randomness: star wars, nin, veronica mars, oscars, asoiaf...
Jeordie White is a total Star Wars nerd. This amuses me immensely.
Also amusing is the latest Meathead Perspective. I think most of the reason I keep up with NIN these days is to make sure I won't miss any of Meathead's jokes.
Veronica Mars last night was stunningly bad. I don't watch for the mysteries, and I generally find them predictable, but that was just over-the-top lazy. It was completely obvious and utterly lacking in suspense.
I do hope that Logan and Parker run off and have a great life together, while Veronica ends up alone, miserable, and desperately repressing her feelings for Logan while never being able to move on, but, yeah, that's probably just me. I really have no patience for the whole "I'm in love with you but too scared to admit it, so I'll scare you away by acting like a bitch while secretly pining for you" thing.
I want the organizers of New York Comic Con to die slow, painful deaths. Preferably after taking off work, waiting outside in freezing windy cold for two hours, being treated rudely at every turn, and not being able to get the autograph of the person they wasted a vacation day to meet.
Seriously, I've been to plenty of conventions, and I certainly never had to wait in line for hours to get in at DragonCon or San Diego ComiCon, especially in freezing weather. And I never had to arrive hours early to wait in line and get some kind of special ticket to get into an event at a convention I'd already paid for. The whole thing is a fucking mess.
I skipped Saturday and Sunday, regardless of George R.R. Martin and Stephen King. I don't care who their guests are in the future; I am never going back.
Huh. I haven't ranted about anything in a while. That felt good.
Back to happier things...
I watched the last half of the Oscars on Sunday night, because I was channel surfing and came across Robert Downey, Jr. I always thought of him as a really good actor who was also cute, but somehow he's turned into a really good actor who is drop dead gorgeous. I also realized that he has a movie opening on Friday that is directed by David Fincher (Fight Club!) and is getting great reviews. I'm very excited.
It was also cool to see Ennio Morricone get an award, since those Sergio Leone/Clint Eastwood Westerns are among my all-time favorite movies, in large part because of Morricone's scores. Although, yeah, his acceptance speech was a little tedious. Whatever, he deserved the recognition.
And it was cool to see Lucas, Spielberg, and Coppola together. The Oscars are pretty interesting from the perspective of someone who is kind of fascinated by the film industry, although the movies it tends to honor are almost always the boring ones that I haven't seen. I like fantasy and action, and "Lord of the Rings" was too pretentious for me, so, yeah. My favorite movies last year were "Pirates 2" and "Pan's Labyrinth," which only got technical awards. I'm not really an Oscar person, but the ceremony itself was more interesting than I expected.
I'm re-reading A Game of Thrones. I really need to re-read the whole series and take detailed notes (there's so many lovely bits of foreshadowing and characterization that I note in my head and then promptly forget!), but some of the thoughts that particularly stood out:
* After all the bullshit about "the Eyrie is impregnable," I'm going to be really pissed off if it doesn't fall. Hopefully at the hands of a dragon-riding Tyrion Lannister; I'd forgotten that he'd already prepared a plan to take it down in "A Game of Thrones," before Tywin sent him off to King's Landing.
* I say a dragon-riding Tyrion Lannister because of the stuff in the beginning about him being fascinated by dragons from childhood. Why else would that be there? Someone's got to ride those dragons, and even if Jon is the son of Rheagar and Lyanna, there still aren't enough Targaryens for all three dragons.
* Please let the Wall fall. Martin wouldn't introduce a horn that can tear down the Wall if he wasn't going to use it, right? And then all bets are off regarding whatever vows Jon has sworn....
* Any time someone tries to prevent a prophecy, they end up making it happen. Cersei's an obvious example of this, but I had forgotten that Cat falls for it too, when she tries to prevent the "stag killing the direwolf" prophecy by encouraging Ned to go to King's Landing.
* The little details are so perfect. There's a paragraph in there about how the Stark/Lannister/Baratheon party stop at Darry's castle while hunting for a run-away Arya. Four books later, we see this again through Jaime's memory of the Darry castle.
* I love how "Lord Snow" is a mocking nickname for Jon; it's just so perfectly ironic that he actual does become Lord Commander so quickly.
* Arya is so incredibly sympathetic in the beginning. I'd forgotten how much I loved her. These days she's (understandably) so cold and difficult to relate to.
