A Year of Ice and Fire: Week 2

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.

All Together Now

"A Year of Ice and Fire" is switching over to weekly-or-so updates, just so I don't feel compelled to drag in stray observations to pad out each individual posts. Look for the next update, um, later.

Today, for my non-existent faithful audience, I'm copying over a message-board post that captures my only new complaint about Game of Thrones this season:

"As I look back at this season, it really sticks out how poorly the show has handled the overall scope of the story. Each plotline seemed to be occurring in isolation, with virtually no reaction to happenings in the others. Until this week, no one in King's Landing ever mentioned Robb's marriage, an event of enormous strategic significance; it was darn near impossible to tell the Lannisters were fighting a war at all, since all the writers could think to do with all the added screen time for those characters was drag out Tyrell/Lannister wrangling that has at least two more seasons to go. Meanwhile, the ironborn apparently sat on their hands all season, until it was time to remind the audience that they hold the North. Robb appears to have forgotten that too, since he made no mention of it, and instead of reclaiming his homeland planned for an attack on Casterly Rock(!). And, of course, Theon had to be isolated from everything else, so they could hold for the finale the underwhelming reveal that his captor is a character who means nothing much to the TV audience anyway. The show is often praised for managing such a large cast and story, but that's easy if all you have to do is divide it into several barely-connected chunks."

Some of that has to do with the (misguided) desire to make the Red Wedding an utter shock rather than an extreme expression of the direction in which the character was already heading, and some is just the inability (seen with Daenerys last year) to create interesting new material for characters they want to expand, but simple incompetence is also likely a factor. The flatness of "Mhysa," with the title scene turned into an underwhelming season-capper, is just the show reaping what it has sown across a season with so little focus that the producers can't bring any kind of closure, only another "Daenerys, white savior" moment and the pretense that anyone cares who Iwan Rheon's character really is. Bring on season four!

A Year of Ice and Fire: Catelyn I (A Game of Thrones)

Catelyn visits the godswood, and visits us with some exposition.

After the first couple posts in this series, I was regretting that I didn't have more to say. But then I said to myself, Dude, (I call myself dude, because no one else will), you're going to write 344 of these. I don't think the works of James Joyce deserve 344 long blog posts, to say nothing of the works of George R. R. Martin.* And this Catelyn chapter is especially devoid of things on which to comment. The description of the godswood is atmospheric enough considering the plainness of Martin's style, but otherwise this chapter is mostly about setting up the scenario and underlining the differences between Northern and Southern worldviews. (Northerners are grim and, er, stark, while Southerners are soft and joyful. If you hadn't noticed.) Because of this emphasis, our first glimpse of Ned and Catelyn is about the distance between them rather than the basic stability of their relationship. Which is interesting, since the Starks have pretty much the only functional marriage in the whole damn series, and they don't get a lot of time together. Granted, Ned is in a mood because he had to cut someone's head off.** The second Catelyn chapter shows more of their intimacy, in every sense of the word. But there are also some signs of strain there, as we'll see, which makes me wonder if on some level Martin doesn't assume that every arranged marriage has its hollows. Or every marriage period; even his fiction with contemporary and futuristic settings isn't big on people getting along. There's a reason some people call it grimdark.

*Idea for a parody: James R. R. Joyce. "Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a deserter coming down along the road and this deserter that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named bran stark..."

**Which sort of undermines my point from last post about the coarseness of the Northern worldview, even granting that Ned is an especially awesome guy.


Next: Daenerys I.

A Year of Ice and Fire: Bran I (A Game of Thrones)

Bran watches beheading, gets puppy. A good day all around.

If the big surprise at the end of A Game of Thrones is that the nominal hero gets his head chopped off, the big surprise at the beginning is that he does some head-chopping of his own. It was only recently that I took note of this, that our first glimpse of the most prominent character in the book shows him killing a man, and not, despite his words about the danger of deserters, a particularly bad man, but one we know to have understandable reasons for the action that led to his death. It's the first sign that this is a cruel setting, one in which even the nice guys operate by rules we wouldn't care for, the kind of place where a father might think it's important for his seven-year-old son to watch a beheading. It's to the series' credit, I think, that even the Northern lords aren't romanticized. They might be more honorable and less duplicitous than Southern lords (Roose Bolton aside), but they're also harsher, with a brutal value system born of life in an unforgiving land. A Dance with Dragons really underlines this, in the conflict between Stannis' Northern and Southern supporters, in the viciousness of Lady Dustin, and in the mention in one of the Reek chapters that houses like the Umbers (of the lovable Greatjon) still practice prima nocte. People go on about how nasty the ironborn are, but the northmen aren't far behind.

A couple moments in this chapter reminded me of one of my issues with Martin's style: the habit of allowing exposition to overwhelm the logic of a character's internal monologue. I don't think Bran would particularly be thinking about how his father's "closely trimmed beard was shot with white, making him look older than his thirty-five years," or about how Snow is "the name that custom decreed be given to all those in the north unlucky enough to be born with no name of their own." Dumping info like that may be a necessity, but at least phrase it within the frame of reference of a seven-year-old.

