applauding -- which is a little disturbing, now that I think about it! The really over-the-top ones, I think he writes them that way specifically for that effect. As for everyone else, he is trying (sometimes too hard) to include "shades of grey" since so much fantasy is stark black-and-white melodrama.

ETA: "Stark" pun not intended, whoops!

For me it wasn't someone really major. But he had it coming since the first book, and finally someone just had enough of him saying what he was and wasn't going to do.

That's about the only spoiler-free way I could think to write it, so I hope you can figure out who I mean.

I got about halfway through the second book and finally said "I'm just not enjoying this, why am I reading it?"

I love it when no character is safe from death, but only if I care about the characters, and I just can't bring myself to care about the cast of A Song of Ice and Fire. I can't stand ANY of them. I need someone to cheer for, and I couldn't find anyone worth cheering for due to the extreme gray-and gray world of Westeros.

Jon Snow seems decent as does the dwarf, Tyltheion(sp?)

He's my favorite in the whole series.

followed by Arya. How can someone NOT like Arya?

And Peter Dinklage's performance of Tyrion makes it obvious to see why he won the Emmy and the Golden Globe.

There was one character that I *hated*. I hated this person, I hated this person's story, I didn't care, and I hoped this person would die horribly.

At the end of book three this person's story suddenly became compelling, and I've been bummed out that we haven't seen much of this person in the last two books.

There's really only one character in the whole series that I find myself totally bored with. All this person ever does is wander around looking for this one other person, and I'm just not there.

I'm halfway through Feast For Crows and I find myself skimming this person's chapters because they are so boring. On the upside on character that I hated in book one is slowly starting to grow on me. Damn, though there have been so many deaths of people I like. The one at the end of book 3 made me want to scream. I, do have one question. Where the hell is Daenerys? She's my favorite character and she hasn't shown up in the book yet, but there is a lot of foreshadowing about her. At least, Araya is in the book and still awesome.

FFC and DWD was split, so FFC is all what's happening in the south whereas DWD follows Daenarys and what's going on in the north and east. DWD was a MUCH better book.

The only character I really like here in FFC is Araya and she's gotten maybe two chapters and a brief cameo in one of Sam's.

And nobody is who you thought they were 140 pages in.

Apparently, it involves hammering a sword, seductively caressing a map, and traveling down the road with a group of people.

I'm reading the very same series and I'm just a little further along than you are, or were when you posted.

I think the characters are extremely authentic to a feudalistic culture, more authentic than almost all fantasy I've seen, which means a lot of what they do are going to be offensive to post-modern sensibilities. The nobles act like nobles, which is to say they have a unshakeable sense of entitlement, that's just how they were raised. They are constantly thinking about who their enemies and friends are, and who they could trust, because it's a matter of life and death. Historically, people in those cultures are, overall, terribly almost desperately protective of their positions.

Such as Prince Joffrey catching the butcher's son doing something above rank. The Prince needed to enforce the class system that placed he himself at the top. I actually expected him to be much more cruel in that scene.

I happen to think that Eddard Stark is a very good person to raise Jon with the rest of his family. You have to see that to Caetlyn, Jon is not just an affront to her, but he represents a threat to her children's position and even their very survival, yet, it doesn't create a rift between her and Eddard. Their relationship is still quite loving. I'm anticipating that Caetlyn is going to end up changing her mind about Jon.

Meanwhile, Arya doesn't seem to be aware of class at all, and so I don't anticipate her faring too well. If anything, she's almost like a modern child dropped into a medieval culture, like putting a baby in the middle of a busy street.

I don't have much respect for Robert, but he's absolutely saintly compared to the rest of his family, with the possible exception of Tyrion.

It seems to me that Daenerys is going to turn into the real antagonist now that she has married into that barbarian tribe. I wonder how much longer she'll tolerate her brother now that she's the one who has power. I anticipate her character changing to something monstrous after Martin gave us reason to have sympathy for her.