* I hate Sansa because she's so willfully naive, but I'd forgotten how much she's also manipulative. She's really quite passive-aggressively cruel to Arya (making constant snooty, rude, disapproving comments), she purposely lies about not remembering what happened (when Arya defended Mycah from Joff) in order to protect Joffrey, and she disobeys her father and informs on him to Cersei because she doesn't want to lose her imagined fairy-tale future. This makes her eventual position as Littlefinger's protege seem a lot more plausible; she's always had a devious streak. And her relationships to the Hound (him protecting her) and Littlefinger (him mentoring her) were foreshadowed very early on.
* Dany is Azor Ahai, right? And the dragons are Lightbringer? I say this because her story of waking the dragon eggs parallels his story of forging Lightbringer. He tries three times, each with more effort; the third works because he sacrifices his true love to do it. Dany tries to wake the dragon eggs three times, each with more effort; the third works because she sacrifices her true love to do it. But then is she also the Prince Who Was Promised, or was that someone different? Man, all these prophecies confuse me.
* Cersei, man. Cersei was always a raving lunatic. She seemed kind of over-the-top insane in her POV chapters in book four, but looking back, yeah, her insanity was always there. She just had Robert/Jaime/Tywin/Tyrion to restrain it before.
* Cat really hates Jaime. From the beginning, she thinks he tossed Bran and that he hired the guy to kill Bran. Then there's Roose Bolton's line ("Jaime Lannister sends his regards") while implicates Jaime in Robb's death. No wonder zombie-Cat is hellbent on Jaime's destruction.
She's spared Jaime's life once, possibly twice, already, in two scenes involving swords. In AGOT, Jaime is captured, says that he'd give her his sword if he hadn't misplaced it, and she argues that his life should be spared since he'd make a valuable hostage. In ACOK, she calls for Brienne's sword, ending on the cliffhanger of whether she'd let Jaime live, and she ends up sparing him. He's pretty much been living on borrowed time from Cat since the beginning.
This is all just such perfect set-up for Brienne's final scene in AFFC, when Cat asks Brienne to kill Jaime and forces her to choose between "the sword or the noose." How can Brienne have said any word but "sword" when it's all been so carefully set up?
We're obviously going to get a Jaime/Brienne confrontation, but I'm still not sure which will kill the other. (It seems likely that Brienne will kill Jaime, given the fact that she's been dreaming of him dying in her arms a la Renly, the love interest she was accused of killing... but Jaime's death would take so much fun out of the series, and it would suck to lose out on a future Jaime/Tyrion confrontation--there's so much unresolved between them!)
* I really, really, really hate Cat so much. I sent 10zlaine a long email ranting about how she utterly lacks any form of a sense of humor or sense of fun. She really manages to suck the joy out of every scene and to see the dire foreshadowing in every event. I don't care if she's right a lot of the time; what a crappy way to live life.
And her mistakes are really devastating: sending Ned to King's Landing, believing Littlefinger about the dagger, kidnapping Tyrion, not sending Robb home, making a deal with the Freys ... seriously, she meant well, but could she have done any worse?
She's also quite vindictive and unforgiving from the beginning; her breakdown after Bran's injury foreshadows her eventual transformation into Lady Stoneheart. She sees Jon at his most vulnerable, sees how much he loves Bran and hungers for kindness from the only mother he's ever known--and she throws it back in his face and wishes for his death. I know this word is overused when it comes to female characters, but I can't think of a better phrase to describe Catelyn: what a bitch.
* Martin really hammers home the nastiness of the Lannisters, doesn't he? This is why I thought, early on, that the series was just going to be moralistically black-and-white. It's also why the point of view method is so wonderful. The Starks see the Lannisters as pure evil, and we're in Stark POVs, so the Lannisters are the villains. Then when the world expands, its moral view expands too (and Jaime is the personification of this, going from villain to grey character to hero). I also love that so much lip service is paid to how evil the Lannisters are for killing Jon Arryn, and it turns out that it was actually Cat's own sister who did the deed. Haha! Take that, you morally self-righteous Starks.
* The first time you read Jaime's scenes in AGOT, you think "Wow, what a heartless bastard." He really seems 100% evil. It's such a fascinating shift in vision to go back and re-read them after hearing Jaime's side of the story. Jaime just seems like an arrogant asshole in Ned's memory of him taking the throne after killing Aerys, but on a re-read you realize how much of that arrogance was a cover for his disillusioned idealism (and how much Ned's inflexible judgment discouraged him from telling anyone about Aerys' apocalyptic intentions).
