Bad news, "Game of Thrones" fans, i.e., everyone: George R. R. Martin is commenting on "Winds of Winter" spoilers again. His agenda today: Confirming that he can kill off POV characters a lot more easily than he could before, and reveling in it. That's the new takeaway from an event in London, and it doesn't bode well for our favorites.
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The newest "Winds of Winter" spoilers, vague as they are, come out of a new speech by George R. R. Martin in London-town. Specifically, it was the HarperVoyager event with Robin Hobb that our team speculated could potentially be the big reveal of the "Winds of Winter' release date. Sadly, that glorious event did not transpire, and we are left as curious as ever about how far he actually is. But his comments, which you can read in full over at Buzzfeed, of all places, are worth taking a look at. Here's the highlight:
The way my books are structured, everyone was together, then they all went their separate ways and the story deltas out like that, and now it's getting to the point where the story is beginning to delta back in, and the viewpoint characters are occasionally meeting up with each other now and being in the same point at the same time, which gives me a lot more flexibility for killing people.
It makes sense, after all: Except for Daenerys, all the POV characters in "A Game of Thrones" started off in Winterfell. Of course, they spread out pretty quickly, but even in book 1, most POV characters were either in Winterfell or King's Landing, or on their way there. Compare that to "A Dance With Dragons," where we have POV characters on the Wall, in King's Landing, in Slaver's Bay, at the Dreadfort, at Deepwood Motte, beyond the Wall, on the great river of Essos, on the way to Slaver's Bay, in Braavos, in Dorne and in the Riverlands, and that's not even counting the people who were only in Feast, like Sansa. It's tough to kill off characters when there's so little overlap: We wouldn't be able to find out what was going on in those locations, even if the needs of the story demanded it.
But George has many times alluded, generally speaking, to a structural "Winds of Winter" spoiler: That the story is coming back together again. It looks like Daenerys will return to Westeros in the relatively near future. At the least, everybody in Essos is now in Meereen or will be within a few days, and an increasing number of people in Westeros are in the North-specifically near Winterfell-along with the usual contingent in King's Landing. And that means, if one of those characters die, we won't lose our view of that location.
It gives George the flexibility he needs for "Winds of Winter," and, as the story narrows and we get closer to the climax in "A Dream of Spring," it stands to reason that more and more characters are going to die or otherwise be written out of the story. Who will it be? That's not for me to speculate, nor to spoil (probably not that one from "Dance," though). But it's worth remembering: We don't really think of George as a writer who handles us with kid gloves, he's always dealt with characters in a somewhat... forceful... fashion, and it sounds like that's only going to get worse from here. I can't wait.
