that's true i think splitting the books was a mistake. but i think the last 2 will be good. Dance got better when they caught up with feast. And i read that these 2 books were not in the original plan he wanted to skip 5 years into the future but thought that he would rely on too many flashbacks so just wrote the books instead. So that could explain why not much happened in terms of major story developments.
Melissandre and Stannis have been cast! http://winter-is-coming.net/2011/07/stannis-and-melisandre-cast/ very nice choices on both...Especially Stannis
I had been holding out hope that they could get Christina Hendricks for Melisandre, but Carice van Houten ain't too shabby, and she's probably a better actor to boot. p.s. I googled her images and got a pretty nice full frontal tit shot in row 8.
That guy looks absolutely nothing like I pictured Stannis but it looks like he's a good actor at least.
I envisioned someone like Mark Strong as Stannis...We didnt get him, so we got the guy below. This looks something like Stannis to me
http://insidetv.ew.com/2011/07/19/liam-cunningham-davos/ Liam Cunningham cast as Davos...One of my favorite characters. He comes from the recent defunct camelot...
Maybe it was just the lack of the beard or the picture in that first article but yeah shave his head and its pretty close.
The Onion Knight is cool. Actually I always love a top 5 - my top 5 favourite characters from ASOI&F (in no particular order): 1. Tyrion 2. Jon Snow 3. Davos Seaworth (the onion knight) 4. Barristan Selmy 5. Beric Dondarrion (the Lightning Lord)
I was really disappointed that Roose Bolton made no appearance in the HBO series. That and after reading Dance I get the impression that Martin has no fucking idea where he wants to take the story.
He's known where he was going with it for years probably, but a couple of things happened. HBO and the internet. HBO probably made him scale up some of his idea for the storytelling in the final books, and the internet created a legion of fanboys who made it their life to try to predict every tiny detail of the unwritten books, and Martin probably doesn't want to be predicted or outdone by the readers. Plus, ADWD and Feast were like empty bridges over a span of time that he hadn't planned on writing. I gained almost nothing from ADWD until it's timeline caught up with Feast's timeline. The next book will probably shit all over any of the other ones excluding ASOS. We hope.
I can put up with most of Dance being an empty bridge (I enjoyed Feast a lot), and I agree that it got a lot better once in caught up and past Feast. I still get the impression though that he got to a point in the plot where some seriously significant shit was going to happen and just said "fuck it I got nothing I'll just end here". And for that matter he should just kill Bran off screen or something. At the end of Storm his story really started to get interesting (and the weirdest), but In Dance he hardly made an appearance and when he did it was just really stupid shit. I don't want to spoil anything but if all the future Bran chapters are just him warging and looking thru trees, Martin really blew it with him. I remember hearing once that Martin said he planned on having Dany land in Westeros at the end of Dance. At this rate he's going to need a couple extra books to finish the series.
Just finished A Storm of Swords. That book was the shit! My favorite so far, no question. Jaime is the man, besides the whole wanting to bang his sister thing. All the Lannisters are pretty awesome characters really. My top 5 would probably be; 1) Tyrion 1a) Jaime 3) Jon Snow 4) Arya 5) Sandor Clegane "There are no men like me. There's only me." Sickest line "Hoder! HODOR!!! Hodor?" Second sickest line
Oh I definitely enjoyed it. But if you're looking the Dance to bring the series any closer to some sort of a conclusion it's not going to happen.
I think its a bit worse than that though. AFFC was a mostly harmless "tales of Westeros" type book but in Dance he starts fucking up major characters. The Dany chapters were shockingly bad. She was never my favorite character but I wasn't expecting Sansa with dragons(or not because they're locked up for most of the book). The Tyrion chapters may have been even worse because of how great his had always been before this. The "Reek" chapters were the only ones that had any semblance of a story arc and they were probably the best. The thing that's most frustrating is that the guy has spent like 10 years and a couple thousand pages writing shit that he originally planned to just skip over in the story with a 5 year gap and I can't figure out why he bothered. I'm not sure if he's working without an editor at this point or if he has one and they just tell him everything he writes is gold but I don't see the series getting back on track unless someone steps in and tells him enough is fucking enough.
