And because Eddard is dumb and honorable, his adopted son is now doinking his half sister. Aunt?
I’m pretty sure he realized it. The problem is it was too late by the time he did.
FYI Martin fans. Have you read this?
Absolutely! That’s one I re-read every few years. I wouldn’t call it great literature, but it’s a thoroughly enjoyable read.
Yeah great book. It’s Martin’s homage to the style of Jack Vance. So if you like this book, read more Jack Vance. :)
BIG JV fan here.
Martin’s care with naming things and people, and his tendency to describe the physical context of events in an evocative way that puts you mentally right there at the scene (right down to details about food), always struck me as the most Vancian aspects of his oeuvre.
They’re subtle things, but they give both authors’ writing a kind of 3-dimensional solidity that’s very satisfying to read; you’re always (as it were) hovering over the shoulder of the protagonist, right there where they are, and the way peoples’ names fit their characters sets a background vibe that substitutes for the subtle emotional cues you get from people in face-to-face contact.
Martin’s occasional use of florid speech with consistent formalisms is also reminiscent.
Reflecting this back to videogames, it reminds me of the perennial discussion battle between first person and third person fans - some think one more immersive than the other, and I’ve always thought that (apart from in narrow spaces like dungeons, where first person mimics fear-based tunnel vision) third person is more immersive, because although you don’t have that kind of third person overview in real life visually, it substitutes for the saccading, scanning and aural cues that we unconsciously do to build up a model of the world around us.
In the same way, although in real life the names of things and the names of people never coincide with their actual characters in the way they do in Vance’s or Martin’s books, the coincidence of naming with what things are substitutes for the kinds of intuitions and emotional cues one has about people and things in real life. It provides an extra dimension that leaps off the page.
Alternative endings for GOT:
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For 4 episodes we see the world from the point of view of the white walkers. Showing the white walkers like some sort of Ice Elves with amazing lifestyles and art, and childrens. And losing most to the humans /forest guys. Then finnaly getting the upperhand and literally making their loved ones reborn from ice after conquering all of westeros.
-
The Upside Down. One character manage to find a strange tunnel that leads to a space-ship looking camera. It end being a space ship. This character fly with the space ship auto controls and travels around the world of westeros. Its visible that the world is a dyson sphere and is damaged causing the ice age thing.
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High Fantasy Ending. Humans discover that they have been used by the gods, and they revolt against that. Every god is released in a battle where they directly fight each another.
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Albion Triumps. A army of steam powered tanks/zepelins indades westeros and kill everything conquering the place, killing the old habitants.
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Revenge of the World Tree. Everything is a setup of the childrens of the forest, when Ice seems to be winning, the world flourish with large trees and break the ice, turning the continent in a huge jungle where the childrens of the forest are reborn. They hunt everyone else (even the ice king) and the survivors have to escape in boats.
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The Faceswappers reveal themselves as a faction from a space faring civilization that come from the asteroid (that is a space ship). They are tasked with controlling the westeros civilizationa and try to influence it. The Ice guys are other sentient race, and they can’t help humanity agains them.
insert here the Captain America “I got that reference” meme…….
I liked your connection between writing style and video game perspective, but how does third person do the above? Isn’t all that external, and thus shouldn’t first person stimulate it more? Not to derail…
Third person isn’t a direct translation of your visual field, but I think it functions more as a translation of your internal model of the world (built up unconsciously from subtle cues), which gives you a sense of the world around you in 3 dimensions. (Of course there’s the “able to see round corners sometimes” problem, which is I’d agree can a bit immersion breaking on occasion! :) )
First person though I think does mimic the visual field when you have tunnel vision (when you’re scared), so it’s great for games (or phases of games, like going into a Skyrim dungeon) that trade on fear in enclosed spaces.
I think as Carmack said when there was all that discussion about VR, we’re never going to get a really good 1:1 representation for the visual field until the VR visual system can interface with the way the eyes work together to focus on points in the distance. If such functionality were combined with really good audio, then the immersive aspect of 3rd person I’m talking about wouldn’t be as good as that.
But this is just a pet theory of mine, take it FWIW.
HBO just announced it. Season 8 in April.
Slightly longer trailer (all old footage)
So this will wrap up the story in some half-assed fashion, because Jar Jar Martin couldn’t be bothered to do so over more than two decades?