Other notes:

*I had forgotten that Theon was nineteen, significantly older than Robb and Jon. That has implications for how he relates to them; I'll try to keep it in mind for the Theon chapters in A Clash of Kings.

*"Bran thought it curious that this pup alone would have opened his eyes while the others were still blind." Symbolic, obviously, like the direwolf having been killed by a stag, but of what? Jon being aware of the threat of the threat of the Others before the rest of his siblings?

Tomorrow: Catelyn I

A Year of Ice and Fire: Prologue (A Game of Thrones)

So after watching "The Rains of Castamere," which was devastating in spite of my contempt for the way that storyline has been adapted over the past two years, I felt like I wanted to reread the books. I get that feeling once in a while, and mostly I ignore it because no matter how much I enjoy the series, I don't have time to reread 1.7 million words multiple times a year. But last night I was thinking about a gradual reread, one that would last a long time and not interfere with the other reading I do. Then I remembered that there are 344 chapters in the series (I counted them once; I do things like that), so one chapter a day would take nearly a year. And my latest soon-to-be-abandoned project was born...

Seriously, I think I can keep up with reading a chapter a day, but I doubt I'll always be able to blog about it. And some chapters don't offer much to talk about anyway. Like the prologue to A Game of Thrones. Two of its characters die right away, and the third becomes an ex-crow in the very next chapter, so there's not much to say about them. It's nice that Royce, instead of living and dying as your standard Nobleman/Fop, gets a moment of bravery. One thing that caught my attention was the talk of how the Wall was "weeping." Obviously it means the temperature is high enough that the Wall is melting slightly, but I don't think we've seen that image, or any description of the Wall's solidity at a given moment, used again, even elsewhere in this book. Am I wrong? We'll see.

I had also forgotten that the Others have a language. I'd been thinking of them more as a force of nature than a people. There's a George R. R. Martin interview I can't find at the moment where he suggests they may not have a culture in any way that we'd understand the term. One of the frustrating things about the dilation of the story is that revelations about the Others, which would have been reasonably paced over three books, have slowed to nothing over seven (or eight). Even the last Bran chapter in Dance, which really jolts the northern/magical storyline forward in a lot of ways, doesn't have much to say about the Others. And speaking of Bran (nice segue), I may or may not be back tomorrow with thoughts on his very first chapter, the image that popped into George R. R. Martin's head 22 years ago and counting, the true beginning of the story. I'm off to read it right now.

Good news, everyone

I'm not going to be updating this blog with thoughts on every week's episode of Game of Thrones. What's the point? I think you know by now what I found objectionable (Edmure being changed from brash to doltish just so Robb looks good; the decision to produce a deleted scene from a direct-to-DVD American Pie flick in the midst of an otherwise serious drama) and what I liked (most aspects of the production other than the writing) on the micro level, and a serialized drama isn't going to offer enough progression for new insights every week on the macro level. To a large extent we already know what the macro level looks like; Benioff and Weiss have been pretty consistent in their vision of the material. To be blunt, that's a vision that appeals most viscerally to people I'm ashamed to share a fandom with. But hey, they probably wouldn't like me either.

Here Comes My Cheese

I got around to watching "Dark Wings, Dark Words" this morning. I liked it. Given what the series is, I think the past couple episodes have been as good as it's going to get. The banality of the dialogue is less glaring, and the decision not to cram every storyline into every episode gives things room to breathe and allows for neglected characters like Sansa to get some screen time. Along with opposite-of-neglected characters like Margaery. But as far as that goes, I thought her scene with Joffrey was interesting to watch. I'm not sure there's a coherent conception of her personality at work, but Dormer has a fascinating presence all the same.

I'm really starting to wonder how the changes the show has made to some of the characters are going to affect the plausibility of fixed narrative points. The cracks are already starting to appear: surely TV Shae ought to be too smart to sneak into Tyrion's chambers or to be jealous of Ros? And how hard are the writers going to work to separate Cersei and Joffrey? Their scene here was a retread anyway; the fact that he prefers Margaery to her was made clear enough last week.

There was a Catelyn scene in this episode. It was stupid and embarrassing and demonstrates that the writers will never run out of new ways to make the King in the North storyline a ridiculous collection of anachronistic cliches. But the damage to Catelyn and Robb was done last year; this is just a little salt in the wound. And I'm happy with Diana Rigg's take on the Queen of Thorns. I can see why some are less enthusiastic: her sharp tongue is now a function of cynicism rather than of brio, which makes the character less of a comic delight. But she's still delightful, and for once compressing dialogue from the books actually works. So I'm going to do what Olenna Redwyne did, and focus on the positive. I thought that dreadful scene with Talisa was never going to end. But look, here comes my Queen of Thorns.