Does he accurately portray medieval life and politics as well as he claims he does?

So show me exactly what your problem with this is?

>he didn't get Tolkien
what a hack

Wow 10/10 banter. You're as clever as my dick

There wasn't much to get senpai

>he fell for the Tolkien meme

Basically this.

yeah, it's pretty straightforward, which is why his spectacular missing of the point is all the more embarassing

Did you actually read any of that?

He's a fat, lazy, perverted sack of shit who's "knowledge" of the Middle Ages consists of tourist trap visits and skimming Wikipedia for the most gruesome and cruel moments of history

youtube.com/watch?v=XAAp_luluo0

>The genre is called fantasy, it's meant to be unrealistic

No, like all fantasy authors who draw inspiration from history, they only take on a facet of a particular decade of history and wing the rest.

But that's why it's fantasy. It's easier than Historical fiction, which requires extensive research to make your historical setting more believable.

That's not his point though.
His point is that he wants to explore the real-world consequences of all those epic fantasy battles.

Did you GoTfag?

If he honestly means what he's saying the man is a tremendous hack and an oaf who clearly hasn't a single clue of what Tolkien was doing.

Who cares? His older stuff is better.

I'm immensely triggered by the fact that people are comparing Tolkien to le fat HBO man

This thread again?

Ok. No. He based the war of the War of the Roses which was at tail end of medieval period. The world Martin creates doesn't make sense. Its tech is all over the pace from viking longboats to galleys, and don't even start on "the wall." But the biggest problem is the world itself. Because of the mostly medieval tech and Westeros low population density, there is no way they would have a unified kingdom or the type of regional warfare he depicts. You can make parraelles between the Holy Roman Empire, where the HREmperor is only monarch in name and partially independent nobles warred among themselves for centuries, Westeros nobles are basically just proxies for muh states muh regionalism, which can't happen with that tech and that population. Westeros should be ancient Russia level of small principalities and tribes.

The almost total absence of religious motives and constraints in characters, before le ebin high sparrow arc.
Yes you may be thinking "lel, but it's realistic, people didn't actually make their decisions based on religion, I'm le enlightened realpolitik historian", in which case you'd be a moron.

BAWW

WHY DIDNT THE ILLIAD GO INTO EXTENSIVE DETAIL ABOUT BRONZE AGR PALACE ECONOMIES?

WHY DIDNT BEOWULF DISCUSS THE FARMING TECHNIQUES OF MIGRATION ERA GERMANIC TRIBES?

>In book sales you've got nothing to say
>I'm number one and two, you're under 50 Shades of Grey

BTFO

That's absolutely retarded, we all know war is shitty

I bet you think Evangelion was "deep" because "dude what if we showed realistic kids piloting death machines to fight horrifying monsters from space?"

To be fair I'm pretty sure Martin himself doesn't like the comparison, at least from what I can gather from interviews he has given. Obviously he likes it as far as being flattered by it, but he has consistently rejected being deemed Tolkien's equal.

That's why it's fantasy, Einstein

Very few people actually went around swordfighting all the goddamned time.

OPs question was "Does he accurately portray medieval life and politics as well as he claims" not whether its fantasy. The fact there are dragons ends that debate.

>some people get raped in bygone days
"Everyone needs to be raped! No exceptions! Every man woman and child needs to feel like they could be raped at any second!"

>some monarchies had trouble with coups and assassinations
"Everyone get's murdered! No Exceptions! If you're a king you get killed because that's how it was in my history! Never mind the fact that they only wrote about the kings who got murdered cause that was interesting, murder for everyone!"

>serfs had it a bit rough back in the day
"I want starvation, slavery and death around every corner! If you're poor your life is shit!"

Life back then was a lot like life today. Banal and pointless. GRRM is a retard.

I don't know if you saw this, but there's a post just above where he spells all this out to you pretty plainly.

He's talking about FANTASY, he says he writes fantasy from a different angle than the most popular Tolkien-inspired style. Literally what aren't you getting about this?

What fantasy books/stories do stay faithful to history?

Tolkien was christian fanfiction. Good fights evil, Good wins.

Granted it was revolutionary in the finer details but there's not much to get.

He's basically a DnD nerd. He's marginally more informed than the average fantasy writer, but he knows about as much about medieval politics as the guys who post on Veeky Forums.

