The Jeffisode: I Am Right: The Five-Year Gap Was Bad SHOW NOTES!

Hello and welcome to the Not A Cast … podcast: the one true chapter-by-chapter podcast going through A Song of Ice and Fire one chapter a week. I’m one of your hosts Jeff better known as BryndenBFish. And I’m all here … all by myself today as Emmett takes a well-deserved break and vacation.

And welcome to the inaugural Jeffisode titled “I Am Right: The Five-Year Gap Was Bad” in which, in this episode, I talk about why I am right about the Five-Year Gap being bad.

This episode is brought to you by our NotASmallCouncil:

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Spoiler warning: All published books, 5 novels, 3 Dunk and Egg novellas, histories, interviews, TWOW sample chapters, as well as Game of Thrones the TV show. Anything and everything!

So, normally here, we’d have a question, but not here. We’ll resume questions from all of our Sworn Sword and higher-level patrons next week when we return with ASOS, Jon I.

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That out of the way, let’s get to the synopsis of the Five-Year Gap!

Synopsis

THE CAUTIONER’S TALE: PROLOGUE: NEW YEAR’S DAY, 2008

Interstate 695: The Beltway

A line of steel, plastic, and brake lights bleeds into the horizon.

Stupid. I’m so fucking stupid.

Another arctic gust whistles against my car. I can’t feel the wind whipping my skin, but I shiver anyway. I throw the heat on. The air hits my face cold, slowly warming until the tip of my nose burns. I let the pain linger.

At least I feel something.

Oh wait. Shit. Wrong doc. How silly of me to advertise the novel of a generation which will sell billions of copies (hello literary agents, my DMs are open) on this podcast.

I digress.

Depth

• Defining the Five Year Gap
  • So, the infamous Five-Year Gap. What is that shit all about?
  • The term “Five Year Gap” should be an easy one to define, but it’s somehow confusing to people.
    • Yes, I’ve read some people who think the Five-Year Gap was the five years it took for George to write AFFC. I mean, they have a point: a wrong one, but I understand. And none of you are free from sin either.
  • So, let’s define what the Five-year Gap actually is: In short, the Five Year Gap was a proposed five year jump in the timeline of ASOIAF between events from A Storm of Swords and the fourth book in ASOIAF then known as A Dance with Dragons.
  • Here’s George talking about it:
    • I came up with the idea of the five-year gap. "Time is not passing here as I want it to pass, so I will jump forward five years in time." And I will come back to these characters when they're a little more grown up. And that is what I tried to do when I started writing Feast for Crows. So [the gap] would have come after A Storm of Swords and before Feast for Crows.
  • (I dedicate the George voice to AdmiralKird whose YouTube channel you should be subscribed to, but his George voice is nearly identical. And seriously, I wasn’t trying to plagiarize. It just kind of came out when I was trying out my first George voice for the episode, and it sounds like Mr. Plinkett and AdmiralKird’s George voice.)
  • In developing the Five-Year Gap, GRRM may have been inspired by his earlier novel Fevre Dream -- which, not to spoil it too much, has a rather lengthy time gap around the two-thirds point in the novel.
  • So, why did GRRM decide on a Five-Year Gap in the first place? Mostly, it’s because the characters were not aging as quickly as he wanted.
  • The original idea when GRRM wrote ASOIAF was that there would be a natural progression in the age of characters.
  • But GRRM being GRRM kept gardening more and more events into the timeline which considerably slowed down the chronology of ASOIAF as he talked about in 2013:
    • Originally, there was not supposed to be any gap. There was just supposed to be a passage of time, as the book went forward. My original concept back in 1991 was, I would start with these characters as children, and they would get older. If you pick up Arya at eight, the second chapter would be a couple months later, and she would be eight and a half and [then] she'd be nine. [This would happen] all within the space of a book.

But when I actually got into writing them, the events have a certain momentum. So you write a chapter and then in your next chapter, it can't be six months later, because something's going to happen the next day. So you have to write what happens the next day, and then you have to write what happens the week after that. And the news gets to some other place.

And pretty soon, you've written hundreds of pages and a week has passed, instead of the six months, or the year, that you wanted to pass. So you end a book, and you've had a tremendous amount of events — but they've taken place over a short time frame and the eight-year-old kid is still eight years old.

