Kyll.Ing.

A short one that could also have led things down different legs of the trouser, as it were: Bran Stark overhears and sees Cersei and Jaime doing the nasty in the Broken Tower at Winterfell, without being spotted. Then he carefully climbs back down the tower and goes to tell his lord father what he saw/heard. Possibly with Robert present. Shenanigans definitely ensue.

Which really makes no sense if you think about it for a few seconds. The environment they live in teaches them to conserve water, stay cool in the heat, and walk funny to avoid upsetting the sandworms. There's nothing in the Fremen's environment that suggests they get overly much training in fighting like soldiers (especially when compared to soldiers that get all of their basic needs cared for so they can spend all their time and energy practicing combat). One might as well say that the Inuits are the best fighters on Earth because they live in the harshest environment. In reality, hostile environments tend to demand all the attention of its inhabitants to keep them alive, leaving very little time and energy to learn other skills.

Thanks! From recent buzz at the various message boards, I had anticipated that something like this would be right around the corner! My level of hype is definitely sustained after hearing this.

My main gripe with the first Dune book (admittedly, the only one I've read) is that the behaviour on display does not match the level of technological development. For instance, so much of the culture of Arrakis obsesses over preserving even the least drop of water, to the point that spitting is considered a waste (and subsequently, it is a great honour to be spat at). Water is portrayed as near-infinitely scarce and infinitely valuable. Keeping even a few trees alive in the capital is seen as an exorbitant luxury. And then the map shows that the planet has icy poles. Why the heck did a spacefaring civilization put the capital (and for that matter, only) city of the planet in the middle of the parched desert, instead of the vastly more acommodating polar region, where ample water is available in solid form? Heck, the planet can't have a polar region covered in water ice immediately bordering a hot and dusty desert. There have to be some sub-polar regions that receives seasonal rain. And even if the poles are culturally taboo or some other reason that justifies that humans need to live in the desert areas, Arrakis is shown to trade quite a lot with the rest of the Empire. I mean, it's the only place that produces Spice and exports it by the shipload, and shipping in the giant machinery to extract it seems not to be a problem. Heck, in the final act, an army of millions with battleship-sized landing craft descend on the planet in what appears to be a routine operation. So what's so difficult about shipping in some water for the capital city? A single iceberg could keep a city of millions from thirsting for a generation. And ice is one of the most abundant resources in the universe. There's a lot of hydrogen and oxygen to go around. For such an advanced civilization, it seems trivial to make the cities a little less inhospitable. Then there's the Fremen hiding a rather expansive civilization in the southern hemisphere, unnoticed by the Empire because ... satellite pictures of the southern hemisphere are too expensive. The Fremen apparently bribe the Spacing Guild not to take any pictures. However, this makes the Empire seem woefully inept, as satellites really isn't high technology at that level of development. Shipping an army across the galaxy is not a problem, but taking a few scans of one of its most strategically important planets is too costly to be worth it? The Fremen being better fighters than the dedicated warrior caste is laughable too. Sure enough, they are extremely well adapted to living in the desert, but that's a very specialized skill set for a very specialized environment, and leaves little room for learning to fight better than those who devote their entire life to fighting. It's reasonable enough that the fremen could outfight the Sardaukar in their own environment, but they sure as heck couldn't "sweep the galaxy" with a few thousand desert dwellers. I think the book is well-written, but these logical inconsistencies bug me a little too much to get really invested in it.

A very short but potentially very impactful one, that came very close to happening to boot. When Eddard Stark arrives in King's Landing in A Game of Thrones, he is dead tired from weeks of travelling, but immediately summoned to an utterly tripe meeting of the Small Council anyway. After he leaves the meeting (which he ends early because he's too tired for it), Littlefinger takes him out of the castle, down a cliff into the city (without telling him where they are going), and to a brothel, which he claims Catelyn is inside. Ned, who is just about done with the world in general and Littlefinger in particular at this point, takes it for a sick joke, slams Littlefinger to a wall, and pulls a dagger on him. The slitting of Littlefinger's throat is only interrupted because Ser Rodrik Cassel happens to intervene. If Rodrik Cassel hadn't been there, we could have lost Littlefinger as early as the first third of A Game of Thrones. That would probably have affected the story going forward.

Keep in mind that they are comparing what Sanderson and GRRM have written since A Dance with Dragons. Nothing of ASoIaF goes under that definition, although some minor spin-off stories do. By the way, one more week now (March 16, to be precise), and The Winds of Winter will have taken longer to write than A Clash of Kings, A Feast for Crows, and A Dance with Dragons combined. Just mentioning it here because there doesn't seem to be any other active discussions on the matter at the moment. On the official ASoIaF boards themselves, nobody has made a substantial post in the TWoW forum for almost two months. That shows how dispirited the fans have become at this point. I mainly come here to check the news about other series now.

