A Song Of Ice and Fire

[Anonymous No.9826095]

Did Martin achieve his objective when writing A song of Ice and Fire?

Martin rejected the allegorical romance of epic fantasy, which basically means tearing out the guts of the genre: the wonder, the ideals, the heroism, and with them, the moral purpose. And replaced it with Realism.

No Ren Faire Middles Ages’, like Disney, and the fantasy authors had no idea of what a real medieval caste system looked like

And certainly not Victorian medievalism, i.e, chivalry, gallantry, fidelity to he crown and to a beloved idealized the Middle Ages

Did he achieve his objective?

[Anonymous No.9826098]

>>9826095
>Did Martin achieve his objective when writing A song of Ice and Fire?

we can talk about that once it's finished.

[Anonymous No.9826183]

>>9826095
Yes. He wrote a realistic fantasy novel that would soon blow Tolkien books out of the water

[Anonymous No.9826404]

>>9826183
Nice delusions.

[Anonymous No.9826438]

>>9826183
Not saying much considering Tolkien is shit.

[Anonymous No.9826441]

>>9826404
Nice argument

[Anonymous No.9826533]

>>9826098
Why can't we talk about now?

[Anonymous No.9826544]

>>9826183
>>9826438
I can still smell the Reddit on you.

[Anonymous No.9826552]

>>9826544
>Tolkien cock gargler calling others Reddit
Mega kek

[Anonymous No.9826692]

TAX PAHLICY

[Anonymous No.9826747]

>>9826692
What was Tolkien tax policy

[Anonymous No.9826765]

>>9826438
YOU TAKE THAT BACK!

[Anonymous No.9826776]

>>9826183
>>9826438
>>9826552

Seriously though, Song of Fire and Ice is comic book level compared to Tolkien. Not that its bad, its just plebe-teir

[Anonymous No.9826825]

Tolkien is to creative literary genius what Martin is to hack pulp idiocy. They both so far surpass anyone else in their field that they will be remembered 1,000 years from now as a kind of yin and yang of fantasy, a Manichaen duality of speculative letters. For every sublime, luminous beauty that Tolkien has gifted the world, Martin has cursed us with a tedious, banal ugliness. It is unfair to compare the two directly on any one point, because Martin is in every way the anti-Tolkien, patently sterile, parasitical, and inferior, but so much so that he becomes a monument in his own right, and counterbalances Tolkien. Could one exist without the other? Tolkien obviously could. But it is only by the contrast that Martin offers that we can truly appreciate the full depths and heights of Tolkien. Our understanding of Tolkien would be incomplete if Martin had never set pen to page. It is through only the abject failure and futility of Martin that we can approach an apprehension of the true scope and scale of Tolkien's hitherto inconceivable greatness. Perhaps this is what Tolkien had in mind when he wrote about the Music of the Ainur. If Tolkien is a subcreator in the image of Eru, truly Martin is like unto Melkor. It is only reflected in the awfulness of the one that we can fully see the goodness of the other.

[Anonymous No.9826837]

>>9826825
I wouldnt go that far lmao, Martin is really good when he wants to be but he fucked himself with poor structure and direction.

Tolkien is top tier though.

[Anonymous No.9826958]

>>9826837
Martin likes to write stories he doesn't like finishing them.
But by the same standard Tolkien liked building worlds, the story however in his works is great.

[Anonymous No.9826970]

>>9826098
FPBP

[Anonymous No.9826994]

>>9826958
LOTR character are pretty bland desu

[Anonymous No.9828083]

>>9826095

>replaced it with realism

>jon snow

pick one
on god, as much as i adore these books, i hate every single time i have to read another one of this fucking angel's chapters

(only got done reading book 3 yesterday tho, and i really hope he changtes into something more human)

[Anonymous No.9828246]

>>9828083
>(only got done reading book 3 yesterday tho, and i really hope he changtes into something more human)

he does in book 5, his storyline becomes the most interesting

[Anonymous No.9828826]

>>9826837
He fucks himself over with too much P.O.V

[Anonymous No.9829110]

There are plenty of fantasy authors who claim to be doing something different with the genre. Ironically, they often write the most predictable books of all, as evidenced by Goodkind and Paolini. Though I'm not sure why they protest so much--predictability is hardly a death sentence in genre fantasy.

The archetypal story of a hero, a villain, a profound love, and a world to be saved never seems to get old--it's a great story when it's told well. At the best, it's exciting, exotic, and builds to a fulfilling climax. At the worst, it's just a bloodless rehash. Unfortunately, the worst are more common by far.

Perhaps it was this abundance of cliche romances that drove Martin to aim for something different. Unfortunately, you can't just choose to be different, any more than you can choose to be creative. Sure, Moorcock's original concept for Elric was to be the anti-Conan, but at some point, he had to push his limits and move beyond difference for difference's sake--and he did.

In similar gesture, Martin rejects the allegorical romance of epic fantasy, which basically means tearing out the guts of the genre: the wonder, the ideals, the heroism, and with them, the moral purpose. Fine, so he took out the rollicking fun and the social message--what did he replace them with?

Like the post-Moore comics of the nineties, fantasy has already borne witness to a backlash against the upright, moral hero--and then a backlash against the grim antihero who succeeded him. Hell, if all Martin wanted was grim and gritty antiheroes in an amoral world, he didn't have to reject the staples of fantasy, he could have gone to its roots: Howard, Leiber, and Anderson.

[Anonymous No.9829119]

>>9829110
Like many authors aiming for realism, he forgets 'truth is stranger than fiction'. The real world is full of unbelievable events, coincidences, and odd characters. When authors remove these elements in an attempt to make their world seem real, they make their fiction duller than reality; after all, unexpected details are the heart of verisimilitude. When Chekhov and Peake eschewed the easy thrill of romance, they replaced it with the odd and absurd--moments strange enough to feel true. In comparison, Martin's world is dull and gray. Instead of innovating new, radical elements, he merely removes familiar staples--and any style defined by lack is going to end up feeling thin.

Yet, despite trying inject the book with history and realism, he does not reject the melodramatic characterization of his fantasy forefathers, as evidenced by his brooding bastard antihero protagonist (with pet albino wolf). Apparently to him, 'grim realism' is 'Draco in Leather Pants'. This produces a conflicted tone: a soap opera cast lost in an existentialist film.

There's also lots of sex and misogyny, and 'wall-to-wall rape'--not that books should shy away from sex, or from any uncomfortable, unpleasant reality of life. The problem is when people who are not comfortable with their own sexuality start writing about it, which seems to plague every mainstream fantasy author. Their pen gets away from them, their own hangups start leaking into the scene, until it's not even about the characters anymore, it's just the author cybering about his favorite fetish--and if I cyber with a fat, bearded stranger, I expect to be paid for it.

I know a lot of fans probably get into it more than I do (like night elf hunters humping away in WOW), but reading Goodkind, Jordan, and Martin--it's like seeing a Playboy at your uncle's where all the pages are wrinkled. That's not to say there isn't serviceable pop fantasy sex out there--it's just written by women.

Though I didn't save any choice examples, I did come across this quote from a later book:
"... she wore faded sandsilk pants and woven grass sandals. Her small breasts moved freely beneath a painted Dothraki vest . . ."

[Anonymous No.9829121]

>>9829119
Imagine the process: Martin sits, hands hovering over the keys, trying to get inside his character's head:

"Okay, I'm a woman. How do I see and feel the world differently? My cultural role is defined by childbirth. I can be bought and sold in marriage by my own--Oh, hey! I've got tits! Man, look at those things go. *whooshing mammary sound effects* Okay, time to write."

Where are the descriptions of variously-sized dongs swinging within the confines of absurdly-detailed clothing? There are a set of manboobs (which perhaps Martin has some personal experience with) but not until book five. Even then, it's not the dude being hyperaware of his own--they're just there to gross out a dwarf. Not really a balanced depiction.

If you're familiar with the show (and its parodies on South Park and SNL) this lack of dongs may surprise you. But as Martin himself explained, when asked why there's no gay sex in his books, despite having gay characters, 'they’re not the viewpoint characters'--as if somehow, the viewpoints he chooses to depict are beyond his control. Apparently, he plots as well as your average NaNoWriMo author: sorry none of my characters chose to be gay, nothing I can do about it.

And balance really is the problem here--if you only depict the dark, gritty stuff that you're into, that's not realism, it's just a fetish. If you depict the grimness of war by having every female character threatened with rape, but the same thing never happens to a male character, despite the fact that more men get raped in the military than women, then your 'gritty realism card' definitely gets revoked.

The books are notorious for the sudden, pointless deaths, which some suggest is another sign of realism--but, of course, nothing is pointless in fiction, because everything that shows up on the page is only there because the author put it there. Sure, in real life, people suddenly die before finishing their life's work (fantasy authors do it all the time), but there's a reason we don't tend to tell stories of people who die unexpectedly in the middle of things: they are boring and pointless. They build up for a while then eventually, lead nowhere.

[Anonymous No.9829130]

>>9829121
A staple of Creative Writing 101 is to 'listen to how people really talk', which is terrible advice. A transcript of any conversation will be so full of repetition, half-thoughts, and non-specific words ('stuff', 'thing') as to be incomprehensible--especially without the cues of tone and body language. Written communication has its own rules, so making dialogue feel like speech is a trick writers play. It's the same with sudden character deaths: treat them like a history, and your plot will become choppy and hard to follow.

Not that the deaths are truly unpredictable. Like in an action film, they are a plot convenience: kill off a villain, and you don't have to wrap up his arc. You don't have to defeat him psychologically--the finality of his death is the great equalizer. You skip the hard work of demonstrating that the hero was morally right, because he's the only option left.

Likewise, in Martin's book, death ties up loose threads--namely, plot threads. Often, this is the only ending we get to his plot arcs, which makes them rather predictable: any time a character is about to build up enough influence to make things better, or more stable, he will die. Any character who poses a threat to the continuing chaos which drives the action will first be built up, and then killed off.

I found this interview to be a particularly telling example of how Martin thinks of character deaths:
"I killed Ned because everybody thinks he’s the hero ... sure, he’s going to get into trouble, but then he’ll somehow get out of it. The next predictable thing [someone] is going to rise up and avenge his [death] ... So immediately killing Robb became the next thing I had to do.

He's not talking about the characters' motivations, or the ideas they represent, or their role in the story--he isn't laying out a well-structured plot, he's just killing them off for pure shock value.

[Anonymous No.9829133]

>>9829130
Yet the only reason we think these characters are important in the first place is that Martin treats them as central heroes, spending time and energy building them. Then it all ends up being a red herring, a cheap twist, the equivalent of a horror movie jump scare. It's like mystery novels in the 70's, after all the good plots had been done, so authors added ghosts or secret twins in the last chapter--it's only surprising because the author has obliterated the story structure.

All plots are made up of arcs that grow and change, building tension and purpose. Normally, when an arc ends, the author must use all his skill to deal with themes and answer questions, providing a satisfying conclusion to a promising idea that his readers watched grow. Or just kill off a character central to the conflict and bury the plot arc with him. Then you don't have to worry about closure, you can just hook your readers by focusing on the mess caused by the previous arc falling apart. Make the reader believe that things might get better, get them to believe in a character, then wave your arms in distraction, point and yell 'look at that terrible thing, over there!', and hope they become so caught up in worrying about the new problem that they forget the old one was never resolved.

