The thing that bugs me about Dany is that she'd be fine if she flew off to parts unknown about 3,000 pages earlier, and was just left parked outside the story for a good long time, like Rickon, for example. Every time the story goes back to the damn Epipens of Qarth or wherever it is that she's cooling her heels, I…

Right. The Whole Point of Pilgrim's Progress was Mumble Mumble Something Something Salvation of Man. "The Whole Point" was something that Tolkien quite rightly said was a pile of nonsense for a story with any kind of fun and tragedy and depth and mythic quality, which is why it's a sack of old underwear left…

The Scouring of the Shire really bugged me. It felt like the kind of ALLEGORY that Tolkien claimed he hated. Getting really geeky here, but Gandalf, Elrond, Aragorn, the smart ones, had to have known that in the aftermath of the War all of the bad men of Middle Earth were going to be running and looking for some…