User blog comment:Mesmermann/Game of Thrones is gonna film in Morocco/@comment-207.179.9.4-20120624030556/@comment-5014364-20120624031452

without spoilers and to be blunt: the entire Qarth storyline was a minor part of the books, utterly irrelevant to Dany's full storyline. She might as well have just taken a year off. Similarly, Jaime Lannister was backburnered during book 2.

Why? To focus on the War of the Five Kings, what Robb Stark, Renly Baratheon, and Stannis Baratheon are doing.

Even WITHIN Season 2, you know how there are some episodes that "main cast members" just don't appear in? (Cersei isn't in every single episode).....Book 2 was like that *for a whole book* for Dany and Jaime.

By and large....expanding this was a mistake by the writing team. Because to give more time to Qarth, making up a shakey storyline that's new and thus doesn't fit well, you have to take time away from Arya, Joffrey, a bunch of other stuff that is going on that is *important* in later books.

Using the analogy comparing the whole book series to a TV season, Jaime and Dany actually come back to prominence after taking book 2 off (this is not a spoiler as you can see they're both alive going into season 3). HOWEVER, Arya has comparatively little to do in book 3...book 2 was when she had a lot going on. So now they're going to take things AWAY from Dany to give things to Arya that didn't exist?

House Targaryen gets a lot to do coming up. You haven't seen anything yet. The reason people are raving fans of Dany in the books are largely for things that haven't even happened yet.

The result of the TV show was we had to waste time and energy making character pages for Qarth characters that were invented or expanded, or dealing with anonymous edits obsessing with parts of Dany's storyline which are *utterly irrelevant* to how the show progresses.


 * My actual, serious advice, would be to functionally just pretend that the Dragon hatching scene from the Season 1 finale *just happened*. As in, you should rewatch the season 1 finale before season 3 starts.

Winteriscoming.net and Westeros.org have great writeups explaining this.