Chaining false endings together creates perpetual tension that never requires solution--like in most soap operas--plus, the author never has to do the hard work of finishing what they started. If an author is lucky, they die before reaching the Final Conclusion the readership is clamoring for, and never have to meet the collective expectation which long years of deferral have built up. It's easy to idolize Kurt Cobain because you never had to see him bald and old and crazy like David Lee Roth.

Unlucky authors live to write the Final Book, breaking the spell of unending tension that kept their readers enthralled. Since the plot isn't resolving into a tight, intertwined conclusion (in fact, it's probably spiraling out of control, with ever more characters and scenes), the author must wrap things up conveniently and suddenly, leaving fans confused and upset. Having thrown out the grand romance of fantasy, Martin cannot even end on the dazzling trick of the vaguely-spiritual transgressive Death Event on which the great majority of fantasy books rely for a handy tacked-on climax (actually, he'll probably do it anyway, with dragons--the longer the series goes on, the more it starts to resemble the cliche monomyth that Martin was praised for eschewing in the first place).

[Anonymous No.9829138]

>>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?

[Anonymous No.9829140]

>>9829138
Some say 'at least he isn't as bad as all the drivel that gets published in genre fantasy', but saying he's better than dreck is really not very high praise. Others have intimated that I must not like fantasy at all, pointing to my low-star reviews of Martin, Wolfe, Jordan, and Goodkind, but it is precisely because I am passionate about fantasy that I fall heavily on these authors.

A lover of fine wines winces the more at a corked bottle of vinegar, a ballet enthusiast's love of dance would not leave him breathless at a high school competition--and likewise, having learned to appreciate epics, histories, knightly ballads, fairy tales, and their modern offspring in fantasy, I find Martin woefully lacking. There's plenty of grim fantasy and intrigue out there, from its roots to the dozens of fantasy authors, both old and modern, whom I list in the link at the end of this review

There seems to be a sense that Martin's work is somehow revolutionary, that it represents a 'new direction' for fantasy, but all I see is a reversion. Sure, he's different than Jordan, Goodkind, and their ilk, who simply took the pseudo-medieval high-magic world from Tolkien and the blood-and-guts heroism from Howard. Martin, on the other hand, has more closely followed Tolkien's lead than any other modern high fantasy author--and I don't just mean in terms of racism.

Tolkien wanted to make his story real--not 'realistic', using the dramatic techniques of literature--but actually real, by trying to create all the detail of a pretend the world behind the story. Over the span of the first twenty years, he released The Hobbit, the Lord of the Rings, and other works, while in the twenty years after that, he became so obsessed with world building for its own sake that instead of writing stories, he filled his shed with a bunch of notes (which his son has been trying to make a complete book from ever since).

It's the same thing Martin's trying to do: cover a bland story with a litany of details that don't contribute meaningfully to his characters, plot, or tone. So, if Martin is good because he is different, then it stands to reason that he's not very good because he's not that different. He may seem different if all someone has read is Tolkien and the authors who ape his style, but that's just one small corner of a very expansive genre. Anyone who thinks Tolkien is the 'father of fantasy' doesn't know enough about the genre to judge what 'originality' means.

[Anonymous No.9829143]

>>9829140
So, if Martin neither an homage nor an original, I'm not sure what's left. In his attempt to set himself apart, he tore out the joyful heart of fantasy, but failed replace it with anything. There is no revolutionary voice here, and there is nothing in Martin's book that has not been done better by other authors.

However, there is one thing Martin has done that no other author has been able to do: kill the longrunning High Fantasy series. According to some friends of mine in publishing (and some on-the-nose remarks by Caleb Carr in an NPR interview on his own foray into fantasy), Martin's inability to deliver a book on time, combined with his strained relationship with his publisher means that literary agents are no longer accepting manuscripts for high fantasy series--even from recognized authors. Apparently, Martin is so bad at plot structure that he actually pre-emptively ruined books by other authors. Perhaps it is true what they say about silver linings . . .

Though I declined to finish this book, I'll leave you with a caution compiled from various respectable friends of mine who did continue on:

"If you need some kind of closure, avoid this series. No arcs will ever be completed, nothing will ever really change. The tagline is 'Winter is Coming'--it's not. As the series goes on, there will be more and more characters and diverging plotlines to keep track of, many of them apparently completely unrelated to each other, even as it increasingly becomes just another cliche, fascist 'chosen one' monomyth, like every other fantasy series out there. If you enjoy a grim, excessively long soap opera with lots of deaths and constant unresolved tension, pick up the series--otherwise, maybe check out the show."

[Anonymous No.9829361]

>>9828083
Jon Snow and Daenerys stormborn are fucking mary sues

[Anonymous No.9829456]

>>9829119
>Like many authors aiming for realism, he forgets 'truth is stranger than fiction'. The real world is full of unbelievable events, coincidences, and odd characters. When authors remove these elements in an attempt to make their world seem real, they make their fiction duller than reality; after all, unexpected details are the heart of verisimilitude. When Chekhov and Peake eschewed the easy thrill of romance, they replaced it with the odd and absurd--moments strange enough to feel true. In comparison, Martin's world is dull and gray. Instead of innovating new, radical elements, he merely removes familiar staples--and any style defined by lack is going to end up feeling thin.
This really is the core of the problem with the series. That, and the lack of closure.

>"If you need some kind of closure, avoid this series. No arcs will ever be completed, nothing will ever really change. The tagline is 'Winter is Coming'--it's not. As the series goes on, there will be more and more characters and diverging plotlines to keep track of, many of them apparently completely unrelated to each other, even as it increasingly becomes just another cliche, fascist 'chosen one' monomyth, like every other fantasy series out there. If you enjoy a grim, excessively long soap opera with lots of deaths and constant unresolved tension, pick up the series--otherwise, maybe check out the show."
Interesting. Why is the chosen one monomyth fascist in a sense?

[Anonymous No.9829480]

>>9828826
>Implying that's not the best of him

[Anonymous No.9829486]

>>9828083
Care to expand?

[Anonymous No.9829500]

>>9826825
Manichaean*
if you want to use big words to shitpost make sure you can spell them

[Anonymous No.9829514]

>>9829500
I'm on a phone without spell check you tremendous FAGGOT.

[Anonymous No.9829516]

>>9826095

The only interesting things are the maesters and Stannis and his crew.

[Anonymous No.9829537]

>>9829514
>needing spellcheck
>on a board devoted to the discussion of words

[Anonymous No.9829559]

>>9826095
he made the black company with better and clearer characters, that is all.

[Anonymous No.9829599]

>>9829537
Holy shit no I do not have 100% perfect spelling off the top of my head on 4chan posts, but I just sold another novel and a screenplay last month, so I guess publishers and producers or even editors don't mind spellchecking, only whining little nobodies.

[Anonymous No.9829634]

>>9829599
I turn off my spellcheck on the phone too because on my texts its suggestions are often garbage when I slip and hit some random #

[Anonymous No.9830027]

>>9829480
No its not

[Anonymous No.9830037]

>>9829143
>means that literary agents are no longer accepting manuscripts for high fantasy series
They should just sign James Patterson to a contract. He'll deliver the book by the deadline, and probably throw in a couple of extra ones for kicks.

[Anonymous No.9830292]

>>9826095
Yes he accomplished his grimnessdarknessquest and made boatloads of money. However his attempted continuance of the series has revealed his limits as a writer which I'm sure was not his intent.

>>9829143
>kill the longrunning High Fantasy series
>(yes i know this is stale copypasta but i have to respond. jg keely might be good at analysis but his knowledge of the industry is simply flawed.)
One author's failings have not impacted an entire subgenre. The continued popularity of Song (even in '07 at the time of the copypasta) meant there was a demand for high fantasy. One of fantasy's primary selling points is its sameness. It's ridiculous to believe the publishing industry as a whole wouldn't accept lesser imitations of a wildly popular series.
/rant

[Anonymous No.9830294]

>>9826183

[Anonymous No.9830529]

>>9829143
nice posts m8

[Anonymous No.9830542]

>>9829143
>chosen one is fascist
>Fascist as a buzzword
You should tell that to J.K Rowling. Also
>Muh Tolkein is a racist
Yeah, sure. Let's just let orcs into Gondor, Orcs welcome! It's not that they're created to be evil or anything.

[Anonymous No.9830544]

>>9826183
Even though i have found his books enjoyable, i feel like fiction without a theme or some sort of moral is just wannabe history.
So at that point why the fuck shouldnt i just read history instead?

[Anonymous No.9830546]

>>9830529
It's copypasta from goodreads

[Anonymous No.9830560]

>>9830544
This is why Tolkien is head and shoulders above most authors, everything from his worldbuilding to conlangs was connected to his larger themes, it wasn't just wanking off.

[Anonymous No.9830562]

>>9826825
This will make good pasta, good work.

[Anonymous No.9830580]

>>9826994
They're as "bland" as the great figures of myth and legend. If we were saddled with their emotions, their personalities, their banal wants and desires, they would be simply human. And myths, legends, those aren't about humans. They're about heroes. We don't need to know Achilles beyond his pride and his rage. To know him intimately would do nothing but serve to drag him to our level.

[Anonymous No.9830678]

>>9830546
I thought goodreads was full of people who couldn't write reviews longer than 3 lines
Are reviews usually that well written

[Anonymous No.9830824]

>>9829486
>Care to expand?
As said, until now I only read the first three books, but in all of these Jon Snow feels just too perfect of a human being to be true. He never has any malevolent or selfish thoughts in him (except maybe that one flashback where the child-him wanted to become heir to Winterfell), and all of his actions are more than reasonable from a humane viewpoint.
Also, his over-the-top innocence can be pretty annoying at times, for example when it takes him like a whole book to get behind the fact, that he's the new Lord Commander.
And even then, when everyone is celebrating and the big, bad Janos Slynt sits brooding in his corner, dutiful ole Jon Snow takes one, but only one swig of wine (Martin even cared to mention that Jon Snow would not drink any more that night) and grimly awaits the dawn when his duties begin.
Everything about him that could be considered "bad" about him is either not his fault (bastard-born) or more than excusable (Ygritte).
That perfectness and over-exaggerated humbleness paired with his extraordinary skills in battle make him a more than unbelievable and thus rather boring character.
Jaime Lannister for example is (in my eyes) way more believable, his skills made him arrogant, and only being captured beat some humility into him.

[Anonymous No.9830848]

Martin paints a realistic view of the human nature and makes ASoIaF miles above Tolkien.

LotR is just a sexist, pseudo-chevalresque drivel.

[Anonymous No.9830886]

>>9830678
That's one of Keely's reviews. And no, while there are plenty of others who write long reviews, his are about as good as it gets on that site.

[Anonymous No.9830896]

>>9830848
tfw some people actually believe this

[Anonymous No.9830939]

>>9826183
>>9826438
>low quality bait

[Anonymous No.9831168]

Here's that >>9826552 you wanted.

[Anonymous No.9831180]

>>9826095
The only thing he really achieved is the destruction of a genre.

[Anonymous No.9831460]

>>9831180
Now if only modern fantasy wasn't filled with pre-teen books about vampires and werewolves so it could take High Fantasy's place.

