QUOTE(Callidus Thorn @ Feb 13 2014, 10:17 PM)

Ugh, I hate George R. R. Martin.
A Song of Ice and Fire. I started reading the first one a week ago, at about this sort of time, I'm now about to start the fifth book in the series.
Too bloody hard to put down, those books are.
I love him. He inspired me to write and change the theme of my stories, though I already had a darker/bloody grittiness to all my stories instead of the knee-slap adventure time stories. His books are fantastic and so are the characters. I absolutely love the fact that he has no true villains in his story. Every character has their flaws.
Jaime Lannister is arrogant, prideful, has an incestuous relationship with his sister, he pushed a kid out of a window and crippled him because he was caught sleeping with Cercei, his sister. Hard to love this guy. Then we find out about how he managed to save half a million people, including women and children, from being burned alive in a city by stabbing a king in the back, breaking his oath as his bodyguard. Funny thing is that he's mostly hated for that single heroic act.
The Hound is a character that's my favorite. In fact, my own fanfiction character has some similar traits. Sandor Clegane(The Hound) is a child-butcher, killed men and women, and has a scarred face and personality. A deeply disturbed guy who loves to kill people and hates knights and all that they stand for because he believes they're a bunch of hypocrites and killers regardless of wearing shining armor(Ironically, he's probably the man in the entire series who's done the most knightly things such as protecting a damsel in distress from a pack of rapists and her sister later on when the Red Wedding happened. Plus, he's a fantastic father figure.
Little girl kills man, he doesn't tell her not to do it again. He just tells her to tell him first

And yet I am, and live—like vapours tossed.
I long for scenes where man hath never trod
A place where woman never smiled or wept
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie
The grass below—above the vaulted sky.â€