Talk:A Song of Ice and Fire/Archive 1

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This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Fourth novel title

The 4th Book is now called 'A Feast for Crows' and will be published sometime around September 2003.

Clean-Up?

There's a lot of discussion and speculation on this talk page about the publication of AFFC which has obviously already come to pass and therefore is now irrelevant. Can I suggest we clean up or archive this information? Cheers--Werthead 21:52, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

Publication Date of A Feast for Crows

A excerpt from George R R Martin's site on June 2004:

I have been getting even more email asking if the latest publication date announced by one bookstore or another is correct. It isn't. I don't even care what date it is. I am still writing the book. Until it is done and delivered, all these announced pubdates are arrived at by throwing darts at a calendar. - George R. R. Martin

None of the messages on GRRM's site since then have announced any further publication date information. Hence I would consider this pubdate (i.e., date unknown) the most authoritative. Adding in other points of view here seems a little silly... Connelly 11:59, 26 Dec 2004 (UTC)

War of the Roses

I'd never heard of the war of roses until Ajd added that to the page. I looked it up and found it very interesting. It is rather obvious that he drew inspiration from that war. A great addition to the article.

Ivanhoe as reference

The knights, their tourneys, even some characters remind me of Ivanhoe. (Gregor Clegane as Reginald Front-de-Boeuf, Sandor Clegane as Brian De Bois-Guilbert. :)) )

Houses

The houses section should probably be moved to another page. We could (I might) also create a template called Template:ASOIAFHouses similar to Template:ASOIAFPlaces for the great houses (and any other major houses), and make pages for each, where each page lists the pledged houses as well. —siro χ o 09:20, Jul 8, 2004 (UTC)

At random, I noticed that there is no link in the nav-box to the List of Houses. Books, minor characters, and places, but no major-characters option? Seems a tad silly to me. Marblespire 07:49, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
- The problem is with Characters from A Song of Ice and Fire. Since it's called characetrs and not minor characters, it should at least point to the house articles. — Laura Scudder ☎ 08:07, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
  - Ok, it at least links to all the houses now. Still is lacking the short descriptions of each I think it needs, but that can wait a bit. — Laura Scudder ☎ 08:14, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
- I'm not sure that made sense. The Characters from A Song of Ice and Fire page really contains Characters from A Song of Ice and Fire that don't belong to a major house. Some are major, some are minor. Some even are POVs. Linking to the major houses is not necessary, and certainly no navigational aid. If you want to find a character, the List of characters from A Song of Ice and Fire is the place to go. Why? Well, where would you look for Catelyn Stark of House Tully? House Stark? House Tully? Better yet, where is Joffrey? The reader shouldn't have to guess the editor's choices for deciding such issues. Arbor 17:08, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
  - The problem is that we have no central place for characters aside from List of characters in A Song of Ice and Fire, which is not exactly helpful navigationally. Notice how only house names are linked there, while characters described in Characters from A Song of Ice and Fire are simply listed without any info or links to where there is info. Characters from A Song of Ice and Fire really needs to be moved a better title unless it has some sort of summary or links for all the major characters. We need to decide which article will be the central repository for all major characters, and that one should be in the template. — Laura Scudder ☎ 22:43, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
    - I'm in the process of fixing List of characters in A Song of Ice and Fire so that it links directly to the character-specific subsections for every character who has one, either on a House page or on Characters from A Song of Ice and Fire. That won't make it any more useful as a central page, since it's bloated and full of incredibly minor characters, but it will make the page less useless. I'm not sure we have much need for a page that acts as a direct central repository, though, or for listing all the House pages on Characters from A Song of Ice and Fire. However inaptly named, that page already points the reader to both the list page and the House pages, in the intro. Listing all of the Great Houses there, and particularly adding brief discussions of them, seems rather redundant. There's currently a "Great Houses" template in use on all House pages; perhaps it could be useful in some way on "Characters from..." Brendan 23:19, 12 November 2005 (UTC)

Completion Announcement

I took this out because Martin has not updated the site yet. I realize that this has been reported on the board by Bronn and backed up by Parris, but I think we should hold off on putting it here until George makes the official announcement on Monday. Indrian 00:33, May 29, 2005 (UTC)

Release

Why are we trusting a quote that was merely "reportedly" said at a book expo over the Amazon and distributor dates? Snowspinner 15:49, Jun 13, 2005 (UTC)

Because some of us know these people personally. However, I understand the verifiability issue. [1], report #80, is a statement from GRRM's wife/significant other. Arbor 16:28, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Merging in character articles?