[Anonymous No.9831471]

>>9826544
Hilarious considering Tolkien is the most jerked-off writer on reddit. You reek of a redditor trying to hide. Get the fuck out.

[Anonymous No.9831473]

>>9829110
>>9829119
>>9829121
>>9829130
>>9829133
>>9829138
>>9829140
>>9829143
I applaud whoever actually wrote this.

[Anonymous No.9831477]

>>9826776
Holy shit, give it up. You guys are all so obsessed with justifying your nostalgia that you pretend he's some literary God. Tolkien wrote children's novels, Martin writes pulp trash. Get over it.

[Anonymous No.9831553]

>>9826776
hobbit feet are gross

[Anonymous No.9831558]

>>9831473
here you go

[Anonymous No.9831879]

>>9831558
Every time Keely has been mentioned on /lit/ before he's been called a pseud

Post this review without his name and people here praise it. Maybe /lit/ were the pseuds all along.

[Anonymous No.9831951]

>>9829143
>>9829140
>>9829138
>>9829133
>>9829130
>>9829121
>>9829119
>>9829110

this pasta is bad and you should feel bad.
redditors will upboat this and claim it is deep.

To save everyone time
>classic tropes replaced with nothing
>flaws of realism without benefit of fantasy
>poorly written females
>poorly written plots tied up only by cheap twist-like death
>no closure
>his writing is more "quantity" than anything
>muh soggy knee because raep xd
>No gays (muh diversity aka not a real argument)

[Anonymous No.9831958]

>>9831951
He's also full of shit when he started talking about dialogue. Literature has more options for dialogue than TV scripts.

[Anonymous No.9831973]

>>9831958
well the review is clearly something written by a guy who primarily reads genre fiction so..

[Anonymous No.9832014]

>>9826095
is he diddling his eunuch-stub in this pic?

[Anonymous No.9832125]

>>9831879
We were always pseuds

[Anonymous No.9832534]

>>9831973
not an argument

[Anonymous No.9832675]

>>9831951
Redditors hate this review: just google search Keely's name.
You, my friend, are a contrarian's contrarian, very impressive.

[Anonymous No.9832831]

>>9832675
Why do they hate him

[Anonymous No.9832968]

>>9826098
But then we can never... Oh.

[Anonymous No.9833022]

>>9826183
George pls leave

[Anonymous No.9833026]

>>9831558
desu this review sounds like he read what people said about the series but didn't actually read it.

asoiaf is full of absurd coincidences and straight up high fantasy shit. in light of that the "but truth is stranger than fiction!" complaint makes no sense. why the fuck does tyrion escape form the sky cells and wander into his father's war camp? plot magic. why does every character in the series run into every other character at the same inn? plot magic.

[Anonymous No.9833031]

>>9832831
They see him as a condescending elitist who enjoys shitting on popular literature for its own sake.

[Anonymous No.9833060]

>>9826183
nobody under sixty says 'blows it out of the water', its like a gentlemans tie forum thing, successful troll

[Anonymous No.9833166]

>>9830027
Yes it is.

[Anonymous No.9833204]

>>9831951
well its actual content for a change so either explain why its 'bad' or stfu you worthless troll

[Anonymous No.9833217]

Is either The First Law trilogy or The Black Company(?) series any good?

[Anonymous No.9833381]

>>9833217
Do both of them talk about taxes?

[Anonymous No.9834011]

>>9833204
Not an argument

[Anonymous No.9834074]

>>9834011
upboat

[Anonymous No.9834291]

>>9829110
>There are plenty of fantasy authors who claim to be doing something different with the genre. Ironically, they often write the most predictable books of all, as evidenced by Goodkind and Paolini.

You’ve misused the word “ironically,” which must posit a shift in reality away from meaning or expectation; something you’ll find quite impossible without modifying the subject of your first sentence, and then providing quotations from both Goodkind and Paolini, two authors who owe all their success to the generic nature of their stories. That would be ironic. But you haven’t done these things, and it’s not. Oh, and, hey, the author of A Game of Thrones is George R. R. Martin. This fact makes your first paragraph irrelevant, and a fallacy called a Red Herring.

>The archetypal story of the hero, the villain, the great love, and the world to be saved never seems to get old, and there's nothing wrong with this story when it's told well. At the best, it's exciting, exotic, and builds to a fulfilling climax. At the worst, it's just a cliché copy of the old masters, and the worst are more common by far.

Ok, cool, creating a little hierarchy of possible outcomes given a story containing heroes, villains, a great love (or two, hopefully), and a world in need of saving, which I hope is pretty much every novel, if we limit “a world” to that portion of the universe relevant to the narrator.

Might I point out however that “at the best” is a constipated phrase? Most people say, “at best.” Also, “the worst is more common” is oxymoronic, since “the worst” describes a degree of badness that is unsurpassable. “The worst” can modify only one item from any given set, and it, therefore, cannot be a common trait. We cannot all be the dumbest, or the tallest, although someone out there surely is both of those things, statistically speaking not at the same time.

>No doubt, this wealth of predictable, cliche romances are what drove Martin to aim for something 'different'. Unfortunately, being different isn't something you can choose, you have to come by it naturally.”

Wow, is that really what inspired him? The cliché romances that you have not mentioned yet mysteriously refer to out of thin air inspired the greatest fantasy writer of all time? Damn.

>Martin rejected the moralistic romance of the genre, and tried instead to create a realistic world.”

What Anon is trying to say here in broken English is that most epic fantasy novels have a clearly delineated, moral dichotomy of good and evil, etc. His use of the word “romance” is misleading; he’s probably applying it in the anachronistic classical sense.

[Anonymous No.9834332]

>>9834291
That comment was so bad it gave me cancer when I first read it.

[Anonymous No.9834337]

>>9826095
>Martin rejected the allegorical romance of epic fantasy, which basically means tearing out the guts of the genre: the wonder, the ideals, the heroism, and with them, the moral purpose. And replaced it with Realism.
He didn't do that at all. His books are filled with standard tropes and cliches. They're just grittier.

[Anonymous No.9834417]

>>9834291
Who hurt you to make you like this?

[Anonymous No.9834478]

>>9834417
Is that from rick and morty?

[Anonymous No.9834708]

>>9834478
No, from Steven Universe

[Anonymous No.9835261]

>>9834417
Not an argument

[Anonymous No.9835862]

>>9834291
top fucking kek

[Anonymous No.9836734]

>>9830824
He dies so I think that'll humble him some. Besides in book five he goes through a major self doubting phase. He fucks himself over simply bc he's too proud to explain to his 'brothers' the truth of things. You think he's flawless? The guy literally gets killed bc he thought he knew more than the rest of the watch about the others since he happened to kill a wight and whatnot, and that that would excuse letting thousands of wildlings across the wall. Guess what? He gets stabbed and dies an awful honorless death. We know that resurrected characters come back as fucked up versions of themselves so he might come back darker and more cynical.

[Anonymous No.9836869]

>>9826095
>And replaced it with Realism.
It is realism through 21st century perception of medieval caste system. Which is heavily skewed by Hollywood "aristocrats are mostly retards and plebs are just like your knights". Everything is distorted by context. Remember you are children of plebs who Revolted against rotted aristocracy. This is you point of view, this your reality.

[Anonymous No.9837231]

>>9836734
Good

[Anonymous No.9837582]

>>9830848
You seem like the kind of person that thinks reading your way thorough ASoIaF is some sort of lifetime accomplishment and also as the kind of person who watched the LOTR movies but never read the books because they had too many big words and you got confused.

[Anonymous No.9837760]

>>9829121
>) this lack of dongs may surprise you
Wut? There are tons of dick descriptions in ASOIAF. Maybe not quite as many as breast-related, but close.
Tyrion's cock is described many times, clothed and naked. So is Jaime's. Others whose junk I remember being mentioned include Sam, Robert, Theon, Hodor, Brandon, Jonas Bracken, Dontos, Pycelle, Daario, Euron, Qarl the Maid, Osmund Kettleblack...I'm sure there are more.

[Anonymous No.9837797]

>>9833026
>desu this review sounds like he read what people said about the series but didn't actually read it.
He straight up said that he read 400 pages. What is that, maybe ten percent of the series? One of my major gripes about goodreads is how many reviewers openly admit that they only read a fraction of the material and still believe that they are qualified to cast judgement on the work as a whole.

[Anonymous No.9837807]

>>9836734
>The guy literally gets killed bc he thought he knew more than the rest of the watch about the others
Although it's true that many of the Watch were unhappy with his decisions regarding the wildlings, I think the last straw was when he announces his intention to march on Ramsay. Which is a bit of a selfish move, definitely not flawless.
Snow makes tons of mistakes. I don't understand why people call him a Mary Sue. Maybe he is on the show, I wouldn't know.

[Anonymous No.9838173]

That reading literature set in an actual historical period or a fictional one represents either an embrace of the values of that period or a nostalgia for them. Or as other anon puts it: “I could talk about how the impulse to revisit an airbrushed, dragon-infested Medieval Europe strikes me as fundamentally conservative—a yearning for a time when (white) men brandished swords for their King, (white) women stayed in the castle and made babies, marriage was a beautiful sacrament between a consenting adult and whichever fourteen-year-old girl he could manage to buy off her Dad, and poor people and people of color were mostly invisible.

[Anonymous No.9838218]

>>9838173
GoT and other grimdark works contradict this--they aren't aspirational at all. Conversely, there's a bunch of popular girl power fantasy series that are aspirational but progressive.

[Anonymous No.9838235]

>>9826095
>Martin rejected the allegorical romance of epic fantasy, which basically means tearing out the guts of the genre: the wonder, the ideals, the heroism, and with them, the moral purpose. And replaced it with Realism.

This would actually be interesting, but this isn't what he actually does. He may attempt it in places, but he never follows through. At bottom, ISoIaF/GoT is basically a fairly traditional fantasy narrative with some nontraditional heroes and a bit of prestige TV moral ambiguity. A realistic fantasy series wouldn't have a teenage girl commanding a horde of wild steppe barbarians. There's just no way in that world Daenerys would be anything but a rape doll. But yet in the end everything seems to miraculously work out for her, because it needs to for the plot to advance, because she's one of the strong woman characters GRRM has chosen to fulfill literally the same good guy messiah function as a handsome knight in an ostensibly more traditional fantasy story.

>No Ren Faire Middles Ages’, like Disney, and the fantasy authors had no idea of what a real medieval caste system looked like.

This part is at least true. The life of the average peasant in this series does look pretty goddamn shitty. But this has less to do with a commitment to realism than it does a particular political agenda. And besides, showing peasants suffering is a fairly common trope in traditional fantasy narratives. It's little more than a vehicle for showing the audience the corruption and brutality of the Evil king who will be displaced by the Good one.

>Did he achieve his objective?

Maybe if Littlefinger sits on the Iron Throne when it all ends, this will make a degree of sense, but otherwise, if this is his objective, the result seems uneven.

[Anonymous No.9838399]

>>9838218
Explain

[Anonymous No.9838496]

>>9838399
I agree that old school fantasy is conservative--a hero saves everyone, he wins the girl, evil is totally defeated. That's to be expected when the sources are Christian Arthurian myths and the also Christian Middle Earth.

