Swan Tower

I can't even count the stuff at the end as "good stuff," mostly -- too much of it is "and then the characters do stupid things and it blows up in their faces." It might seem cooler if it weren't all cliffhangers . . . but since it is, all I'm left with is their stupidity, not the part where they redeem themselves from it.

And why was that stuff postponed until the next book, anyway? Because there wasn't room for it in here? Then cut some of the goddamned filler. Seriously.

I think I would have liked Theon/Reek's stuff better if it hadn't begun with a chapter which did nothing but wallow in how horrible his life is and Ramsay Bolton is a monster blah blah blah. We got enough of that later on, so cut that chapter and start with the part where something other than torture is happening. Also -- though I am going to sound like a horrible person for saying this -- one of the payoffs I kept waiting for was the confirmation of what the narration keeps hinting at, i.e. that Theon's been castrated. But nope, we can't even accomplish that much; it has to be saved for later.

Manderly bothered me mostly because wow, was Martin always this horrible in his depiction of fat people as gross and disgusting, or is that a new development here in this book? I felt like I was being clobbered with it. But his second scene with Davos was one of the few decent parts of the book. Not awesome, but at least a bit where I could say, "okay, I see what you're doing, and it's pretty cool."

Daario . . . as I said to teleidoplex, that felt to me like Martin was trying to do the female gaze thing, to counterbalance the way his male characters are always rating the fuckability of the women around them. Trying, but failing: all it accomplished was contributing to the general sense that Dany's turning into an idiot.