2018 has only just started

god fucking dammit i hate this fat motherfucker

it's been a decade since i read the first four books. haven't seen the series. been holding off on starting over and reading the fifth as well because six is supposed to be coming out. rahhh george martin stop playing video games and doing side projects and just finish your dumb stupid vision already i hate you so.

youtube.com/watch?v=bNKfLINJJ-U

i take the approach of simple appreciation for what he's produced so far and if that's all we get then so be it.

if he truly has written himself into a creative bind, why waste your time bleating about his struggle? why not feel empathy for him, i'm sure he didn't intend to bereave his audience of finality.

Demand-consumerism has begotten silk slippered brats. He owes you nothing, be grateful.

friendly reminder all the pages from winds released so far, have been material cut from dance, and there is no evidence george r r martin (writer) wrote a single page since 2010

Surprised he even managed to shit out 5 of those turds desu.

He had to strain for that tbqh deus vult

Why does it seem like lit unironically gives a shit about Game of Thrones?

...

You wouldn't be saying this if it hadn't become a normie fandom. I think it's fine to read New York Best Sellers, as long as there's a lot of skepticism and criticism involved. What's wrong with being up to date?

because despite our posturing we all really are the unwanted, the neglected, the outcast loners. even the internet philosophers who put on airs secretly appreciate genre. this is Veeky Forums for goodness sake man.

He's a very important pseud, you see. He has things to prove at his online college, you see, where he uploads photos of classical art as avatars and overuses the word "milieu" when discussing the set text (Dickens).

the virgin George R.R. Martin
>doesn't finish his books
>tries to give people five spin-off series to the TV show
>is massively butthurt that the show might finish before his books and that the show might be better
>fat and ugly
>no wife or kids

the chad J.K. Rowling
>allowed the film directors to take creative liberties with her work and stayed out of the production process so she could actually write
>finished the last Harry Potter book well in advance of the final film
>8/10 hottie
>is happily married with children
>is richer than the Queen of England

top kek

Each hp book followed a set formula and everyone knew how it would have to end anyway.

It's cheap pulp fantasy sprinkled with politics. His books should be no more than 300 pages each, but he keeps writing these colossal works, adding new characters, some of which should have been added during the first and second books. The man is a hack, but his writing is a lot better than half the shit I've read, especially that fraud, Patrick Rothfuss. I don't think it even matters if he does finish it or not, the show has given the audience the satisfaction it wants. GRRM has two options, pump out the books before the show finishes and the plebs lose interest entirely, or just retire and let someone else finish it for him.

because Veeky Forums hates everything that even remotely becomes normie. Is it the best writing? Of course not! It's still captivating though, you have to be completely honest, his big moments like poor ol' dead ned, and the red wedding were very creative. He does try very hard to keep the story from becoming predictable which makes the story worthwhile.

Season 8 comes out 2019. No way he's gonna finish, let alone release, two books.

i wish the series was pulpy and hackish. then at least it'd be an engaging read.

Fire and Blood I is maybe out later this year or early 2020, so 2020 or 2021 is the very earliest we may see WW.

>that change of cover design on the fifth book screwing it all up

He has to know how to end it, otherwise he wouldn't be able to tell the plot to the HBO producers. It's more likely that he's just a slow-working perfectionist who likes to include far too much detail that isn't necessary and there's no editor there to stop him.

His books are shit, they exemplify everything that is wrong with epic fantasy in my opinion: verbosity, autistic descriptions, and meandering. I don't want to read an entire page describing the food that's on a table. Tell the fucking story.

>As for "too much description," well, opinions differ. We write the books we want to read. And I want to read books that are richly textured and full of sensory detail, books that make me feel as if I am experiencing a story, not just reading it. Plot is only one aspect of telling a tale, and not the most important one. It is the journey that matters, not how fast you arrive at the destination.

>That's my view, anyway. Others writers differ, of course. There are hundreds of books where everything is subordinate to advancing the plot, some of them quite fine, but my work has never been about that, and never will be.

>no wife or kids
He's married actually

Yeah but he's too obese to fuck and hasn't seen his dick in years.

He's finished two fluff books and a map book since Dance With Dragons, he can obviously write, his story is just fucked up. The character deaths had a chance to really focus the story but he added a dozen new ones to slow down the pace even more.

The earlier books were and they were fun in a brainless way. After book 3 is when it really went downhill.

I thought Veeky Forums hated the Song of Wind and Fire books

Are they actually worth reading then? Or is Veeky Forums only talking about it because it's kinda fun to speculate/rant about pop-fiction like John Green

They're trash. This thread is full of /sffg/fags and rabbitors.

b-b-but you're just hating because it got popular! if it wasn't popular u would lvoe it !!

I read them back in the day, before the tv series, and liked them a lot. Not mind-enriching like some sci-fi (e.g. Gene Wolfe, PKD) but good entertainment value. Spectacular world-building.

But back then the books were being released every few years and I thought the series would be finished eventually.

Is it worth reading an unfinished story? If you think so, go for it. I personally refuse to read anything else in that series until it's finished. It's a big time commitment, the books are huge.

if he's a perfectionist why is his series so shit?

