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Notes -
Well, the things that worked best for me in the series were generally either individual character work, or the entertainingly convoluted web of treachery. The most popular characters in Ice and Fire are the ones that lean into both, right? Tyrion stands out. But even past that, if I think about characters I liked or chapters I looked forward to, there's Davos, Jaime, Brienne, or even to an extent Sansa. Cersei getting chapters for the first time was also appealing; really, all of the core Lannister trio are great. I liked characters with strong convictions and complicated personal loyalties who get mixed up in or who have front row seats to leaders making difficult decisions under uncertain circumstances. Jon and Sam had some of this as well, though as I said, in general I think the Night's Watch sections, though good, deserve their own separate novel and don't complement the rest of Ice and Fire.
Meanwhile I tended to get bogged down in or just want to skip past the Bran or Daenerys chapters, or even a lot of the Arya chapters, because they are not connected to most of the political action. All the vague mysticism and prophecy is not what GRRM does well, and Essos in general suffers from firstly being a land of absurd racial caricatures, and secondly being completely disconnected from and irrelevant to the action of the story. I just do not care about the Targaryens.
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