Read the books, by the time you’re done GRR will hopefully have finished them. The show is really good but the books are really great.
Correction: The show was really good until they blew up the sept. But yes, the books are terrific. I started reading the books after hearing two of my co-workers go on and on about how good they were. So I finally said, fuck it, let's do it. I thought it was a completed series and picked up book 1. I immediately went to book 2, and then onto book 3. It was at some point during book 3 that I found out it was NOT a completed series, and that there were still 3-4 more books in the works. I went into book 4 very disappointed knowing that there wasn't anything to read once I finished it. It was probably 3-4 years later that book 5 came out. I still haven't read it - not gonna read another word until I can pick up book 5 and read all the way to the end of the damned story.
The moment I started to drift was Jamie's whimsical trip into Dorn... I like the show but man it's been slipping since then with timelines and distance skewed, characters acting out of character, plot lines fizzling out, sloppy writing, and parlor tricks.
The Dorne storyline in the show was easily the worst thing about the show. What's especially frustrating about that is that the Dorne storyline in the books is great. It's clear the showrunners had no idea how to write Dorne out of the plot since they couldn't do the whole arc from the book, so they just created Jaime & Bronn's Excellent Adventure.
Oberyn was cool. The Sand Snakes had a lot of potential. I agree everything else about Dorne sucked though.
Yes, Oberyn was great. When I say "the Dornish plotline," I mean all the stuff that takes place in Dorne, essentially. I disagree on the Sand Snakes. In the show, they just came across as angry brats. In the books, they had a bit more nuance to their personalities, IMO. And Ellaria Sand was completely butchered as a character--in the books, she was a moderating influence and that made her an interesting character considering she saw her lover killed grotesquely in front of her; in the show she was just another blindly angry person, indistinguishable from the Sand Snakes.
Oh I recognize that in the show they weren't used very well. What I'm saying is that in theory they should've been cooler and had a much better story line than they had. The potential was there for them but the execution was terrible.
This episode is gonna be brutal. The official Game of Thrones Twitter account tweeted Valar Morghulis, which translates to "all men must die" I predict lots of bad things, and character deaths.