Illustrating how badly the hope for TWoW seems to have died in here: this two-word post that could just as effectively have conveyed its message by reacting to the post to which it responded instead of quoting it, was the only post in the TWoW forum made in the past month. EDIT: Now it turns out that my post pointing this out was the only post made in the TWoW forum for the whole of the next month too. Oh well, at least there's a milestone coming up soon. On March 16, 2024, the wait between books 5 and 6 of this saga will officially have been longer than the wait between books 2 and 5.

This is partially why I'd be perfectly fine with discarding the idea that "the real conflict" is that with the Others. To be blunt and frank, if they haven't been important until this point of the series, they don't really need to be important as we go forward either. There's that famous GRRM quote along the lines of "the only conflict worth reading about is that of the human heart struggling with itself" or something to that effect, and having the series ultimately be about a war against the inhuman ice zombies runs quite contrary to that. So far, the most captivating moments of the series have been those where people have fought other people for the Iron Throne. The Others, and everything associated with them, has been lurking in the background. For all I care, it can stay there. It doesn't need to suddenly become the focus point of the series. As it were, this was always about the Game of Thrones. Sure, it might be underwhelming if the Others mainly turned out to be a rather localized problem for the northern half of The North, and that most of the characters in the series had their thoughts on other problems without ever being bothered by them. But if there's no way to write the series into an "everyone vs. the zombies" showdown, then let it stay that way and focus on what is actually working. Then again, I've always held that Daenerys' story really should end with her letting go of Westeros, where she has never set foot, where her army can't fight and where she has no extant character relations, and focus instead on the continent where she has actually built an empire of her very own. Sometimes, the short way to finish the story may simply be the best one. There's no need to cram the entire expansive saga into a dime-a-dozen-fantasy war of Humanity against The Evil Monsters, when the depiction of very human politics has always been the series' strongest suit.

Smeared ink? Ink? Oh, you sweet summer child ... don't touch that!

It just has to exist, really. Just something to show that 1) at least snippets of the book have been drafted, and 2) that Rothfuss can keep to his word. Failure to deliver would instantly make a lot of people suspect that neither were true, so it should have been a top priority to sort it out very quickly once it had been promised. I mean, nobody obliged Rothfuss to publish a chapter before he told us he would. He could have said nothing, then done nothing, and status quo would have been comfortably maintained (some would have continued to low-key curse the prolonged silence, but at least it would only be because of the prolonged silence). But as soon as that promise was made, expectations were raised, and the failure to deliver became vastly more prominent. And the baffling thing is, there's no way he didn't see it coming. Promising a chapter was a power move. It raised the stakes. Created expectations. He must have known that he needed to follow it up, or there'd be a great backlash. And there was. Backlash that previously had no reason to exist. There's a very straightforward cause-and-effect thing going on, and it seems to have been set up on Rothfuss' own initiative. So now we've got the worst outcome for the worst reason, as it were.

Conversely, promising it and then not delivering it was pretty much the worst thing he could have done. I mean, when a rather substantial part of the follower base had doubts that even an outline of the third book ever existed, it seems like a monumentally bad idea to seemingly substantiate their claims by failing to deliver even one chapter after promising it. At the very least, it gave the naysayers a whole lot of traction. He should not have made that promise without having a sample chapter ready, or at the very least he should have cobbled together something and written disclaimers all over it.

Ah, Jon Fosse. Scourge of any high school class of Norwegian literature. Let's just say his writing style is a bit peculiar. Like modernist gray-box architecture or foul-smelling cheeses, it's probably genial if you're into that sort of stuff, but from the outside perspective, it stands out as monumentally boring. The average high schooler would find more entertaining reading on the nutrition label of a packet of peanuts than a play by Jon Fosse. We had to read and discuss one of them in, I believe, 12th grade. It was like watching paint dry. Monotonous, un-engaging, and endlessly repeating to stretch a five-minute story into a two-hour play. The high school curriculum is never going to get rid of him now.

Finding out that you need to exempt certain threads from the questionably justified "lock threads and start a new one after 20 pages" rule because it makes it a hassle for the moderators to stay up to date on them, is a pretty shining example of this in action. I would also have quoted Gorghan of Old Ghis, but that wouldn't be as family friendly. Same thing applies, though.

As I once again missed five pages of discussion because the thread I was subscribed to was locked, and a new one opened to continue the exact same topic for no discernible reason, I have to ask ... ... why wasn't this thread locked sixty pages ago?

Times two, plus two. And counting.