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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Theron" data-source="post: 2736355" data-attributes="member: 2326">I finished it over the weekend.  Definitely the weakest of the series so far, but still head and shoulders above the vast majority of the fantasy field.Re: the complaints about Cersei's screen time.  I knew she was going to be a POV character this time around and I feared that Martin would have me grudgingly caring for her by the end of the book, much as he did with Jaime's first POV book.  Looking back, I think he was playing on that expectation with every intention of making us like her even less.  He did need to show us how things were falling out in King's Landing, and more importantly, he had to show us that things were going to hell pretty much entirely through Cersei's actions.  If he'd done it from without, through the eyes of another party, it wouldn't hold as much impact.  If you think about it, we've had three volumes of POV from a tremendous schemer in Tyrion.  All along, we've gotten the feeling that Cersei was a conniving rhymes-with-witch, but one also got the idea that she did have a bit of an inkling of how the Game of Thrones was played.In this volume,  we really see that any clout she had was entirely due to family and station.  She's the classic case of someone believing their own press and getting destroyed by it.  When she started hatching her plans to undo Margaery and kill Jon at the wall in one Rube Goldbergish swoop, I found myself laughing out loud at the sheer incompetence that would dream up such a notion.In short, I didn't mind her having all that screen time.  I'm not sure who else you could have given it to.  She's a hateful little beast, but she's readable, and after the way all the competent people vacated King's Landing, who else could he elevate to POV character?</blockquote>

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