You're GRRM's editor. He gives you his manuscript of A Feast for Crows. There's a red pen in your hand.

[JonCon's Red Beard]

There's a rather criticized theory on just that called, if I remember correctly, the affective reception theory or something along those lines by (I think?) Stanley Fish. It basically argues that for a text to be successful we necessarily have to feel what the characters themselves are feeling and even the structure of the text should mirror it. So in the case of Feast, people would say that the sprawling nature and the dullness of the book reflect the aftermath of the war, and the depression that comes with it, and so on. It's a fair approach, a bit too postmodern for my tastes, but I personally disagree. Like, if we take for example The Sun Also Rises (I know it's unfair to compare anyone to Hemingway, but that's the first text that popped into my head) we'd have a story where pretty much nothing happens other than people traveling through Europe, thoroughly consumed by ennui...on the surface, that is. The novel is incredibly rich, deep and engaging, because Hemingway understood that while the characters can be bored to death, aimless, lost, confused, the readers don't have to be. The readers have to be engaged. Some authors can make the dullest, simplest, most uneventful plot engaging, but in GRRM is not necessarily that he can't (though, well, in my opinion he couldn't in Feast and Dance) but rather that we know that everything Brienne does before meeting Stoneheart was just an entree to a main plate we were promised but never got. And like I said, I don't think this isn't just Brienne, it keeps happening with almost every storyline. 

We were served bread alright and ate ourselves full, but we're still waiting for the main plate. 

That's what Rowling also tried to do in "Harry's amazing camp trip adventure" in book 7 and it was very boring. The trio was bored and we were frustrated. At least I was.

 

ETA: It was so boring that RON LEFT. Like "fuck yourself, I'll go and do more relevant important things with Fleur and Bill!". And for what he later told them, looks like he actually did...

[BrettG]

To catch up on a few things mentioned over the last page or so:

Firstly, in response to the question about wait time vs. reading the books all at once.  I first read the series right after ADWD was published; it was the same time that the show premiered, which I hadn't yet watched.  I wanted to read the books first, because I knew I wanted to watch the show.  I was able to read all five books one after the other, and it was still a massive disappointment going from Storm to Feast.  I remember getting two hundred or so pages in and having this horrible realization, "Oh my God, he's not even gonna get to half the characters."  If I hadn't had Dance sitting there (and I immediately picked it up and started flipping through, to make sure Tyrion and Daenerys were in it), I would have lost all interest in finishing that book.  I got to the author's note at the end of Feast and just thought "I can't imagine how mad people were when this was first published."  It would be like JK Rowling taking five years to put out a Harry Potter book, and it only focuses on the Dursleys and Professor Flitwick.  And then there's a note at the end saying, "Don't worry, Harry, Ron, and Hermione will be in the next book!" Which takes another six years to write.  So yes, the poor structure of the last two books is very noticeable and disappointing regardless of how long you waited in between.

Secondly, the point of deliberate dullness and monotony.  This is well-observed, and certainly part of the intention of the Brienne chapters (and probably many others -- some of Tyrion's spring to mind).  However, there's a vast difference between crafting a tone of dullness and monotony and simply writing dull material.  And the comparison to the Frodo/Sam material in Two Towers is perfect.  Frodo and Sam in The Two Towers is brilliantly written, and tells a compelling story.  Every chapter moves the plot forward and develops the characters; the point of those ten chapters is the relationship between Sam and Frodo, and they end with character resolutions for both of them.  Frodo realizes on the stairs just how much he needs Sam, and Sam realizes at the very end, when he's about to enter Mordor with the Ring alone, that he can't do it without Frodo.  He turns around to save his master's (what he thinks is his) corpse from the Orcs, knowing he'll likely die in the process.  There's also the character of Gollum, Faramir, everything with Shelob -- a ton happens in the course of (in my edition) 136 pages. Those chapters also convey a mood of monotony, dullness, and despair.  The reader feels exhausted, just as Frodo and Sam are, but is never bored.