The newest trends in fantasy aren't like that at all. Grimdark paints a nasty picture of the medieval-ish past. All kinds of shit goes down and grey or even evil characters win the day. There's no traditionalism here.

The girl power fantasies have some edge to them too. Their primary ideas of female agency may not be outright feminist but they certainly lean in that direction. (I'm basing this off of a handful of the most popular girl power fantasy books.)

[Anonymous No.9838497]

>>9838399
Girl protag = progressive these days

[Anonymous No.9838529]

>>9837797
If a book is still bad 400 pages in why should it be necessary to read the next 3600 to give proper judgement?

[Anonymous No.9838563]

>>9838235
>realistic fantasy series wouldn't have a teenage girl commanding a horde of wild steppe barbarians. There's just no way in that world Daenerys would be anything but a rape doll.
Here is the thing. There is no magic and dragons in the real world. So it is thought experiment what would happen if magic is added.

With full realism Renly wins unquestionably and order is fully restored in Westeros. End of story.

[Anonymous No.9838570]

>>9838563
We shall see, Renly. Come the dawn, we shall see.

[Anonymous No.9838580]

>>9838497
There's more to it than that. Throne of Glass, Graceling, and His Fair Assassin series all have assassin heroines. Throne of Glass has the assassin girl become queen. In Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, the tribal heroine is a contender to become empress but instead becomes a goddess. Kushiel's Dart stars a courtesan/spy.

Then there's new subgenre of urban fantasy which is also miles away from conservative ideals.

[Anonymous No.9838584]

>>9838580
Are any of the protagonists ruthless as fuck? Cause that's the only way I can imagine them keeping themselves in power.

[Anonymous No.9838590]

It's dawned on me more than once that Martin's take on the Middle Ages, among its numerous deviations from the actual Middle Ages, is missing a powerful religious institution that can dictate things to secular rulers. Sure, there's the Faith of the Seven and everything with the High Sparrow and all the other genuine gods, but no religious entity in ASOIAF approaches the power of the Church in the Middle Ages. It's kind of a gaping hole, since it's precisely the Church and its activities that make sense of a lot of the Middle Ages.

[Anonymous No.9838594]

>>9838590
Who needs the church when you have dragons.

[Anonymous No.9838616]

>>9838590
Westeros has many Gods and they all are real (unlike Earth God) and competition limits their influence.

[Anonymous No.9838619]

>>9838563
>With full realism Renly wins unquestionably
>Implying Renly had a claim before Stannis

QUESTIONABLE

[Anonymous No.9838627]

>>9838619
>>Implying Renly had a claim before Stannis
He had claim worth of hundred thousand swords. Stannis had claim of magic assassin that doesn't work in the real world.

[Anonymous No.9838657]

>>9838627

Reply had a claim as long as he lived. The moment he or anyone close to him died, everyone in the kingdom would be trying to win the crown or declare independence. Renly becoming king subverts the hierarchy upon which Westerosi society is built. It sets a precedent that anyone, as long as they have a small amount of royal blood, has a right to be king.

[Anonymous No.9838669]

>>9826438

[Anonymous No.9838670]

>>9826095
His feminism makes me doubt his realism.Women in his books are too powerful for the age he describes.

[Anonymous No.9838758]

*asks your task policy

[Anonymous No.9838765]

>>9838670
More like they're too terribly written and stupid to have anywhere near the power they have. Dany is the biggest example of this.

[Anonymous No.9838783]

>>9826095
*BBBRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP*

[Anonymous No.9838787]

>>9838758
A proportional tax policy for the peasants, and progressive tax for nobles and merchants.

[Anonymous No.9838934]

Looking at the 2 most "shocking" incidents:

Ned's execution: Given that the biggest chunk of AGOT is told from Ned's POV, it seems that he is the protagonist of the series and his death comes as a major shock. However, with hindsight it becomes clear that Ned is more of a mentor figure for his children, ala Obi Wan Kenobi from Star Wars, Dumbledore from Harry Potter or Brom from Eragon. Those kinds of characters invariably die, and GRRM's real deviation from the norm is to make Ned the initial POV.

Robb's Defeat and the Red Wedding: After AGOT lots of people expected that Robb would defeat the Lannisters and free Sansa and Arya and everyone would live happily ever after, as given the standard fantasy cliches the young warrior would obviously defeat assholes like Tywin and Cersei. When he got wiped out unceremoniously at the Red Wedding, it was hailed as a great example of Trope Subversion. But the problem with this theory is that in the books Robb is not even a POV character and the view through which we seem him, i.e. Catelyn is mostly filled with fear and foreboding about death and defeat. If one had to make an LotT comparison Robb's mindshare as a force for the "good" side would be something like the Rohirrim of Rohan. Even though they were an important part of the Battle for Minas Tirith, the major show was Frodo and Sam.

Now to present the other side of the argument, i.e. GRRM actually follows tropes quite a lot, there's:

Tyrion: The only non-tropey thing about him is that he is dwarf, besides that Tyrion can fight battles, can successfully lead warriors, is fucking immortal and randomly gets to marry the hottest girl in westeros. Given all the foreshadowing, will probably also ride a dragon soon.

Dany: Most of the criticism for Tyrion above kinda applies to Dany, but then she has dragons so she mostly gets a pass on this.
Sam: The sidekick geek is everywhere.

To round this off I am would like to include characters I think are pretty unique to GRRM or atleast defy expectations of the trope:
Stannis: In most other works Stannis would either be the prince's evil uncle or the righteous but clueless old man killed by the machinations of his evil sister-in-law. I think GRRM does a great job of making Stannis more than moderately Intelligent and willing to bend the rules a bit, yet honourable.

Littlefinger: He is really mostly a villian, but he could potentially ally up with our heroes (Sansa), besides he has a very fleshed out backstory.

Sansa: Conforming neither to the dumb princess, the warrior amazon trope or the hero's sidekick trope she definitely has some intelligence chops and is bound to make trouble soon.

Theon: One could argue that he is sort of like Boromir, but again Boromir was never as messed up as Theon. Besides we haven't seen the last of him.

[Anonymous No.9838962]

>Sansa: Conforming neither to the dumb princess, the warrior amazon trope or the hero's sidekick trope she definitely has some intelligence chops and is bound to make trouble soon.

Sansa is fucking unbearable. Every time I think of her is me cheering for something bad to happen to her.
Too fucking bad she didnt get raped or better yet, killed.
Because, ffs, I cant stand her since book 1.

[Anonymous No.9839104]

>>9838934
She is a dumb princess for most of the series.

[Anonymous No.9839105]

if GRRM wasn't busy world building instead of writing and if he didn't revive every 2nd character that died maybe the books would have been good

[Anonymous No.9839289]

>>9838962
>>9839104
Sexist

[Anonymous No.9839296]

>>9839289
Okay

[Anonymous No.9839307]

>>9839105
Essos sounds fucking rad while Westeros is awful generic medieval europe.

[Anonymous No.9839319]

>>9839307
North of the wall is kinda cool.

[Anonymous No.9839334]

>>9831951
Thanks, dude. I stopped reading it as soon as I saw TvTropes terminology, and reading your summary shows I made the good call.

[Anonymous No.9839347]

>>9838657
>Renly becoming king subverts the hierarchy upon which Westerosi society is built.
>hierarchy
You meant Robert's hammer? Funny things is Renly had better claim that Robert before him. Renly had ok blood claim. Stannis was dick nobody liked, Joffrey was child king, nobody has reasons to like pawn of the guardian, especially Lannister guardian. Renly suited everyone, fact that he easily assembled hundred thousands host shows that he was chosen by Westorsi houses. Only magic miracle could've stop him. Well welcome to the fantasy territory.

[Anonymous No.9840070]

>>9839289
Fuck off baiter.
Arya for example, is the greatest ever
But fucking Sansa...

[Anonymous No.9840370]

>>9838616
Yes, I know the divinity outlook is different in ASOIAF, but in that regard it's pointless to compare it to the real Middle Ages. The influence of the Church on the state of Medieval Europe really cannot be overstated.

[Anonymous No.9840402]

>>9840370
The sept also got crippled by the targaryens

[Anonymous No.9841010]

>>9829361
How is executing an 11 y.o. child being a mary sue?

[Anonymous No.9841205]

>>9839307
>Essos
Essos is just Italian city states and not-Mongols, with Chinese proxy empire and I think Martin said Assai is Japan

[Anonymous No.9841259]

>>9841205
Martin has a really weird idea about what medieval Japan was like.

[Anonymous No.9842015]

>>9838529
Because it's called a book review, not an excerpt review. You can't review something you haven't read.

[Anonymous No.9842044]

>>9839105
>if he didn't revive every 2nd character that died
2 characters have been revived...Beric and Catelyn. I guess you can count the Mountain if you consider Frankenstein's monster as "revived". Compare that to the maybe fifty significant characters who have died: Robb, Robert, Renly, Ned, Mormont, Quorin, Tywin, Kevin, Balon, Lysa, Oberyn just to name a few of the more important ones.

[Anonymous No.9842301]

>>9842015
Except that anon wrote a review of Game of Thrones the first novel

[Anonymous No.9842322]

>>9838594
No man with a good dragon needs to be justified.

[Anonymous No.9842661]

>>9842044
Jon snow will be the third

[Anonymous No.9842792]

>>9830580
Except we aren't living in the age of myths and heroes anymore. By modern standards Tolkein's characters are bland.

[Anonymous No.9843002]

>>9826825
>truly Martin is like unto Melkor. It is only reflected in the awfulness of the one that we can fully see the goodness of the other
Fucking hell this is probably the most savage thing I've ever read on /lit/.

[Anonymous No.9843006]

>>9831879
Keely can be pretty garbage. He gave up on Book of the New Sun halfway through because Severian doesn't treat women like a third wave feminist numale.

[Anonymous No.9843052]

>>9842792

[Anonymous No.9843207]

>>9843006
A shame considering his ASoIaF review is pretty on point.

[Anonymous No.9843221]

>Maybe /lit/ were the pseuds all along
mmm... you may be onto something here

[Anonymous No.9843245]

>>9838934
>However, with hindsight it becomes clear that Ned is more of a mentor figure for his children, ala Obi Wan Kenobi from Star Wars, Dumbledore from Harry Potter or Brom from Eragon. Those kinds of characters invariably die, and GRRM's real deviation from the norm is to make Ned the initial POV.

Not even Eddings, who boasted about the formulaic nature of his stories, killed off the mentors.

[Anonymous No.9843269]

>>9826095
>And replaced it with Realism.
No he replaced it with grim dark, which lacks to romantacism of the ideal in favor of Machiavellianism. What suck the most about A Song of Ice and Fire is that it's essentially a generic fantasy world with grim dark themes - and that's it. He could've at least tried to transpose a new age mythology that incorporates Machiavellianism and grim dark themes but frankly there isn't even an attempt of this except with Little Finger who basically just a direct rip off of the charter of Machiavelli himself.

[Anonymous No.9843294]

>>9843207
To be fair it's not exactly a bold conclusion. I've considered ASoIaF to be a generic epic fantasy with all of the tradition and enjoyment stripped out for the sake of edge and pretensions of realism/worldliness for a while now.

