[Da'Shain]

Originally Posted by Eldan

In reply to Da'shain:

Spoiler

Aegon wasn't that bad on his own. My problem was that we had two princes trying to reach Daenerys, and after a while, I had problems trying to keep them apart.

Small, spoiler laden rant incoming.

Spoiler

Hah, when thinking about what was wrong with aDwD I didn't even remember that Quentyn existed. Yeah, he was useless.

I don't know, Aegon as a character might not be bad (we'll see when he actually has a character other than "prince raised in exile"), but Aegon as an idea is just too ridiculous to be the real plan Varys and Illyrio cooked up together, in addition to smacking EVEN MORE of the tired "true prince in exile" trope that a lot of people already dislike Dany (and sometimes Jon) for, with less of an interesting twist on it. Either Aegon loses and, shocker, we see yet another idealistic character get totally trounced, or he wins and basically comes from behind to say "All that struggle in the past few books? That was just to get me on the throne!" Not to mention it's adding yet another faction to a plot that has already grown out of control, by the author's own admission. It's not necessarily going to turn out terribly, but ... I really don't see how it's going to make anything better, either.

Contrast that with the expansion of the Iron Islands plot, which essentially does the same thing (add new viewpoint characters, introduce a new fighting force to Westeros), but actually has more roots in the backstory than "Oh, we spirited him away in the night", has played a continuing part over most of the series, and is actually going to intersect with Dany's plot in one of the first major joinings of her plotline with ANYONE ELSE'S. This is what adding a new faction should be like; we've seen the rumblings of it, we have some roots for it in the past several books, and it's actually served several important story functions. Varys and Illyrio's plot is now just made more convoluted with the addition of a wholly new character who is, of course, the REAL one they were pinning their hopes on.

Ugh, it just ... doesn't work for me. I'm sure it's an opinion thing, but it just feels legitimately like a bad move to me. Sorry for the small rant.