• Another reason why GRRM thought the Five-Year Gap would work in the story was the dragons as he talked about in 2005:
  • I announced the famous five-year gap: I was going to skip five years forward in the story, to allow some of the younger characters to grow older and the dragons to grow larger, and for various other reasons.
• So aging up the children and the dragons (and various other reasons) were what influenced George to attempt the five-year gap, but this solution to the problem of the kids not aging up fast enough came fairly late in the process of George writing ASOIAF -- namely between ACOK and ASOS.
• The Meta-History of the Five-Year Gap
  • The first mention of the five-year gap came up right after GRRM published A Clash of Kings in 1998 when he told Elio Garcia Jr.
    • I am not completely certain how long a period of time A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE will cover. There will be a gap of about five years between the end of A STORM OF SWORDS and the beginning of A DANCE WITH DRAGONS, but overall… well, we’ll have to wait and see. – GRRM, So Spake Martin, 11/30/1998
  • Now, the timing of GRRM developing the 5YG is fascinating, because it was right around this time that GRRM also decided to sketch out all of the remaining plot details that would be in ASOIAF.
  • In fact, GRRM called it an outline. And GRRM, as everyone who studies this meaningless shit knows, is famously adverse to an outline as he is a gardener, not an architect and yadda-yadda.
  • The thing is that this was a separate outline from the 1993 Pitch Letter, and I think from all available evidence, this is largely the story contours GRRM has stuck to -- even as puts the finishing touches on Wild Cards: Flopped the Nuts.
  • Anyways, I think the outline was also the point where GRRM decided on the Five Year Gap.
  • So, we’re talking 1998 at this point just as George moved into writing A Storm of Swords.
  • Here’s a little theory I’ve kind-of played around with: I think GRRM, knowing that he was going to jump the story ahead by five years, was inspired by both how fast he wrote ASOS and also how plot-impactful the story became in ASOS.
  • Every POV character in ASOS has major arc-ending stories that both resolved Act 1 of ASOIAF and really fucking slapped hard.
  • The reason all of these stories slapped so hard was because GRRM knew that he had to wrap Act 1 of ASOIAF in order for the Five-Year Gap to occur.
  • So, if you have a wrong opinion that ASOS is the best book in ASOIAF, and it’s because all the dynamic plotting and resolution GRRM integrated into the book, I think you can partially credit the Five-Year Gap for it.
  • So, let’s fast-forward to the year 2000. By that time, ASOS was published and was the first book in ASOIAF that hit the best-seller charts.
  • GRRM goes on a book-tour and returns in late November 2000 and gets to writing ADWD, albeit an ADWD with a five-year gap.
  • From November 2000 until September 2001, GRRM wrote several hundred manuscript pages of ADWD with the Five-Year Gap in mind.
  • Do we know what stories were in the Five-Year Gap version of ADWD? Indeed we do. Somewhat.
• Everything We Know About the Plots from the Five Year Gap
  • Throughout the years, GRRM’s statements and interviews about ASOIAF have been collected by fans.
  • The most famous example of this is known as So Spake Martin on westeros.org: a curated collection of sayings GRRM has made since 1991. It’s maintained by the founders of westeros.org Elio Garcia Jr and Linda Antonsson.
  • Additionally, GRRM has his own blog called NotABlog in which GRRM occasionally finds time between promoting Wild Cards and mourning every New York Giants/Jets loss to talk about ASOIAF
  • There are a lot of statements about the Five-Year Gap contained therein, and over the years, I’ve collected a lot of information about ADWD: the book that never was, or it was, but it didn’t have the five year gap.
  • Arya
    • So, let’s cover everything plot-wise here, starting with Arya Stark
    • Arya Stark seemed to be a character that GRRM wrote a fair amount of material for with a Five-Year Gap in mind.
    • For instance, we know that the earliest version of the Mercy TWOW Sample Chapter was originally written as Arya’s first Five-Year Gap chapter.
    • Here’s GRRM talking about the history of that chapter back in 2014:
      • I mentioned that this chapter had quite a history. It’s true. The first draft was written more than a decade ago. Originally, it was intended to be the opening Arya chapter after the infamous “five year gap,” her first appearance in A DANCE WITH DRAGONS as initially conceived. Then it was supposed to be a part of A FEAST FOR CROWS, after I abandoned the five year gap and split the books. Then it was going to be the concluding Arya chapter in A DANCE WITH DRAGONS. But it seemed more like an opening chapter than a closing one, so shortly before ADWD was published my editor and I agreed to remove it from DANCE and shift it over into WINDS. – Notablog 3/27/2014
    • So, a lot of folks have pointed out that even in the released Arya sample chapter, there are some rather mature sexual themes in the chapter -- like how Arya seduces Raff the Sweetling, even getting her first kiss from Raff before, of course, murdering him.
    • What I, and others, have theorized is that a lot of that is leftover material from the Five-Year Gap where Arya Stark would have been about sixteen years old or so.
    • Meanwhile, there have been hints over the years that a lot of the Arya material that GRRM wrote for the Five-Year Gap ended up being material leftover for TWOW.
    • We know that Jonathan Roberts, the artist for The Lands of Ice and Fire received a batch of Arya TWOW chapters in early 2012, and I suspect that these chapters were likely refashioned chapters from the Five-Year Gap -- remember! “Mercy” was originally written as Arya’s first post-five year gap chapter. I suspect there were other completed Arya chapters from the 5YG which GRRM has since rewritten. Maybe.
    • Overall, GRRM said this about Arya’s Five-Year Gap chapters:
      • [The gap] worked well with some characters like Arya — who at the end of Storm of Swords has taken off for Braavos. You can come back five years later, and she has had five years of training and all that.