[Anonymous No.9843724]

>>9843269
Same shit

[Anonymous No.9844653]

>>9842301
That's all fine and dandy, but he DIDN'T READ A Game of Thrones, the first novel. He read 400 pages of it. Again, it's called a book review, not a half-book review.

[Anonymous No.9844749]

>>9844653
lol, silly martin fag

[Anonymous No.9844793]

>>9844653
Not an argument

[Anonymous No.9845027]

I like watching the show just so I could see the fans rage about shit that was cut out from the book. The tard rage from the white walker origin reveal was amazing.

[Anonymous No.9845169]

>>9838590
The church had a lot more power in the past in the asoiaf world

[Anonymous No.9845188]

>>9826095
>Martin rejected the allegorical romance of epic fantasy
>jon snoo is innately good and incorruptible like batmane

[Anonymous No.9845212]

>>9842792
>Except we aren't living in the age of myths and heroes anymore
And we were in the 1950s? We have never lived in an age of myth and heroes, and that's exactly why it's so appealing.

[Anonymous No.9845443]

>>9829143
>>9829140
>>9829138
>>9829133
>>9829130
>>9829121
>>9829119
>>9829110

Delete the stupid anime avatars (are you 12?) and I'll consider reading.

[Anonymous No.9846312]

>>9845169
Let me guess? Dragon

[Anonymous No.9846329]

>>9831471
>considering Tolkien is the most jerked-off writer on reddit
how do you know this? you reddit filth

[Anonymous No.9846359]

>>9845443
it's the jg keely review on goodreads

[Anonymous No.9846571]

>>9846359
And?

[Anonymous No.9846584]

>>9830544
This is why I constantly stop reading fiction and revert back to history books

[Anonymous No.9846613]

>>9838657

You're acting as if there wasn't near constant wars of succession in our medieval era, and as if Westeros hasn't had near constant wars since it's unification.

[Anonymous No.9847171]

>>9846613
Name twenty

[Anonymous No.9847184]

>>9839347
An Elective Monarchy system similar to the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth would be best for Westeros, with a Sejm-like Parliament to represent the plebs and minor landowners.

[Anonymous No.9847199]

>>9846613
But there weren't "near constant wars of succession." In fact, ASOIAF is based precisely on the War of the Roses, of course, which all stems from the deposition of Richard II, the rightful king of England. This was HIGHLY UNUSUAL. The whole reason it's so dramatic and strange, and makes such great fodder for literature and television, is precisely because there's so little like it in European history. It was a bloody mess, but it wasn't typical. In fact, when Shakespeare chronicled the whole thing he went out of his way to highlight how freakish and unnatural it all was, which of course is why it ultimately culminates in Henry VIII, when everything is "back to normal," at least for a while.

[Anonymous No.9847377]

>>9829361
>literally any time dany has tries to do anything other than conquer she fucks everything up massively

>sets out to free slaves
more people get enslaved and she starts a massive war/revolution in slavers bay
>sets out to rule mereen
ends up almost getting overthrown by sons of the harpy, and has to give them the fighting pits back and then almost dies anyways
>gets 3 dragons
loses control of them, drogon fucks off for over a year and the other two are uncontrollable feral beasts locked in a pyramid. And why? because some farmer cried about his poor daughter.

Nigger you are going to conquer the 7 kingdoms ur GOING to end up killing a whole lot more parents and children stop being so fucking pathetic.

IM DAENRIS OF TOO MANY TITLES BOW BEFORE ME AND DONT WORRY ABOUT THE FACT THAT THE ONLY THINGS IVE EVER ACCOMPLISHED IS BECAUSE THE GODS GIFTED ME DRAGONS XD

you might have a case for john but claiming dany is even remotely competent and not a flaming retard is extremely questionable.

[Anonymous No.9847425]

>>9838173
>ah poor people of color in the middle ages
never mind the moors pillaging and raping 1/2 of Iberia

[Anonymous No.9847534]

>>9836869
wew

[Anonymous No.9847682]

>>9837807
When he gets revived, I can't imagine why he would feel upset about getting killed. He deserted and the penalty for that is death (albeit by the hands of the Warden of the North). He's a pretty reasonable man so I can't imagine why he should feel like he's been betrayed or something. Although he might be more prone to insensible lashes of anger so he might dispose of his mutineers anyway. I really wish Gurm keeps his POV in Wow and expand on how his persona has changed. If he doesn't I swear I might riot.

[Anonymous No.9847901]

>>9843294
Why does Martin hate fantasy so much

[Anonymous No.9847906]

>>9847901
Its really just a nuwestern thing to make stuff as gritty as possible for whatever reason

The easts fascination with infantlism isnt any better tho

[Anonymous No.9847930]

>>9847901
I think that it's either he's a miserable nerd who REEEs internally at other fantasy authors who always write about fantasy Chad killing the Robot wizard and saving fantasy Stacy so he decided to write about how in the real world everything is hardcore and shit all the time, or he knew he could never live up to Gene Wolfe and the other greats and it killed him inside so he decided to kill the genre rather than be remembered as a B-lister. http://grrm.livejournal.com/424135.html

[Anonymous No.9848169]

>le human heart in conflict with itself
I lol'd so hard when I heard he said this.

[Anonymous No.9848245]

daily reminder that ASOIAF is literally a glorified South American telenovela

There is not a single scene that requires it to have a fantasy setting. Every single plot point revolves around people acting like retards.

Set it in Bogota, turn the houses into families with rivalling hotels or restaurants, have everyone speak Spanish it pass as one of those hilarious series my grandma used to watch on weekend mornings with flying colors

[Anonymous No.9848254]

>>9848245
*and it could pass

I'd also add that the episodic pacing of the books (no surprise there since the fat fuck worked as a screenwriter for years) together with the noted telenovela aspects is the main reason it works well on TV and that's why no actual fanatsy series can be as succesful

[Anonymous No.9848261]

>>9848245
>There is not a single scene that requires it to have a fantasy setting.

You can say that about any story, all genre boils down to is a set of symbols the artist prefers. Once you think on the level of theme then you can tell a story within any setting.

[Anonymous No.9849145]

>>9848169
Really

[Anonymous No.9849229]

>>9849145
https://www.reddit.com/r/asoiaf/comments/4rdl2d/the_human_heart_in_conflict_with_itself_favourite/

[Anonymous No.9849251]

>Ruling is hard. This was maybe my answer to Tolkien, whom, as much as I admire him, I do quibble with. Lord of the Rings had a very medieval philosophy: that if the king was a good man, the land would prosper. We look at real history and it’s not that simple. Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn’t ask the question: What was Aragorn’s tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all these orcs? By the end of the war, Sauron is gone but all of the orcs aren’t gone – they’re in the mountains. Did Aragorn pursue a policy of systematic genocide and kill them? Even the little baby orcs, in their little orc cradles?

[Anonymous No.9849365]

>>9849251
Did no one explain to him that orcs are artificially made?

[Anonymous No.9849550]

>>9849365
You think he cares? He hates Tolkien

[Anonymous No.9849669]

If his objective was $ then yes.

[Anonymous No.9849723]

>>9849550
B-but he admires him!

[Anonymous No.9849763]

>>9849723
Yet he fails to understand the simple premise

[Anonymous No.9849928]

[Anonymous No.9849967]

>>9849928
top fucking kek

[Anonymous No.9850001]

>>9826825
Good pasta. Much enlightenment.

[Anonymous No.9850031]

>>9847171
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_succession#Early_Medieval_Europe
>Not knowing what google is

[Anonymous No.9850046]

>>9849928
My sides

[Anonymous No.9850150]

>>9849928
heroic

[Anonymous No.9850254]

>>9826095
Is grim dark realism? If so yes if not no

[Anonymous No.9850909]

>>9849251
What is Aragorn’s tax policy?

[Anonymous No.9851164]

>>9826441
>x is better than y!
>no, not really
>NICE ARGUMENT

[Anonymous No.9851432]

>>9851164
Not an argument

[Anonymous No.9851654]

>>9847377
yeah but a person who made all those mistakes should normally be dead already according to asoiaf rules, fucking plot armor.
yeah we pretty much know that she's gonna die near the end, but that doesn't change how plot armored she is

[Anonymous No.9851668]

>>9851432
sauce

[Anonymous No.9851717]

I'm not a Martin hater but here is my take in the Tolkien x Martin idea.

Tolkien's work is the purest form of epic fantasy in all senses, his goal is through the adventures of these impossible characters to show virtue. Tolkien went to war and had all the reasons to be edgy and turn his work into a gory mess to reflect all the ugliness he saw back then, but he chose otherwise and thats where Tolkien's genius shines to me, how focused and dedicated this man was to stay faithful to his ideals. Tolkien wanted people to read his work and have hope, a thing that people needed back then.

Martin probably grew as a writer reading Tolkien, and surely was influenced by him like every other fantasy author in after Tolkien, but instead of trying to surpass Tolkien's dedication to his work and all the value it tries to bring to the reader, Martin took a different twist by giving this bored generation that doesn't need any hope something to fulfill their most basic desires. The primal pleasure of seeing someone get fucked, in every way possible. I don't think Martin is a bad writer I quite enjoy some of his other works but Song of Fire and Ice is just an allegory to that, there is no big lesson on values and moral, there is no message of hope or anything. Its just his take on humanity put in a "fantasy setting".

[Anonymous No.9852037]

>>9851717

[Anonymous No.9852047]

>>9851432

what anime is this from?

[Anonymous No.9852050]

>>9852047
boku no pico

[Anonymous No.9852419]

>>9849928
Is this OC?

[Anonymous No.9852466]

>>9826825
lmao

[Anonymous No.9852688]

>>9852419
>Is this OC?

No, got it from /tv/

[Anonymous No.9853256]

>>9852688
Then go back there

[Anonymous No.9853280]

>>9851717
Good post. And it's true.

There's a very clear and cohesive moral in Tolkien's works, a considerably positive and inspiring one. Whereas in Martin's works its the same wishy-washy greyness the West loves to indulge in.

[Anonymous No.9853314]

>>9826183
t. george

[Anonymous No.9854468]

>>9849928
Hilarious.

[Anonymous No.9854478]

>>9851717
It's summarised in the last episode of Game of Thrones for me.

Jon Snow explains that, if Daenerys does not work with him, then the Night King and Whitewalkers will kill everyone in Westeros.

My reaction was...I do not particularly care. The world of ASOIAF simply does not emotionally engage you the same way as Tolkien's.

In LOTR, I cared about the Hobbits of the Shire. I cared about the Bree folk. I cared about the elves of Rivendell and the Men of Gondor etc.

You can bemoan le ebil dark lord plot all you want, but it's a fantasy epic that makes you care.

Mass genocide of the Westerosi leaves me feeling...indifferent.

[Anonymous No.9854511]

>>9854478
When literally everyone except northerners and a few token characters have shown to be fucking awful people would you actually give a shit if they died?

[Anonymous No.9854526]

>>9853256

[Anonymous No.9854534]

>>9838616
>unlike Earth God
Lol
Reddit thread

[Anonymous No.9854696]

>>9854526
Blame Martin in wanting a grim dark world

[Anonymous No.9854712]

>>9837582
>LOTR
>Big words
You might want to revisit those novels as an adult, friend, because they're at a reading level that's as low or lower than ASoIaF.