I came across a character article Beric Dondarrion, and as it seemed pretty small, propsed that it be merged with this article. I didn't do it myself as the current structure of this article did not contain a character section, so I thouhgt I'd open it up for discussion first. Thoughts, anyone?

He should go to Characters from A Song of Ice and Fire. (If he were of a greater House, say House Targaryen, he would belong there. But House Dondarrion doesn't deserve its own page. so he goes to the catch-all Characters from A Song of Ice and Fire. Thanks for trying to clean this up, by the way. Arbor 08:43, 6 August 2005 (UTC)

I've now made the merge. (I also added a link to that character page to the Books template; maybe it should be changed to the comprensive one(List of...), though. Thanks for the response! JesseW 16:35, 6 August 2005 (UTC)

I think you're right—it should. Also, the Characters from... ought to make it clear that many (most?) of the really interesting characters aren't on that page at all, but distributed over various House Blah pages or even their own page. I'd be grateful if you look at that. Arbor 17:38, 6 August 2005 (UTC)

Arya pronunciation

I removed some homebrewn attempts for what seems to be (?) a variant pronunciation of Arya. But I'm not sure. The suggest was "are-ya", whatever that means. Is this meant to be different from the first suggestion? If no, it has to go, as per WP guidlines (use IPA). If yes, it is interesting and needs to be included. Please answer the following, and I will try to insert it properly

Which syllable is stressed? If it's the first, then I cannot really discern a big difference from ['ɑːrɪə].
Is the r pronounced? Because I say are as ['ɑː], and there sure is not r in ya.
Do you mean ['ɑːrjɑː]? (Last vowel like the first, but unstressed, i more like j)
Who says it this way, and what is the source for that?

Arbor 08:58, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

I'm not the one who introduced the pronunciation into the article (pronunciation is not a particular interest of mine), but I can offer a couple notes on it. The source is Martin himself, per Report #104 on [2]. The problem with that is that it's based on the reporter's own understanding of the colloquial phrase "Are ya?" (As in "Are ya (short form of "you") coming to the show or not?") It's particularly ambiguous as to the final vowel; I think it could credibly be ['ɑːrjɑ:] or ['ɑrj^] or ['ɑrjə].

The big difference as compared to Dotrice is that it's two syllables, not three, and has [j] rather than [ɪ]. I'm not at all sure that we should put it in without knowing more clearly what the final vowel is, though. Brendan 09:46, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for providing the source. The problem with this is the same as with most of the other "con reports", for the reason you mention—most of them are useless, and tell us more about the reporter's pronunciation than about GRRM's. In the current case, I cannot see what we can do, GRRM could easily have said ['ɑːrɪə] at the reading, and the reporter gives his or her closest interpretion, wanting to stress that GRRM doesnt say [ɑ'rʌɪə]. I bemoan this situation as much as the next person. Arbor 11:05, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

There are a couple audio interviews with GRRM online; I may listen to them sometime in the hope that he'll happen to mention Arya somewhere. If so, I'll let you know how he pronounces it. Brendan 20:05, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

I found an interview where he uses her name. It is in fact ['ɑːrɪə], just like the Dotrice pronunciation. You can find it at the Martin interview in the archive at [3], about 1/3 of the way through. So no change to the article needs to be made. Brendan 20:44, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

I've looked at some web pages (such as [4] and [5]) and listened to the Random House audio interview ([6]) and edited the pronunciation section accordingly. For instance, I've given Cersei as ['sɜ:rseɪ], and added Doran, Elia, Hodor, Rickon, and Sansa. The transcription of Baratheon seems implausible, but I don't know of an audio snippet of it or a pronunciation hint available on the Web from someone who's spoken with GRRM.Scentoni 10:17, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