Compare that to the Brienne chapters.  There is no plot progression.  The reader knows from the beginning that she's not going to find what she's looking for, so there's no tension.  There isn't even the start of a plot until her very last chapter; until then the only slightly interesting thing that happens is the fight with Rorge and Biter, the very definition of minor, unimportant characters.  There is also very little character development.  Brienne faces some inner turmoil and we learn more about her past, but there's no complete arc.  She's a woman that is unattractive and wants to be a knight, and won't be accepted as such.  Nothing really ever gets added to that.  It hints that maybe she's rethinking things, and we can extrapolate where that story will probably go, but the book itself never actually gets there.  Sure, the reader gets her mood of dullness and despair.  But we're also bored.  And I suppose others may disagree, but if I'm actually straight up bored by a work of art, as in personally uninterested, then that work of art has failed in its purpose.  Full stop.  Art can make us feel boredom.  It can make us feel anything, that's what's so great about it.  But if it actually bores us outright, then there was no point in opening the book in the first place.  We could have sat and stared at the wall and had the same experience.  As Garlan said, the reader/viewer has to be engaged.  If they're not, it's a failure.

And that's a problem, not just with the Brienne chapters, but with large swaths of both Feast and Dance.  It's just boring and not engaging.  It goes nowhere, nothing we're reading actually matters or is all that interesting, and the characters aren't advancing.  So a better comparison to Tolkien would be if The Two Towers had started with Frodo and Sam in the Emyn Muil and ended with them realizing they can't get through the Black Gate.  Across ten chapters.  They don't really get anywhere, the plot for them is just beginning, and while the character story is there, it hasn't actually gone anywhere.  We can extrapolate things from it, but the story itself hasn't gone there yet.  We'd feel the boredom, but we'd be bored ourselves.

[Maxxine]

Yeah, I think there's a definite possibility that Brienne's chapters resonate more with women who are mid-20's and over more than other demographics.  Us men probably will have a harder time getting the most from those chapters.  Good point on the Cersei foil-ishness of her too.  

Gender was there from the start with Arya and Sansa, but I think George got more interested in it as the series progressed.  Hence Balon's ball references for the Iron Islands!   

As a female in her mid-20s I have to say Brienne's chapter doesn't resonate with me. Obviously, this is just for me personally & I don't speak for all women in this demographic, but I don't identify with Brienne at all. My interpretation of Brienne is that she wants to be a man. I don't remember anything in Brienne's chapters about her having internal conflict regarding "career" and "motherhood." So for me liking or disliking her chapters don't break down based on gender. And I don't like her chapters. Cersei also seems to want to be a man. If there's a character who resonates with me as a woman in mid-20s it's Dany. She's a woman who's defying gender roles and stereotypes (leading armies & ruling) without losing her femininity. Arya does this to a certain extent too. She doesn't want to become a lady in some castle just because she woman & that what she's "supposed" to do. She can take care of herself. I think she'll stay a bit of a tomboy, but not to the extent of Brienne. I never got the sense from Arya that she actually wanted to be a boy (despite constantly being called one) like I did from Brienne.

[Maxxine]

There's a rather criticized theory on just that called, if I remember correctly, the affective reception theory or something along those lines by (I think?) Stanley Fish. It basically argues that for a text to be successful we necessarily have to feel what the characters themselves are feeling and even the structure of the text should mirror it. So in the case of Feast, people would say that the sprawling nature and the dullness of the book reflect the aftermath of the war, and the depression that comes with it, and so on. It's a fair approach, a bit too postmodern for my tastes, but I personally disagree. Like, if we take for example The Sun Also Rises (I know it's unfair to compare anyone to Hemingway, but that's the first text that popped into my head) we'd have a story where pretty much nothing happens other than people traveling through Europe, thoroughly consumed by ennui...on the surface, that is. The novel is incredibly rich, deep and engaging, because Hemingway understood that while the characters can be bored to death, aimless, lost, confused, the readers don't have to be. The readers have to be engaged. Some authors can make the dullest, simplest, most uneventful plot engaging, but in GRRM is not necessarily that he can't (though, well, in my opinion he couldn't in Feast and Dance) but rather that we know that everything Brienne does before meeting Stoneheart was just an entree to a main plate we were promised but never got. And like I said, I don't think this isn't just Brienne, it keeps happening with almost every storyline. 

