Screeling wrote:
Wwen wrote:
I think maybe TV show viewers understand now how it is in the books. It's not caught up to the books, but this is the theme. There is no happy ending in GoT. Nothing ever ends well. There's almost no pay off ever where the hero triumphs.
I had the red wedding spoilered for me pretty early on. When I found out, I was ready to break from the story completely. I had to ask a few folks if there was really any protagonist that doesn't get whacked to make it worth continuing to read. A couple have assure me that's the case. I'm nearing the end of book 2 at the moment.
My attitude is this: My free time, up until last month, has been very little. I have a short break for a while, but I'll be grinding through other things very soon and my free time will drop again. I want entertainment to be entertaining and not depressing. When I lose sleep like I did last night, I don't like it. Some can consider it a testimony to how good the books/shows are and I'd agree to some extent. This, however, isn't the kind of "good" I want. If there's never a payoff, I'd rather stop wasting my time. There are other things I have queued up that I know won't give this kind of disappointment.
Am I wasting my time?
Who knows. I think Book 3 is where I got the most fed up. He makes it so it's hard to care, because at that point, you think things might look up or someone might have a turn of good luck, then it falls apart. You have to have some glimmers of light for the audience to keep some interest. Too dark. Too often. There should be one episode this season all the people upset with the red wedding should stick around to see, I don't want to spoil it though.
I gave up for a while at book 4, but picked up 5 a month or so ago. IMO, the TV show is the best representation of the work. He writes too much. 1000 pages is too much for a novel and there's plenty of things he could trim down and still maintain the same story. I skipped a lot of Greyjoys chapters and Craven-guy and Bran. That **** was boring as sin and nothing really happens (that moves the main plot(s) forward) in those parts of the book, but it doesn't seem as bad in the TV show.
Still, he made a consistent world that feels like it's inhabited by real people. There are a lot of likeable characters (or like to hate), so I'll probably pick up the new books. I think reading books 1-4 right after one another made it worse. 4000+ pages of Grim Darkness later I wanted to quit.
http://i.imgur.com/ER1FWlO.jpg