How popular was it before GoT came and normies invaded?

How popular was it before GoT came and normies invaded?

It was still pretty popular.

Fairly popular. There was a very dedicated fanbase on Tv Tropes and LJ.

Normies didn't ruin GoT, the author did

this. i remember back in middle school a lot of people were reading it and this was when the first season wasn't even finished.

>this. i remember back in middle school
Christ, are you even 18?

I was reading this series since I was in high school, almost 15 years ago now. Back then nobody but fantasy nerds even knew it existed. I couldn't get anybody to listen to me when I tried to tell them about this series, my family wrote off everything I read as "Tolkien stuff".

To be fair most of the stuff that teenage fantasy nerds read could scarcely be called Tolkien stuff in terms of quality so you could interpret it as your family being nice.

Except I started reading Tolkien when I was 10 and it was my mother who handed my her ratty old copy of the Hobbit. She didn't care much for fantasy herself but she read the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings when she was young, so that was her entire conception of the genre.

You moved in wrong circles. He was well known on the better side of the pond. First three novels were really well received in contemporary scify community. Then the writers block hit, and he obviously lost it.

>First three novels were really well received
It still surprises me that people think the third one is a good book. The first two, while not being great works of literature, I thought were okay fantasy fluff. The third book comes out and ever single chapter has to have some huge event happen in it. Gone are the chapters of character development and theme exploration. It's all aboard the schlock express after that. Also I think killing Robb (Rob?) was the single biggest mistake he made in the whole series except for the existence of Danny.

It was popular enough to have a mod for Rome: Total War. That's how I first heard of it.

eh? Tyrion, Jon, Sansa, Samwell, Stannis, Brienne, Jaime and Arya all go through fantastic development in ASOS
It was pretty popular, probably the third most popular fantasy series of the 00s after The Lord of the Rings and The Wheel of Time

the fourth and fifth books are the best if you like character development and theme exploration (even if they move at a snail pace)

Very. Why do you think hbo wanted to make the show?

>all go through fantastic development in ASOS
Well they develop, but I would hardly call it fantastic. What I mean is that the pace of the third book is so fast that in the second half of the book something big plot wise happens in every single chapter. The first two books had chapters where literally nothing happened except we got to understand a character. Every new POV character that gets added after the second books is hardly a character at all. Jaime is an exception though I think a lot of his development is an illusion created by merely showing that a bad guy has an internal life and isn't one of his cardboard thin characters that run around the place. The problem I have with the pace of the third book is most characters never have their meager growth actually shown. GRRM sets up an event that would change someone but then we are gone to the next chapter so that the character changes without us seeing it.

What character development does Jon get? He's near identical in the fifth book from how he is near the end of the first book. How does Stannis grow? A deontologist type gets seduced by utilitarian actions.

I hated the fourth and fifth books because by then it was obvious GRRM had no idea what he was doing and everything was a huge mess. With the first two you could feel like there was an actual plan and things had reasons for happening.

>fifth books are the best if you like character development
And what was Quentyn Martell's character development, becoming toast?

can you do basic math?

Who gives a shit, it's a boring rape-filled soap opera about taxes and dragons. Fantasy is escapist garbage. Peter S. Beagle is the only fantasy author of merit.

Household name among fantasy fans

your mum know her shit. thats all you need to read to have the entire conception of the genre.

>American middle school does children up to 12 years
>The first season of GoT aired in 2011
>Therefore the poster is at oldest 18
>inb4 I live in shitrektistan and suck my own dick, I did middle school until I was 34

It was pretty popular as a fantasy series and was constantly recc'd on Veeky Forums.

There were dedicated threads on /tv/ before Veeky Forums was even created and way before the TV show.

Normalfags were completely unaware of it until HBO announced their adaptation. The only people who knew about the books before then were those who were already reading genre fiction.

Back in 2009, a kind user dropped the Roy Doetrice audiobooks on megaupload for all of us.

Nigga what?
Do you know what the definition of middle is? Up to 12 is grade school. 12 - 14 is middle school, then high school.
So the oldest he can be is 20.