The problem is (i) the attributions are no longer correct. The audiobooks certainly don't use rhotic pronunciation, so you cannot attribute that to them. If you want to attribute it to GRRM (no doubt correctly so), I would be grateful if you updated the attributions as well. (ii) Inferring GRRM pronunciations from the audio interview is good. That's a faithful source. But inferring them from people's records at cons is bad, because you (as a WP editor) add unverifiable information by transforming an ill-defined proh-NAUN-see-ey-shun (or is it per-noun-cee-ehshin) to a very well-defined and faithful one (IPA). That violates WP:V; Wikipedia cannot be a primary source. (I started this effort, and the first version of this page was promptly voted for deletion, and correctly so, for precisely that reason: It's unverifiable. Here's the vote.) Until somebody else (like Ran) collects an external list of IPA pronunciations I cannot see how we can turn people's con reports into proper IPA. I am frustrated by that as much as the next guy. Arbor 13:18, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

To expand on this: Wikipedia can never have a page attempting to do Correct pronunciations of XYZ. That's not what Wikipedia does; it's not normative. What we can do here is to describe some pronunciations. For example those that we can verify, like the audiobooks'. You and I might agree that GRRM's pronunciations are much more interesting that some stuffy British actor's. But that's irrelevant. Your or mine opinion what the "correct" pronunciation is doesn't enter into it. Wikipedia collects viewpoints—it doesn't arbitrate the truth ("Verifiability, not Truth, is the standard for inclusion on Wikipedia". So we can do GRRM's pronunciations of XYZ and Dotrice's pronunciation of XYZ. That's what we are trying to do here. Describe and attribute. Don't arbitrate. Arbor 13:23, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

I don't think laymen's pronunciation guides are of no use whatsoever—particularly those guides that are found in GRRM's own emails and such—but I agree it's best to solidify the foundations of the section before discussing expansion. Because of that, I took the article and pasted back in the previous version of the pronunciation section and started again from there.

The way I initially read the section, it appeared that most of the entries were unattributed, and so I made changes that used the same set of sources, without specifying the attribution for each change. I think now that I misread the section, and that the entries without any specific attribution were actually meant to have a default attribution of "RD and/or JL"—that is, that either that's the way the word was pronounced by RD in the audiobooks (and JL didn't use the word at all) or that's the way it was pronounced by JL (and RD didn't use the word at all), or that both RD and JL used the word and pronounced it identically. Could you confirm that this understanding is correct? Because of this uncertainty, I marked those pronunciations with a question mark (?). If I misunderstood the attribution, some other readers probably have too, and it seems best to me to attribute every entry explicitly. Perhaps we should change that to another label, like AB for audiobook, or RD&/JL. A more painstaking solution (though not necessarily a better one) would be for you or someone else familiar with the audiobooks to make this more detailed, changing the ? to either RD, JL, or RD&JL, as appropriate for each entry.

I listened carefully to the two GRRM interviews linked in the article, and transcribed the names I heard. The Wikipedia:Footnotes system has difficulty dealing with multiple references to the same footnote, and it seems unwieldy to have a list of many individual footnotes just for the pronunciation section. Since there are only two interviews, it makes more sense to me to have only two footnotes (located in the introductory paragraph with a key) and use the labels RH and FF to identify the source for each entry. Take a look at this version and tell me what you think. Scentoni 06:05, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

This looks great! Thank you a million times for doing this; I will give it a detailed look later. Arbor 06:31, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

Hi Arbor. I see you've added some more pronunciations, marked CBC. Could you put a reference for this source into the article, parallel to the Random House and Fast Forward interviews? Is it Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, or some other CBC? Is it available on the web? Also, some of these pronunciations seem to be in a dialect of English other than what GRRM speaks...the word "no" in general American English is [noʊ] or sometimes [no], not [nəʊ], so I think e.g. Areo Hotah and Doran need to be modified. Scentoni 18:08, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

Yup, there is some cleanup left. AE "no" would maybe even be [o(ʊ)], to be consistent with IPA chart for English. And I want to add Arianne. Arbor 18:23, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

Plans for series pages

(This discussion is not solely about the page titled A Song of Ice and Fire, but about all the pages dealing with topics from the series; I've started it here for convenience.)

