GRRM made the kids too young, and that made some things (Arya in Mercy, Sansa’s upcoming wedding, etc.) creepy. The five year gap was supposed to fix this by aging up the kids, but that didn’t work out b/c of the impact on the storylines of Jon, Cersei, et al. so GRRM dropped that idea.
I’m pointing out that it probably would have been easier just to go back and change the text of AGOT so that the kids started older.
Hmm, is this the actual problem?
I never saw the problem, or the reason for the five-year gap, being that some things involving the kids were overly creepy. Indeed, the creepiness always seemed part of the point; Joffrey, the prepubescent boy-king, ordering grown men to sexually humiliate Sansa, who is also a child, is supposed to be terrifying and horrific. Arya becoming a child assassin is supposed to make us take a step back and go “god damn, girl.”
The five-year-gap I think existed in order for Arya, Bran, and maybe even Rickon to master their various crafts and to put a few years on them so they don’t appear to be as weird children but instead as adults or near-adults when they re-emerged for the endgame. (Well, okay, not Rickon. Rickon is… very young.)
I know Martin is seeking to stare a lot of fantasy tropes in the face and rebuild and execute them into something better, but he can also make them work FOR him. And something that fantasy readers are quite happy to swallow whole is the idea of omnicompetent, wise-beyond-their-years children protagonists who master complex skills and talents incredibly quickly.
The readership will absolutely accept Arya turning into a badass trained-by-Faceless-Men assassin and Bran mastering greenseeing in under a years worth of time. We totally will. Is that realistic, to the extent realism should be a consideration? Not really. The skills of the Faceless Men and the greenseers are probably something that takes many years, maybe even a lifetime, to master. Hell, merely becoming a true master of something as mundane as a longbow takes like a decade! But we’ll absolutely accept it because we’re used to reading stories where that’s de rigeur.
The trope can be made to serve the story.
I was more thinking about stuff like “Mercy.” 11-year-old Arya as an assassin is something of a suspension of disbelief, but it doesn’t raise the same issues that an 11-year-old Arya acting as a femme fatale who uses her sexual wiles to seduce and then murder Raff the Sweetling does compared to if it was a 16-year old Arya. Likewise, whatever’s going to happen with Sansa’s upcoming marriage and Baelish’s obsession with her takes on very different tones if she’s 19 versus if she’s only 14.
RFTIT Tumblr Backup 