We were served bread alright and ate ourselves full, but we're still waiting for the main plate. 

I agree with this. For me, while I can believe an author may intend that the reader feel bored bc that's what the characters are feeling, but why would you want to. Keep the readers engaged even if the characters are bored. Idk. Maybe I'm just not sophisticated enough to applaud someone for making bored out of my mind but making me feel what the characters felt.

[FuzzyJAM]

Too much material to respond to everything.  I'll try my best to offer something worthwhile on a few things.

Garlan, I absolutely would not argue that anything has to be written in a certain way to be successful.  There are millions of books, and it's great that they work in different ways and appeal to different people at different times.  That's one of the fundamentally fantastic things about art.  If on a winter's night a traveller is not supposed to be written in the same style as Jane Eyre, and neither would benefit from aping anything in the other.  No book cancels out the existence of another, they aren't in competition, and none is the perfect expression of what a novel should be because there is no such thing.  

So you don't have to write in such a way that the reader feels the emotions of the character and the novel itself is an expression of them.  Absolutely, ASOIAF (and particularly parts of Feast) could be written very differently, and no doubt you'd prefer that which is fine.  I'm simply arguing that that's possibly what George was attempting, and that he seems to have succeeded (perhaps too well!).  I do think it's questionable to start writing in a different manner in the middle of a series, certainly, so I can see the problem there, but then the impact wouldn't be the same if it weren't part of a series so. . .meh, it's a knotty problem.  

For BrettG's points, my favourite play is Waiting for Godot, which has a famous line encapsulating its essence: "Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful!"  Obviously that's not quite what Martin is aiming for in Feast, but the idea that plot and development be deliberately foiled to a certain extent is surely a theme that runs throughout the novel.  To be honest, I think it's overdone, but as an idea I think it's really neat, and probably the most artistically interesting part of the whole series.  It's a shame that people really don't enjoy Feast, but I feel there's something of an overreaction - even as a story alone, it's surely not awful.  Flawed (deliberately or not), but not without merit, surely?  Well, if you genuinely don't like Feast/Dance as a whole then, yeah, I think Martin has failed you.  

Maxxine, sorry, wasn't at all trying to suggest that gender and age definitely determines how people must react, only that there may well be some correlation.  Brienne does think about wanting motherhood at least a couple times though - not sure on the references, I'm afraid.  

To be clear, I think it's very possible I'm utterly misreading the books.  But I think my interpretation at least makes them more 

interesting. 

[Maxxine]

Too much material to respond to everything.  I'll try my best to offer something worthwhile on a few things.

Garlan, I absolutely would not argue that anything has to be written in a certain way to be successful.  There are millions of books, and it's great that they work in different ways and appeal to different people at different times.  That's one of the fundamentally fantastic things about art.  If on a winter's night a traveller is not supposed to be written in the same style as Jane Eyre, and neither would benefit from aping anything in the other.  No book cancels out the existence of another, they aren't in competition, and none is the perfect expression of what a novel should be because there is no such thing.  

So you don't have to write in such a way that the reader feels the emotions of the character and the novel itself is an expression of them.  Absolutely, ASOIAF (and particularly parts of Feast) could be written very differently, and no doubt you'd prefer that which is fine.  I'm simply arguing that that's possibly what George was attempting, and that he seems to have succeeded (perhaps too well!).  I do think it's questionable to start writing in a different manner in the middle of a series, certainly, so I can see the problem there, but then the impact wouldn't be the same if it weren't part of a series so. . .meh, it's a knotty problem.  