    • George’s original idea, then, was that the plot would skip over Arya’s novice training to become a Faceless Man and plop her right into her role as an acolyte of the Faceless Men and get to her doing all the killing shit.
  • Sansa
    • Turning next to Sansa Stark, we can be reasonably certain that at least one, probably two or more, Sansa chapters were written with the Five-Year Gap in mind.
    • In May 2001, GRRM was asked a question about custom titles in Westeros, and he responded:
      • I am not sure what you mean by a "custom title." A title from the books? There are a few in the volume I'm presently working on that readers haven't seen yet... a guy who calls himself King of the Mummers, frinstance... another one who is called Harry the Heir... these are informal titles, though, on a par with the Knight of Flowers or the Kingslayer, and so on... - SSM, 5/2/2001
    • The King of Mummers was Izembaro from the Mercy chapter, and Harry the Heir is a figure who should be familiar to those who have read the Alayne sample chapter that GRRM released as a sample in 2015.
    • We can reasonably deduce, then, that the Alayne chapter was originally written for the Five-Year Gap.
    • In fact, GRRM hinted at it when he talked about “finishing” a Sansa chapter for ADWD in 2008 (long after he’d abandoned the gap)
      • I am getting a lot done. Finished an Arya chapter yesterday, and a Sansa chapter the day before. (And before you guys assume I'm writing a chapter a day, I said "finished," not "wrote." Large portions of these particular chapters were written years ago. A chapter a day? I wish). - Notablog, 5/23/2008
    • When Adam Whitehead, AKA Werthead, did his “Facts and Figures” essay on AFFC, he noted:
      • TWoW is going to be massive headache because apparently there were 1-2 Sansa chapters written for the pre-split AFFC which aren't showing up until TWoW.
    • So, not a lot of Five-Year Gap chapters for Sansa probably. I think it’s the logical conclusion, though, to think that the 5YG Sansa material is similar to what was seen in the Alayne chapter.
    • Again, Sansa’s seduction of Harry the Heir - as suggested by Littlefinger - reads as a leftover from the 5YG when Sansa was eighteen years old.
    • My suspicion is that Sansa’s plot from the 5YG will be quite similar to her plot when TWOW is published next week as the material for Sansa in AFFC was developed after the gap was abandoned.
    • So, we’d probably have the Tourney of the Winged Knights, Littlefinger’s plan to reveal Alayne as Sansa and the probable march north for the Knights of the Vale in a 5YG scenario.
  • Bran
    • Turning next to Bran: Bran Stark has always been the hardest character for GRRM to write due to his age.
    • In my mind, I think Bran Stark was one of the primary motivations for the Five-Year Gap in the first place -- especially given Bran’s role as the future King of Westeros as revealed by the Thrones Show, Season Eight.
    • How believable is it for an eight or nine year old child to get his way onto the Iron Throne in GRRM’s grounded mEdIeVaL rEaLiSm?
    • Regardless, GRRM thought that the Gap worked well for Bran as he said in 2013:
      • Bran, who was taken in by the Children of the Forest and the green ceremony, [so you could] come back to him five years later. That’s good. Works for him.
    • What is this “green ceremony”, you ask? What I think GRRM is referring to there is that extremely creepy ceremony where the Children of the Forest feed Bran the bowl of paste totally made of weirwood sap and not the remains of his friend Jojen Reed and then starts to experience visions of the past.
    • Let’s get super fucking into the weeds here. Here’s something I never connected previously: in 2008, GRRM talked about finishing a Bran chapter in ADWD that took him “six years to write.” I think this chapter is ADWD, Bran III. But the weirdness is that in 2012, GRRM said that he hadn’t written any Bran material when he split AFFC and ADWD into two separate books in 2005.
    • What I think now is that the green ceremony scene was written for the Five-Year Gap, and then refashioned for ADWD with it occurring without the gap -- hence why GRRM said it took “six years” to write that Bran chapter but he hadn’t written anything for AFFC by the time he split AFFC/ADWD: because all Bran material was written for the Five-Year Gap and then refashioned after the split.
  • Daenerys
    • Moving onto Meereen, we come to Dany, and we have a sense of the plot GRRM had in mind for her story in a 5YG ADWD.
    • In 2011, right before ADWD was published, GRRM was interviewed by Elio Garcia about the book he was about to publish and talked a little bit about Daenerys in ADWD:
      • "There's a Dany scene in the book which is actually one of the oldest chapters in the book that goes back almost ten years now. When I was contemplating the five year gap [Martin laughs here, with some chagrin], that chapter was supposed to be the first Daenerys chapter in the book. Then it became the second chapter, and then the third chapter, and it kept getting pushed back as I inserted more things into it. I've rewritten that chapter so much that it ended in many different ways." - SSM, 7/11/2011
    • What Dany scene was this? I think the context clues are that this was the Daznak’s Pit scene from ADWD when Drogon returns to Meereen.
    • What’s interesting about this scene was that when GRRM later read this as a sample for AFFC in 2003, the scene did not have Dany flying away atop Drogon as it appeared in the published version -- though this may be due to the fact that GRRM didn’t want to spoil the ending of the scene of Dany becoming a dragonrider.
    • Did she fly away atop Drogon in the 5YG version? It’s hard to say, but if this was the intent, it meant that the original Dany arc would have had her flying away from Drogon to embark on a Dothraki arc in ADWD rather than sticking around Meereen.
  • Jon Snow/Stannis
    • So, the Stark siblings and Daenerys seemed to be the spots where the gap was working well. Let’s turn to where it started to not work as well, starting with Jon Snow and Stannis Baratheon.
    • At the end of ASOS, Jon had just become LC of the NW, and had a king (Stannis) to face.
