More Clash of Kings
Dear brain, please stop drawing parallels between ASOIAF and Harry Potter. It's not doing me any good. The Starks are not the Weasleys and the Lannisters are not the Malfoys. Joffrey is certainly not Draco Malfoy and Samwell Tarly is not Neville Longbottom. And Littlefinger is not the Snape to Catelyn's Lily and Brandon and Ned's Sirius and James.
(Oh, and Osha is not Tonks and Walder Frey is not Filtch, and considering Aunt Petunia is now in True Blood, I wonder if HBO had the best stand at the post-HP career day).
Anyway, I finished A Clash of Kings and I'm now part way into A Storm of Swords.
Although, I suppose, in a way, ASOIAF is, like Harry Potter, basically a long tale about love. Just instead of love being a force of good, George RR Martin take the cynical view that love is essentially a destructive force. I think what he's trying to say it this:
As you are human and not some kind of monster or psychopath, you will love. Chances are the person that you love will not love you back, and you will be miserable. If they do love you back, bad things will happen to keep you apart, and you will be miserable (this may also happen if they don't love you back, in which case you will be doubly miserable). All desperate and occasionally despicable actions that you can't help but made in attempts to get said person to love you back or overcome the bad things that are keeping you separate will have far reaching consequences that you could not possible predict which will make you even more miserable and probably also lead to a few hundred or thousand people being raped or killed or raped and killed, making everybody miserable, if they're not by now dead. So why are you reading this? Errr....look! Zombies!
But then, while it's a cynical view, the most redeeming feature of the characters is their capacity for love and in my eyes the true villains of the piece are the characters seemingly incapable of love such as Joffrey, the Mountain, Tywin Lannister (although he was capable of it until his wife died), the Boltons, Melisandre.
Okay, yes onto less overarching and thematic things:
Theon Greyjoy you are the biggest tool that ever was a tool you tooly tooly tool. You sister is quite awesome though.
Winterfell burnt down. Nooooooo! Winterfell *sob* Bran's thought about Winterfell being still Winterfell so long as the Stark crypts remain was a nice thought, but noooooooo! It really brought home that the Starks are not going to ever be the family they were at the beginning of A Game of Thrones for me, even more than Ned's death.
I would so not mind at all if the entire series became the adventures of Lady Stark and the Brienne of Tarth. Okay, so such a book would be light of humour since neither of them are particularly cheery, or rarely rise out of a state of depression, but they're got such a wonderful odd almost-friendship and such a cool dynamic of one being a Lady, the other being her sworn knight, and they're both women. It's got my vote for the relationship I most want to see more of.
The relationship I want less of is the Hound/Sansa. That's a major ship. Really? Unless he has a massive personality transplant, it would never work for me. He's just far too close to snapping at any given moment and Sansa's just a teenager and not really emotionally mature enough to handle that dangerous mess.
Also on the topic of relationships, Arya/Gendry adorable. Tyrion/Shae I cannot get behind. He needs someone he doesn't have to pay and also, closer to his intellectual equal.
Daenerys is no longer working for me. I liked her in A Game of Thrones, but now I don't. I think its for two reasons, firstly she has dragons. Sure she's not got any money and barely any followers never mind an army, but a soon as they're full grown, Daenerys will rule any battlefield she steps onto, and there's a sort of contradiction in the narrative in which I fell that GRRM's telling me I should be rooting for her because she's the underdog, yet she has dragons that will one day be great big unstoppable dragons, which makes her the character farthest away from being the underdog. I much prefer the characters who are closer to being actual underdogs, such as Tyrion and any member of the Stark family.
And secondly, I have to agree with Miri Maz Duur, not her actions, but what she told Daenerys. Daenerys' dreams of going home is at the end of the day, conquest. And it will be brutal and horrendous and I just can support Daenerys in her dream given the massive amount of suffering it will cause.
Also, still totally bored with Jon. Ugh.
Not quite sure what I make of Stannis's storyline. I find Davos quite likeable and the whole set up it intriguing, particularly now that religion has been drawn into the conflict and we've got a Rasputin figure, but none of the characters in the Stannis camp quite grab me like a lot of the other characters in the other storylines do. So while intellectually the storyline works for me, I'm not quite emotionally invested in it just yet.
And my favourite continues to be Cat. I adored her chapters in Clash, and she did spend most of the novel essentially acting as her son's foreign minister, which was awesome (particularly since I'm such a diplomacy and foreign policy geek).
