/lit/ - Literature

>>22441190
>Another germ post

There are many fantasy series one could argue is better than LOTR, but ASOIAF is nowhere close. ASOIAF isn't fit to wipe Wheel of Time's ass, shine Malazan's shoes, hold the piss bucket for The Belgariad, and it can't reach Narnia. Hell, the Oz and Harry Potter books are better than ASOIAF.

The problem isn't the characters, or the plot. The problem is George RR Martin doesn't understand anything. From his interviews, I gather he is an empty headed old fuck who has never given thought to what he writes, hell -- what he believes in, until he sits down to write. In interviews he just repeats the same tired phrase over and over. For example: "No one is wholly good or wholly evil". Find 3 interviews where he doesn't say this.

I'm not only talking about the Geographic and Linguistic blunders in his worldbuilding, which have been mocked on this site before, but his syntax errors, over-reliance on the same words and phrases being used by different characters thousands of miles apart; people born in different classes and cultures (ever notice that people in Texas don't use the same slang as people in California), and his in-universe mistakes; Renly has green eyes in one book, and then blue in another. George shrugs this off and says Renly has blue-green eyes because he doesn't care about the details of his series or anything that doesn't involve descriptions of food, battle, or awkward sex. Harold Bloom once lied and said Rowling kept using "stretched his legs" throughout the first chapter of Harry Potter; Bloom would've had a field day with Martin without having to fabricate an example.

I want to say even Sanderson is better, but I'm not sure. Sanderson is just as good of a writer as George in terms of prose, but Sanderson obviously puts thought into his world and characters.

People don't seem to understand: it isn't that George doesn't want to finish his series, it's that he doesn't know how. It's easy to dictate plot ideas to showrunners, but not so easy to write a novel without a plan.