    • That was a pretty dynamic jumping off point for the story, and GRRM had written himself into a corner where there’d be some fairly massive plot unfoldings in the story that would have occurred in those five years.
    • However, GRRM’s first thought was, “Nope. Nothing much is happening up at the Wall for five years!” as he said in 2005:
      • He was writing chapters where Jon thought, "Well, not a lot has happened these past five years, it’s been kinda nice.”
    • In 2013, he recalled how this was not a good way for the northern story to unfold:
      • “The Jon Snow stuff was even worse, because at the end of Storm he gets  elected Lord Commander. I’m picking up there, and writing ‘Well five years ago, I was elected Lord Commander. Nothing much has happened since then, but now things are starting to happen again.”
    • In the case of the North, the Five-Year Gap reads as inauthentic storytelling -- an artificial time gap that would make Jon’s story seem strange and not compelling.
    • With Stannis, it’s hard to imagine the King just hanging out at the Wall for five years with the Iron Throne still sat by traitors and usurpers.
    • Sure, Sad-King Stannis is the brooding type, but to brood at Castle Black for five years? It’s not believable -- especially given how Stannis moved decisively against Storm’s End, King’s Landing and on up to the Wall in the space of just a few months, maybe a year, in ACOK/ASOS.
    • The one plot-point we can be fairly confident that GRRM always intended -- even with a Five-Year Gap in mind - was Jon’s assassination.
    • In a 2011 interview, GRRM told James Hibberd:
      • “Some of the stuff about Melisandre warning Jon of “daggers in the dark” was written 10 years ago.”
    • Ten years before 2011 would have been 2001 when GRRM was writing an ADWD with a five-year gap.
    • So, Jon was always bound to face the daggers however the story unfolded. What’s unclear is whether the same set of plot points which drove Jon to the daggers would have been the same as seen in the published version of ADWD.
  • Cersei/King’s Landing
    • Another character where the Five-Year Gap did not work well was Cersei of House Lannister.
    • Although GRRM was not always certain, he seemed to have decided to include Cersei as a POV during the time of writing the Five-Year Gap, correctly deciding that Jaime alone would not be able to fully capture the politics of King’s Landing and the deterioration of the Lannister-Tyrell alliance in the wake of Tywin dying peacefully on the shitter with a crossbow bolt sticking out of him.
    • The problem was that in writing a five-year gap version of Cersei, GRRM realized there were many events which occurred during the five years since Cersei’s regency as he talked about in a 2013 interview:
      • “I'm writing the Cersei chapters in King's Landing, and saying, "Well yeah, in five years, six different guys have served as Hand and there was this conspiracy four years ago, and this thing happened three years ago."
    • To me, what that translates to in layman’s terms is how the fuck was Cersei ever going to stay in power for five years given all of the turmoil in King’s Landing that would have unfolded with her in charge?
    • So, in contrast to GRRM’s original idea that nothing much would happen at the Wall and GRRM realizing that didn’t make much sense, Cersei’s story was that too much was going to happen in those five years.
  • Dorne
    • Onto Dorne. The first two books had Dorne and the Dornishmen mostly off-stage and mostly there to develop the background of the story.
    • However, with the entry of Oberyn Martell in ASOS, Dorne came running into the plot of ASOIAF.
    • Right after Clash was published, GRRM talked a bit about this running entry into the story, saying:
      • The Dornishmen will come on stage in A STORM OF SWORDS and will have an even larger role in A DANCE WITH DRAGONS. As to why they have stayed aloof, well, both history and geography have set them apart from the rest of the Seven Kingdoms. – So Spake Martin, 12/18/1998
    • Remember: this was right around the time that the Five-Year Gap was imagined for the story. So, GRRM had a larger idea for Dorne’s story in a post-5YG version of ADWD.
    • What precisely was that idea? There isn’t a lot to go on, but there is a hint in a February 2001 SSM where a fan told George that Oberyn shouldn’t have died, because he was SOOO COOOL.
    • George responded:
      • GRRM: Wait till you meet his daughters. – GRRM, So Spake Martin, 2/1/2001
    • Again, February 2001 is squarely within the timeline of when GRRM was still writing a 5YG version of ADWD.
    • So, the Sand Snakes would have been big players in a 5YG version of ADWD with interesting roles (allegedly) to play.
• GRRM abandons the Five Year Gap to write AFFC or does he?
  • But Dorne is where GRRM struggled to write a compelling story after the 5YG. And it became the pivotal reason why he ended up abandoning the gap some nine or ten months into writing it.
  • GRRM officially announced that he was abandoning the 5YG at Worldcon in September 2001: a month where nothing else happened …
  • Officially, the reason why GRRM abandoned the 5YG was straightforward
    • He said that he started writing the book set several years after the events of the last book but after he was several hundred pages in he decided that that just wasn't working; that he had to leave too much out. - SSM, 2/14/2003
  • However, in the years since, GRRM talked about how Jon Snow and Cersei’s Lannister’s stories were reasons why the 5YG didn’t work.
  • But the biggest reason the gap didn’t work, according to GRRM, is because of Dorne and Oberyn Martell as he revealed in 2002:
    • During Q&A, GRRM revealed what seemed to be the major reason for the five-year gap. He said that he realized something. He had to deal with the reaction to Oberyn’s death in Dorne. He thought of different ways that he could handle things. He could have just summarized what happened, without talking about it very much, but he did not want to do this. He could have decided that for some reason there was no reaction, or a delayed reaction, but the reasons he could come up for to do that did not make sense. So, he finally realized that the story needed to be told. – GRRM, So Spake Martin, 8/23/2002
