his memories of his parents' attempts to get him to stop climbing. And then it all goes bleak. I'm sure this shocked me once, but now I'm thinking "Yes, Jaime is fucking his sister, and then he tries to kill a little boy, but when is something interesting going to happen?"
Tyrion I
Tyrion does some reading, some slapping, and some fast breaking.
A short chapter. I had forgotten that it begins with Tyrion reading, which does feel like an attempt to manipulate a geeky, literate audience into liking the character. I should also point out that while Joffrey getting slapped is always a crowd-pleaser, it's not exactly great child-rearing even in a feudal context. As Arya's entire storyline across Clash and Storm is designed to point out, cruelty begets cruelty. I don't know whether Joffrey was doomed from birth to be a monster-- two generations of inbreeding aren't a good sign-- but look at his family life: a drunken lout of a father (who also hit him at least once), an overindulgent mother, and the nicest guy in the vicinity is slap-happy Tyrion. You could almost pity the kid.
Coming over the next week: Jon gets abused, Dany gets married, Catelyn gets saner, and Arya gets into a bunch of trouble.
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