I finally finished reading A Dance with Dragons
Well, I finally finished A Dance with Dragons…
OMG, you guys, that was so boring. What a waste of time.
Lots of long endless journeys, most with dead ends, and by the time anyone actually gets anywhere, it has dragged on so long that you don't even care.
Just a sloppy, long-winded, poorly plotted, incompetently edited mess. Nearly a thousand words to tell me very little that I didn't already know, and nothing that I cared about.
The most compelling characters were Asha and Theon! (Not a complement.) The Jaime chapter told us literally nothing that couldn't be extrapolated from the previous book. Bran's going to be a tree and Arya's going to be the most boring assassin ever and OMG who cares about any of this? You start the book thinking "Yay Tyrion and Dany will finally meet" and 959 pages later they still haven't met. Is Dany ever going to get to Westeros? Does anyone care anymore? Will someone please kill stodgy old Stannis, because I don't believe for a second that we're lucky enough that Ramsay actually did. Did we actually need a Melisandre POV??? And THE POLITICS OF MEEREEN OMFG!!?? Is Dany's incomprehensible and shallow "romance" with Daario really what GRRM thinks attracts women to men? And does anyone care about Quentyn or Victarion? Or if random pulled-out-of-GRRM's-ass-Aegon is really Aegon?
All these pointless characters wasting time, and the writing so sloppy and undisciplined that I don't even know what this series is supposed to be about anymore. Remember when there used to be coherent plot and character arcs?
Not to mention the incessantly grotesque violence, which is not so much ~shocking~ and ~edgy~ as repetitive, cliched, and juvenile.
And do not even get me started on the misogyny. There is a line between "portraying a misogynistic culture for the purpose of critique" and "reveling in misogyny for the thrill of it." GRRM writes a lot of diverse and complex female characters, but that does not excuse him writing 959 pages that is absolutely riddled with gratuitous violence against and dehumanization of female characters. It's both misogynist and lazy, to use this as a shorthand for societal corruption.
I mean obviously the rapes, mutilations, slavery, sexual abuse, the never-missing-an-opportunity-to-write-in-some-whores...
And just, the way we know the size of every womans' breasts, and the judgment on their looks from every man who is observing them. The "oh no, of course Cersei can't be powerful anymore, everyone saw that she's just a woman." Like stretch marks and sagging breasts are some kind of great shame for a beautiful woman who's borne three children? The way GRRM repeats and lingers on the facts of Cersei's aging body--this isn't just Cersei's vanity, it's Kevan thinking it too, it's the deep seated misogyny that I'm increasingly less convinced GRRM is portraying intentionally and more convinced is just the way the author sees the world.
(That's one example of many; it was at the end of the book so it's freshest in my mind.)
There's so much good fanfic out there; I don't need to put this kind of crap into my head.
Originally published at rusty-halo.com. Please comment there or at Dreamwidth.