The Random Thread of Random Randomness

I put up stuff fishing for ideas on my thread on interesting characters and brainstorming metaphysics, but Pendrake is right. What I really need is islands with with good topography and a shortage of vowels.

 

Some of my friends have read Song of Ice and Fire books 1-5, I have not. Everyone I talk to agrees that book four and five are weaker than the previous ones. The question is "Are the later books slightly weaker or WAY weaker."

One thing that is good in small doses but can be frustrating in large doses is when readers are more informed than their the characters. Aparently there are hundreds of pages of characters traveling to pass a message to a character they don't know is already dead or questing for something that is already impossible.

One friend used Harry Potter as a metaphor. "Book 5 would be like if Rowling put four chapters in Deathly Hallows where Dean Thomas and Seamus Finnigan try to find and destroy a horcrux that is already destroyed." Characters readers don't really care about doing things that won't effect greater events.

It should be noted that for the later books, George R Martin fired his original editors and replaced them with some Yes Men. The pacing was thrown off by this.

Another concern is that George R Martin, to put it bluntly, is old and overweight. He could die before finishing his book series.

That said my friends tend to speak highly of the series. Like me, they only pick apart fiction that they love. If we don't like something we don't pick it apart, we just say "that sucks" and move on.

 

True

Also true

THe first three books came out in a short time. Martin was an inspired author, with ideas and the will to tell them. They were FANTASTIC.
After this… meh, the books are still an enjoiable read, but the good ideas are fewer, and watered down within hundreds of pages. He added too much things and too many characters. Side stories were opened, without closing almost any one of the older… the saga is being strangled by its own weight, and my impression is that Martin doesn't know how to exit from the maze he created… and that he no longer wants to write it.
I don't believe ASOIAF will be ever finished.

 

Same impression about ASOIAF here.
I have not seen the last GoT season yet, so I don't know how bad exactly it is, but I read all the books and I also noticed that especially the last one was a bit... meh.
I am not sure that it will end well.