> implying his dick doesn't trail along the floor to the extent where people trip over it

and he still can't see his dick? lmao fatty

I read the blog post. He doesn't seem to say that explicitly, although he does say this:

>On the other extreme, I don't consider A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE a series either; it's one single story, being published in (we hope) seven volumes.
>we hope
>hope
>tfw

I read them as a teen and I'm still fond of the story.

He's already written them, he's just waiting for the TV series to end.

It's fucking over. I say this as a fan of both the books and the show (seasons 1-4).

We will be lucky to get TWOW before he's a goner. It's been, what, 7 years since ADWD? And there is no way he is nearly done, otherwise we would fucking know it. Fatman would be rubbing his nearly finished manuscript in our faces on his myspace journal.

But in the OP he can't even guarantee it this year, in fucking February. So either he is nowhere near done or he has given up completely.

Either way, TWOW will likely never be released and even if it does, there is no way we will EVER see A Dream of Spring written entirely by GRRM. ADOS is supposed to be the final book of this clusterfuck of a story.

He won't have the excuse of leaving major plotlines until later like he had for the last six books. He'll have to wrap it up completely, while taking the cacophony of criticism that TWOW will inevitably get when it isn't the most perfect book in the world like everyone wants.

The man can't even finish the penultimate book without procrastinating like a college student. We will never ever see the finale. It's fucking over.

calm down, hes only 60

This. He does what he can and we get what we get.

journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/05/entitlement-issues.html

Why not just have the TV show be canon? The books he finished have fulfilled their purpose in being the background material for the series.

I'm sure the people who started reading it since it was first published really appreciates being called entitled brats because the bloated coffin dodger is too busy trampolining naked to write.

he's also morbidly obese and unproductive

Of course he has an ending in mind. The point is he doesn't know how to finish it in a satisfactory way so he just isn't going to try. We can already see from the show that it's going to be some lame Daenerys and Jon save world shit.

The show went complete horseshit the second it departed from the book, because D&D are mentally retarded when it comes with writing their own stuff.
I no longer consider the show canon for the past 3 seasons.

He knows how to finish it. It just takes him an extraordinarily long time from how much meandering and unnecessary detail he adds, as well as the endless rewrites and revisions he'll do.

.It's not.

it objectively is

70

oh right were fucked

This is why this series will never be as good as people want it to be.

Great stories have something to say or something they want you to feel reading them. If this cunt doesn't even know how he wants to end the books, or if he knows how he wants to end it but is so scared of being compared to the show that he refuses to finish it then the fat bastard never had any idea to begin with.

Which is we'll never be able to compare them to Tolkien, or the stories in the bible or any other great work of fiction with a powerful point to it. His books have no fucking point!
the world building is great though, more maps plx

He fell in love with his own characters. It'll never end until he's dead then will happen

Inhear you but I fear for new authors/sagas that'll never get published because now folks will fear the story never being completed. They'll say "eh, I'll just wait until it's done". Problem is, it doesn't work like that.

>No editor to stop him.
This. After he sacked his first editor the writing went to hell.

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 is 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 a 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.

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 to 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 . . ."

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.

Novelists often write in isolation, so it's easy to forget the rule to which playwrights adhere: your story is always a fiction. Any time you treat it as if it were real, you are working against yourself. The writing that feels the most natural is never effortless, it is carefully and painstakingly constructed to seem that way.

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.

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 anyways, 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).

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?

You also hear the same things from the fans: that it's all carefully planned, all interconnected, all going somewhere. Apparently, they didn't learn their lesson from the anticlimactic fizzling out of Twin Peaks, X-Files, Lost, and Battlestar. Then again, you wouldn't keep watching if you didn't think it was going somewhere. And who would blame them? No person wants to read a novel nor watch a series where a series would inevitably fizzle out due to either the Authors incompetence.

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 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 worldbuilding 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.

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."

He's an immature, arrogant shit head. I'd rather he just kick the bucket already.

> The first dish was a creamy soup of mushrooms and buttered snails, served in gilded bowls. Tyrion had scarcely touched the breakfast, and the wine had already gone.

> He called for more wine. By the time he got it, the second course was being served, a pastry coffyn filled with pork, pine nuts, and eggs. Sansa ate no more than a bite of hers, as the heralds were summoning the first of the seven singers.

> Tyrion listened with half a ear, as he sampled sweetcorn fritters and hot oatbread baked with bits of date, apple, and orange, and gnawed on the rib of a wild boar.

> Their feats were accompanied by crabs boiled in fiery eastern spices, trenchers filled with chunks of chopped mutton stewed in almond milk with carrots, raisins, and onions, and fish tarts fresh from the ovens, served so hot they burned the fingers.

