/lit/ - Literature

>>9829133
The drawback is that even if a conclusion gets stuck on at the end, the story fundamentally leads nowhere--it winds back and forth without resolving psychological or tonal arcs. But then, doesn't that sound more like real life? Martin tore out the moralistic heart and magic of fantasy, and in doing so, rejected the notion of grandly realized conclusions. Perhaps we shouldn't compare him to works of romance, but to histories.

He asks us to believe in his intrigue, his grimness, and his amoral world of war, power, and death--not the false Europe of Arthur, Robin Hood, and Orlando, but the real Europe of plagues, political struggles, religious wars, witch hunts, and roving companies of soldiery forever ravaging the countryside. Unfortunately, he doesn't compare very well to them, either. His intrigue is not as interesting as Cicero's, Machiavelli's, Enguerrand de Coucy's--or even Sallust's, who was practically writing fiction, anyways. Some might suggest it unfair to compare a piece of fiction to a true history, but these are the same histories that lent Howard, Leiber, and Moorcock their touches of verisimilitude. Martin might have taken a lesson from them and drawn inspiration from further afield: even Tolkien had his Eddas. Despite being fictionalized and dramatized, Martin's take on The War of the Roses is far duller than the original.

More than anything, this book felt like a serial melodrama: the hardships of an ensemble cast who we are meant to watch over and sympathize with, being drawn in by emotional appeals (the hope that things will 'get better' in this dark place, 'tragic' deaths), even if these appeals conflict with the supposed realism, and in the end, there is no grander story to unify the whole. This 'grittiness' is just Martin replacing the standard fantasy theme of 'glory' with one of 'hardship', and despite flipping this switch, it's still just an emotional appeal. 'Heroes always win' is just as blandly predictable as 'heroes always lose'.

It's been suggested that I didn't read enough of Martin to judge him, but if the first four hundred pages aren't good, I don't expect the next thousand will be different. If you combine the three Del Rey collections of Conan The Barbarian stories, you get 1,263 pages (including introductions, end notes, and variant scripts). If you take Martin's first two books in this series, you get 1,504 pages. Already, less than a third of the way into the series, he's written more than Howard's entire Conan output, and all I can do is ask myself: why does he need that extra length?

>>9792203
All humans, are afraid of monsters, the monsters they keep inside of them. They drove the species who are able to expose the monsters in them down the purgatory underground. There, in the purgatory deep inside the earth where people are made, he was born. He hated, and loved, the monster that is forming inside of him more than anyone else. Together with his second mother, he climbed up to the world where the people who have driven him into the underground live. However, at that time, it was too late. This world above ground is waiting for its slow death, same as the people who continue to stay there. This world, this surface, is the realm of the dead. And this species called humans, they have built for themselves a world of twilight. There, he met a ghost called "father". His second mother, who has come to this netherworld with him, remained there, while he returned to the purgatory where he was born. That place, the place where he lives, that purgatory. That should be the last world of humans.

>>9677862
For one thing. It can decide if it wants to take after Medieval time period or Renaissance. You have the rise of a merchant class yet no guns or cannons. Where are the tax policies and why does a region like the North with a large port( White harbor) that can trade directly with one of the largest trading city in that world, a large resource base of Timber in the vast not have a Warden that becomes at least the 3rd richest house? How does this same region not have a large amount of ships at their disposal just because of muh traditions(which is retarded how it came about)?

>>9656894
>realistic things like A Song of Ice and Fire.
>Realistic

Realistic? Are you serious? Martin's characters have mono-dimensional and random behavioral patterns, their actions and not prepared in the script, they delve into erratic petty politics and schemes to provoke and impress the reader in a world that dragons existed and exist and in a world that shadows kill people from afar and magical frost themed outsiders threaten the lands.

How can that make sense? Why would you care about taxes and who your psychopath son will marry in his reign when there are priests who raise the dead and assassins who take whatever form they want in order to kill whomever they want, etc? This is an "art" that poses as pseudo-realistic, but in truth is an undecided mix of high fantasy, medieval pseudo-realism, porn, epic parody and Martin's personal complex about how cruel the world is.


The problem with his art is, that it does not make sense and it does not have cohesion and a robust core like Tolkiens art did. He fails because he has not decided on what the core of his work is. Hell, he doesn't even have the main story.