This son of a bitch will take every excuse to delay TWOW:
"George R.R. Martin Hints at New Project with Arya Stark Star Maisie Williams; Says 'Do Not Want to Jinx It'"
Look, I'm totally fine with characters having cheats, like three dragons in an allegedly scarce-magic world. Cheat powers are a narrative convenience, and not intristically worse than having a character start with riches and power - it can enable some plots, just as it can trivialize others. What I don't like is the world not reacting on clear presence of cheat powers, or reacting in such supeficial way that it beggars belief. Like... if fucking cultivation novels can weave the fact that possessing an alienable cheat thingy paints a big fucking target on you into the plot, why can't Martin? Daenerys' adventures in ACoK/ASoS should have been a tense thriller, where she's trying to survive, hide, and avoid falling under control of others until her dragons get big enough to be a viable defense. Instead, they are Daenerys' Magical Adventure, where she solves all problems with violence or wills them away with the cheapest treachery ever.
That doesn't jive with how Daenerys spends two whole books doing nothing but lusting after a man with a blue beard and massacring brown people in Slaver's Bay.
He's even said his difficulty to deal with resolving what he called the Mereeneese Knot in a quick manner is why she didn't appear in A Feast For Crows, and why she still hasn't left Essos by the end of A Dance With Dragons.
They should've just brought Dany to Westeros after she got that army and once the dragons grew to a decent size. Full stop.
Cersei doesn't want Tommen to marry Margaery. That should've led to her inviting Dany to Westeros as a counterbalance against the growing Tyrell influence. Have Dany be set up by Cersei to be Tommen's bride-to-be, to deny Margaery the right of becoming queen.
At first, Ser Barristan argues against the deal, because it stinks of a trap, but Dany becomes desperate enough once the people of Slaver's Bay reject her reforms that she takes the deal, takes her army, her dragons, and her followers, and they sail west to Westeros. And Ser Barristan is right-it is a trap, but not for Dany.
When she arrives in Westeros, Cersei gives her every courtesy, and even tries to take the girl under her wing, almost like an apprentice, and outright promises Tommen to her in a public betrothal ceremony that ends with Dany taking Tommen for a ride on her dragon as it flies around the Red Keep.
It's also par for the course for Book!Cersei; she does things that on paper, sound smart, but upon close inspection, it causes a lot of problems, like how she made that deal with the Faith Militant. The deal sounds solid; the marriage will give Tommen a stronger claim to the throne due to marrying a Targaryen, and Dany has the dragons and the Unsullied army-a tempting asset for any tyrant who wants to remain in power. Cersei seeks to control the dragons through Daenerys, she sees the Unsullied as another unit full of cannon fodder to toss at the enemy, and her marriage deal between Tommen and Dany prevents Margaery from becoming Queen.
But what Cersei doesn't realize is that Dany has more of a spine of her own, and when she stops needing Cersei and Tommen gets old enough to wed her, she becomes more assertive, and her literal firepower becomes more of a threat as the Lannisters now have to contend with a bossy Targaryen Queen who has their new king under her thumb. Then you can have Stannis defeat the Boltons, join forces with Jon Snow, and plan for the defense of Westeros against the Others, and they have to persuade Cersei, Dany, and Margaery to join them.
Sure, Martin still occasionally tortures her, because that makes his fat pink mast hard, but nothing compared to fates of other characters.
It never ceases to amaze me all these preachy liberal men hiding their fetishes behind the guise of realism. Like dude, we get it, women getting tortured gets some men hard. It's nothing to be ashamed of. But the fact is, GRRM threw his lot in with people who would get pissy with him about his kink, so he hides it behind a guise of realism when in reality, as you said, he gives his female characters a hard time because that gets his willy wet.
