<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>Goodkind's books are not the same as Martin's, Martin's is one big large slur of a novel where 90% of the stuff in the end turns out to be dead end and laregly irrelivant. Each book in the sword of Truth series is a separate novel with a separate story, a separate situation. They are all linked together by common characters, and are generally links in a developing history.
>The guessing is what keeps me reading, killing main characters has to be done with his style. I dont consider it a bad thing, many authors dont do it, maybe they should.
The majority of authors in the Post-modern trash literature genre do kill off their main characters and write their work in fairly fragmented form, which is what Martin's work most closely resembles. The entire horror genre of film works on the "watch to find out what happens next" formula, as do soap opera's. As I said, the main draw to his book is to see who gets killed next, because that is the chief defining factor of who gains power. In comparisson, Goodkind's work focusses mainly on developments in the plot, sure death does happen, but he is not going to kill off his characters who are telling the stories, that would just be foolish and would lead to a dead end; stories are not told by those who die in them. Consequently, the characters of Goodkind's world are much more richly developed than any in Martin's world, it is much easier to feel for Goodkind's characters, and to understand their actions, whereas Martin's seem rather impersonal (except for Jon who I believe is by far his best developed character). If Goodkind wanted to, he could have used different characters for each book, because each book does have its separate story. He used the same characters for all of his books up to Pillars of Creation (which incidently is possibly the best story he has told so far, but it had new characters, the main one only described before, during Stone of Tears) and people complained because they lacked the characters that they had grown attatched to in his previous books.
Now I am not completely against main characters dying off, but Martin's don't die off for the necessity of the plot, but rather the convenience of it; which is just lazy writing and ultimately has caused a lot of dead ends in the plot with information highly irrelivant to the rest of his story. An example of a character death necessary to the plot (historical reasons aside) would be William Wallace in Braveheart, he died towards the end, but as it was written, he served as a martyr which made for the heavy emotional impact of the final chapter. An example of a character dying just out of convenience, or shock value, would be anyone ever killed in a Jason/Freddie movie. I'm not saying that all horror is bad, just the majority, some Stephen King stuff has been done incredibly well, "It" comes to mind. The plot of It is not to see who gets killed next, but the actual development of the characters, and uncovering the mysteries surrounding "It". The best film/book that I can think of which relies on the shock value/convenience of "who dies next" is Final Destination, because at least it is honest about the essential nature and value of the plot.
>As for my guesses, i dont think Jon will be king, he is afterall a bastard and would disgrace himself even farther by leaving The Wall to claim the throne. The Wall is his fate.
If you read carefully of how well he develops his characters and the detail of their parts of the story, you'll see that Jon's up to date has received the richest amount of development. "Rob" (was it, I forget his name now) and Catherine (the mother, I forget her name exactly too) received very poor development, and ended up dead. It is already easy to see who is going to die among the villains for sure, because Martin portrays all of the Lannisters, except the Dwarf, to be rather stupid characters (Jaime in particular). Many of the characters have repetetive stories involved with them (Daneries, Sansa the two most obvious characters). I think that Arya will be one to survive solely based on the fact that she somehow has the strength and stomach of a grown merciless man, she killed armed guards on several occaisions, but then again, she seems to have the mentality and intellect of a five year old which might point to her being stupid, and therefore a possible death victim, but I think the unnatural strength unballances that.
>If he did, however, it is even less likely that he would fall in love with Danaerys (sp is close).
As the story has proven though, love, age, anything has nothing to do with anything, no one in this world cares. In fact, Martin prefers pedofile relationships that seem to lack any form of love.
>I predict she will be defeated.
That is a possibility, I don't think that he has developed her character very well, which shows me that he does not incredibly care for her as he does characters like Jon (in particular), the Dwarf, Arya, and even Bran.
>Remember Gendry? The lost son of Cersei's husband (the name eludes me)? He will be found out to be Barantheon and the true heir to the thone, not any of Lannister kids, and he will be king all said and done.
I forget that (it's been a while for me, and I have read about 40 novels since I read Storm of Swords last summer), but Gendry is a baseborn child, and has less power than Jon, and no where near the intelligence. Gendry would have to have followers to take power (he has none), Jon's followers will grow over time as he is the only hope for all in the North. Also with Jon, it is all but a certainty that he will find the sollution to the threat in the North as well he will unify the Wildings and the people of the Seven Kingdoms; thus he will eliminate the need of the Watch on the wall. I believe that he will acquire the means to end the threat in the North through Deneries (though, as I said, it's been a while since I read). Now I may not be remembering correctly, but I do recall Jon as being the son of one of the true line of Kings; he is not the bastard son of Edgar (or whatever that guys name was) he was son of Edgar's sister and of a Prince of the Dragon Royal Family (I really forget all their names now), this has been very clearly forshaddowed to: Mainly because that part of the story about Edgar's sister and the Prince would have otherwise been completely irrelivant to everything, and so would keeping Jon's past such a misty secret. In otherwords, Jon is the true heir to the throne.
Had I been Martin though, there is a lot of the book I would have left out, I would have cut all of the uninteresting stuff that didn't really seem to fit with the plot, and put it into the Appendix under a sort of historical-document type format. Therefore all of the information of what is going on (who kills who, etc..) would be known, and there wouldn't be this game of "who gets killed next" fit into mediocre writing, by an author not very enthusiastic about the majority of the characters within the book. I feel that would have made (at least the last two books) the series a much more interesting read, and I might have enjoyed all of it and not just a small part of it.</div>
-Insert Inspiring Quote-