Jaime seems so cruel when he kills Ned's men, but on a re-read you get how incredibly worried Jaime is about his little brother (and you realize that it actually balances out; Tyrion loses his men thanks to Lady Stark, so Ned loses his in return... it just feels worse because you're in Ned's POV). And Jaime's tossing of Bran is still awful, of course, but it makes sense when you realize he's doing it to protect Cersei, and that's he's thoroughly disgusted with himself for doing it. It's quite wonderful to watch him develop his own moral compass apart from Cersei's narcissistic lunacy. (And you can see that he's always been the sane one, he's just never bothered to force the issue before--he even argues against her paranoia in their first scene in AGOT, and stops her from abusing baby Tyrion in Oberyn's memory.)
* Also amusing: Jaime declaring that he'd rather die than be a cripple. Haha. It's kind of cool (in a literary sense) how every bad thing he's ever done gets done back to him.
* No wonder Cersei hates Robert. I know she's crazy, but she's pretty justified in this one. It is an affront for him to visit his dead long-lost-love's grave before attending to the comfort of his own wife, especially after he had the gall to call out Lyanna's name on his wedding night instead of Cersei's. Who wouldn't be pissed about that?
* Ned is so stupid. Life-saving advice is thrown at him from every corner, and he manages to ignore every single bit of it in his pursuit of his narrow definition of honor. After reading the rest of the series it's just mind-blowing how much he screws up--he's as bad as Cersei, just in the opposite way. She has no honor at all, he has nothing but honor; they're both completely blinded to reality by their expectations that everyone else will behave as they do (Cersei thinks everyone is a devious schemer like her; Ned thinks everyone is just as obsessed with honor as he is).
* Back to AFFC (and ASOS) -- I love that Jaime is such a great judge of character. He feels bad for Jeyne Westerling and sees right through her mother. He gets that Joffrey hired the guy to kill Bran (and I love that he realizes what a sociopathic little shit Joffrey was, and doesn't even bother to mourn him--but does try to develop a kinder relationship to Tommen. Jaime learns from his mistakes!). He realizes that his squire is into Pia, and encourages them to get together--and tells him to be sweet to her!
Jaime has a very practical sense of morality, unlike Ned's unrelentingly honorable one. (You can't exactly imagine Ned doing that kindness for Pia and what's-his-name, the squire). Jaime also shows kindness by taking in Pia when everyone else was looking down on her for being a slut. He also sees right through the Freys and feels the requisite disgust for them. And his character-judging abilities are never more apparent when he manages to talk Edmure into giving up Riverrun without a fight. Isn't that the great tragedy of Jaime, that he does terrible things for a greater good (killing Aerys saves everyone in King's Landing, threatening Edmure saves thousands from dying in a seige), but he'll always be remembered as a villain?
(*loves Jaime*)
* It is a really nice moment when Jon says goodbye to Sam and notes the snowflakes melting in his hair. Sam doesn't know what it means, but the reader remembers that Jon was thinking of the snowflakes melting in Robb's hair during their final goodbye. (*sniffle*)
* Comparing AGOT with AFFC: the AGOT chapters are much shorter and more streamlined. Unnecessary details are limited and a lot more actual stuff happens. If GRRM was still writing AGOT style, AFFC would've been so much more readable (and he probably wouldn't have had to split it). I like that he's expanding the world, but it does worry me that he's getting so bogged down in detail that he seems to be missing the big picture. And AFFC is just sloppy; why are four separate minor characters named "Pate" when we've never heard the name before? Why is the word "nuncle" suddenly coming out of everyone's mouth? Why break the pattern of named POV characters with a bunch of random one-chapter POV characters with weird titles? How come we've never heard of "most dangerous man in Dorne" Darkstar before (read this thread, it's awesome)? Why is there no payoff to any of the plotlines? Why is every other character getting horribly maimed? How many fake deaths can you possibly have before it gets ridiculous (seriously, who hasn't ended a chapter on an "are they dead???" cliffhanger, only to reappear later)?
Not that I'm saying anything new here, just some thoughts as I was reading.
Oh, and there's a Jaime love thread over at the forum, started by some condescending asshole, but it actually has some interesting discussion. (Or maybe I just like reading nice things about Jaime.)
