Kyll.Ing.

The relevant passage goes: "I want my bride back. I want the false king's queen. I want his daughter and his red witch. I want this wildling princess. I want his little prince, the wildling babe. And I want my Reek. " He's asking for both his bride and Reek, so any forger would have to be aware that they are two separate persons. No, the biggest clue is probably this bit: "Your false king's friends are dead. Their heads upon the walls of Winterfell." Ramsay wouldn't hang up anybody's heads, he'd hang up their skins.

Coming home from the bookstore, sitting down in my favourite chair, and reading the book.

Honestly, any ending would do just as long as it's properly done. Or done at all; at this point I'm not really picky.

It truly appears to be the one relatively mainstream fantasy series more dead in the water than the one for which this board is dedicated, given that the author is still alive. And even that caveat isn't holding some series back; stuff is added to Tolkien's work relatively often, and the guy has been dead for 45 years.

Also to be a negative Nancy number two, this subforum dies a little bit more every time the mods close down discussion related to the progress of TWoW. Every bit of guesswork related to the actual plot has been done dozens of times or more, every single option has been laid on the table and dissected. All visible paths have long since been explored, now all that's left for the fans is to wait and see which is the correct one (or if there were more possibilities that could not be seen). The only TWoW-related topic where new elements are actually added to the body of evidence is the progress of the book itself, and that one topic has been declared taboo by the moderators. And when the only topic of discussion worth coming back for is discouraged, and its threads deleted, what reason is there to come back at all?

Why is everyone recommending to skip Wyrd Sisters? It's my favourite of the Discworld books so far (I'm reading them in publishing order, and am currently three-quarters of the way through Jingo). It does have the problem of featuring certain characters that don't return later in the series, but it also nicely introduces many of those who do. I can see why you'd skip Equal Rites, as it has the above problem while also not introducing characters that well (Granny Weatherwax is the only one, but she is a little out-of-character if you compare her to later books), but Wyrd Sisters is definitely on my recommendations list.

I found The Color of Magic to be a little strange, and really lacking in cohesion, so after reading it (and finding that its preface promised the rest of the series to be written like that too), I put it away and didn't feel like continuing. But then one day I saw The Light Fantastic on sale, decided to give it a try (hey, might as well find out what happens with Rincewind), and found it leaps and bounds better. I've bought one Discworld book per month since, there should be enough of them to sustain me for another two years. So yeah, even though you like the first one, just rest assured the series will be even better later on.

Neat book, but I found it becoming really, really heavy-handed with a political message in the end (not that I don't agree with that position, but I don't think it was elegantly presented). In a similar vein, I found it a little too on the nose that all the characters kept referring to events from the turn of the millennium that they knew in detail from memory. Isn't a century and a half supposed to have passed? It'd be like two people in contemporary conversation illustrating their points with examples from the lead-up to the Franco-German war. I get that the author wants to draw long lines from the present to his imagined future, and that it's easier to draw on knowledge (both the author's and the reader's) of present events than making up plausible future ones, but it kind of gets in the way of immersion for me. Again, though, a neat book. Wouldn't mind reading it again some day.

Add the Dorne plot to my list. That whole plot line came out of nowhere, and went nowhere. Wouldn't it be wonderful if the whole region just wasn't ever mentioned again? At all? Maybe in a passing sentence, "We sailed around the south coast of Westeros, but nothing worth telling about happened there," but no more.

Finally got around to read all of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, plus the sixth-of-three book by Eoin Colfer. I had read it all many years ago, and didn't remember much beyond the first book and the Colfer add-on (those were the only ones I had read multiple times). To be honest, it didn't exactly blow my mind. Not sure what it was about it. I presume the unique presentation style is what made it a classic, since few of the characters are that intriguing (Marvin the robot is a classic, of course, but the traits of all other characters aren't much to write home about), the series jump locations all the time and none of them are dwelled on for long, and the books hardly have a story either beyond book 1. The narration remained delightfully quirky throughout, but the action kind of comes from nowhere and goes nowhere, and the end (before Colfer's sixth book) is sudden and depressing too. I don't regret having read it, but I'm not sure how many times I'll bother to re-read it either. No hard feelings, but also not many soft ones.

The inevitable hype, the inevitable backlash, and the inevitable disappointment. And then years more of waiting for ADoS without being allowed to hold a conversation about how far along it is.

On these forums, pretty much every possible branch of the story tree has been guessed at some point. Every unknown identity, parentage or other relationship has been paired with every known character. It has been suggested that every POV character interacts with every other character and goes to every point on the map. Every sentence of every book has been analyzed for possible clues, and given that these clues are meaningful, I don't think Martin himself could twist the story in a direction that hasn't already been the subject of half a dozen theory threads. We're the proverbial monkeys writing Shakespeare; exhausting every option by brute-forcing our way through the possibility space. The true solution has to lie in here somewhere.

If he really wanted a Gordian knot cut, he could have Daenerys die from the bloody flux. There, whole Essos plotline resolved, no need for a second dance of the dragons, focus back to Westeros, never mention Slaver's Bay again. Makes me wonder if GRRM has ever considered (or indeed, gone through with) killing off a character just to make writing easier. He's writing like a gardener, and what would a gardener do if one of his biggest trees was blown over and toppled over the greenhouse in a storm? Sure, it would be a lot of work for a very anticlimactic payoff, but is that really worse than a lot of work for no payoff at all?

For basically being large chunks of frozen flesh, wights have proven to be strangely flammable, comparable to a scarecrow during drought season. One swing with a lantern or a light poke with a fire arrow, and they go up in flames. One would think some sort of arrangement with a burning barricade and obsidian caltrops in a chokepoint area would be able to eat into an Others army like a massive meat grinder. The wights burn up while obsidian kills an Other with a single pinprick. Scatter them over a large area with catapults and you've effectively created an impassable minefield. If the legends of the Long Night are to be believed, obsidian must be a pretty hard counter to the Others. According to legends, the Others had kept a night going for a generation, covered vast areas in endless winter, killed most of humanity and driven them far, far south. Then the Children of the Forest give the battered and broken humans some obsidian, and suddenly the tables are turned immediately, the Others driven as far back as the Frostfangs, and subdued for eight millennia. That stuff must be like kryptonite, a gamebreaker even a civilization on the cusp of extinction can use to beat a far superior enemy so decisively they haven't been heard from in half a thousand generations. Something made the Others lose, and lose badly, when they were at their strongest and just at the edge of victory.

(del)