  • So, he decided that showing the reaction to Oberyn Martell’s death had to be seen on-page, rather than told in flashback and memory.
  • Then again in 2003, GRRM further explained, talking about how all of the events in Dorne during the Five-Year Gap
    • On the 5-year gap this has probably already been discussed before, but here goes. George said that he was writing ADwD and was writing the flashbacks (he confirmed that they would have been flashbacks) and then he realized that he couldn’t just skip things like Myrcella being crowned and the resulting Dornish problems, for example. – GRRM, So Spake Martin, 8/23/2003
  • So, Myrcella’s crowning by Arianne was an important plot point which influenced GRRM in abandoning the Gap, because he knew he couldn’t do it in flashback and dialogue.
  • (Does anyone have a theory about this whole crown-Myrcella-thing? I don’t know!)
  • But here’s the thing that has been almost completely unexplored by the fandom: George did not abandon the 5YG in September 2001.
  • In fact, George’s next “fuck them kids. Why won’t they grow up and be #teens or adults” idea was a book known as A Feast for Crows.
  • In its original conception, A Feast for Crows was not half of the POV characters from ASOIAF -- mostly set in the south and Braavos.
  • Instead, AFFC was a bridging book that would cover all events from the 5YG; so that GRRM could get back on track in ADWD for the storylines he wanted to tell after AFFC got through those plot-points in the five years after ASOS
  • Don’t believe me? I’m insulted. But I will show you the evidence.
  • In 2001, at the Worldcon event that GRRM announced he was abandoning 5YG, a fan summarized what George was saying there:
    • The 4th Book will be A Feast For Crows, and will cover what would have been the five year gap. Some POV's -- who George said will be "learning" during the five year gap -- will have only one or two chapters.
  • Then in a 2002 interview, the interviewer asked whether AFFC would cover the five year period. George’s response?
    • I hope to cover the five years.
  • In 2003, in yet another interview, GRRM talked about what he intended for AFFC and ADWD:
    • At that point A Dance With Dragons becomes the fifth book and the book that I'm now working on, A Feast For Crows, is essentially the book that covers the five year gap that I previously was going to skip over. That's an oversimplification to an extent because it takes a certain amount of restructuring, and some of the events that were going to be in the fourth book are pushed to the fifth book, while others remain.
  • Here’s the craziest thing. Even as late as February, 2005: a mere three months before GRRM split AFFC and ADWD into two books, George made a convention appearance and was reported to have said this:
    • He thinks there are going to be 6 books in the series, but he laughed and said that of the five year gap AFfC has only covered 4 months so far. Others have mentioned 7 or 8.
  • Look, I know I’m a fucking nerd about this shit, but that is mind-boggling that George was still hoping that AFFC would do the entire 5YG.
  • I mean, at this point, George had like 1,300 manuscript pages for AFFC and had pushed the story along by only 4-8 months? C’mon!
  • For reference, ASOS was 1,521 manuscript pages and ADWD was 1,510 manuscript pages.
  • What I’m saying is that it seems pretty damn impossible that GRRM could either edit his work or simply jump another 50+ months of the timeline in the remaining 200 manuscript pages of space he had.
• GRRM finally comes to terms that the Five Year Gap will simply not work
  • And wouldn’t you know it, but George RR Martin agrees, or … he agreed me in 2005, when I was like fucking 21 years old and had never heard of books before. To this day, my question remains: what are books?
  • In those three months between the February 2005 con appearance and the AFFC publication announcement at ConQuest in May 2005, GRRM made the decision that he could not do the 5YG, saying at the con:
    • He confirmed that the 5-year-gap is now deader than the dodo and has fallen back on his excuse that in the Middle Ages kids had to grow up FAST, so that a 12 or 13-year-old would be much more mature than today. He wanted the books to cover a much longer span of time and blames himself for setting the first Catelyn chapter in A Game of Thrones on the same day that Robb and Jon find the direwolves in the snow.
  • In George’s mind, the main reason why he kept on going with a 5YG was because he didn’t want to disappoint fans, saying (again, at that con):
    • He wasted a lot of time trying to make the 5 year gap work, mostly because he had told so many people there was going to be one, and felt that he had to deliver. Otherwise AFfC would have come out significantly earlier.
  • But my favorite thing George said about abandoning the gap is something he said closer to the time when AFFC was published:
    • [George] said he would have abandoned the Five Year Gap sooner if he hadn't told so many fans about it. And there is no gap anymore. "If a twelve-year old has to conquer the world, then so be it."
  • Fucking needle that “if a twelve-year old has to conquer the world, then so be it” onto my face as a tattoo.
• Why abandoning the Five-Year Gap was good
  • So, we’ve spent a lot of time unpacking what the Five-Year Gap was, the plots of what the Five-Year Gap probably looked like, how GRRM abandoned it (sort-of) before truly abandoning it, and holy shit, we haven’t even gotten to the whole point of this episode: why I think it was a bad idea in the first place and a good idea that George dropped it.
  • Throughout the fandom, I constantly see how people thought that GRRM’s abandonment of the 5YG was a massive mistake, that the reason AFFC and ADWD sucked was because they didn’t have the 5YG.
  • Furthermore, a lot of the same criticisms of AFFC/ADWD interrelate to the 5YG: there was too much walking around, not enough action, too many training sequences.
  • Now, I think the smart listeners here can probably start to glean why I think the Five-Year Gap was a bad idea, but I’ll make my reasons explicit now.