For BrettG's points, my favourite play is Waiting for Godot, which has a famous line encapsulating its essence: "Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful!"  Obviously that's not quite what Martin is aiming for in Feast, but the idea that plot and development be deliberately foiled to a certain extent is surely a theme that runs throughout the novel.  To be honest, I think it's overdone, but as an idea I think it's really neat, and probably the most artistically interesting part of the whole series.  It's a shame that people really don't enjoy Feast, but I feel there's something of an overreaction - even as a story alone, it's surely not awful.  Flawed (deliberately or not), but not without merit, surely?  Well, if you genuinely don't like Feast/Dance as a whole then, yeah, I think Martin has failed you.  

Maxxine, sorry, wasn't at all trying to suggest that gender and age definitely determines how people must react, only that there may well be some correlation.  Brienne does think about wanting motherhood at least a couple times though - not sure on the references, I'm afraid.  

To be clear, I think it's very possible I'm utterly misreading the books.  But I think my interpretation at least makes them more 

interesting. [emoji3]

No need to apologize. I didn't mean for that post to come off as if I was offended bc I wasn't. I think there could definitely be a correlation between what people like & gender and age. As a mid-20s female I figured it was appropriate for me to provide my thoughts to the assertion you & another poster said.

[Falcon2908]

Mark a big X 

[BrettG]

For BrettG's points, m

y favourite play is Waiting for Godot, which has a famous line encapsulating its essence: "Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful!"  

Obviously that's not quite what Martin is aiming for in Feast, but the idea that plot and development be deliberately foiled to a certain extent is surely a theme that runs throughout the novel.  To be honest, I think it's overdone, but as an idea I think it's really neat, and probably the most artistically interesting part of the whole series.  It's a shame that people really don't enjoy Feast, but I feel there's something of an overreaction - even as a story alone, it's surely not 

awful

.  Flawed (deliberately or not), but not without merit, surely?  Well, if you genuinely don't like Feast/Dance as a whole then, yeah, I think Martin has failed you. 

I agree that stagnation and a sense of aimlessness is a theme of the book, which makes sense for the middle of this type of story, where a massive war is the beginning.  And I also think it's a neat idea, but as you say, it's overdone.  Massively overdone, in my mind.  Which goes back to the problems with both these books that I pointed out in my first post, which is that it's just too much and too long.  In the wake of the war it makes sense to have a period of time where the characters are sort of collecting themselves and taking stock of what is left...but it shouldn't be 2000 pages.  Brienne has more chapters than anybody in Feast except for Cersei.  So having one of the two biggest stories of an entire book being nothing but stagnation and wandering is a problem.  And this is a problem with many of the POVs in both books.  Tyrion, Dany, Jon, Arya, Sam, all of them are stagnating and taking far too long to go from point A to point B.  This is the fourth book in a continuing series, not the second.  Radically changing the entire narrative style and dynamic, for more than a short period for specific effect, is bad storytelling, plain and simple.

And I think if there's an overreaction it's honestly among the fans that won't acknowledge the problems with the book.  I don't mean you personally, Fuzzy, you've been engaged in an open discussion and have been clear about your enjoyment of the book while also recognizing certain flaws, so please don't misunderstand me. But there's definitely a sense among certain fans that the book is an untouchable masterpiece, and that's simply not true.  There are structural problems that exist outside of personal opinion, so I think pointing them out and commenting on the negative effect they have on the work as a whole is much less of an overreaction than saying "The book's perfect, change nothing." Garlan, myself, and others that have criticisms of the book are still here posting on a forum dedicated to the series.  I think it's safe to say we still enjoy the books and find merits in them even when there are problems with the writing/pacing/structure.  But those problems absolutely do exist, and to say otherwise is just being willfully ignorant.  Again, you can totally love the book despite its flaws, that's perfectly fine, I have no problem with that.  But the deification these books receive among certain portions of the fanbase, who won't hear of criticism or issues with the writing, is asinine, and the true overreaction.