Her husband, by the way, showed a surprising amount and depth and deference for her. So, now she has emotional support, and she, not her brother, has an army behind her and will be socialized into a ruthless culture. Her power-hungry, faithless brother has made a huge mistake. This should be interesting.

In other words, I think you should stick to it.

Robert, or even Edward, is very different than say, Aragorn, who Tolkien portrays as the ideal king. Of course, Tolkien wasn't going for realism at all. He was trying to create myth and myths often have perfect kings.

Actually, no, he copied people who copied medieval propaganda. The Throne series does not. It appears to take its cues from social history.

I guess the only other fantasy book I've seen that tries to be socially authentic about feudal cultures was "Dune." (I realize technically speaking it wasn't fantasy, but only technically speaking). By comparison, I had a hard time taking those characters, including the ones I should have been rooting for.

We have a lot of social history on the Middle Ages and the first thing we learn is that there's no such thing as the middle ages. If you want to look at the true dark times of the period you have to look back at the so-called Dark Ages, when the average life expectancy was similar to that of sub-saharan Africa... and even then the reason they're known as Dark Ages is because of missing records. The High Middle Ages were a period of relative prosperity, and the Black Death actually caused the end of feudalism due to the resulting labor shortages producing peasant rebellions and class levelling (the word "levelling" became a thing then). If you look at the bloodshed of warfare well that hasn't improved much. If you look at starvation and privation of the underclass, well, we just started exporting it elsewhere. Look at London's East End, where one researcher estimates that England actually killed off or deported much of its lower class to the colonies. Most present day Englishmen are biological descendants of the upper class, apparently. The lower classes did not survive the Industrial Revolution.

Tolkien was indeed going for myth, the societies in his books are all directly influenced by divine creatures and magical forces. Tolkien actually wrote a lot of background dissertations on where he felt Middle Earth fit in with his politics which were basically culturally conservative, anti-corporate, libertarian. He felt the best government was none at all.

Last edited Tue Apr 10, 2012, 10:44 PM - Edit history (1)

To be perfectly accurate, people living in both the Middle and Dark Ages used the term "Middle age" as the name of their times, for a completely different reason than we do. It referred to the times between Christ's Ascension and the Second Coming. So, I use the terms interchangeably even though I know there's a huge difference between the High Middle Ages and the Dark Ages, but the latter was the beginnings of the feudal system that reached fruition in the former.

You have to expect a fiction writer to simplify the system for the modern reader, who is not going to earn a degree just for the honor of reading a writer's fiction. For one thing, if you think lawyers have made everything complicated today, law was just complicated in the Middle Ages, and required plenty of lawyers.

The main social difference between then and now is the concept of individual rights and liberties. People in those systems from top to bottom were born into a network of social obligations, vassal to lord, lord to vassal, lord to king, and vice-versa. The society was made of a network of these, and it would take a Pope to release somebody from them, and it did take a Pope in the case of Leonardo da Vinci.

I'm skeptical that the people in England are all descended from the upper classes. For one thing, genealogists would have been able to determine this long ago, and it would now be common knowledge, impossible to miss. For another, surnames like "Miller," "Baker" and "Smith" would be extinct in England if that were true. You should look at compelling, novel observations critically.

It's a culture where peasants, women, and children are NOTHING, and as I said upthread, the plot is driven by people who have nothing trying to get a piece of something.

you'll find your opinions change a lot on the characters.

One character I started out hating turned out to have some decent qualities. Another that I absolutely loathed wound up being merely pathetic.

And even the "good" characters have some interesting flaws.

I must admit I did cheer at least two of the deaths in series. Westeros is a better place now that they're gone.

Two others were [font size=30]N[font size=20]O[font size=10]Oo[font size=5]ooooooo!

She's very funny and it's entertaining to read her tearing into your favorite 'love to hate' characters. Highly recommend it...

http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/03/a-read-of-ice-and-fire-a-game-of-thrones-part-1

The books are very interesting, and had finished reading the 2nd