    • The first point I want to make is that characters training and learning is an integral component of storytelling, demonstrating character growth and development.
      • It was probably easier for George not to write Arya’s entry to Braavos and her entry into the House of Black and White.
      • It’s fun to write a character in medias res and not have to do the hard work of showing how a character got from point A to B.
      • But while Arya’s AFFC chapters are not my favorite parts of the story, let me never state that I don’t think they’re important for demonstrating where she is in her story.
      • In sailing to Braavos and coming into the House of Black and White, Arya’s story continues the thread from ASOS of her identity: who is she? Is she Arya of House Stark? Is she Arry the Orphan Boy? Weasel? Some random smallfolk girl trying to survive the war?
      • AFFC has Arya learn how to be “No One” through becoming Cat of the Canals and then Blind Beth in ADWD.
      • Through the dynamic of name-changes, the instruction of the Kindly Man and Arya’s wolf-dreams, we see a complex conflict of identity for Arya -- one that needed to be properly set up in text for Arya to become Mercy and eventually, hopefully getting Needle and returning home as Arya of House Stark.
      • The same holds true for Sansa Stark. Her AFFC chapter - the three we have - are instrumental in furthering her character development.
      • Sansa learns how Littlefinger manipulates and holds power, how he uses promises, lies, bribes, manipulation and threats to deter the Lords Declarant.
      • We also see Sansa learning the subtleties of power and sex through Myranda Royce.
      • Sansa also has to deal with brats like Sweetrobin who have become the way he is through the negligence and mis-parenting of Lysa.
      • Finally, Sansa learns Littlefinger’s true plan: how he plans to marry Sansa to Harry Hardyng and then reveal her as Sansa Stark, manipulating chivalric imagery and ideals to drive the Knights of the Vale north to seize Winterfell and stake her claim.
      • Many people - and I count myself as one of them - think that Sansa Stark’s story in later seasons of the Thrones Show was a dud, because the show simply made Sansa politically smarter than everyone else without the requisite training arc she had in AFFC.
      • GRRM nearly made the same mistake with a 5YG version of Sansa.
      • IMO, if Sansa showed up on-page after the 5YG as politically savvy, it would have seemed like cheating the story -- in the same way that a smart Sansa in the later Thrones Show was unsatisfying without the requisite training arc as seen in AFFC.
      • When Sansa appears in the North come TWOW or ADOS, I think GRRM’s decision to not just open the story to a 5YG version of Sansa as a skilled political actor will read naturally.
      • And we can already see how Sansa’s training arc dovetails nicely with her story in the Alayne sample chapter from TWOW.
      • Onto Bran. George always struggled to write his story, with him citing Bran’s age as the main reason why this has been the case.
      • For reasons I’ll detail a bit later, Bran’s story may have been the spot where an aged-up Bran might have worked best.
      • However, his three chapters in ADWD (four if you count the one cut to TWOW) demonstrate Bran’s character development as well introduce important story elements: like all the cannibalism which will come hot and heavy in TWOW.
      • Additionally, Bran is the character with the closest tie to the magic of the series, and Bran’s three chapters - especially his third - in ADWD, start to show the mechanism for how greensight, skinchanging, warging, heart trees and blood sacrifice intermix.
      • Moreover, meeting the Three-Eyed Crow (who is Bloodraven BTW) is one of the spookiest, best horror scenes in the books.
      • The TEC is vital for Bran’s character development, and him attached to the roots of a weirwood tree shows Bran how he could end up if he detaches completely from his humanity.
      • For that matter, the Thrones Show did a version of the 5YG with a one-year gap between Seasons Four and Six.
      • Bran was not in Season Five of the Thrones Show, because the showrunners wanted his training under Bloodraven’s tutelage to occur off-page.
      • Did that make for more satisfying storytelling?
      • To me, no, it did not -- especially if Bran was being set up to be the endgame King of Westeros.
    • One Daenerys Targaryen.
    • So, the one mystery for Dany’s story in the 5YG was what happened at the end of her first 5YG chapter? Was she going to fly away atop Drogon similar to what happened in ADWD, Dany IX?
    • Or would she stay in Meereen and face many of the same obstacles she faced in the published version of ADWD.
    • For the sake of argument and because I think this may have been the case, I think Dany was always intended to fly away from Meereen at the end of her first 5YG chapter. And that’s not good storytelling!
      • Many fans are particularly critical of Dany’s ADWD story in the published form, frustrated by the malaise of Meereen and how terrible Meereen is as a setting.
      • What many fans miss is how Meereen is vital to understanding Dany’s character evolution.
      • At the end of ASOS, Dany decides to stay in Meereen to learn how to rule, thinking it will be a good experiment for her to rule a city-state prior to staking her claim to the Iron Throne.
      • However, this turns out to be an exceptionally hard task as Dany is met with violent resistance -- especially from the Great Masters of Meereen through the Sons of the Harpy and then from external threats like Yunkai and her allies.
      • Moreover, Meereen turns out to be extraordinarily dynamic in exploring Dany’s human heart in conflict with herself as she makes costly - perhaps too costly - sacrifices for peace when a big part of her just wants to roast her enemies and go conquer Westeros.
      • If her first chapter was her flying away - and I admit that’s not certain - it would have undercut the whole point of her being in Meereen in the first place: to learn how shitty it is to actually rule.
      • And while I think Dany’s pathway to nuking King’s Landing weaves its way through Meereen.