I've mentioned before, in the HotD thread, that Martin just stopped advanced the story because he wrote almost every relevant character into predicaments so dire that he could not write them out in satisfying, non-asspull ways. But another reason the story stalled probably was Daenerys' side of the story getting into position where it should have increasingly taken over the rest of plot. I wonder if the above-outlined favoritism was not due to Martin especially liking Daenerys (except as fap material), but on the contrary - once she hit her lowest point before the end of Book 1, and ended in a place with nowhere to go, but up, he no longer enjoyed writing her chapters, and sought to "speedrun" them, resolving all the story beats necessary for the overall scheme of things as swiftly and easily as possible.
That's the problem with grimdork writers like GRRM. The situation becomes so dire that only an asspull can save the characters, but if they did that, it'd destroy the dark atmosphere that the novels rely upon as a selling point.
I think he just had favoritism for the character because she's, in his mind, the 3rd most important to the story after Jon and Tyrion, and the source of near all the fantasy elements in it.
Dumping most of the fantastical shit onto one character's story is a massive mistake, in my opinion. I mean, at this point, if we removed Dany's story from the equation, most of the fantastical elements not involving wargs, Others, and the Red Priestess disappear.
The timeskip was designed around the sizes of the dragons and the ages of the young protagonists. Without the time skip we have teenage and even younger world leaders and dragons the size of a small cow. Unless we want to watch the characters and dragons age in real time we either need a timeskip. Or GRRM will be ending the novels with dragons the size of large dogs beating the Others. And children like Bran as a 10-12-year-old ruling the world. He's written himself into a situation that requires two more books of content to resolve. Or skipping a decade of story and just hand waving most of the timeline of the main series.
It's clearly his 'gardener' technique making plotting the novels impossible. And those characters are not as important as Bran either. A character with even bigger issues regarding his plot and characterization. Bran is supposed to be the center of the story, future ruler, first POV chapter, etc. and has less direction than almost any main character.
This is what happens when you have a story writer who dismantles the outline he made for himself just to watch his characters organically grow. Things such as stories need structure and a direction, otherwise, it's just a jumbled mess that goes nowhere, which is what the ASOIAF series has been since books 4 and 5.
Imagine writing the 'biggest' fantasy series of all time only for most of its timeline and story to happen in a paragraph summary. And then for the rest of the chapters to be bogged down with food platters. And descriptions of Tyrion's penis and other fat pink masts. The next Tolkien. Where things like Dany ruling or the Others preparing to invade are never described to the reader. But Tyrion's sexual experiences with dozens of prostitutes are given vivid detailed accounts across multiple books.
Next Tolkien my ass. It's a hilarious joke that GRRM picks on Tolkien for supposed "flaws" when Tolkien actually managed to finish his fucking story and have a substantial message behind it. Not to mention said story became the framework for 90% of western fantasy in the years after LOTR. GRRM's focus on things like Tyrion's dick or his escapades with whores while skimping on more substantial matters goes to show where his focus lies.
Maybe he should've been more honest and made ASOIAF as smut, like hentai. Then at least, it'd be more honest.
If the main story of the series is "the Others" then almost every single chapter is of zero consequence. It still leads me to believe that the Others will die before reaching Winterfell just like in the HBO show. And that GRRM will get right back to writing about food and whores and King's Landing with only a brief interruption of the zombie snow apocalypse. And that the real story is the Iron Throne and Westerosi culture and not some existential threat that won't even reach Essos or more than few miles beyond the Wall.
The entire cast of characters haven't done anything in the last two or three books depending on the POV. And the Others haven't really done anything either. The Wildings have made more of a presence at the Wall at this point. We're supposedly 75% of the way through the novels and almost no one has interacted with the Others aside from Jon or Sam. And Jon is dead and Sam is now hundreds of miles south of the Wall.
I wouldn't be surprised if GRRM makes it so that the real enemy is the patriarchal culture and the monarchy instead of the Others. The Others have always felt more like a peripheral threat; they're not like the Undead Scourge from Warcraft who devoured the Kingdom of Lordaeron and the other human realms in Azeroth. They're basically there to be the zombie equivalent of Picts that the Romans have to keep out.
Point is that this series cannot be salvaged. It needs to be rewritten from chapter one.
I'd probably scrap most of books 4 and 5 outside of the Winterfell and Sparrow plotlines.