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Bored, so bored. My corner of LJ is on life support. I did get back on the ficcing hobbyhorse with a thousand words of Sprache XXI and resume the reading of Clash of Kings, so I am stirring, however feebly.
I love GRRM's imagination, but my God, can he be lazy when it comes to plot advancement. He needs Character X to get from plot point A to plot point B, so he has Character Y behave like a complete moron. Case in point: Theon Greyjoy wakes in the night with the foreboding surety that something is awry. He soon discovers that Bran and Rickon Stark have been spirited from Winterfell, along with their direwolves and four helpers. Unsurprisingly, he swiftly marshals a search party and sets out to capture them. One of the members of this party, Reek, brings a mysterious bag on the search. They search high and low for the fugitives, but can find no trace of them. On the verge of defeat, Theon is about to turn back in disgust when Reek pipes up that he might know where they've fled. When Theon asks how he knows their whereabouts, Reek opens the bag. The bag he's been carrying around for twelve hours. The bag about which he could have talked to Theon at any time. Instead, he lets Theon and his coterie blunder through dense, inhospitable forest for an entire day.
It's possible that Reek was deliberately withholding the information in order to give the Stark children and their aides a chance to escape, but since the aforementioned Reek was a prisoner of the Starks until Greyjoy's conquest of Winterfell, I doubt this charitable interpretation. Methinks that Martin just wanted Theon to fritter about in the befrigged woods for ten pages so he could get get murderously angry at a pair of frightened children about whom he'd been having relatively sanguine thoughts a few moments before.
I love GRRM's imagination, but my God, can he be lazy when it comes to plot advancement. He needs Character X to get from plot point A to plot point B, so he has Character Y behave like a complete moron. Case in point: Theon Greyjoy wakes in the night with the foreboding surety that something is awry. He soon discovers that Bran and Rickon Stark have been spirited from Winterfell, along with their direwolves and four helpers. Unsurprisingly, he swiftly marshals a search party and sets out to capture them. One of the members of this party, Reek, brings a mysterious bag on the search. They search high and low for the fugitives, but can find no trace of them. On the verge of defeat, Theon is about to turn back in disgust when Reek pipes up that he might know where they've fled. When Theon asks how he knows their whereabouts, Reek opens the bag. The bag he's been carrying around for twelve hours. The bag about which he could have talked to Theon at any time. Instead, he lets Theon and his coterie blunder through dense, inhospitable forest for an entire day.
It's possible that Reek was deliberately withholding the information in order to give the Stark children and their aides a chance to escape, but since the aforementioned Reek was a prisoner of the Starks until Greyjoy's conquest of Winterfell, I doubt this charitable interpretation. Methinks that Martin just wanted Theon to fritter about in the befrigged woods for ten pages so he could get get murderously angry at a pair of frightened children about whom he'd been having relatively sanguine thoughts a few moments before.
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