Agree about the red wedding. At that point I was actually kind of pissed at GRRM for following the Starks so closely through the whole story just to kill them all off. I get that the world is unpredictable but to really catch readers you need characters they can care about. When you make characters they care about then just kill them off you run a big risk of just losing the readers. Maybe that is part of the reduced or changed impact of the 4th book. He killed off enough characters we cared about that it is hard to care much about all these secondary characters now. Took the wind out of the sails so to speak.