Thursday, May 31, 2012

Regarding A Game of Thrones

WARNING:  The following post contains spoilers for the novel A Game of Thrones by George RR Martin.

The spoilers leaking out of people due to the popular HBO series A Game of Thrones bumped the novel up on my reading list.  I finished it recently, so I thought that I'd share some thoughts on it.
Overall, I liked it.  The perspective characters were used effectively.  The story also seemed to effectively convey a world in which magic once existed, but now was all but gone, at least in the main area.  I was actually a bit relieved when the corpses found north of the wall turned out to be revenants, since I was starting to worry that there wouldn't be any actual magic involved.
I suffered some disappointment near the end, though.  For one, when Drogo learned of the king's orders to assassinate Daenerys, and committed himself to taking his khalasar across the sea, I was like thinking, "Alright, this is going to happen."  But then, it didn't.  Also, when Dany's child wound up being stillborn, it of course raised questions about the nature of prophecy in the world, but I think that I was even more disappointed when I read the description of it, which included scales and everything.  We could have had some kind of draconic dude in this story and we didn't?!
Well, at least the dragons hatched by the end.  Those eggs were such a tease.
It sounds like I'm complaining but I think that that's because it's easier to specify what disappointed me (not necessarily "disliked") than it is to specify what I actually liked.
That said, don't get me started on how crappy Mirri Maz Duur's plan was.

P.S.:  Are all of the books going to include the title (maybe minus the leading article) in the dialogue?

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