Why doesn't he do it then?

>le realism u guize
Not only it's a trite point, Martin knows fuck all about any of that. His ignorance of medieval taxation, protocol and """"population control"""" is baffling.

>Why didn't this guy include mass rape and in-depth discussion on taxation in his heroic romance mythology?

And what I'm trying to say is that, at least based on what OP provided as evidence, his question is entirely missing the point and taking GRRM's words way out of context. He never says that is his view of history, he was speaking almost entirely in the confines of the fantasy genre.

I thought Gene Wolfe's 'Latro in the Mist' and its sequel 'Soldier of Sidon' used accurate history to contribute to the fantastical aspects.

Yes, truly he is the first ever fantasy writer to have ever though "hum, I want to do some things different from Tolkien"

Is there really nothing better to talk about than mudslinging over a fucking fantasy series on a history board? No wonder I rarely come here.

>We look at real history and it’s not that simple.
>But the vast majority of wars throughout history are not like that.
He uses "but le real history you guize" as an argument twice in those two quotes only. Stop twisting his mouth to defend your fat fuck YA author.

Never said that either
Look, if you want to talk shit about GoT, go to /tv/.

Even as far as fantasy goes there are problems. The tech for ones thing and the vast distances. The idea that the Starks couldscrounge up an army and march south near undefeated is silly lorewise. I can suspend my disbelief for all sorts of things but Rob Stark wasn't riding a dragon, he was riding horses and even the fastest Merchant caravans could only travel 30 miles a day in the middle-ages and armies were way slower. No magic was introduced to explain that.

Anyone?

Martin evokes history whenever he's criticized. If the fat man wants to dance then we should oblige him.

Yeah this board is terrible and should have never been made. That was known before the board was made.

The "history-buffs" are casuals and the philosophers are douches, so it memes out quickly on Veeky Forums.

I don't care what you say, it's shit and inaccurate, fuck off to another board if you're unhappy about us not validating your teen litterature.

Salammbô is remarquably well researched.

As someone who used to live in the DRC I can see what the critics mean

Yeah there was murder, war, rape, torture blah blah blah in certain areas back during the worst of things in the 90's

But for most people life was "meh"

>Durr, it's not retarded it's fantasy.

"Fantasy" is no excuse for bad writing. Tolkien said it best. "Inside it, what [the author] relates is 'true': it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the primary world again, looking at the little abortive secondary world from the outside."

*tips fedora*

I bet you liked Eragon

>Did Aragorn pursue a policy of systematic genocide and kill them?

>Does he accurately portray medieval life and politics
no
>as well as he claims he does?
does he?

I'd bet fifty big bad buckaroos that both of those go into many times more detail on those topics than LotR goes into its equivalents.

How about no

>Beowulf
>Farming techniques

>Medieval story
>agriculture never comes up

Idk, it's been a long time since I read Beowulf but farms are hell of important in every other medieval story I've read except maybe the Song of Roland

>an author revisiting a topic in depth that is normally only glossed over because it's taken as a common sense given
>b-but muh kitsch.

You're absolutely autistic. If people like you were listened to, then we'd forget that shit in a generation.

huehehehueheuhee

>Epic poetry
>Agriculture

Are you Australian by chance?

>We look at real history and it’s not that simple.

This fucking guy...

It is literally

just

a criticism

It's a criticism of black and white morality in medieval or historically inspired fantasy. Get over yourself.

which topic? medieval taxation? He doesn't treat it either

Martin has obviously read some history, and obviously has not read a lot of Tolkien. But his history (and probably his Tolkien reading) is from like the 60s. He lacks modern knowledge and still follows many common pop-history "memes" in his works, that were much more rampant back then.

But he obviously has read some history.

>The Tolkien model led generations of fantasy writers to produce these endless series of dark lords and their evil minions who are all very ugly
Seriously nigger

Except he doesn't. I've read all his ASOIAF-universe books and if you consider the amount of time he talks about "muh realisim", "muh lotr had no taxation" and "muh lotr didn't talk about agriculture" he really doesn't explore these themes in his book much.

The others are obviously not evil. And it's a good thing you bring this up because i find it funny that people constantly demand that they want morally gray and non black and white characters yet they believe in R+L=J and want Jon to become the super badass savior jesus christ

LoTR is literally

an

allegory.