> Tyrion suffered through it with a double helping of honey-ginger partridge and several cups of wine. A haunting ballad of two dying lovers amidst the Doom of Valyria might have pleased the hall more if Collio had not sung it in High Valyrian, which most of the guests could not speak. But "Bessa the Barmaid" won them back with its ribald lyrics. Peacocks were served in their plumage, roasted whole and stuffed with dates

> Four master pyromancers conjured up beasts of living flame to tear at each other with fiery claws whilst the serving men ladeled out bowls of blandissory, a mixture of beef broth and boiled wine sweetened with honey and dotted with blanched almonds and chunks of capon. Then came some strolling pipers and clever dogs and sword swallowers, with buttered pease, chopped nuts, and slivers of swan poached in a sauce of saffron and peaches.

> A juggler kept a half-dozen swords and axes whirling through the air as skewers of blood sausage were brought sizzling to the tables

> Tyrion was toying with a leche of brawn, spiced with cinnamon, cloves, sugar, and almond milk, when King Joffrey lurched suddenly to his feet.

these descriptions are all for the same feast.

>these descriptions are all for the same feast.
its called Padding.

GRRM is like a WoW altholic who can't stop making new characters but never gets past level 20. He also relies on using PoV characters who have no fucking clue what is going on, because if he ever wrote from the perspective of an individual who does, the entire history of Westeros could be summarized in a couple paragraphs. When he does write from the perspective of a character who is competent and knowledgable, he is careful to avoid having them think about anything other than what is immediately pertinent, or some senseless minor incident that happened in the past. If he had kept the length to a trilogy, or been able to pump out books at a reliable pace, people would not be upset. But his failure to finish the series, and his inability to stick to a deadline like anyone with a real job, along with a few faggots creaming themselves over how great they think he is, has made Veeky Forums hate him. I'm not convinced Veeky Forums really dislikes the books, just the author and the fanbase.

>every death is a fake death
>not predictable

>I'm not convinced Veeky Forums really dislikes the books

Aside from the first book they are legitimately bad. The overarching narrative goes absolutely nowhere because at some point along the writing process Martin made the decision to stretch things out for a few more books. Then the series devolves into cliches that the original set out to subvert, like the fakeout death or messiah figure archetype. When taking the series as a whole there is nothing that sets it apart from any other generic fantasy shit. There is no artistic value to be found.

Except now that he has to wrap things up it's predictable as fuck

As someone who actually read the books, this is all true.

I thought the first book was indistinguishable from the others, but I don't like fantasy so perhaps you're correct. I thought they were all mindless entertainment.

The first one did some interesting things. The death of Ned Stark really changed the game because main characters weren't supposed to die like that. The rape and incest was actually new and shocking even though he quickly made it boring by overusing it. It inspired a lot of copycats and kicked off this era of "adult nihilistic fantasy."

This is a terrible critique, why did you bother posting the entire thing? I've read vastly better criticisms of the series, it's incredibly obvious that the author of this didn't finish the book or even understand it on a basic level.

Not the user you responded to, but what made it such a bad critique?

I've read all of the books (so far) and broadly agree with much of the criticism, although I do think it's lazy and bad form not to finish reading even ONE of the series you are talking down on.

Still interested in what you have to say, though.

They're decent books, but very flawed. An interesting case study and worth reading if you like fantasy. Veeky Forums's problem is with it's myopic obsession of ranking and listing books and authors as if they are some sort of videogame stat or purely for their social value, so you can pretend to be superior because you've read X unknown author. This attitude is the complete antithesis of art.

This will fail because people already know how the "what-if" is artificial; he didn't die from cardiac arrest after he published his last book. He's been fucking around for YEARS. People know it should be out by now and it isn't because he has no clue where he's going with it.

Sorry I don't have the time to write up a big response right now, but where to even begin? The guy completely misunderstands everything about the context, the history, and even the basic thematic concerns, and is completely uncharitable. The guy's perspective on fantasy is also quite bizarre, it feels like he's dealing with some straw man he's concocted of what he thinks the series is like and what it represents culturally rather than actually dealing with the text itself. FWIW I'm not even really a fan of the series either, but I've read much better critiques.

And also the guy says he doesn't like Wolfe, which is a huge warning sign because Wolfe is almost undebatably one of the greatest authors to ever work in the genre. Just read his review of Shadow and Claw, this dude has no clue what he's talking about and it shows goodreads.com/review/show/6736950

Shadow and Claw is Wolfe weakest book to date

Well I fervently disagree and also reviewing series or books before you finish them is an awful habit that this reviewer seems to have.

Take this dreck to /b/

Fat fuck was probably masturbating as he wrote this out

Thanks for what you had time to put down on the subject, it's appreciated.

I've not read much fantasy (other than China Meiville's works) for the last few years, although It used to be one of my favorite genres, so I might check out Wolfe on your recommendation.

I hope he never finishes it because he’s a fat, useless fuck who sold out to talentless television hacks for cash rather than knuckle down and finish what would have been a respectable legacy. ASoIaF is a joke now, just the same as he is himself.

>a dream of spring will never come to reality

>it'll be awful.
dude, its genre fiction

they already have a point, even without an ending.
And he knows the ending btw

What changed with book 3? Never read the books but plan to

the first seasons were godlike, I dont think he expected that id would turn out like this.