[Cladinator]

I could have done without pretty much everything that happened in Dorne. But to be fair I liked the Dorne stuff a lot more on the second read through. Also, I don't want to rule anything out until the story is done. 

[Blackfish Tully]

 

[Blackfish Tully]

Garlan, myself, and others that have criticisms of the book are still here posting on a forum dedicated to the series.  I think it's safe to say we still enjoy the books and find merits in them even when there are problems with the writing/pacing/structure.  But those problems absolutely do exist, and to say otherwise is just being willfully ignorant.  

Those problems may exist for you and others but that does not mean they exist for all of us . It's a little arrogant of you to state that somebody who does not acknowledged those problems is being willfully ignorant , i didn't have any problem with either book and frankly was shocked when i came on this site and saw the negative reaction to book books when i had nothing but positive reaction myself to both books. The problem may be that certain posters read the books with an expectation of certain things happening and when they did not happen it threw them off . The criticism that "Dany needs to reach Westeroes" , "Tyrion needs to reach Dany" "certain characters are taking to long to get from point A to B" distort the book for some posters but I just don't understand that thinking , it's not my story to write and frankly i don't have any expectation of any character doing anything to fulfill my desires . The story is going to play out however it's going to play out and i'm going to enjoy whatever happens as long as it's a great story and there is no doubt for me that the last two books did nothing but add to the story . I want as many POVs as i can get and as much detail and story as the author can cram into one book , this idea that he should get rid of POVs and cut out story lines frankly just baffles me. 

[Lautrec]

Yep 
And I agree with the comparison. 

The best description I've seen of aFfC was - "It's 700 pages of b-sides". For me, that's very true. But I love b-sides. Especially Radiohead ones from the 90's.  


 

 

Feast+Dance are more like Martin's White Album. Nowhere near as good as the trilogy that preceded it, being Rubber Soul, Revolver and Sgt. Pepper, which progressed naturally and had great build-up with a consistent tone and structure. There is still great stuff in there like While My Guitar Gently Weeps and Happiness Is a Warm Gun and Helter Skelter, but then there is also Revolution 9 and Wild Honey Pie and Why Don't We Do It in the Road?... There's material there for a great 15 track album, and I can totally see why someone would love the whole thing, but in the end it would have been a much better product with some liberal application of pruning shears. Let's just hope Winds and Dream are Abbey Road and not Let It Be.

[Silvana]

Take out Aeron Greyjoy's POV. It just wasn't necessary. Take out Hotah's POV. Also wasn't necessary either & Hotah just has nothing interesting going on even in his internal thoughts. Every thing he does could've been accomplished wig Arianna. Would also consider taking out Aerys bc he's not necessary as a POV either, but at least his chapters were interesting.

 

Brienne POV really takes some unnecessary turns. It would've been much better had she just went straight to the inn with Gendry. I don't get the whole purpose with Dick & some left over Mummers. Maybe it'll serve a purpose later on but right now it seems unnecessary.

 

He leaves out all of this stuff maybe he can get to the two battles he's going to put at the beginning of Winds

I must respectfully disagree. I for one found Hotah's POV insightful. It's the POVs from more minor characters that can provoke interest; they add to the overall depth of the story, and keep us from growing bored with the characters we've been hearing from since THRONES.

Brienne's POV was lengthy, and I won't pretend that I wasn't bored at certain parts. But it was necessary, IMO, to give us an accurate representation of the hardships faced by the commonfolk of Westeros, and indeed their take on everything. Again, it sufficed to add depth to the plot. Arya's POV sufficed similarly.

Were you to remove such POVs, the plot would likely have felt too rushed. But that's just my opinion.

[Good Guy Garlan]

I must respectfully disagree. I for one found Hotah's POV insightful. It's the POVs from more minor characters that can provoke interest; they add to the overall depth of the story, and keep us from growing bored with the characters we've been hearing from since THRONES.

