- thot,
You can't go into a George R R Martin project and not invest in knowing all the many, many characters. In GoT they spent the time developing the characters, especially minor characters, they didn't do much of that in HotD. I guess with 20 years worth of storylines to cover in 10 episode, some things had to be cut. In the books Martin, doesn't go much into details regarding these characters either and I thought HotD would fill in the gaps. The rest of the story takes place over about 2-3 years so I think there will be time to develop.