[Anonymous No.9855182]

>>9854712
Sleepless linley

[Anonymous No.9855550]

>>9854478
Would this be any different if a song of ice and fire was more hopeful

[Anonymous No.9857170]

>>9855550
Yeah, there'd be an actual future that isn't a complete shit hole.

[Anonymous No.9857797]

>>9857170
I'm Sorry anon, but that's not a realistic world. Martin had it right. The world isn't a fairy tale in which the good guys win. It's time you grow up from that Childish Delusion

[Anonymous No.9857814]

>>9857797
The world isn't a fairy tail where there are good guys and bad guys. It's just people trying to live their lives without getting fucked

[Anonymous No.9857817]

Martin writes good scifi but shit fantasy.

[Anonymous No.9857877]

>>9829121
>If you're familiar with the show (and its parodies on South Park and SNL) this lack of dongs may surprise you. But as Martin himself explained, when asked why there's no gay sex in his books, despite having gay characters, 'they’re not the viewpoint characters'--as if somehow, the viewpoints he chooses to depict are beyond his control. Apparently, he plots as well as your average NaNoWriMo author: sorry none of my characters chose to be gay, nothing I can do about it.
>And balance really is the problem here--if you only depict the dark, gritty stuff that you're into, that's not realism, it's just a fetish. If you depict the grimness of war by having every female character threatened with rape, but the same thing never happens to a male character, despite the fact that more men get raped in the military than women, then your 'gritty realism card' definitely gets revoked.
Stopped reading here. Nobody wants to read about buttsex.

[Anonymous No.9858057]

>>9857877
pussy loving vanilla ass bitch

[Anonymous No.9858425]

>>9851432
So yeah, sauce?

[Anonymous No.9859011]

>>9826183
DELET

[Anonymous No.9859105]

>>9851432
>this gallery

[Anonymous No.9859881]

>>9826994
I think it seems that way because of how many there are, but Gollum automatically invalidates that argument.

[Anonymous No.9859888]

>realism
Existence isn't le grimdark horseshit.

[Anonymous No.9859898]

>>9857817
Dark Dark Were the Tunnels is the single worst piece of fiction I've ever read.

Wildcards sounds bad even for capeshit.

[Anonymous No.9860172]

>>9859888
>Existence isn't le grimdark horseshit.
That's where you are wrong.

[Anonymous No.9860697]

>"wow GoT is so good because you never know who will die"
>John Snow gets revived

I haven't read a single letter from the book, but I'm not that retarded. Resurrection has been the perfect device to manipulate the fanbase since very long time ago. Dragon Ball started it as far as I can remember. Lets make an unpredictable plot and kill the protagonist, making the fanbase pity him, and then revive him so the plot can continue safe and sound. Who knows, most people are retarded, maybe they'll get surprised and cry again if he dies again.

I'll never cry for a death in a fantasy or sci-fi series again.

[Anonymous No.9860932]

>>9826183
George R.R Martin can't even blow his own books out of the water.

[Anonymous No.9860946]

>>9860697
> Dragon Ball started it as far as I can remember.
Pretty sure this trope is literally as old as the bible.

[Anonymous No.9861037]

>>9854478
>In LOTR, I cared about the Hobbits of the Shire. I cared about the Bree folk
Jesus christ what a faggot.

[Anonymous No.9861039]

>>9841010
Because there are virtually no repercussions for doing it and her narrative trundles along uninterrupted along the same lines it has always been on.

This is a common feature of Mary Sues, they do reprehensible things but everyone continues to hail them as the best thing ever anyway.

[Anonymous No.9861080]

>>9854478
> Mass genocide of the Westerosi leaves me feeling...indifferent.

What about the mass genocide of the orks and goblins? you probably don't ever give the slightest fuck about the orcs or the nazguls they are just something to be murdered and overcome and aren't even menacing orcs are just varying degrees of stupid and evil and the nazgul have no personality just something for the elfs and gondor good guys to kill.

In the real world it's not the United Republics of good and nice vs the horde of mindless evil made of shit people it's the Entente vs The Triple Alliance Nazis vs The Soviets etc war is not a fairy tale with a glorious ending it's shit that leads to more shit even for the winning side. The evil is amplified because all people have a capacity for doing evil and most evil has good intention there is nobody innately born evil like the orcs

[Anonymous No.9861135]

>>9838616
>and they are all real
The old gods do seem to be real but they don't seem to be actual gods, rather they seem like the first men's retarded understanding of Children of the Forest and Weirwood trees passed down through a massive game of intergenerational telephone.

There is no evidence that the seven are real.

R'hllor might be real but it's uncertain.

I don't think any of the other religions are shown to manifest themselves in any significant way.

[Anonymous No.9861140]

>>9860946
older

[Anonymous No.9861513]

>>9860946
>>9861140
Evidence?

[Anonymous No.9861524]

>>9838173
>and people of color were mostly invisible
How could that be?

I don't see many black people in feudal Japanese mythology either. I wonder why?

[Anonymous No.9861551]

>>9838934
>Those kinds of characters invariably die
This is literally a meme from exactly the first two stories you mentioned

[Anonymous No.9861617]

>>9861513
The fact that Jesus does exactly what anon is describing in the bible.

[Anonymous No.9861675]

>>9826095
I truly enjoyed A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. I liked the tone of it.

[Anonymous No.9862213]

To say I’ve arrived late to the George Martin party would be an understatement At their height, I think it’s fair to say these books were as popular as it’s possible to be without crossing out of the genre audience like Harry Potter or Ender’s Game did. Fourteen years after the first book, A Game of Thrones, and almost six years since the most recent volume A Dance With Dragons was published these are still very popular books This is really a two-for-one epic, in that by reading it you experience not only the epic storyline but also participate in Martin’s epic struggle to actually complete the series The series is well over a million words in length already, but even more, words have been written about it online, so I will dispense with both the plot summary and the recap of Martin’s authorial adventure and instead relate my experience coming to these books in 2010

I’ll begin by answering the most obvious question: given that I obviously read a fair amount of fantasy, why haven’t I read these before? Some people who had read a lot of my reviews will know that I almost always wait until series is finished before starting them Although this was prompted in part by elapsed series that never paid off, the main concern was time Whenever a series tells a continuous story, I don’t feel like I’m getting the full effect of the later books unless the preceding stories are fresh on my mind This led to me reading the first book in a series, then the first book again before the second, then the first two before the third, and so forth For trilogies, this was barely acceptable but as I only have a limited time for reading it becomes quite inefficient for longer series So I swore off incomplete series right about the time that A Game of Thrones was soaring in popularity

But I’m sure this only raises a further question: why read them now? There are again a couple reasons The first came when HBO greenlit a TV adaptation of A Game of Thrones I’m one of those people who go out of their way to read a novel before its screen adaptation, and I was definitely interested in the HBO series, which struck me as at last the appropriate way to adapt a complicated novel: spending a whole season on it instead of cramming into a movie or even miniseries Then there was the increasing chance that the series would never, in any case, be finished. It has grown in projected books faster than Martin has written them, and cruelly Martin himself ages at the same rate as the rest of us regardless of how quickly the series moves forward. Who knows whether he will live to finish it? Even if he does, while I’m considerably younger than Martin, nothing is certain in life and I might not make it that long either Tolkien founded the modern fantasy genre with a trilogy he said was about death, so I guess it’s only fitting that series like this one and Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time have themselves unwittingly become grim memento mori for authors and fans alike

[Anonymous No.9862218]

>>9862213
But the final straw was the feeling that I had already read A Song of Ice and Fire by reading other books. Just as Tolkien spawned countless imitators, Martin is widely credited with sparking a flood of hard-edged, cynical fantasy, and I’ve read my fair share of it. For instance, Wikipedia cites no less than four prominent authors as being heavily influenced and although I wouldn’t call myself extremely well-read I’ve already read all four (Scott Lynch, Joe Abercrombie, Steven Erikson, and R Scott Bakker). I’ve also read Glen Cook, whose Black Company books are thought to have influenced Martin, and indeed this influence was probably the reason Cook has remained prominent enough for me to seek out his work. I even make comparisons to Martin’s work when reviewing fantasy on this site. Well, not his work itself, but to perceptions of it at least. This is starting to get ridiculous, I told myself. My first real contact with epic fantasy was reading Lord of the Rings, after all. Wasn’t I grateful that I hadn’t first waded through imitators like David Eddings, Robert Jordan, and Tad Williams that, whatever their actual quality, fall short of Tolkien’s masterpiece?

A Storm of SwordsSo I started reading A Game of Thrones for the first time in the position of someone who had never read the series before but thought he had a pretty good idea what it was like. I knew nothing about the plot or characters for I had avoided all such details knowing I would eventually read the books, but from countless asides in conversations with friends and reviews of other books, I primarily associated two attributes with Martin’s work: First, an unromantic approach to fantasy that emphasized intrigue and realism over magic and elevated prose. Second, the implacable and ruthless slaughter of major characters. Beyond that, while I’d heard some criticisms of Martin’s prose and the decision to split the fourth book into A Feast for Crows and an as-yet unpublished fifth book, the overall extremely positive reception of the series made me expect an exciting, even addicting, set of books.

Having now finished the extant series, I can say that despite this apparently detailed foreknowledge, the series Martin wrote was quite a bit different than the one I had expected to read.

[Anonymous No.9862223]

>>9862218
Let’s start with the gritty realism. It’s not Martin’s fault, but here my exposure to later writers has probably completely changed my reaction from what it would have been had I read the series as it came out. Plenty of authors have tried to imitate Tolkien’s archaic yet evocative style, yet no one has come close to equaling it. It was reasonable for me to suppose that Martin’s realistic style would work the same way. Reasonable, but wrong, and obviously so in hindsight. Tolkien’s work hasn’t been matched because he was uniquely suited both in temperament and profession to write the way he did. Throwing out the excesses of epic fantasy in favor of gritty realism is not nearly so challenging. In fact, it’s easier than trying to stay the course. It’s no surprise then that Martin’s work was not the apogee of this trend but just another stop along the way. Compared to Joe Abercrombie, just to pick one name out of probably a dozen, Martin seems like a hopeless romantic. It’s interesting that these days the people impressed with Martin’s grit and realism are the people writing about the HBO series (“It’s like the Sopranos in Middle-earth”), since when it comes to epic fantasy in television and movies Lord of the Rings is still very recent and the natural benchmark.

A feast for CrowsThen there’s the character slaughter. For me, the textbook case of this is in the film Serenity. Before that film, I have to admit I thought of killing characters as cool and subversive, but afterward, I started thinking about how a work of fiction has an unwritten contract with the audience. In some modes, I decided, killing a character might be an effective move while in others it is a betrayal of audience expectations. The fact is, A Song of Ice and Fire does indeed kill off characters, a great deal of them. But contrary to my expectations, I argue that it does not, in fact, kill off major characters. Rather, the reader is understandably mistaken about who is a major character and who is not, for reasons I will get into at length in a moment. So while it’s true there’s a lot more death in Martin’s series than in most fantasy (including many, like Tolkien’s, where theoretically lots of blood is shed yet almost no named characters die), it didn’t nearly live up to its reputation in this respect either, although that’s nothing to be ashamed of.

