Emerson said:
Here's a question. Was I the only one who knew Robb and Grey Wind would end up dead? I can't remember where but somebody has a prophecy dream that involves the two of them walking in somewhere covered in a thousand cuts or something similar. As soon as I read that I knew they'd die, but not how obviously.
Dany does at the House of Black & White on whatever island/area that is in Essos. She has a vision of a red wedding with a completely bloody wolf & man w/ wolves' head with a cup n his hand.
Though to say I necessarily saw it coming ... I really didn't. GRRM is a master of mixing his styles, which really separates him from other authors, especially in this sort of narrative. I enjoyed
The Pillars of the Earth but by the final 300 pages I was bored to death by it, and had to stop reading the sequel, because the author's writing style was
so predictable. In
Pillars (and a lot of other fiction narratives), basically, if the character is happy, cheerful, and thinks good things will happen,
THE WORST happens... And vise versa, if all is lost, nothing is going right,
everything turned out better than expect. It was so formulaic.
GRRM mixes it so well that you can never quite tell what is going to happen, even with prophesy. For instance, Game of Thrones spends most of the first book prophesizing that Dany & Drogo's unborn baby is going to mount the world and conquer Westeros & Essos... BUt... that obviously doesn't happen. Now, some might think, "well, maybe the crone Khaleesi is really talking about Dany's dragons..." but even then, the prediction just doesn't necessarily flow.
Similarly, in the chapter of the Red Wedding, we get it from Catelyn's perspective. And Catelyn is SO filled with absolute dread the whole time... She's completely convinced that Fat Walder Frey is going to sell them out and do them harm, everything she does tries to prevent that, and at every moment she's completely suspicious. It's a reverse psychology on the reader: So many other authors set it up this way with these overbearing suspicions, and "everything turns out better than expected." But, with the Red Wedding, the whole scene is staged with dread, it keeps getting worse and worse, and as a reader you're expecting a twist, but then, nope, total betrayal and murder and it just keeps getting worse and worse.