Also amusing is the latest Meathead Perspective. I think most of the reason I keep up with NIN these days is to make sure I won't miss any of Meathead's jokes.
Veronica Mars last night was stunningly bad. I don't watch for the mysteries, and I generally find them predictable, but that was just over-the-top lazy. It was completely obvious and utterly lacking in suspense.
I do hope that Logan and Parker run off and have a great life together, while Veronica ends up alone, miserable, and desperately repressing her feelings for Logan while never being able to move on, but, yeah, that's probably just me. I really have no patience for the whole "I'm in love with you but too scared to admit it, so I'll scare you away by acting like a bitch while secretly pining for you" thing.
I want the organizers of New York Comic Con to die slow, painful deaths. Preferably after taking off work, waiting outside in freezing windy cold for two hours, being treated rudely at every turn, and not being able to get the autograph of the person they wasted a vacation day to meet.
Seriously, I've been to plenty of conventions, and I certainly never had to wait in line for hours to get in at DragonCon or San Diego ComiCon, especially in freezing weather. And I never had to arrive hours early to wait in line and get some kind of special ticket to get into an event at a convention I'd already paid for. The whole thing is a fucking mess.
I skipped Saturday and Sunday, regardless of George R.R. Martin and Stephen King. I don't care who their guests are in the future; I am never going back.
Huh. I haven't ranted about anything in a while. That felt good.
Back to happier things...
I watched the last half of the Oscars on Sunday night, because I was channel surfing and came across Robert Downey, Jr. I always thought of him as a really good actor who was also cute, but somehow he's turned into a really good actor who is drop dead gorgeous. I also realized that he has a movie opening on Friday that is directed by David Fincher (Fight Club!) and is getting great reviews. I'm very excited.
It was also cool to see Ennio Morricone get an award, since those Sergio Leone/Clint Eastwood Westerns are among my all-time favorite movies, in large part because of Morricone's scores. Although, yeah, his acceptance speech was a little tedious. Whatever, he deserved the recognition.
And it was cool to see Lucas, Spielberg, and Coppola together. The Oscars are pretty interesting from the perspective of someone who is kind of fascinated by the film industry, although the movies it tends to honor are almost always the boring ones that I haven't seen. I like fantasy and action, and "Lord of the Rings" was too pretentious for me, so, yeah. My favorite movies last year were "Pirates 2" and "Pan's Labyrinth," which only got technical awards. I'm not really an Oscar person, but the ceremony itself was more interesting than I expected.
I'm re-reading A Game of Thrones. I really need to re-read the whole series and take detailed notes (there's so many lovely bits of foreshadowing and characterization that I note in my head and then promptly forget!), but some of the thoughts that particularly stood out:
* After all the bullshit about "the Eyrie is impregnable," I'm going to be really pissed off if it doesn't fall. Hopefully at the hands of a dragon-riding Tyrion Lannister; I'd forgotten that he'd already prepared a plan to take it down in "A Game of Thrones," before Tywin sent him off to King's Landing.
* I say a dragon-riding Tyrion Lannister because of the stuff in the beginning about him being fascinated by dragons from childhood. Why else would that be there? Someone's got to ride those dragons, and even if Jon is the son of Rheagar and Lyanna, there still aren't enough Targaryens for all three dragons.
* Please let the Wall fall. Martin wouldn't introduce a horn that can tear down the Wall if he wasn't going to use it, right? And then all bets are off regarding whatever vows Jon has sworn....
* Any time someone tries to prevent a prophecy, they end up making it happen. Cersei's an obvious example of this, but I had forgotten that Cat falls for it too, when she tries to prevent the "stag killing the direwolf" prophecy by encouraging Ned to go to King's Landing.
* The little details are so perfect. There's a paragraph in there about how the Stark/Lannister/Baratheon party stop at Darry's castle while hunting for a run-away Arya. Four books later, we see this again through Jaime's memory of the Darry castle.
* I love how "Lord Snow" is a mocking nickname for Jon; it's just so perfectly ironic that he actual does become Lord Commander so quickly.
* Arya is so incredibly sympathetic in the beginning. I'd forgotten how much I loved her. These days she's (understandably) so cold and difficult to relate to.