I've been thinking lately about how to make the aSoIaF pages on Wiki more useful. (No, I don't have anything better to do with my time; why do you ask?) Six months ago, when I was new to Wiki, I did a lot of revision on the various character pages. Looking at them now, I do think they still need some work- I hadn't quite figured out how to do a character section without summarizing book plot, and successive revisions have in some cases created issues I'd like to look at- but for the time being, they're good enough; there's certainly a lot of detail there (perhaps too much, but never mind).

By contrast, there seems to me to be a paucity of information on the milieu. We do have a few pages dealing with this (Westeros, Wars in..., Tourneys in...), but not all of them are as fleshed-out as they could be. Also, between them these articles offer a lot of opportunity to expand on history and geography, but no so much about the culture and institutions of the series. The way I'd like to remedy that is a catchall page about organizations in the books. "Organizations" is a broad term by intention: I'd like the page to discuss briefly groups like the Kingsguard, the maesters of the Citadel, and the Faceless Men.

Why do this? For one thing, it will help contextualize the character pages. One problem I ran into while rewriting them, and that I've seen looking at subsequent revisions, is that explaining what happens to characters requires going into detail about the milieu. How can we discuss Arya's training among the Faceless Men without saying quite a bit about what Faceless Men are, or mention that Jaime Lannister was the youngest Kingsguard in history without saying what the Kingsguard is? Too often the only recourse has been to add little asides in the character sections themselves, which bulks out the articles and pulls them off topic.

Another reason is that I think such a page will be more immediately useful than the character pages. As I mentioned, the character pages tend to read like plot summaries. While this is somewhat correctable, to a degree plot summary will always play a role there. But plot summaries are easier to glean from reviewing the books. The scattered info about how organizations work can be harder to find via casual reading, so collecting them in one place creates a useful resource.

Why not just create individual articles for each group? For one thing, I think they would probably be AFD'd quickly, and I'm not sure that would be wrong. Just as consolidating most of the character information into Great House pages and a catch-all creates a potentially encyclopedic article out of hundreds of potential stubs, putting all these discussion together allows for a broad overview that works better for general audiences. Also, putting all these things into one article encourages brevity, which I think is important in keeping away from fancruft.

You can see my early work at sectioning such a page at User:Brendan Moody/Kingsguard. The stuff at the bottom of the page is random information about Aerys's court that I pulled out of Aerys Targaryen before it was merged, and should not be mistaken for something that would be added to any page in its present form. You can see from the sections I've worked out there that I'd like to see Night's Watch merged with this page if it is created. Anyone is welcome to add new sections or content to that subpage; if an article is created, I'd like it to be of respectable length right from the beginning, to reduce the possibility of AFD.

So this is what I'd like to hear from other users: (1) Do you think such a page is a good idea? (2) If not, how could we better include this information (or should we include it at all)? (3) What are other organizations that should be discussed if this page does happen? (4) Can you come up with a decent name for the page? The best I can do is Organizations in A Song of Ice and Fire, which I think is terribly clunky and anachronistic. (5) I'd also like to know what others think could be done to improve Westeros and Wars in A Song of Ice and Fire, both of which offer the sort of information I'd like to see from the organizations page. Thanks for reading this bloated, rambling request, and please do comment. Brendan Moody 00:29, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

I'm sorry I hadn't seen this comment before. As you can see I've already created stand alone Maester, Kingsguard and Night's Watch pages. I would think that many of the Orgs in aSoIaF deserve their own pages just on extent of info alone. I think major institutions can get their own pages when they fall under the following criteria:

They are populated by POV or other important characters. (i.e. Night's Watch and Kingsguard)
They serve as a central plot device themselves (i.e. Night's Watch)
They are unique to the point that a detailed explanation is needed for the reader to understand the basics and why it's important (i.e. Maesters)

I wouldn't support an Organizations page because there would only be two ways in which to do it: put every Org in there or only the Orgs that do not warrant their own page in a situation similar to what we have now with the characters pages. If we took the first route then I think we would end up with a very messy and very long page that would be hard to navigate. This is possible to fix with alot of work and some painful trimming edits but I think the reader will be better served navigating by the aSoIaF Template and wikilinks and not having to keep going back to one massive page to find what s/he wants.

The second choice is, I think, better left alone in favor of minor context summaries of minor Orgs such as The Faceless Men and religious groups (that might get their own pages in the next few books). This makes it easier to learn as you go and puts everything into place when the reader needs it.

