so this finally arrived on tuesday!
spent most of wednesday reading this, eating tacos, reading this some more.
i liked it! but:
- twins fucking really squicks me out
- i didn’t like drogoxdaenrys
- female characters were really shitty. lysa’s hysterical; catelyn’s only ever a mother or a wife; sansa’s the prissy girl while arya’s the tomboy, and cersei so embodies the evil queen trope it’s almost comical. i don’t like the way dany’s written because reasons. this was just kind of disappointing; authors like elaine cunningham do a great job at this, and game of thrones could have been so much better than an average fantasy novel in its character treatment. this whole topic should actually be a separate post in itself but welp
- so you need a ominous foreign invasion force in your story. it’s a fantasy novel, so you can pretty much make up whatever the hell you want because power of ~imagination! “..how about mongolians?” >:I
- tyrion is one of my favorite characters, but let’s be honest “witty halfling/dwarf” isn’t exactly novel. in fact, i feel like the vast majority of the characters could’ve been pulled from a dozen other books.
- this is really trivial, but at the end when dany emerges from the ashes with two dragons at her breasts: uh, they’re reptiles
i enjoyed the book immensely, but the lack of depth in any of the main characters keeps it from being anything more than just a pretty good fantasy novel in my mind.
still going to read rest of the series though