* I hate Sansa because she's so willfully naive, but I'd forgotten how much she's also manipulative. She's really quite passive-aggressively cruel to Arya (making constant snooty, rude, disapproving comments), she purposely lies about not remembering what happened (when Arya defended Mycah from Joff) in order to protect Joffrey, and she disobeys her father and informs on him to Cersei because she doesn't want to lose her imagined fairy-tale future. This makes her eventual position as Littlefinger's protege seem a lot more plausible; she's always had a devious streak. And her relationships to the Hound (him protecting her) and Littlefinger (him mentoring her) were foreshadowed very early on.
* Dany is Azor Ahai, right? And the dragons are Lightbringer? I say this because her story of waking the dragon eggs parallels his story of forging Lightbringer. He tries three times, each with more effort; the third works because he sacrifices his true love to do it. Dany tries to wake the dragon eggs three times, each with more effort; the third works because she sacrifices her true love to do it. But then is she also the Prince Who Was Promised, or was that someone different? Man, all these prophecies confuse me.
* Cersei, man. Cersei was always a raving lunatic. She seemed kind of over-the-top insane in her POV chapters in book four, but looking back, yeah, her insanity was always there. She just had Robert/Jaime/Tywin/Tyrion to restrain it before.
* Cat really hates Jaime. From the beginning, she thinks he tossed Bran and that he hired the guy to kill Bran. Then there's Roose Bolton's line ("Jaime Lannister sends his regards") while implicates Jaime in Robb's death. No wonder zombie-Cat is hellbent on Jaime's destruction.
She's spared Jaime's life once, possibly twice, already, in two scenes involving swords. In AGOT, Jaime is captured, says that he'd give her his sword if he hadn't misplaced it, and she argues that his life should be spared since he'd make a valuable hostage. In ACOK, she calls for Brienne's sword, ending on the cliffhanger of whether she'd let Jaime live, and she ends up sparing him. He's pretty much been living on borrowed time from Cat since the beginning.
This is all just such perfect set-up for Brienne's final scene in AFFC, when Cat asks Brienne to kill Jaime and forces her to choose between "the sword or the noose." How can Brienne have said any word but "sword" when it's all been so carefully set up?
We're obviously going to get a Jaime/Brienne confrontation, but I'm still not sure which will kill the other. (It seems likely that Brienne will kill Jaime, given the fact that she's been dreaming of him dying in her arms a la Renly, the love interest she was accused of killing... but Jaime's death would take so much fun out of the series, and it would suck to lose out on a future Jaime/Tyrion confrontation--there's so much unresolved between them!)
* I really, really, really hate Cat so much. I sent 10zlaine a long email ranting about how she utterly lacks any form of a sense of humor or sense of fun. She really manages to suck the joy out of every scene and to see the dire foreshadowing in every event. I don't care if she's right a lot of the time; what a crappy way to live life.
And her mistakes are really devastating: sending Ned to King's Landing, believing Littlefinger about the dagger, kidnapping Tyrion, not sending Robb home, making a deal with the Freys ... seriously, she meant well, but could she have done any worse?
She's also quite vindictive and unforgiving from the beginning; her breakdown after Bran's injury foreshadows her eventual transformation into Lady Stoneheart. She sees Jon at his most vulnerable, sees how much he loves Bran and hungers for kindness from the only mother he's ever known--and she throws it back in his face and wishes for his death. I know this word is overused when it comes to female characters, but I can't think of a better phrase to describe Catelyn: what a bitch.
* Martin really hammers home the nastiness of the Lannisters, doesn't he? This is why I thought, early on, that the series was just going to be moralistically black-and-white. It's also why the point of view method is so wonderful. The Starks see the Lannisters as pure evil, and we're in Stark POVs, so the Lannisters are the villains. Then when the world expands, its moral view expands too (and Jaime is the personification of this, going from villain to grey character to hero). I also love that so much lip service is paid to how evil the Lannisters are for killing Jon Arryn, and it turns out that it was actually Cat's own sister who did the deed. Haha! Take that, you morally self-righteous Starks.
* The first time you read Jaime's scenes in AGOT, you think "Wow, what a heartless bastard." He really seems 100% evil. It's such a fascinating shift in vision to go back and re-read them after hearing Jaime's side of the story. Jaime just seems like an arrogant asshole in Ned's memory of him taking the throne after killing Aerys, but on a re-read you realize how much of that arrogance was a cover for his disillusioned idealism (and how much Ned's inflexible judgment discouraged him from telling anyone about Aerys' apocalyptic intentions).