Also we might want to consider a Wikiproject for this kind of discussion and editing work. NeoFreak 18:41, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for replying. I'd given up these plans, and am happy with the current structure in any case. Brendan Moody 19:49, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

I think a project or portal or whatever it's called would be a good idea. A nontrivial number of editors are now contributing good material, and some sort of unified frontend would be great for co-ordination. Anybody care to point to a similar setup that we might emulate? Have the Harry Potter people or the WoT people already done this? Arbor 20:12, 29 July 2006 (UTC)

I would love to one day have a quality Portal for ASOIAF but I think we are lacking in material to warrant one at the moment. A great example, as usual, of a good portal is the Tolkien portal at Portal:Middle-Earth. As far as the Wot pages go I would say that they are the last thing we would want to use as an example or inspiration as they are a stub filled mess with very hit and miss writing. As a matter of fact I think the ASOIAF pages are already better than the WoT. Still, I think a Wikiproject for the half dozen major editors to collaborate and attract new attention and editors to the pages would be great. I'll start to fish around and try to review the standards and practices for Projects but I'm as of this moment not familiar enough with them to speak as an authority. NeoFreak 00:36, 30 July 2006 (UTC)

I've been looking at the WikiProject guidelines, and I'd say we clearly meet them; it suggests a minimum of three to five articles (we have 35 so far) and five interested editors (I'd say there are about ten semi-regular ASOIAF page editors, and "If you have less than the minimum number of editors recommended above, it may still be worth creating a WikiProject if the work being done involves a lot of coordination," which it clearly does). There are already Wikiprojects on Discworld, the Harry Potter books, the Inheritance trilogy, and the Narnia books, which are of comparable size and/or complexity to this series. All of which is a long-winded explanation for my creation of Wikipedia:WikiProject A Song of Ice and Fire. Please pop on over and help organize it. Brendan Moody 04:58, 30 July 2006 (UTC)

Martin quote about third person ominiscient?

I am sure GRRM has made a general comment about 3rd person omniscient, something along the lines of it being the best way of writing modern novels. That would fit well under the Style and themes headline. Anybody knows what I am rambling about? Arbor 19:09, 6 August 2006 (UTC)

Trying to find it on westeros.org, not much luck so far. In the meantime: this may be useful to you: "When asked about his favorite/least favorite characters were, he quickly said Tyrion was his favorite character to write and that Bran's chapters were the most difficult and usually the ones left for last in the books released so far. But there aren't any characters that he dislikes per say, as he maintained that he had to be able to 'get into their heads' and 'understand them' in order to be able to tell the story as he wanted. He said the multiple PoV perspective was essential for understanding SOIAF, as he believed it offered a way for not just him, but for the readers to gain multiple perspective on the same events." Paul Willocx 19:23, 6 August 2006 (UTC)

Adaptations

I included the three adaptations to other media (CCG, PRG, board game) here, summary style. These belong to the series-spanning article (this one) instead of Game of Thrones, I believe. (We can discuss this.) I also suggest that two of the articles (RPG, board game) be changed into a redirect to the current page. Currently they contain no other information than what I copied to this page, and that's simply too little for an article. Whenever somebody wants to expand the stubs into full articles, we can revivify the articles. The CCG, on the other hand, has a fully fledged out main article. Also, is Adapatations the best title for this? How about In other media? Arbor 20:18, 6 August 2006 (UTC)

Sorry Arbor, I was doing a big edit on this page at the same time you were and some rather odd things started happening to it. Took me a few minutes to fix it. I've put up a section in the article called 'Spin-Offs' which seemed to fit the bill for this section and transferred your information across to it. To be honest, I'd have left the board game and RPG sections up as there's plenty of information that can be put up on them (pictures of the boxes/books and the expansions, further info on the fact that Mongoose Publishing want to pick up the RPG and are trying to work out the financial details etc) and it's an area I might want to look at a few weeks down the road (although I've spent about six hours today on this page and ironing out problems in the plot summaries for the novels, so it's not something I want to do just now). Let me know what you think of the new-look ASoIaF page as well. I'm unsure about having the pictures up so high in particular.--Werthead 21:36, 6 August 2006 (UTC)

