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Question for all the Slaver's Bay storyline haters


Two and a Halfhand

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Here a question for you:all those who hate Dany's staying in Meereen and pretty much everything after the sack of Astapor,do you hate this storyline because it is plain boring,because you can't stand a minute of Dany outside Westeros or just because the story itself is bad?



The main thing is,even if Dany's storyline had to be dragged up and she couldn't go to Westeros,would it make a difference if the characters were a bit more empathetic and not a bunch of pit fighters and mustache twirling slavers with strange names and forgettable personalities?


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Here a question for you:all those who hate Dany's staying in Meereen and pretty much everything after the sack of Astapor,do you hate this storyline because it is plain boring,because you can't stand a minute of Dany outside Westeros or just because the story itself is bad?

The main thing is,even if Dany's storyline had to be dragged up and she couldn't go to Westeros,would it make a difference if the characters were a bit more empathetic and not a bunch of pit fighters and mustache twirling slavers with strange names and forgettable personalities?

I find it so boring. Her story line was awesome IMO up until taking Mereen. Now she is just sitting around doing nothing. all though it is looking up with the dothraki making an appearance.

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It's the names of the characters in Slavers Bay that bothers me the most. Quazzar, Kandaq, Yherizan and so on. I have friends all over the world and none of them have names nearly this confusing. and hard to pronounce.


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while the meereen storyline is pretty boring compared to dany's previous arcs i do understand hy it was necessary to have it. If dany does end up taking the iron throne whether on her own or with jon, she would need to know how to rule.

But she's learning "how to rule" on a completely different scenario than the one she's supposed to go.Slaver's Bay is so much different in culture and politics and comparison to Westeros that there is little to be learn being a Queen there.Maybe there could be some experience,but it definitely not worth the time

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I'm actually in the middle of a reread of her aDwD chapters, actually, and I think I know why they're just so offensively awful:

It's not about the terrible names. It's not because we have no reason to care about the characters with terrible names (sorry, fans of Rylona Rhee). It's because fucking nothing happens with the characters with the terrible names

Honestly, it only hit me now that I'm reading her chapters back to back, but it's almost laughable, almost astounding, not only how very little (next to nothing, really) happens in those chapters in terms of plot, but how it's really one chapter, repeated several times. It's ridiculous, you get the exact same beats every time:

Sons of the Harpy kill someone, Hizdahr tells Dany to open the pits, Daario. It's the exact same shit stretched over I don't know how many chapters, and the central conflict (am I a dragon or a tree-planter?) was clear and obvious since the beginning, so why does GRRM have to keep piling on it?

No wonder Barry's chapters make Meereen look relatively interesting, because shit actually happens in them

I don't know, it's just ridiculous how no editor pointed out to GRRM that he wrote the same fucking chapter over and over and that he could've conveyed the same message in less than half of the extension

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I don't know, it's just ridiculous how no editor pointed out to GRRM that he wrote the same fucking chapter over and over and that he could've conveyed the same message in less than half of the extension

We'd all have been better served if his editors had spines, in more ways than one.

To the OP, I personally find Dany and Jon's "learning to lead" chapters in Dance to be pretty equally boring, with one major exception; Jon's storyline is happening at a place we care about with characters we've been following for some time. While I love Dany as a character, I'm not going to suddenly care about a location just because she's stopped there. Mereen is important to Dany's growth, but means nothing in the grand scheme of the series. THAT is the central problem with those chapters, which is exacerbated by the fact that no one in Mereen, not any of the slaves she's trying to save, not any of the enemies we only vaguely hear about, and certainly not any of her allies beyond Barristan are people we've been led to care about.

As I said, I find Jon's counting of food and slow deliberations on how to fix a wildling problem we all realized the solution for 2 books prior to be pretty boring, especially compared to his superb arc in Storm (a characteristic he shares with Dany). But as with her stay in Qarth, Dany suffers more from being so far removed from any of the other major events of the book, and asking her to carry an entire storyline while surrounded by proverbial paint drying is too damn much.

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The villains in the Meereen storyline seem very cartoonishly evil too. George is usually known for creating very complex villains like Tywin, Roose and Little Finger, but these guys are a joke in comparison.


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The villains in the Meereen storyline seem very cartoonishly evil too. George is usually known for creating very complex villains like Tywin, Roose and Little Finger, but these guys are a joke in comparison.

This. It could just be that it feels like the best characters and story arcs are in Westeros. All you have in essos really is Dany and Tyrion. In Westeros you have Jon, Jaime, Brienne, Stoneheart, Cersei and many more.

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The villains in the Meereen storyline seem very cartoonishly evil too. George is usually known for creating very complex villains like Tywin, Roose and Little Finger, but these guys are a joke in comparison.

Hizdahr, the Shavepate and the Green Grace look like the most nuanced and complex of characters compared to the Yunkaii, that's for sure

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Hizdahr, the Shavepate and the Green Grace look like the most nuanced and complex of characters compared to the Yunkaii, that's for sure

The Yunkaii are like a bad joke. One of these guys is a sick whale, another has an army that fights on stilts.

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The Yunkaii are like a bad joke. One of these guys is a sick whale, another has an army that fights on stilts.

That's the worst offender. A chubby little guy called the Pigeon with an army of dudes in stilts called the Herons. Like, what kind of Looney Toons realness.

Let it never be said that Slaver's Bay is a subtle experience

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We'd all have been better served if his editors had spines, in more ways than one.

...

This. Jon's chapters are up North. I care about the North. I have a lot invested in it. It's central to the plot. Also, unlike poor Dany, there are people other than Jon up North that I care about, and there's Theon, whose chapters are brilliant. Even Ramsay is a more fleshed out, creepy villain than anyone in Meereen. The people of Yunkai--I can't even believe that Martin, the man who specializes in creating grey characters, and even manages to humanize someone like Roose, came up with those people. It's mind boggling.

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Her story line was awesome IMO up until taking Mereen. Now she is just sitting around doing nothing.

I agree. More and more I think GRRM really screwed up by scrapping the 5 year gap. It sounds like he got bogged down in explaining the details of what went on when he really should have just picked it up and ran with it and let people wonder about the details. He could have always gone back with short stories for material like Arya in Braavos or Brienne looking for the Stark girls. He also complained about keeping tension at the Wall, but if he just started off with he Nights Watch under siege and at their breaking point it wouldn't be an issue.

This would have allowed him to settle Mereen with half a page and not need to go into every boring detail of the politics.

Ah well

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Like so many I enjoyed Dany's story until she wound up in Meereen. Now it just seems that she's marking time. I'm really not interested in the folks she's met, I hate Daarrio and I can't tell Hizdarh apart from ZwyHwyzzxd. And she doesn't want to leave until her "people" are safe but they're never going to be safe, at least not until some sort of homegrown abolition movement springs up and that's not happening in her lifetime.


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Two wrongs don't make a right.

That means mass murder and other human rights abuses are not justified just because the cultural group being targeted practices slavery.

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