      • Because ultimately, Dany chooses fire and blood over peace at the end of her arc, dragons plant no trees, etc. You’ve heard this before, and all that was an extraordinarily well-earned plot resolution, setting her up for her role at the end of her arc.
    • And then there’s Jon and Stannis. Boy, I don’t know how George planned to pull off Jon’s or Stannis’ story with a 5YG in mind.
      • George already outlined his reasons why it worked worst with Jon given that having nothing happening at the Wall for five years didn’t make a lot of plot sense.
      • But the thing I want to drive home is how Jon’s arc in ADWD works best with him just assuming the role of LC of the Night’s Watch.
      • For one, Jon’s recent experience with the wildlings makes him the only figure truly sympathetic to the plight of the wildlings and makes his desire to bring them south of the Wall that much more poignant.
      • Secondly, Jon and Stannis were bound to come into conflict, and there’s no way Stannis just sits around at the Wall while usurpers sit the Iron Throne.
      • Third, ASOS has Jaime discover that “Arya” is being sent north to marry Ramsay Bolton. Given Jon’s love for his sister Arya, does it make any logical sense for Jon just to stew on Arya being given to a monster for five fucking years?
      • And what in the world are Mance and Tormund doing for these five years?
      • Finally, and this is the most important point: An inexperienced and young Jon Snow trying his best, making mistakes and then dying reads far more believably and tragically than an experienced LC Jon Snow in his 20s getting merc’d.
      • The tragedy of Jon Snow’s arc in ADWD is that the kid did his best, but he was undone by a number of factors, but one of the primary ones was his youth and inexperience.
      • Of course, Ned Stark made his mistakes and lost his head, and he was in his mid-30s, but I always felt that one of the points of Jon Snow’s story was that a lot of his mistakes came as a result of how young he was.
    • So, that’s Jon. Let’s turn to Cersei and Jaime’s stories, and the biggest point is that her story within the five years was too goddamn interesting to be told in flashback and in conversation
      • For starters, we really had to see the Lannister twins’ reaction to Tywin Lannister’s death. Jaime standing sigil over Tywin’s body as Cersei starts to misrule Westeros is a good story!
      • Meanwhile, all of the conspiracies Cersei weaves as Queen Regent are just too good to tell in retrospect and flashback.
      • Moreover, it’s hard to imagine that the Tyrell-Lannister tensions would just simmer for five years without boiling over at any point.
      • Like, can you imagine Cersei just living with Margaery married to Tommen for five years before moving against Margaery?
      • How about Jaime? Does he just sit around, not doing anything after Tyrion revealed that Cersei has been cheating on him with the Kettleblacks and Moon Boy for all I know? I think not.
      • Ultimately, the five-year gap storytelling in King’s Landing would have failed because of that old writing saw: Show, don’t tell.
    • Finally, Dorne: the main reason why GRRM abandoned the Five Year Gap.
      • If Dorne is as important to the future of the story as they seem to be set-up to be, we needed to see how the Dornish reaction to everything happening in the story.
      • Oberyn’s death, the crowning of Myrcella were all reasons why George decided to forego the 5YG.
      • However, to expand out why: I think we needed to see Dorne as a location in the immediate aftermath of Oberyn’s death.
      • When Doran Martell returns to Sunspear with the Dornish shouting “To the Spears!”, it’s a real visceral experience.
      • People are pissed that their beloved hero was “murdered” in King’s Landing by Gregor Clegane.
      • That level of dramatic tension would not have existed five years after Oberyn’s death. The Sand Snakes’ non-reaction to Oberyn’s death for five years makes even less sense.
      • And then there’s the story of Arianne/Young Grift and Quentyn/Daenerys. Do they work with five years of story behind them?
      • Perhaps, but so much of their stories are timed to occur precisely. Quentyn sets off from Dorne with the Dornish offer of marriage to Daenerys, and likely this would have occurred shortly after Oberyn was dispatched to King’s Landing.
      • Meanwhile, Arianne, having “discovered” Doran’s plan to make Quentyn the Prince of Dorne just sits around for years?
      • To be fair, George could have tinkered with the timeline a bit, having Arianne find out much later about her father’s plans and for Doran to send Quentyn after Dany when the dust settled from Oberyn’s demise.
      • But it gets back to that old question of dramatic tension. What makes a story feel alive? A lot of it has to do with how characters and plots are intersecting in real-time.
      • Plot-momentum propels stories forward, and so much of that in ASOIAF is directly related to how story ideas build off each other in distant and near past.
      • For Dorne, Oberyn and Doran plotted vengeance for Elia and her children after Robert’s Rebellion, Oberyn showed up for the first batch of vengeance in 299/300 AC in King’s Landing, then Oberyn dies. This propels the actions of the Sand Snakes. Arianne uses the death of Oberyn as cover for her own plot to displace Doran by crowning Myrcella. This, in turn, leads to the disruption of the plot by Doran and his agent, the maiming of Myrcella, the journey of Balon Swann down to Dorne, the conspiracy to blame it all on Darkstar and the arrival of the Golden Company in Westeros and JonCon’s letter.
      • And all of this occurs as Quentyn finds out that adventure stinks.
      • That’s plot-momentum, and a time gap of time would have made the entire endeavor feel artificial, not in keeping with the story as told by George in the first three books.
  • So, that’s just a bit about why I think the Five-Year Gap was bad, and George was right to abandon it.
  • Of course, let me know what YOU think -- on twitter, a comment on podbean, a livestream chat or as a regular comment on YouTube.
  • But before I get out of here, I wanted to talk about one more thing with the Five-Year Gap: whether it’s truly gone.