Minor Edits

I note that there have been some minor edits sprinkled throughout a lot of the ASoIaF pages, mostly by user 128.210.12.95 . Some are good, but some are speculative and some are factually incorrect (Daenerys may become a canny politican by the end of the series, but she isn't one yet and she has no idea about war: that's why she has military advisors). Please remember to list your reasons for edits on the related talk pages. Cheers.--Werthead 22:34, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

Recent edits by anon

I reverted the recent edits by an anon user that seemed to be motivated by Brendan Moody's revert of his POV edits to Terry Goodkind. I did, however, think he had a couple of good points and went ahead and reimplemented two of his changes. The part about genre-defying depiction of feudal society may be true to a degree, but does overhype that aspect of the series in a POV manner. I also removed the portion about recomendations by other authors as part of an "impressive" prerelease campaign. There is nothing unusual about getting famous authors to comment on a new fantasy series, and there does not seem to be any reason to single this out for Martin. If someone disagrees with these removals, they can certainly put that information back in. Indrian 03:42, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

No, they seem to be good edits on your part. Most of the people that are going to devote time to editing GRRMs pages are fans so we should always police ourselves and be on the look out for POV even if that attention is brought by a Goodkin fan in "retaliation" for having his own POV edited out. It's not really an anon IP, it's Mystar. Look up his history of edits and it will paint all the picture you really need. We do need to find that Time article and source it though as it's relevent. I'll see if I can't find it today unless someone else can dig it up first. NeoFreak 14:06, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

Yikes. Hopefully we get no more of that, but good call on the removal of the POV. I hadn't really read through this page in a while and I didn't realize it needed the help it did. -Captain Crawdad 10:22, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

Pronounciation guide Question

In the pronounciation guide, what does the CBC stand for? Some of the creditings are to GRRM-CBC for example, and while the other acronyms are listed, I couldn't find CBC.Coldwind 19:22, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. It's a long interview that GRRM did when he toured Canada to promote FfC. Arbor 20:09, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

Suggestion for table: # chapters per POV

Wouldn't a table like this be somewhat informative? It's verifiable and NPOV, and furthermore a good way to explain the POV structure, and some of the structural changes in it (like the increasing number of "other" POVs and the split between volumes 4 and 5).

Number of chapters per point of view character
	Game	Clash	Storm	Feast
Bran	7	7	4	–
Catelyn	11	7	7	–
Daenerys	10	5	6	–
Eddard	15	–	–	–
Jon	9	8	12	–
Arya	5	10	8	3
Tyrion	9	14	11	–
Sansa	6	8	6	3
Davos	–	3	6	–
Theon	–	6	–	–
Jaime	–	–	9	7
Samwell	–	–	4	5
Cersei	–	–	–	10
Brienne	–	–	–	8
Others	1	1	2	10

I, for one, like the concept. It's spoilerish but I don't think that should really be a big concern in an encyclopedia. Maybe a page count could be introduced as well? NeoFreak 14:10, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

Wouldn't the page count depend on the edition, whether it's paperback or hardcover and so on and so forth? —Nightst a llion (?) 19:25, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

That's a very good point, I didn't even think of that. Duh. I guess the US hardcover should be used as all the books are in that form, they are the most common esp on an englsih wikipedia. As far as I know the only diffrence would be the cover art from edition to edition so it wouldn't matter if we used the 1st 2nd or 3rd. NeoFreak 19:29, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

The format used for the Wheel of Time main page, where they have a similar table, is interesting. Personally I don't think it's entirely necessary, but if you want to set such a table up, than sure. It's not a spoiler since we already list the POV characters in each book anyway. As for page count, you could use the mass-market paperback page counts as actually they are the most common format for the books and I believe they are consistent between the UK and US editions. However, we do have the headache of ASoS being split in two in the UK, which would require accounting for on such a table.--Werthead 23:14, 17 September 2006 (UTC)

Finished the table. I think this is good information—it makes a point about chapter structure in general, but also about the drastic change of viewpoint characters in Feast. This way we don't have to write hogwash like "Many fans were disappointed by the number of foreign POVs introduced in FfC and missed their favourites". Instead, we can just point this out in the table without making a value judgement or guessing what "many fans" may or may not have felt. As to page counts, I am not sure how much interesting information they add (apart from number-cruft). If anybody wants to add them, go ahead. Arbor 09:14, 18 September 2006 (UTC)

