Captain Jordan said
Sadly, Books 4 and 5 are quite sedate when it comes to deaths. It's as if GRRM lost his taste for the stuff. I'm waiting for another POV character to die, hopefully in Book 6.
Book 4 is sedate as pertains to deaths, sure. Book 5 though? It only seems sedate due to how insane ASOS was. I went through that list of the dead that you link later on in the thread, and counting only the confirmed deaths in ADWD it's pretty much on par with AGOT and ACOK for total deaths. It also matches up with my highly subjective count of important characters killed, with 5 a piece for books 1, 2, and 5. ASOS has 10 important deaths and half again as many total deaths as the other books by my count. AFFC only has 2 important deaths and less than half the total deaths of any other book in the series, for the record. Book 5 probably just seems very sedate to you because of the plot pacing, which I understand but personally have no problem with.
Captain Jordan said
To be fair, AGOT, ACOK and ASOS were written as a trilogy. Clearly, that didn't pan out, as we're sitting here with 5 books out of a planned 7. However, it makes some sense if you consider the first three to be a trilogy reworked into a larger series, they're quite cohesive and fast paced compared to the later books. We can only hope that The Winds of Winter will speed things up.
No they weren't, or at least not in the way you seem to be implying. His original concept of a trilogy was to be A Game of Thrones, A Dance with Dragons, and The Winds of Winter. Before he was even done with the manuscript for AGOT he realized three books wouldn't be enough and estimated that he'd need 4, then while still writing that he bumped the estimate up to 6 books. The idea at that point was to have two linked trilogies with a time skip in between. As he started to write ADWD he realized the time skip wasn't going to work out very well at all, so A Feast for Crows was born to bridge the gap and push the series out to 7 books.
It wasn't at all like the first three were written with the intent being to wrap everything up by the end of ASOS, but he decided around the end of that one to keep going. The original trilogy idea was intended to encompass the entirety of the major plot points being told over the series, including those to come in the next two books, and GRRM decided that wouldn't work so he expanded the scope.