Brienne's POV was lengthy, and I won't pretend that I wasn't bored at certain parts. But it was necessary, IMO, to give us an accurate representation of the hardships faced by the commonfolk of Westeros, and indeed their take on everything. Again, it sufficed to add depth to the plot. Arya's POV sufficed similarly.

Were you to remove such POVs, the plot would likely have felt too rushed. But that's just my opinion.

The problem with Brienne as our window to the perspective of the smallfolk is that she doesn't show us anything we didn't already see in Arya's POV in Clash and Storm. We already had that point of view, so in that regard I think most of Brienne's journey is not only repetitive, but also unnecessary. (Plus, Arya did it better, IMO)

[Maxxine]

I must respectfully disagree. I for one found Hotah's POV insightful. It's the POVs from more minor characters that can provoke interest; they add to the overall depth of the story, and keep us from growing bored with the characters we've been hearing from since THRONES.

Brienne's POV was lengthy, and I won't pretend that I wasn't bored at certain parts. But it was necessary, IMO, to give us an accurate representation of the hardships faced by the commonfolk of Westeros, and indeed their take on everything. Again, it sufficed to add depth to the plot. Arya's POV sufficed similarly.

Were you to remove such POVs, the plot would likely have felt too rushed. But that's just my opinion.

I could never get bored with just the characters from GoT. Those are the characters I'm invested in. Even though characters like Danerys and Tyrion are moving very slowly as far as plot progression I don't mind as much because at least I care about the character. With Hotah it's like nothing is happening plus I don't care about him, so his chapters of no plot progression and nothing interesting are just torture for me. Even Arianne's POV when she was locked in tower by herself the whole time so nothing was happening was more interesting than any Hotah chapters. Although I will admit I'm biased because I do like Arianne.

As Good Guy Arya's chapters have already done this so I don't if it's necessary to do it again. Even if it was you can still accomplish this without all the detours. The road from KL to the inn with Gendry is not close. So she could skipped all the extra, unnecessary stuff and still captured the plight of the small folk. I guess you also need the add in the trip to Quiet Isle so we can get the clue about Sandor.

I'll agree I wouldn't want the plot to feel rushed, but I also don't want it to move at a snail's pace either, which is what I feel happened in Dance and Feast. GoT, Clash, and Storm didn't have this extra fluff and the plots didn't feel rushed, at least to me.

 

[Guess who's back]

Put the pen down. Applaud.

[The scourge of westeros]

Too much material to respond to everything.  I'll try my best to offer something worthwhile on a few things.

Garlan, I absolutely would not argue that anything has to be written in a certain way to be successful.  There are millions of books, and it's great that they work in different ways and appeal to different people at different times.  That's one of the fundamentally fantastic things about art.  If on a winter's night a traveller is not supposed to be written in the same style as Jane Eyre, and neither would benefit from aping anything in the other.  No book cancels out the existence of another, they aren't in competition, and none is the perfect expression of what a novel should be because there is no such thing.  

So you don't have to write in such a way that the reader feels the emotions of the character and the novel itself is an expression of them.  Absolutely, ASOIAF (and particularly parts of Feast) could be written very differently, and no doubt you'd prefer that which is fine.  I'm simply arguing that that's possibly what George was attempting, and that he seems to have succeeded (perhaps too well!).  I do think it's questionable to start writing in a different manner in the middle of a series, certainly, so I can see the problem there, but then the impact wouldn't be the same if it weren't part of a series so. . .meh, it's a knotty problem.  

For BrettG's points, my favourite play is Waiting for Godot, which has a famous line encapsulating its essence: "Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful!"  Obviously that's not quite what Martin is aiming for in Feast, but the idea that plot and development be deliberately foiled to a certain extent is surely a theme that runs throughout the novel.  To be honest, I think it's overdone, but as an idea I think it's really neat, and probably the most artistically interesting part of the whole series.  It's a shame that people really don't enjoy Feast, but I feel there's something of an overreaction - even as a story alone, it's surely not awful.  Flawed (deliberately or not), but not without merit, surely?  Well, if you genuinely don't like Feast/Dance as a whole then, yeah, I think Martin has failed you.  