ETA and completely not related to the rest of this post: Mark Kermode's review of Transformers 3. In summary: 'this is what happens when civilisations are about to collapse.' Listening to the Wittertainment podcast has become the highlight of my week.
(Oh, and Osha is not Tonks and Walder Frey is not Filtch, and considering Aunt Petunia is now in True Blood, I wonder if HBO had the best stand at the post-HP career day).
Anyway, I finished A Clash of Kings and I'm now part way into A Storm of Swords.
Although, I suppose, in a way, ASOIAF is, like Harry Potter, basically a long tale about love. Just instead of love being a force of good, George RR Martin take the cynical view that love is essentially a destructive force. I think what he's trying to say it this:
As you are human and not some kind of monster or psychopath, you will love. Chances are the person that you love will not love you back, and you will be miserable. If they do love you back, bad things will happen to keep you apart, and you will be miserable (this may also happen if they don't love you back, in which case you will be doubly miserable). All desperate and occasionally despicable actions that you can't help but made in attempts to get said person to love you back or overcome the bad things that are keeping you separate will have far reaching consequences that you could not possible predict which will make you even more miserable and probably also lead to a few hundred or thousand people being raped or killed or raped and killed, making everybody miserable, if they're not by now dead. So why are you reading this? Errr....look! Zombies!
But then, while it's a cynical view, the most redeeming feature of the characters is their capacity for love and in my eyes the true villains of the piece are the characters seemingly incapable of love such as Joffrey, the Mountain, Tywin Lannister (although he was capable of it until his wife died), the Boltons, Melisandre.
Okay, yes onto less overarching and thematic things:
Theon Greyjoy you are the biggest tool that ever was a tool you tooly tooly tool. You sister is quite awesome though.
Winterfell burnt down. Nooooooo! Winterfell *sob* Bran's thought about Winterfell being still Winterfell so long as the Stark crypts remain was a nice thought, but noooooooo! It really brought home that the Starks are not going to ever be the family they were at the beginning of A Game of Thrones for me, even more than Ned's death.
I would so not mind at all if the entire series became the adventures of Lady Stark and the Brienne of Tarth. Okay, so such a book would be light of humour since neither of them are particularly cheery, or rarely rise out of a state of depression, but they're got such a wonderful odd almost-friendship and such a cool dynamic of one being a Lady, the other being her sworn knight, and they're both women. It's got my vote for the relationship I most want to see more of.
The relationship I want less of is the Hound/Sansa. That's a major ship. Really? Unless he has a massive personality transplant, it would never work for me. He's just far too close to snapping at any given moment and Sansa's just a teenager and not really emotionally mature enough to handle that dangerous mess.
Also on the topic of relationships, Arya/Gendry adorable. Tyrion/Shae I cannot get behind. He needs someone he doesn't have to pay and also, closer to his intellectual equal.
Daenerys is no longer working for me. I liked her in A Game of Thrones, but now I don't. I think its for two reasons, firstly she has dragons. Sure she's not got any money and barely any followers never mind an army, but a soon as they're full grown, Daenerys will rule any battlefield she steps onto, and there's a sort of contradiction in the narrative in which I fell that GRRM's telling me I should be rooting for her because she's the underdog, yet she has dragons that will one day be great big unstoppable dragons, which makes her the character farthest away from being the underdog. I much prefer the characters who are closer to being actual underdogs, such as Tyrion and any member of the Stark family.
And secondly, I have to agree with Miri Maz Duur, not her actions, but what she told Daenerys. Daenerys' dreams of going home is at the end of the day, conquest. And it will be brutal and horrendous and I just can support Daenerys in her dream given the massive amount of suffering it will cause.
Also, still totally bored with Jon. Ugh.
Not quite sure what I make of Stannis's storyline. I find Davos quite likeable and the whole set up it intriguing, particularly now that religion has been drawn into the conflict and we've got a Rasputin figure, but none of the characters in the Stannis camp quite grab me like a lot of the other characters in the other storylines do. So while intellectually the storyline works for me, I'm not quite emotionally invested in it just yet.
And my favourite continues to be Cat. I adored her chapters in Clash, and she did spend most of the novel essentially acting as her son's foreign minister, which was awesome (particularly since I'm such a diplomacy and foreign policy geek).
ETA and completely not related to the rest of this post: Mark Kermode's review of Transformers 3. In summary: 'this is what happens when civilisations are about to collapse.' Listening to the Wittertainment podcast has become the highlight of my week.