#im_not_bitter
At this point, the show is the real GoT. It’s canon. Martin either can’t or won’t finish the books.
I’m fine with that. The show is fantastic :)
I don’t really plan on finishing the books myself. The last one, that I still haven’t finished, is a slog.
The show has become better than the books IMO. At least after book 3 at least. Martin just doesn’t seem to care or doesn’t know how to end it. At least Benioff and Weiss are delivering.
I do get all that. Better some ending to the story than none, which was its obvious fate were it not for the HBO series, given Martin’s lack of interest in finishing it, and his age + cartoon Santa Claus physique.
It’s sad because the first three books came out in such quick succession and were so freaking good. Then the fourth book inexplicably starts introducing a bunch of characters you’ve never heard of and don’t give a crap about.
Well, mostly it was older characters though. The two new POV characters in Feast of Crows were Brienne of Tarth and Cersei Lannister. And we were pretty familiar with them already.
There were a few people introduced as POV characters, but they only had one or two chapters. I have to agree that felt a bit jarring though. In the series up to that point, it wasn’t normal to have a POV character for only one or two chapters.
For reference, via Wiki of Ice and Fire:
Feast of Crows:
- Cersei Lannister, the queen regent and the sister of Jaime and Tyrion - 10 chapters
- Brienne of Tarth, the daughter of Lord Selwyn Tarth - 8 chapters
- Jaime Lannister - 7 chapters
- Samwell Tarly, the elder son and former heir of Lord Randyll Tarly - 5 chapters
- Arya Stark - 3 chapters
- Sansa Stark - 3 chapters
- Aeron Greyjoy, a younger brother of Balon and a priest of the Drowned God - 2 chapters
- Victarion Greyjoy, a younger brother of Balon, the Lord Captain of the Iron Fleet, and the captain of Iron Victory - 2 chapters
- Arianne Martell, the daughter and heir of Doran - 2 chapters
- Asha Greyjoy, the daughter of Balon and the captain of Black Wind - 1 chapter
- Areo Hotah, the captain of guards for Doran Martell, Prince of Dorne - 1 chapter
- Arys Oakheart, a knight of the Kingsguard - 1 chapter
- Pate, a novice at the Citadel in Oldtown - 1 chapter (Prologue)\
I guess that’s 10 chapters altogether for those minor characters, which is a lot when put together.
Who do you think would win in a dogfight?
One of Daenerys Targaryen’s dragons, or a F-16A Fighting Falcon?
Proof that subjective opinions are often not only wrong but spectacularly poor in nature. You’re dead to me, and I’ll write an ending to you if we ever find ourselves in the same room together. You have been warned.
The Arys Oakheart chapter is an admitted error on GRRM’s part, but otherwise I love the expanded PoVs and some of those chapters contain some of the best non-action moments in the entire series (Arianne’s convo with her father, Brynden Tully and Jaime on the drawbridge, Aunt Genna and Jaime, etc.). GRRM is clearly setting the Act 3 stage in books 4 + 5 and it’s unfair to judge the series at this point. Book 5 is an obvious fleshing out of Jon and Dany’s arcs rather than the 2-3 chapter schlock we usually get from genre writers. You could argue that GRRM took it too far in the opposite direction and could’ve achieved roughly the same result in fewer pages, but a lot of fantasy series suffer from mid-trilogy blues. And book 6 is going to open with a spectacular first few 100 pages due to the groundwork laid in the previous two books.
The show, otoh, is just garbage writing. People may enjoy the production values and the visuals they produce, but the writing is terrible. It’s lazy, sloppy work that plays out more like bad fan fiction than anything produced by a team of professional writers. Seasons 5 + 7 were just unbelievably bad and if 8 continues that quality and GRRM were to die (highly likely at this point) before finishing, the canonical version that lives in my head will whatever I choose it to be, though a version based entirely on the books.
Edit: Crap, forgot to add that first paragraph is a joke. Should be obvious, but just to be perfectly clear. . .no, I’m not posting actual death threats against someone just because the poor soul has yet to develop any real taste or aesthetics when it comes to the written word. In fact, I take pity upon this fellow Qt3er and hope one day they may emerge from that black hole of unrefined sensibilities.
If there was a sky full of jets and dragons, I would not want to be in one of the jets.