OK .....Soulsinger, let me try and give an angle u might not have seen.
GRRM is very very realistic with his characters and how things happen. Good doesnt always win, people are two-faced, spiteful, hardships etc etc etc ...
i get that and it's fine with me. i'm a big hard-boiled detective fan and those novels often have the bad men walking away and leaving the good damaged, no happy ending, very gritty, etc. that's not the problem. part of it might be my tastes though... i read fantasy when i don't WANT something realistic. there's also a difference between realistic and boring. i could write a very realistic story about my day, but nobody wants to read it because it's boring. i felt that way about parts of GoT. sure it's realistic, but parts of it are also very boring and repetitive. i get it, sansa is spoiled and her sister is mean. i get it, drogo is the sun and stars and she loves riding a horse (pun intended).
Now Dany has no money, no support and really no drive for anything because she was only a littel girl who deferred to her brother. In a GoT she is traveling with her husbands people and finding out who she really is outside of her brothers shadow. Discovering the way the world really is and so forth. That takes time. If it was another cliche series she would miraculously figure it all out and then strike the villains down in one swift blow.
Her drive IS going to Westeros though. It just takes time, monies, allies and well, lets face it she is half way across the world without either of those. I wouldnt go home where my family and supporters have been butchered unless I had help or a tank.
As to her marriage: In those times most marriages of high birth were for political reasons and had nothing to do with love or feelings, but duty and need. Her own marriage was for an army. Her brother was her elder and rightful king therefore she did her duty in accepting the marriage for the given reasons. She was NEVER raped. Granted, she didn't love Drogo yet for she didnt even know him, but back then a husband had "rights" to his wife that were expected. If u reread her chapter u'll see that she is just nervous, scared although I am sure somewhat curious it being her first time for sex. She never tells him to stop and he never takes her against her will.
i'm aware of what happened in those times. but this is supposed to be fantasy, not "those times." if i want details of medieval customs, i can read an equally boring history textbook. and my problem wasn't the actual fact of her marriage, it was the way she went from being terrified in one chapter to suddenly being madly in love with an worshipping drogo. meanwhile, sansa and arya have dozens of chapters where they develop (at similar ages) so slowly as to be glacial. and once dany DOES assume her role as a princess, there are dozens more chapters where NOTHING happens to her. just her travelling to more places and seeing more things, none of which advances any plot or adds to the sense of her being a stranger in a strange land.
maybe it's not fair to compare to tolkien, but part of his appeal might be that he had an economy of language. in one chapter, he can create a lived in lothlorien and then move on. yes, dany needs to learn to rule and raise an army and whatnot, and no it should not magically happen overnight. but it also does not require the kind of page count it gets here and (from what i understand) then next 2-thousand page books. as i mentioned before, aragorn learns to be a king and a leader and raise armies in 2 chapters. frodo learns to stand on his own in the dark in only a fraction of the number of pages these books have. dany could have her whole plotline done in 3-4 chapters, when here she gets twice that. sansa, who grows not a bit and adds nothing to the plot in GoT, gets as many chapters. it just seems to move at a glacial pace... like WoT once it went into its holding pattern.
i guess i'm generally just trying to convince myself one way or another. it's reassuring to hear that sansa's story becomes slightly more complelling, and maybe i'll like dany more sans drogo. we'll see about bran and catelyn. i just feel a bit disheartened at the prospect of reading another 2000 pages knowing that at least half of the chapters i won't want to read because the characters are dreadfully boring.
or maybe i'm just worn down from trying to read this while i take classes! i guess the fact that i'm writing so much about the darn books is a sign that it's certainly got me thinking, hehe.
oh, the way to grab someone else's post is when you read their post, on the bottom right is a button that says "quote." click that and it will set you up with their post already in your reply box.
