I finally finished reading A Dance with Dragons

[rusty_halo]

Well, I finally finished A Dance with Dragons…

OMG, you guys, that was so boring. What a waste of time.

Lots of long endless journeys, most with dead ends, and by the time anyone actually gets anywhere, it has dragged on so long that you don't even care.

Just a sloppy, long-winded, poorly plotted, incompetently edited mess. Nearly a thousand words to tell me very little that I didn't already know, and nothing that I cared about.

The most compelling characters were Asha and Theon! (Not a complement.) The Jaime chapter told us literally nothing that couldn't be extrapolated from the previous book. Bran's going to be a tree and Arya's going to be the most boring assassin ever and OMG who cares about any of this? You start the book thinking "Yay Tyrion and Dany will finally meet" and 959 pages later they still haven't met. Is Dany ever going to get to Westeros? Does anyone care anymore? Will someone please kill stodgy old Stannis, because I don't believe for a second that we're lucky enough that Ramsay actually did. Did we actually need a Melisandre POV??? And THE POLITICS OF MEEREEN OMFG!!?? Is Dany's incomprehensible and shallow "romance" with Daario really what GRRM thinks attracts women to men? And does anyone care about Quentyn or Victarion? Or if random pulled-out-of-GRRM's-ass-Aegon is really Aegon?

All these pointless characters wasting time, and the writing so sloppy and undisciplined that I don't even know what this series is supposed to be about anymore. Remember when there used to be coherent plot and character arcs?

Not to mention the incessantly grotesque violence, which is not so much ~shocking~ and ~edgy~ as repetitive, cliched, and juvenile.

And do not even get me started on the misogyny. There is a line between "portraying a misogynistic culture for the purpose of critique" and "reveling in misogyny for the thrill of it." GRRM writes a lot of diverse and complex female characters, but that does not excuse him writing 959 pages that is absolutely riddled with gratuitous violence against and dehumanization of female characters. It's both misogynist and lazy, to use this as a shorthand for societal corruption.

I mean obviously the rapes, mutilations, slavery, sexual abuse, the never-missing-an-opportunity-to-write-in-some-whores...

And just, the way we know the size of every womans' breasts, and the judgment on their looks from every man who is observing them. The "oh no, of course Cersei can't be powerful anymore, everyone saw that she's just a woman." Like stretch marks and sagging breasts are some kind of great shame for a beautiful woman who's borne three children? The way GRRM repeats and lingers on the facts of Cersei's aging body--this isn't just Cersei's vanity, it's Kevan thinking it too, it's the deep seated misogyny that I'm increasingly less convinced GRRM is portraying intentionally and more convinced is just the way the author sees the world.

(That's one example of many; it was at the end of the book so it's freshest in my mind.)

There's so much good fanfic out there; I don't need to put this kind of crap into my head.

Originally published at rusty-halo.com. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[soundingsea]

The misogyny is depressing, but the editing is more depressing. I mean, really, book four and five could have been one tightly-edited book. They're the literary equivalent of Guns'n'Roses' Use Your Illusion I and II.

I'm not convinced that Cersei's actually been defanged. She's too sneaky for that. She's just pretending to play the game the way they want her to.

Also, there are way, way too many viewpoint characters at this point, and a lot of them (Quentyn?!?!) did not need to exist. At All.

I may have to start reading fic! And I didn't even *hate* the book or anything... it just could have been a lot more than it was.

[rusty_halo]

Thanks for all your recent comments. :)

Totally agreed about the need for editing and the pointless POV characters. My friend Cat had a good insight which is that his failure was that he put plot above characters, by filling time with all these pointless POVs that are only there to further the plot, not to have interesting arcs of their own. He lost sight that the thing that originally made the story so compelling was the depth and layers of the characters.

Oh, I don't think Cersei is defanged! I think if Kevan had lived, she might have been, but without him as a sane restraint against her excesses, she's just going to keep causing trouble.

I actually didn't mean ASOIAF fic, just fic in general. (Well, in my case it's SPN fic. ;) Fic is written mostly by women, and even if what I read is mostly about men, it's an escape from the male gaze. Dean in fanfic is so much less offensive than Dean on TV that I forget when an asshole he is and am usually rudely awakened when I go back to the show.

I think spending so much time in a non-male gaze fictional environment makes things that I used to take for granted as "normal" stand out as the creepy offensive sexist things that they actually are. Fandom has ruined me for most mainstream media!

[soundingsea]

Right, Martin's gotten so bogged down in plot that he's no longer letting it emerge organically from the lives and choices of the characters themselves. (Also known as: in later seasons, most shows collapse under the weight of their own mythology...) ;)

Fandom has ruined me for most mainstream media!

Oh, I know. I have this conversation with Ironchefjoe every time he comes back from a movie I didn't bother going to: "How was it?" "Great!" "Were there female characters with agency?" "um... yeah..." "Did it pass the Bechdel test?" "Nothing passes that!" :P Then I don't want to watch that stuff!!! :P

[rusty_halo]

I have friends who aren't in fandom, and they're always like "You're so elitist! You're asking for too much!" But honestly, I'm a lot happier reading fic than putting myself through the weight of sexism that you get from consuming mainstream entertainment. It's hard to explain to people that there really are places where the male gaze isn't the norm, and it's like, once you've had it, it's really hard to go back.

[soundingsea]

Right. I put up with enough sexism in the stuff I'm paid to do; I'm definitely not interested in enjoying (heh) more in my entertainment.

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks for this review. I've been trying to slog through ADWD but I keep putting it down for weeks at a time. It's just so damn dull. Now that I know nothing really happens, I can give it up without feeling like I might be missing something.