Desmond Hightower

Thank you! :cheers: I still like the show. Of course, reading the books is the only way to get the "full" Westeros experience. But I think the show is pretty good in its own right. Yes, I think you have a point there: if you already know the spoiler (as I unfortunately did), some of the clues seem more "obvious" than they might have been otherwise. All I can say is that, in hindsight, the Eddard chapters from AGoT drop some pretty heavy hints!

Hello everyone! I'm a historian from Germany, I work at university and as a freelance journalist, and I am in my late 30s now. As a teenager, I was a major role-playing game nerd who played Dungeons & Dragons and all kinds of other games in all kinds of settings. Except for Tolkien's books and some of the Dragonlance novels by Hickman and Weis, I have not read a lot of fantasy, though. As I grew older, I became more interested in science fiction than in fantasy, and besides, I already do so much reading of non-fiction books for my academic work that I usually prefer watching a movie to reading a book when it comes to fiction. So I did not read the A Song of Ice and Fire books when they first came out, even though I was still keeping an eye on the fantasy genre and knew that there was a lot of talk about them. About a year ago, I decided to watch the A Game of Thrones TV series. Again, it was something I had heard about and was curious about, but I had not had the time to check it out yet. I became hooked immediately and quickly watched all four seasons (the last episodes of Season 4 were just airing as I was catching up). After that, I decided to read the books - the first fantasy books I have read since my teenage years. I loved the books as well and went through them at the pace of one per month, sometimes devoting an entire weekend to reading. I finished A Dance with Dragons a couple of weeks ago. While I was reading, I made a point of not visiting any sites like this because I wanted to stay away from all possible spoilers. Unfortunately, someone's online comment on the TV series had already spoiled the R+L=J theory for me before I started reading, but it turned out not to be a huge spoiler - I think it becomes fairly obvious fairly quickly while you read Eddard's chapters from the first book. Aside from that, though, I have managed to stay away from all spoilers while I was still reading. Now that I have caught up, and while I am eagerly waiting for The Winds of Winter like everyone else, I decided to register on the forums here and say hello!