Theory/Discussion

Will there be a time skip in The Winds of Winter?

• As we’ve talked about, George RR Martin’s abandonment of the Five-Year Gap didn’t just occur in 2001. It took years for GRRM to abandon the Five-Year Gap, really only deciding to abandon it in 2005 when he split AFFC and ADWD into two separate books.
• Or did George RR Martin truly abandon the Five-Year Gap?
• Right after Season Eight of the Thrones Show aired, Elio Garcia Jr and Linda Antonsson (George’s co-authors for TWOIAF and someone GRRM consults with on a somewhat regular basis) released a video of them talking about the End of Game of Thrones.
• In the video, Elio said something interesting about Bran Stark becoming king and how it might work in ASOIAF around the 90 minute mark, and I’m paraphrasing a little for clarity:
  • “Without some significant jump in time, perhaps a five-year gap after The Winds of Winter, [Bran becoming King] might not work. If George starts talking about big jumps in time again, he’s probably trying to make the Bran story work.”
• To do a little throat-clearing, Elio wasn’t saying that this will happen, and he especially wasn’t saying that George told him that this would occur.
• However, it presents a fascinating dynamic: even if the Five-Year Gap for ADWD was abandoned, will we have a Five-Year Gap in TWOW or between TWOW and ADOS?
• Here’s the evidence for a time jump in TWOW or between TWOW and ADOS:
• Something you’ve probably noticed in all the analysis of the Five-Year Gap is how the timeline is more than a little unbalanced.
• Multiple storylines that were set to occur in a five-year gap version of A Dance with Dragons ended up being pushed to The Winds of Winter -- Arya, Sansa, Bran, Cersei and Dany.
• Meanwhile, other storylines are basically on-track with GRRM’s original conception of the Five-Year Gap: Jon and Stannis.
• So, what will George do in The Winds of Winter re-balance everything to time everything to occur in the most dramatically-satisfying way possible.
• Moreover, is it believable that a young boy - a Stark boy at that - would sit the Iron Throne -- especially given all of the tumult associated with Joffrey, Tommen, Young Grift’s and Dany’s short and violent reigns?
• Perhaps not. So, Bran as an aged-up character may work to offset this.
• Meanwhile, if Sansa becomes QiTN - something I think will absolutely happen by the end of ASOIAF - her being an 18 or 19 year old queen would work similarly as a more believable or realistic plot realization.
• But ultimately, I don’t think GRRM will do a five-year gap in the story. I think the story parameters are locked in with the last two books.
• Again, I go back to that quote about “if a twelve year old kid has to conquer the world, so be it.”
• That reads like George is just going to power forward with the story set without a jump forward in the timeline.
• For that matter, all of the points I was making before about how an artificial jump in the timeline would disrupt the story momentum of ASOIAF still stands.
• I guess there’s a point where maybe it’s going to take a really fucking long time for Dany and the POV characters around her to make it to Westeros, and maybe the Northern sand the King’s Landing storylines hit a lull that allows the story to jump forward by a few years.
• But I see no evidence by the end of AFFC/ADWD that we’re approaching that point.
• In fact, everything is speeding up plot-wise. Young Griff has landed. Stannis and the Bolton are about to finally battle. Jon is assassinated but will be back. Arya is coming into her own as a Faceless Man, Sansa is on the cusp of gaining a massive army for herself, the POV characters around Meereen have a ton of shit to survive and live through. And Dany is on the Dothraki Sea going backwards to go forwards
• So, while I think it’s a possibility, I think the story dictates should dissuade George from this idea.
• But hey, who the fuck knows anything besides that I’m right: the Five Year Gap was bad, George was right to abandon it and you are a coward if you disagree with me.

Conclusion

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