[Anonymous No.9862235]

>>9862223
This leaves the most important issue. Is this the masterpiece of modern fantasy literature that it’s made out to be? No, not even close. I’m genuinely disappointed about this. Like anyone, I sometimes start reading a book or watching a film with some bias one direction or another (for instance, all the hype made me go into The Matrix looking for a fight, so while I didn’t think it was very good, a lot of that reaction is probably my fault), but in this case I was definitely hoping to love these books. For years I’ve checked up on Martin’s progress hoping he’d hurry up and finish so I could find out what the fuss was about. I thought there was a great chance I’d love it, along with certainly some fairly small chance that I’d hate it, or at least strongly dislike it.

I never expected to end up saying: Well, I guess it’s not bad. It’s okay.

The highlight is probably the world building. Tolkien and his imitators have emphasized the landscapes of their fantasy worlds. Even the Thomas Covenant series, which seemed at first glance like a rejection of everything Tolkien brought to the genre, spent a lot of its time (and won a lot of its fans, I suspect) on landscapes. Although there are some maps to be found of Westeros and its surrounding countries, Martin’s efforts in geographical construction and detail are merely adequate. Instead, more than any author I can recall, he has constructed a social landscape. Looking now at a map of Westeros, the names of cities, rivers, and castles bring to mind the characters who live in or near them. I can’t really tell you anything about what Casterly Rock looks like, for example, but just mentioning it evokes the wealth of detail that Martin has invested in the Lannister family and the twists and turns of their fortunes. The Lannisters are perhaps the series’ most prominent family, but by the end of the fourth book well over a dozen noble families have been sketched out in impressive detail. The variety in personality, character, and history is impressive and gives Martin’s Westeros a different and possibly greater sense of solidity than the traditional naturalistic approach.

The other aspects of the world are considerably weaker. The society seems reasonable enough, but various references to the ancient past ask us to believe that technology levels have been roughly unchanged for thousands of years, and further that not just one but almost every society is historically self-aware of their progression throughout this time. Each of the four seasons lasts for years, but after the first book it is hardly mentioned and I frankly almost forgot about it. Agriculture and economic planning don’t seem to be any different from generic feudal despite this massive climatological difference.

[Anonymous No.9862249]

>>9862235
Although initially confined to a few children, the series rapidly expands to encompass a large set of viewpoint characters, and this works better than in most pluralistic narratives, probably because Martin is more willing to kill off minor characters and thus prevent his cast from becoming too unwieldy at least until the fourth book. After a seemingly good guy/bad guy approach, Martin shades in a surprising degree of nuance as the series progresses. That Tyrion would be a fan favorite character was obvious from the start, but I was particularly impressed by the handling of Jaime Lannister. Not every character is a success, to be sure (if I never read anything more from Cersei’s viewpoint I won’t complain) but I don’t have many complaints with the characterization. Except for the youngest, the Stark children all act about five years older than they actually are, but that’s par for the course (I’m looking at you, Ender’s Game).

Then there’s the plot. Ah, the plot. Goodness. Where to begin?

I think most of the series’ fans would point at the plot as being its strength. I can see why they might like it, but I’m going to call it a disaster. Oh, it’s not an unmitigated failure, but a tragic one, for there’s a good story somewhere in all this quicksand trying to claw its way out. It pulls the reader in, keeps them going through the four massive books that have been published so far, and amounts to nothing. To understand this, think about just what it is this series is about.

You see, in the prologue of A Game of Thrones, some throwaway characters venture past a great wall to patrol the wilderness of the far north. For millennia, we learn, the Night’s Watch has manned this wall against evil, but for long centuries this threat has been dormant, the people shielded by the wall have become decadent, and the Watch is now too weak to reliably stand against bandits, much less a terrifying supernatural evil. But now there are signs that evil might be stirring! Kill the throwaways and bam, cut to chapter one. I think it’s safe to call this an extremely convenient way to begin a fantasy novel. The ur-epic fantasy, Lord of the Rings begins with the shadow of the past stirring once more, and it's Mordor was once carefully guarded before its watchers became lax. Since then thousands of fantasy books have begun this way, and I have read dozens of them, as have most of Martin’s audience. But I don’t think any of those books took Martin’s approach to developing this story in the rest of the first book: never mention it again in any way.

[Anonymous No.9862254]

>>9862249
All right, that’s a slight exaggeration, but not by much. He spends more time on Daenerys, a young princess in exile who must overcome all manner of obstacles both internal and external before she can start walking down the road toward reclaiming her throne, but this well-worn storyline is also strictly a sideline item. The second book, A Clash of Kings, even spends a little time on a King who is increasingly led down dark paths by a foreign sorceress, but this too gets only a little space in the ongoing story. Any one of these stories, properly developed, would be enough for a fantasy novel and probably an entire trilogy. Incorporating them all would definitely make for a lively fantasy series. Mind you, anyone who has read a reasonable amount of fantasy can sketch out roughly how these stories will evolve. For example, although a few people sound the alarm most deny the existence of the ancient evil despite increasingly clear evidence, then it sweeps down and everyone is very sorry they didn’t listen earlier, and it seems like it is too late and all civilization will perish, but just at the bleakest moment some enterprising individuals manage to win an unlikely victory. Despite his reputation as an innovator, Martin doesn’t appear to be deviating from the standard storyline here. Yet by the end of the fourth book, after 1.3 million words and nine years, the ancient evil has only just begun to sweep anywhere, and the other plotlines are even further behind. And no wonder: I don’t know how much of all those words went into developing them but I think fifteen percent would be a very generous guess.

Instead, most of the series has been devoted to the titular game of thrones as countless nobles struggle for power in Westeros. Unlike the plotlines I just described, this main thread does not follow normal conventions. It is almost completely without structure. Events happen one after another without any kind of cohesion. It’s not that they don’t make sense…everything seems fairly logical and Martin proves to be a very inventive spinner of intrigue and conspiracy. Yet this all proceeds outside of the narrative structure that has characterized western literature for centuries. There is no development, there is no sense of progression of any kind, there is no climax. It’s the plot equivalent of someone banging an endless series of chords, each unrelated to the next, on a piano. Now I readily admit to being far more interested in the way stories are constructed than the average reader, but I think this has many important downsides even for those who aren’t consciously aware of the dissonance.

[Anonymous No.9862273]

>>9862254
What was immediately noticeable to readers of the first book in 1996 was the way they had no idea what was coming next. Why should they? Long experience has taught us how plots work in almost all fiction, but here was a book that was resolute in ignoring these conventions. To be sure, the immediate result is a fairly refreshing feeling of suspense. But these narrative conventions exist for a reason. Although A Feast for Crows has other shortcomings, I think one of the biggest reasons it wasn’t as well received as the first three books was that without a sense of where the narrative is going, the reader doesn’t feel any momentum. Since there’s no plotline developing and advancing towards a climax, the reader realizes there’s no reason why the intrigue surrounding the throne of Westeros can’t go on indefinitely. And if the plot goes on indefinitely, then the individual events are completely deprived of meaning. In particular, one realizes that the characters can’t win any victory that won’t just be undone by further events two hundred pages later, so why bother rooting for them at all? When all is said and done, whoever is left standing in the ruins of Westeros will be swept aside by Daenerys and Jon Snow as they confront the evil out of the north, so isn’t this something of a waste of time?

Incidentally, I believe this was also how Martin got the reputation as a killer of main characters. Floating in a vacuum of story, readers latched on to what they assumed were main characters only to have them unexpectedly swept aside. Initially, Eddard Stark and his son Robb seemed like central characters, yet with the benefit of hindsight even from a position only halfway through the series, it’s obvious they are bit players. In a typically sized fantasy novel, they’d have a page or two of screen time. In fact, the actual main characters of the story, like Daenerys, are just as bulletproof as any normal story’s protagonists.

[Anonymous No.9862278]

>>9862273
The unpredictable and unstructured nature of the central plotline has a literal realism to it and I’m tempted to see it as a bold artistic statement on Martin’s part, but alas all the evidence points to this being an unintended effect. This was originally supposed to be a trilogy, after all, but has defied every prediction its own author made regarding its eventual length and publication schedule. Martin surely was writing a conventional fantasy novel about an ancient evil and an exiled princess but somehow got distracted by what probably was summed up in some original one page outline in about one sentence (“Westeros monarchy weakened by infighting and succession problems”). Having fallen in love with what was supposed to be a bit of window dressing, he has continually expanded its role within the series even though it threatens to completely drown out what the series was supposed to be about in the first place. Is it any wonder that he has suffered from the contemporary genre’s most famous case of writer’s block? I’m sure that long ago he planned what would happen to Daenerys and the Night’s Watch, but now he feels obligated to give equal time to characters like Brienne who are likable yet serve little purpose to the central narrative and are instead dragged through increasingly arbitrary make-work scenes to keep them available for some later bit of relevance.

Although I’ve been critical, I will defend Martin of one charge frequently lobbed at fantasy authors. I don’t think he’s stretching things out to make more money. The typical pattern for fantasy series is to start out with an exciting and action packed first book and then to become ever more bogged down in extra viewpoint characters and minutiae. Although it’s true A Feast for Crows is somewhat bogged down like this, really Martin deeply invests himself in the minutiae right from the start, and even the fourth book moves at a faster clip than typical doorstop fantasy. Likewise, where typical slow fantasy seems to get stuck always approaching but never reaching some critical point, Martin blasts through critical points all the time. The central plotline is a meat grinder that constantly chews up minor characters, spits them out, then pulls in more. If there’s a record for the fictional work that kills the most named characters then this series is right up there with the Iliad.

[Anonymous No.9862282]

>>9862278
I’m glad I read A Song of Ice and Fire but less because of the story itself and more because I find it interesting how unbalanced the story is. On one hand, it’s probably a testament to how a work that does one or two things really well can become extremely popular even if it does other things very poorly. Writing about Wheel of Time, Adam Roberts attributed some of its popularity to “fans who want to know every atom of the imagined world” and I think something similar is at work here. On the other hand, I think that the series’ weaknesses get magnified as the story goes on even if the quality of the books remains constant, leading me to suspect the series will never be again be as popular as it was when A Storm of Swords came out. Unfortunately for Martin, I think the series will only get harder and harder for him to write as he tries to provide some sort of climax and closure that justifies the endless profusion of aimless detail he’s provided so far. I’m even a lot more skeptical that HBO can successfully translate it into an effective television show, although being forced to provide an abridged version might end up being beneficial.

Hopefully I’m wrong and Martin eventually manages to both finish the series and somehow produce a satisfying second half in the process, but I won’t be holding my breath. Fortunately, looking back at the writers bearing Martin’s influence who I mentioned before, it seems like they have each taken something good about the series, amplified it, and then coupled that with a more conventional narrative structure (“conventional narrative” sure sounds like an insult, but that’s why reading Martin has been so helpful…breaking convention is a risky thing). Even if I never read any more of this series (the most likely possibility I’m afraid) I will at least be able to read other books that continue down the trail Martin blazed.

[Anonymous No.9862304]

>>9861617
Not an argument

[Anonymous No.9862386]

>>9861675
>I truly enjoyed A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.

Me too. He's a darn good storyteller. The first story in particular is top-notch.

