I just got to the red wedding. Why is the red wedding so hyped by everyone...

Arya isn't dead lul

kek, well I don't care too much about spoilers of characters living.

I just sort of assumed the Arya death was real because I figured it would justify people being shocked/pissed off at the red wedding sequence to the extent that they are.

>I haven't seen the show, I'm going to watch it after I finish A Dance with Dragons

Don't bother. Season 1 is good, because it's a translation of the book (with some minor errors, and a lot of the fantasy taken out of the story due to budget constraints and the constraints of reality). Each season after that gets progressively worse, the latest season being (probably because they have no book material to actually derive decent content from) a completely illogical eye-rolling cringe-fest fucking mess. The last season is going to be a total abortion - literally, it will butcher the end of GRRM's series before he even has chance to give birth to it, and he only has himself to blame for selling out his magnum opus before he finished it.

He wrote ASOIAF with the intention of creating something so huge and fantastical that it could never be translated to screen. Then he sold it to Hollywood, who dissolved it into trash. He will never finish the series - he lost his drive to write it. A lot of the plot secrets that he so carefully concealed and cultivated have already be revealed (or will be soon) on the screen, slapped up all in our faces in a quick and crude manner - how can he muster the energy to reveal them in his books when they've already been spoiled?

The TV show is shite, the books are doomed never to be finished.

Well now you know. Every single main character in the series dies at least once but not really.

>Did anybody actually give a shit about Robb and Catelyn?
I know you're trying to be edgy, but yes most people did care about them. Robb and Catelyn had been major characters since the beginning of the story. It looked as though they were the last hope of the Stark family and their deaths had a major impact on the surviving Stark members and the story in general.

>I just sort of assumed the Arya death was real
I'm with all the people above, I don't know what the fuck you're talking about. What death? Arya was with Yoren and the N'sW recruits, then she was with Bolton, then with Dondarrion's crew, and then the Hound until she left Westeros. At no point that I can recall was she "dead".

>Every single main character in the series dies at least once but not really.
That's a bit of an exaggeration. There are plenty who die and stay dead, and there are plenty who haven't died.

>there are plenty who haven't died

Who?

Arya. Sansa. Tyrion. Jamie. Cersei. Jorah. Barristan. Daenerys.
I started to say Davos, but I guess there is a cliffhanger ending to his POV at the Blackwater where one could ASSUME he died.
Anyway, there are more, that's just off the top of my head.

sam and brienne?

Arya has a fakeout death during the red wedding. I'm not going to look them up to in order to remember specific instances but I know every one of those characters had a fakeout death at some point. Daenerys had at least a couple and Davos had one at Blackwater. It was implied that Barristan died when soldiers went after him after he left Kings Landing.

Your problem is that you're too gullible, then. How did Dany have a couple? Just because she flew off on a dragon? That's not a death... Because she walked into fire? Literally a few pages later once the fire cools, she's sitting there with hatchlings suckling.
Tell me when Sam died. You can't. Cause he didn't. Arya didn't have a fakeout death. She was hit with the blunt side of an axe at one point, but that's all.
Literally nobody thought Barristan was dead. The people at King's Landing KNEW he escaped, killing the guards who chased him.
When did Sansa die? Tell me that. You can't.
How about Tyrion? The last we saw of him in the battle of the Blackwater after he was wounded was Podrick saying "you're hurt bad milord". THAT IS NOT IMPLYING DEATH.
People get hurt, chapters end abrubtly sometimes, but that doesn't mean they're dead.

Barristan murked the shit out of the gold cloaks sent after him, pretty sure it explicitly says so in the book. None of the other characters had fakeouts as far as I remember.

just so you know, most people would describe a fakeout death as something similar to what happened to Bran in book two. I think your definition is more than a little loose.

My problem isn't that I was every tricked by it, it's that Martin overuses the trope to the point of ridiculousness. He's a one trick pony. If you want to pretend that Martin isn't intentionally trying to lead his readers into believing characters are dying with his cliffhangers that's fine. I'm not going to bicker with you over it because its been years since I've read the books and I don't remember them all that well. I do know that Tyrion's fakeout death comes when he drowns with the stonemen though.

You can't deny that he's been overusing the fakeout death though

The Red Wedding on the show was more shocking to show watchers because Robb was a rounder character (never had a POV chapter but had many character moments in the show) and they made Catelyn (slightly) more likeable. Plus his fiance's death was more impactful because they actually loved each other; in the book Jeyne Westerling is just some girl Robb knocks up and she doesn't even die.

>If you want to pretend that Martin isn't intentionally trying to lead his readers into believing characters are dying with his cliffhangers that's fine.
I don't have to pretend that, because readers are smarter than you give them credit for. I've read hundreds of books where someone is knocked unconscious or "starts to drown" and the scene fades to black...and then later they wake up.
That's not a "trick" that's exclusive to Martin, it's a fucking standard of the fantasy genre, if not all fiction!
I'll agree with you that Martin certainly has no qualms about using that, but it's not a 'fakeout', because it's usually obvious which is a real death and which is just a SUSPENSEFUL ENDING TO A CHAPTER (oh god the fucking nerve, he wants us to squirm a bit).

back to back with the red wedding arya has a chapter that ends with the hound hitting her in the head with an ax. youre supposed to think he kills her, but hes really just knocking her out so he can sneak her out of there.

I agree with you about Jeyne, she was definitely fleshed out more in the show, but I found Catelyn just as unpleasant as in the book.

Yeah, I finally realized that was what he's talking about, I just never got any hint of death off that.

I never thought the red wedding was such a big deal, because as much as I like the Starks as a whole, Rob and Cat I didn't really give a shit about.
I got an awful lot of pleasure out of the purple wedding, though. More from the book, obviously.

it was just a device used to bring an end to the chapter, I don't think even GRRM himself expected you to believe she was dead. why wouldn't the Hound try and hit her with the business end of the axe if Martin wanted to fake you out?

Not really, I didn't think any of those characters had died while reading and I don't think Martin even intended for the readers to be fooled

That's a solid cover. Why'd they change it to the ugly one?

Catelyn losing what she thought was her only child in front of her eyes was quite heartbreaking imo

People like you are the reason I get made fun of on Veeky Forums when I post my bookshelf with ASOIAF on it

The whole sequence was really effective for me because I didn't know about RW and thought that Arya will finally be home. Because of what transpired I fully felt being completely lost in the world without any place to be or rest at.To be fair though I read it at a time when I still wasn't concentrated on reading into and predicting everything and that definitely played a large part.