Game of Thrones (TV series) Official Thread

[rocketpig]

Scoobes said:

rocketpig said:

Good books, not great. Martin has built one of the finest worlds I've ever read but he's bogging it down with hydra characters (kill one, two more pop up in his/her place), kudzu plot lines, lack of progress, and 4,500 pages into the series, he still hasn't really introduced the wights/others, who were the center of the friggin' prologue in book one.

This series has all the makings of a big ol' mess in the sixth and seventh novels. If he continues down this path and then magically wraps up everything in the last 100 pages of the seventh book, I'm gonna be bent.

I fear that he has bitten off more than any writer could chew with this series. Stuff like having Arya wander around unnecessarily for, oh, about 2,000 pages show that he's just trying to juggle too many characters. He needed her character to not advance while other stuff happened.

And don't even get me started on character growth. Outside of Jaime Lannister, almost every character is the same in book five that they were in book one. Some have changed sides, some have done good, some have done bad, but they're all essentially the same people doing the same stupid things, only now some of them are dead because of it.

I'd agree with you if you were only talking about books 4 & 5. They were slow, characters didn't develop as much as they should and the fact that they both occured at the sametime meant not a lot of eventful material actually got covered. It feels like it's building to something big though.

Books 1-3 on the other hand were fantastic.

I'm the first to say the books are good, some of them very good (books 1 & 3). I just think they're overrated by many. When you get right down to it, a lot of the story is not enjoyable to read. Too much of the series involves characters you don't like doing things you think are stupid and repeating that formula over and over and over again. And it all takes too long to unfold. And characters rarely grow and mature, they simply die and are replaced by someone equally as stupid.

It's an incredibly frustrating series to read. Some of it is just so bloody good while so much of it is just so bloody annoying. Overall, I've enjoyed it but after books four and five (not very good at all), Martin better get his shit in order for six or the series is going to be a huge letdown. If book six is like four and five, that will mean the middle 40% of the series is mediocre at its best, bad at its worst. No series can be considered "great" if the entire middle portion of the series is boring and uninspired.