[Anonymous No.9862464]

>>9861080
it's not the real world baby, it's a fantasy book

[Anonymous No.9862653]

>>9862464
Even so. My argument is valid

[Anonymous No.9862834]

>>9862653
it is invalid

[Anonymous No.9863334]

>>9862213
>>9862218
>>9862223
>>9862235
>>9862249
>>9862254
>>9862273
>>9862278
>>9862282
Not an argument

[Anonymous No.9863343]

Wow! The last episode was so cool! Dragons and fire, so much death! Best episode I've seen so far! Best thing I've seen on T.V. ever!

[Anonymous No.9863357]

>>9861080
Westerosi are like unborn babies or Jews -- outside the circle of humanity.

Their deaths are perhaps regrettable, but drowning kittens likewise might cause a spasm of regret. Regret is merely an emotion, and fleeting at that. It's not a ethical imperative.

[Anonymous No.9863358]

*an

[Anonymous No.9863968]

>>9861617
Jesus does the exact opposite. Martin kills John Snow so he can evoke artificial emotions of pitying in the audience, and then revive him because the character is mandatory for the plot.

Jesus dies and he never returns in the plot again.

The downfall of contemporary literature is being discussed, and you bring up the Bible to express your pretentious atheistic views.

[Anonymous No.9864005]

>>9830544
>theme or some sort of moral
It does have plenty of that though.

[Anonymous No.9864007]

>>9830678
?
Most are okay, certainly longer than 3 lines. Why not look at some reviews occasionally instead of ascribing to fiction and memes.

[Anonymous No.9864020]

>>9863968
>Jesus dies and he never returns in the plot again.

But doesn't the bible's plot require his return too? The second coming?

[Anonymous No.9864042]

>>9826438
Honestly, I think some people hate on GRRM and like Tolkien mainly to appear contrarian and edgy because ASOIAF are extremely popular now, especially with the normies who are 99% of any audience. The LOTR are literally books made for children, it doesn't get more reddit than that. They are fun reading when you were in your teenage years but sooner or later you should grow out of them even if you still find them good (I still do). Sooner or later you should be mature enough to understand that LOTR as a story is incredibly simplistic and the characters - even more so. Yes, the world building is amazing , but is it as good as ASOIAF? I don't think so. It just really comes down to personal preference - a mythic world filled with various legends or an extremely realistic one filled with maturity and gritttiness. I myself personally prefer ASOIAF way of worldbuilding because things are styled more to my lliking - the world is written from a character's perspective, yet it's still extremely detailed. The mystery that still surrounds the world is extremely fascinating from the Ye Ti and the Five Forts to the Lands of Never Winter and the Others.And the rest is really just... not worth mentioning. The characters and the story of ASOIAF just blow LOTR out of the water, it's not even funny.

So in the end liking LOTR over ASOIAF is just pure contrarianism from a couple of r*dditors that have either not grew out of their teenage years or are still in that phase, or are just doing it to appear edgy and "cool" because hating on popular things is a 4chan fashion trend.

[Anonymous No.9864265]

>>9864020
Lol these ad hoc arguments. No, dude, pretty sure Jesus wouldn't come a second time just so the Bible's plot could continue.

[Anonymous No.9864647]

>>9847199
>which all stems from the deposition of Richard II, the rightful king of England. This was HIGHLY UNUSUAL.
To ENGLISHMEN. Succession wars weren't something strange in Europe. Heck, the English themselves were an attacking faction in the French one, which they didn't seem to notice until they started losing.

[Anonymous No.9864650]

>>9849365
>Did no one explain to him that orcs are artificially made?
In the movie? Sure. According to Tolkien, orcs reproduce the same as the Children of Illuvatar.

[Anonymous No.9864684]

>>9826095
>Did Martin achieve his objective when writing A song of Ice and Fire?
It's hard to say when he hasn't finished ASOIAF.

Looking at his previous works, GRRM has a Shyamalan-level love for plot twists, so the world turning out to be sci-fi, or the Others ending up not evil all along (after all, they haven't even done anything in the books, yet), or the Children trying to fool humans into killing each other would certainly be interesting. It's kinda sad how many people celebrate the series as "realistic fantasy", when the books are about how such "fantasy" should be repugnant to a human being. Of course, not many people notice that when Martin himself continues to focus on the stories of schemers, plotters and warriors, on the importance of their quests, while the characters that could offer a perspective contrary to the war one remain unnoticed by the readers.

The closest Martin has come to achieving his objectives is, IMHO, the Brienne POV of "A Feast For Crows", and that book is probably the most hated of the series. Considering how Martin keeps sliding off to write more stories about Targaryen history instead of finishing TWOW, it's quite possible that he caught onto the fact that people may just plain not like where he taking the story (away from the War of Five Kings and towards its bloody aftermath, "phasing out" the importance of Stark vs Lannister conflict that has been going on for the first three books) and just concentrates on Tolkienesque world-building, which he likes. Had the ASOIAF fans read Martin's other literature, half of them would probably stop being his fans, because looking at how he ends most of his books, ASOIAF's ending (if it ever comes) will be anticlimactic, confusing and challenging the morals of an average reader at their very core.

[Anonymous No.9865484]

>>9864684
Please post examples

[Anonymous No.9866256]

>>9826183
Nice meme

[Anonymous No.9867480]

>>9864684
I'm not huge on GRRM but I think A Feast For Crows got entirely too much shit. A Dance With Dragons was extremely painful for me on account of its bigness but before that he wasn't going too bad. I kind of hope ASoIaF doesn't turn out to be science-fiction for his sake though, it'll invite comparisons to Gene Wolfe and that's a match-up GRRM won't survive.

[Anonymous No.9867555]

>>9864042
Have you ever considered that maybe people like LOTR more because it's better? Books aren't just "le morally gray" and "le plot twists". LOTR is an actual work of art, it's like a beautiful painting with how everything connects together, from the surface level world building to the greater themes. ASOIAF is entertaining but is also unwieldy and has gone completely off the rails and totally ruined any chance it had of being a cohesive work of art.

[Anonymous No.9867558]

>>9826825
Martin BTFO

[Anonymous No.9867578]

>>9838173
>people of color were mostly invisible.
Gee, maybe because they weren't there?

[Anonymous No.9869049]

>>9864042
LOTR were kids books at the time they were written but theyre still way more advanced than contemporary fantasy

[Anonymous No.9870383]

>>9867555
>Have you ever considered that maybe people like LOTR more because it's better?

No, it's really just a couple of autists that spam the taxes and "sunset found her on the grass"meme. If you ask what most normies would prefer, they'd say GOT (even though it has really become pleb-tier after season 4)

>LOTR is an actual work of art, it's like a beautiful painting with how everything connects together, from the surface level world building to the greater themes.

Biggest bullshit I have ever heard. Maybe for its time but not nowadays. Every other fantasy is literally like LOTR, so it's really not anything special. ASOIAF, on the other hand, is something unique.

[Anonymous No.9870432]

>>9870383
Are you serious?

[Anonymous No.9870545]

>>9870432
Can you try and make a dumber post?

[Anonymous No.9871023]

>>9840070

Sansa is much more complex, unorthodox and a much more compelling character than Arya. Her development is superb, and she consistently has entertaining chapters. She doesn't fit the usual mold of the portrayal of women in the medieval age, and is mostly despised due to the fact that she's a traditionally feminine teenage girl in a medieval setting (that make mistakes)

[Anonymous No.9871040]

>>9826825
Pasta deliciosa

[Anonymous No.9871156]

>>9871023
GRRM makes a pretty accurate portrayal of real life women t b h. Almost every woman in his books is absolutely incompetent, incredibly irrational and emotional and generally stupid.

[Anonymous No.9871184]

>>9826095
>Realism
dragons, ice zombies and blood magic
no i don't think he achieved this

[Anonymous No.9871854]

>>9826183
George, why are you here?

[Anonymous No.9871977]

>>9870383
>unironically using normie opinion as an argument
Nice to see you think Harry Potter is the best book ever written. Why the fuck are you here?

>le every book is like Lord of the Rings now
Does that tell you something about it, faggot? If ASOIAF was half as good as LOTR then every book would be like it too.

[Anonymous No.9871985]

>>9826825
I'll shitpost this in /tv/'s GoT general. Thanks.

[Anonymous No.9872618]

>Sunset found her squatting in the grass, groaning. Every stool was looser than the one before, and smelled fouler. By the time the moon came up she was shitting brown water. The more she drank, the more she shat, but the more she shat, the thirstier she grew, and her thirst sent her crawling to the stream to suck up more water.
Top notch series, really broke down the barriers of the fantasy genre.

[Anonymous No.9872672]

>>9871977
>Nice to see you think Harry Potter is the best book ever written. Why the fuck are you here?
>have you ever considered maybe people like LOTR more because it's better

You're massively contradicting yourself here. Which one is it now?

>Does that tell you something about it, faggot? If ASOIAF was half as good as LOTR then every book would be like it too.

LOTR was released in 1950, ASOIAF in 1996. There's really no comparison to be made here as ASOIAF really doesn't have much time to influence other books. Hell, ASOIAF isn't even finished yet.

[Anonymous No.9872856]

>>9864042
>The LOTR are literally books made for children
Books that deliberately invoke the stylings of Northern European myth and folklore as they depict in detail the end of an age of magic and wonder regardless of whether or not the good guys can at least stave off the end of the world are for children. Granted, LOTR isn't even Tolkien's best work the (for me, that would be The Silmarillion).

>an extremely realistic one filled with maturity and gritttiness
What does "realistic" even mean? Is grit realistic? Well, yes a certain amount makes sense given the at time gritty nature of reality. But "maturity"? What does that even mean? Since when is pessimism "mature"?

The belief that pessimism is maturity incarnate is nothing more than the naivete of a teenager that, fancying themselves an adult, believe that they've "figured things out" and that a nihilistic and negative view of the world is the mature view to have. What is that, if not the very incarnation of a pseudo-intellectual Redditor.

The child is naive in that they are too idealistic. The teenager is naive in that they react harshly to learning that idealism doesn't always work, and thus are reactionary in their pessimism for fear of being childish. The adult reconciles these extremes, and sees the world for what it is. Better to gamble a stamp than act as if a high quality pulp novel series (and they are pulpy, believe it or not) is great literature on par with the work of Homer or Cervantes because of the "maturity" of its "grit" and "pessimism."

[Anonymous No.9872953]

>>9826098
ok so youre saying we wont ever discuss it, would love to agree but it can be discussed now

[Anonymous No.9873820]

>>9872672
>You're massively contradicting yourself here. Which one is it now?

How is this a contradiction? I never said more people like LOTR. I was saying that the people who do like LOTR like it because it's good, not because they're "edgy" like you said which is just retarded. I'm sure the people who like GOT like it because they think it's good too, and it is, just not better than LOTR.

>LOTR was released in 1950, ASOIAF in 1996. There's really no comparison to be made here as ASOIAF really doesn't have much time to influence other books. Hell, ASOIAF isn't even finished yet.

So if ASOIAF does end up influencing other books then you won't like it anymore because it's not "unique"? This is just such a bad argument. Does the fact that a lot of movies took techniques from Citizen Kane make Citizen Kane no longer a good movie? When you make something good then it gets imitated. And every fantasy became like LOTR easily within 20 years of its release.