Le fat reddit man's criticism is ridiculous because it assumes the book ought to do something Tolkien never intended it to do. It's similar to criticizing a religious icon for not being photo-realistic.

It's just self-promotion, user. Kind of like the Assassins Creed developers often saying they want to portray history accurately and then shit out a casual arcade game about le alium conspiracies and with a heavy leftie / identiatarian bias on top of it.

He has massive fuckhuge castles designed to hold off sieges and treats the one character in the series who does the thing a Lord should do, take the populace behind his walls with their livestock, like he's a fucking moron for doing so.

Castles and keeps were built big for a reason.

>i find it funny that people constantly demand that they want morally gray and non black and white
nobody is asking that only the fat fuck is stroking his own dick about that when it's not even a selling point for his book anyway
>every single Stark is obviously good
>Joffrey, Frey, the Roose and his son are obviously evil

>does a fantasy novel featuring zombies and dragons reflect medieval history accurately?
Stay autist Veeky Forums

He still acts as if he's some kind of revolutionary just for making fantasy boring and "realistic." Sure, he's found his niche, but he shouldn't be praised for doing so. By the way, he's not the first to write more realistic fantasy either

>Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years
Way to spoil it, asshole. I'm still working through the two towers.

So he's literally worse than a hack. He doesn't understand worldbuilding OR decent writing, and gets royally offended when he's compared to JRR Tolkien. And he also was a peer of that cunt Robert Jordan, if my memory serves me right.

Even Stephanie Meyer writes better, and she fucking caters to teenage girls.

It's fair enough to gut Martin for being a hypocrite. But I would vastly prefer some weird fucker jumping into exactly that instead of not doing so because "everyone knows peasants hate taxes".

The logic behind it is braindead at best. At worst, it's the literary elitism of somebody who loves the smell of their own farts more than interacting with the world around them. It's a fucking abortion of a thought, to think that you shouldn't explore an idea because it might be kitschy and somebody else might have done it better.

How about this instead. It's pretty apparent that not everyone likes history. And it's also pretty obvious to a lot of us that war is shitty. (Though it apparently isn't so clear-cut to some ) But you're only parroting the phrase if you aren't willing to consider the details as to which, where, why, and in what contexts do wars suck. So thankfully, those of us who are interested in history can come up with mountains of the shit. But a lot of people who wouldn't normally, find GoT fascinating. It blows their goddamn minds that it's based off of war of the roses, or that this level of brutality and intrigue could be so commonplace as a society collapses into civil unrest. A lot of them likely didn't even know what it was or that it happened. So while GoT isn't doing what it does as well as it could, it's acting as a springboard to do exactly what Martin is vouching for: Using history as a lens to examine fantasy more critically.

(farts)

I don't disagree with what he's saying and I love the lord of the rings.

It's a different sort of genre of fantasy. Game of Thrones is definitely a more realistic approach to fantasy than the lord of the rings, that comparison doesn't mean he's saying it's all historically accurate.

I also think the people acting like he's complaining aren't really understanding the fact that he's not saying LOTR is inherently wrong or that it should have been done differently, he's saying he prefers his approach to fantasy.

Everything lasts thousands of years, while IRL royal families only survive a few centuries.

Also, too many people. The capital has 200k poeple.

This
Neckbeard Ahab and his shittily written war of the roses sexual fanfic cant hold a candle to Gene Wolfe
Or Tolkien for that matter
This, Diabetes Ahab is a hack
>bet
So you havent even experienced the thing youre bitching about? Gee, sounds familiar.. oh yeah, thats right, Tolkien actually does go into detail on that shit, but generslly only when it concerns the Shire because unlike Pervert Ahab he wasnt lusting for money and spreading an obviously totally unplanned story out to multiple sequels filled with pointless details for that $$$

>TLotR is an allegory

>I’m not sure that it’s a good template, though
>But if you’re going to write about war, and you just want to include all the cool battles and heroes killing a lot of orcs and things like that and you don’t portray [sexual violence], then there’s something fundamentally dishonest about that.

It's his opinion, all right, but he seems to be pretty clear that it's 'wrong'.

>[sexual violence],
>muh sex

this guy is a total beta who thinks that sex mattered yesterday like it matters today