So...umm...why isn't this in the article, if everyone seems to agree? Also, can anyone remind me what the 'other' POV chapters are? Are you counting the prologues (Ser Royce, Maester Cressen, Chett)? --Alex

"Ice and Fire"

The part where it says that the only place that the title is referred to is in Dany's vision of Rhaegar is only half-true. When the Reeds present themselves at Bran's feast, they swear their loyalty to him "by ice and fire". Furthermore, I thought it was pretty clear that ice and fire symbolize the Starks and Lannisters, respectively. Throughout the series, the Starks are described as having ice flowing through their veins, while the Lannister color is crimson, etc. If you guys think that counts as 'original research' then take it out, but the part about the Reeds is worth mentioning.--Alex

Your first point about the Reeds is valid and may be worth mentioning, but it is in no way clear that Ice and Fire represent Stark and Lannister. In fact, that is a highly unlikely interpretation. Far more believeable is that it either symbolizes Daenerys and Jon or the war between the Great Other and R'hllor. All of this, of course, is speculation, and therefore none of it need be discussed at length in the article. Indrian 17:57, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

Pictures of books

I was reading through the article and noticed that the pictures of books as they are now obscure the title of at least the themes section. I tried editing them down to 100px and looked at the preview - the covers seem pretty visible to me, and it fixed the formatting of the titles and sections. Thoughts? WLU 12:40, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

That's weird. I just looked at the previous version and the heading was fine. Anyway, I thought I had corrected a problem and it turns out it may not have been there, so if anyone prefers the 200px size images, I'm not too attached. It does seem to be bumping the edit tags down, perhaps a tabled version of the book covers might be useful? WLU 12:43, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

I'm still obsessing over the images. Here's a possible way of displaying the 4 covers so it's a horizontal row rather than a vertical column. You are more limited on how you can manipulate them, but it doesn't screw up the edits or headings from what I can see. WLU

2005 US Edition of A Game of Thrones from Bantam

2005 US Edition of A Clash of Kings from Bantam

2005 US Edition of A Storm of Swords from Bantam

2005 US Edition of A Feast for Crows from Bantam

Or there's an image table:

Novels in **A Song of Ice and Fire**
2005 US Edition of A Game of Thrones from Bantam	2005 US Edition of A Clash of Kings from Bantam	2005 US Edition of A Storm of Swords from Bantam	2005 US Edition of A Feast for Crows from Bantam

Though I don't understand why SoS and FfC are smaller than the others.

I must say that I really hate the horizontal layout. It looks wrong and pushes down some of the text on the screen, creating a sort of vacuum of information at the top of the page. None of the computers I use display any problems when the book covers are placed along the right side. I think they should be moved back to the way they were. -Captain Crawdad 05:05, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

The vacuum is 'cause of the index list, which is very long and I don't think can be moved around. I'm not super attached to the layout, not enough to revert it if someone else feels really strongly, but if it was switched back to along the right, I found the old pictures were very large and messed up the layout. I'm using Safari on a Mac to view them, perhaps that's why - when I view it on the old size and layout, it cuts off one of the headings and the edits hyperlinks above each section are all screwed up. Again, perhaps it's just 'cause of my program. I tried a preview of the old way, but with the images at 100px, I found it to be reasonably satisfactory - you can still see them, the text isn't overwhelming the picture and it doesn't seem to mess with the headings. Anyone know a way to put it in some sort of grid next to the contents box? That might solve my problems, but then again my problems might be unique to the computer and programs I'm using. I'm not a regular contributor here, so I bow before the preferences of those who are. WLU 14:32, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

The Ice Dragon?

Isn't new novel: The Ice Dragon set in the ASolaF world? It's written by Martin. It should be included in the list AWP_Lizard

No, "The Ice Dragon" isn't actually set in the Ice and Fire world, though some of the promotional material inaccurately suggests that it is. Brendan Moody 00:01, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

Template updates

I've corrected a couple of links I missed on the template, added categories, added associated items, and changed the colour scheme (couldn't find a color to match the lavendar-ish background for the categories cells, so went with shades of grey). Pejorative.majeure 20:51, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

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