Maxxine, sorry, wasn't at all trying to suggest that gender and age definitely determines how people must react, only that there may well be some correlation.  Brienne does think about wanting motherhood at least a couple times though - not sure on the references, I'm afraid.  

 

Hidden Content

I certainly agree with you, that GRRM has the ability to slow the pace down and give the reader a general feeling of listlessness, yet at the same time I also believe that the majority of storylines that fans have felt as "filler" or "boring" is a direct result of Martin having to scrap the 5year gap. We generally are at a consensus that the gap slowed down certain main pov's storylines, but minor characters, their storylines, and overall arcs struggled do this also. That's something that I haven't seen to much acknowledgement of; the same way Dany ends up turning her wheels in mereen, is the same thing with characters such as brienne. It seems if you are planned to have a relatively influential role as a character in the third act, then that character too has suffered from the gap due to now having to stretch their story longer than originally planned. 

We as a fanbase are relatively versed in novels and literature. It's not as if we are a fanbase that can not discern quality wringing from struggling writing, and at least to me, it's become obvious that he is struggling with story. 

[Dolorous22]

 

Feast+Dance are more like Martin's White Album. Nowhere near as good as the trilogy that preceded it, being Rubber Soul, Revolver and Sgt. Pepper, which progressed naturally and had great build-up with a consistent tone and structure. There is still great stuff in there like While My Guitar Gently Weeps and Happiness Is a Warm Gun and Helter Skelter, but then there is also Revolution 9 and Wild Honey Pie and Why Don't We Do It in the Road?... There's material there for a great 15 track album, and I can totally see why someone would love the whole thing, but in the end it would have been a much better product with some liberal application of pruning shears. Let's just hope Winds and Dream are Abbey Road and not Let It Be.

Great comparison, especially considering Rubber soul (I'm guessing other albums too) was produced by a chap called George Martin! Do you think you'd felt differently if you'd had to wait 5 years between Sgt. Pepper and the white album though?  I think that's where the real sting is.

Revolver is my favorite. 



 

 

 

[protar]

I would have trimmed down Brienne's travels, made Arianne the sole POV in Dorne and Victarion or Asha the sole POV in the Iron Isles. However I don't really think you could edit AFFC without also editing ADWD. And visa versa. I think that one area Feast suffered in was the lack of the old favourites, so perhaps I would have moved Jon's POV to Feast? However that leaves him out of sync with the other Northern stuff. So I think the POV assignments would have had to be completely different.

Feast could have contained: Jon, Sam, Theon, Sansa, Brienne, Asha, Melisandre, Davos.

Dance could have contained: Cersei, Jaime, Arianne, Victarion, Daenerys, Tyrion, Quentyn, Barristan, Arya, Joncon.

However I feel that that leaves Feast a little short. So alternately alternately I would have attempted to squish feast and dance into one book, perhaps not getting quite so far in the narrative. I think with some heavy trimming it could have worked.

[BrettG]

The problem with Brienne as our window to the perspective of the smallfolk is that she doesn't show us anything we didn't already see in Arya's POV in Clash and Storm. We already had that point of view, so in that regard I think most of Brienne's journey is not only repetitive, but also unnecessary. (Plus, Arya did it better, IMO)

The other problem with justifying Brienne's storyline as being necessary because it gives the "perspective of the smallfolk" is that the smallfolk don't matter to the story.  These books are about ruling houses, nobles, and the people that interact with them on a regular basis.  That's who 90% of the characters are.  The smallfolk don't matter except as an occasional plot device (the riot in Clash being a good example).  So spending excessive amounts of time showing us their perspective and the impact of the war on them is a waste of time.  Maybe it's a neat idea for a chapter or two, or fifty pages, but not for almost the entire duration of two major POVs in two separate books.  This would be like JK Rowling devoting half of an entire Harry Potter novel to a wizard interacting with a group of Muggles.