Jaime seems so cruel when he kills Ned's men, but on a re-read you get how incredibly worried Jaime is about his little brother (and you realize that it actually balances out; Tyrion loses his men thanks to Lady Stark, so Ned loses his in return... it just feels worse because you're in Ned's POV). And Jaime's tossing of Bran is still awful, of course, but it makes sense when you realize he's doing it to protect Cersei, and that's he's thoroughly disgusted with himself for doing it. It's quite wonderful to watch him develop his own moral compass apart from Cersei's narcissistic lunacy. (And you can see that he's always been the sane one, he's just never bothered to force the issue before--he even argues against her paranoia in their first scene in AGOT, and stops her from abusing baby Tyrion in Oberyn's memory.)
* Also amusing: Jaime declaring that he'd rather die than be a cripple. Haha. It's kind of cool (in a literary sense) how every bad thing he's ever done gets done back to him.
* No wonder Cersei hates Robert. I know she's crazy, but she's pretty justified in this one. It is an affront for him to visit his dead long-lost-love's grave before attending to the comfort of his own wife, especially after he had the gall to call out Lyanna's name on his wedding night instead of Cersei's. Who wouldn't be pissed about that?
* Ned is so stupid. Life-saving advice is thrown at him from every corner, and he manages to ignore every single bit of it in his pursuit of his narrow definition of honor. After reading the rest of the series it's just mind-blowing how much he screws up--he's as bad as Cersei, just in the opposite way. She has no honor at all, he has nothing but honor; they're both completely blinded to reality by their expectations that everyone else will behave as they do (Cersei thinks everyone is a devious schemer like her; Ned thinks everyone is just as obsessed with honor as he is).
* Back to AFFC (and ASOS) -- I love that Jaime is such a great judge of character. He feels bad for Jeyne Westerling and sees right through her mother. He gets that Joffrey hired the guy to kill Bran (and I love that he realizes what a sociopathic little shit Joffrey was, and doesn't even bother to mourn him--but does try to develop a kinder relationship to Tommen. Jaime learns from his mistakes!). He realizes that his squire is into Pia, and encourages them to get together--and tells him to be sweet to her!
Jaime has a very practical sense of morality, unlike Ned's unrelentingly honorable one. (You can't exactly imagine Ned doing that kindness for Pia and what's-his-name, the squire). Jaime also shows kindness by taking in Pia when everyone else was looking down on her for being a slut. He also sees right through the Freys and feels the requisite disgust for them. And his character-judging abilities are never more apparent when he manages to talk Edmure into giving up Riverrun without a fight. Isn't that the great tragedy of Jaime, that he does terrible things for a greater good (killing Aerys saves everyone in King's Landing, threatening Edmure saves thousands from dying in a seige), but he'll always be remembered as a villain?
(*loves Jaime*)
* It is a really nice moment when Jon says goodbye to Sam and notes the snowflakes melting in his hair. Sam doesn't know what it means, but the reader remembers that Jon was thinking of the snowflakes melting in Robb's hair during their final goodbye. (*sniffle*)
* Comparing AGOT with AFFC: the AGOT chapters are much shorter and more streamlined. Unnecessary details are limited and a lot more actual stuff happens. If GRRM was still writing AGOT style, AFFC would've been so much more readable (and he probably wouldn't have had to split it). I like that he's expanding the world, but it does worry me that he's getting so bogged down in detail that he seems to be missing the big picture. And AFFC is just sloppy; why are four separate minor characters named "Pate" when we've never heard the name before? Why is the word "nuncle" suddenly coming out of everyone's mouth? Why break the pattern of named POV characters with a bunch of random one-chapter POV characters with weird titles? How come we've never heard of "most dangerous man in Dorne" Darkstar before (read this thread, it's awesome)? Why is there no payoff to any of the plotlines? Why is every other character getting horribly maimed? How many fake deaths can you possibly have before it gets ridiculous (seriously, who hasn't ended a chapter on an "are they dead???" cliffhanger, only to reappear later)?
Not that I'm saying anything new here, just some thoughts as I was reading.
Oh, and there's a Jaime love thread over at the forum, started by some condescending asshole, but it actually has some interesting discussion. (Or maybe I just like reading nice things about Jaime.)