Was this an accurate view of the medieval way of life?

Was this an accurate view of the medieval way of life?

Other urls found in this thread:

warosu.org/lit/thread/9826095#p9831558
awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Jalabhar_Xho
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

Why would you think that?

Only to people who haven't studied medieval history past memes and maybe a quick wikipedia skimming. The more I learn and read about it the more I realize just how much is lost to these idiot fantasy writers, even the ones the pride themselves as being 'realistic'. I started out with the same idea about GoT when I first read the books in high school but after studying intensely about my interested subject for a historical fiction novel(early to late medieval tuscany) by reading at least 15 works just thinking about grr Martin and the praise for his so called 'dissection of the fantasy genre' is hilariously laughable

People keep saying it is.

Like who? Name one single person.

Was this an accurate view of the medieval way of life?

Reddit book, fuck off.

Literally nobody, except normies watching the tv show (which is still pretty good)

The TV show was good like five years ago, but it's been absolute trash for years now.

Everyone is a cynical cunt.
To much killing. Not enough ransoms.

Would you kindly elaborate?

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.

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 . . ."

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, endnotes, 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?

Melodrama can be a great way to mint money, as evidenced by the endless 'variations on a theme' of soap operas, pro wrestling, and superhero comics that people keep creating for no other reason for money. People get into it, but it's neither revolutionary nor realistic. 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 that's how A Song of Ice and Fire starts out at first, carefully planned, all interconnected, all going somewhere, until Martin hits a ceiling that he cannot overcome, either due to him writing himself into a corner, or because if he writes anything else than the natural occurrence than everything that happens before would have been for naught since people will start to ask and wonder why didn't he do this before.


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."

Quality post user, 10/10

I appreciate the civility of this thread, but isn't this supposed to be in Veeky Forums?

try this and maybe you will understand

Stannis=Richard III
General story=War of the Roses
Starks=Yorks
Eddard Stark=William Lord Hastings
Robert Baratheon=Edward IV
Robb Stark=young Edward IV
Lannisters=Lancasters
Cersei=Margret of Anjou
Cerseis walk of shame=Jane Shores shame walk
Tywin Lannister=Edward I
Tyrion=Richard III
First men=celts
the wall=Hadrians Wall
Wildlings=scots in Roman Britain
The Nights Watch=Templars/other oath based warrior priest type of groups
Andals=Anglo-Saxons
Aegon the conqueror=William the conqueror
The Red Wedding=The Black Dinner+The Glencoe Massacre
Daenerys=Henry Tutor
the unsullied=spartans+mamluks+janissaries
The dothraki=mongols+huns+native americans

Robert E howard straight up just used historical names and terms like pict or hetman

still made for great fantasy

>dissection of the fantasy genre
You're letting the fandom blind you
Although it's certainly not realistic or historically accurate it is a good dissection of the fantasy genre

The entire thing is so disgustingly American, it's nothing but tits, cocks, faggots, sex, carnage, rape, feces, piss, vomit, torture, blood and incest. Pure pulp. The writing style is also abysmal since it reads like something from Deviantart.

Why does the kingdom of Westeros need to be so big? It's a state with the structure of 1300s england but the size of all Europe, how do they manage anything and stop rebellions when it takes months for an army to get to one end of the country to the other?
Why are their only three real ethnicity in this continent sized kingdom? Why haven't major regional changes in language developed like in real life? Why do the Northmen speak the same language as the southern Andals if they were never conquered by the Andals?
Why do knights in full plate armor still use shields?
Why are the Iron Islands so fucking small? Am I supposed to believe that these tiny lifeless islands could sustain enough of a population to pose a serious threat to any of the Seven Kindoms? Each of which could field an army larger than France during the 100 years war.
Why do the Dothraki not wear armor? GRRM must realize how retarded it is for an entire race of warrior pastoralist to think of armor as beneath them, but he still makes them out to be this feared powerful force of nature when in real life they would be cut to pieces.
Why do many of the ruling families genealogy dates back thousands of years? Starks have been around since the dawn of time and yet they only have 5 members of the dynasty instead of hundreds of descendants and members as is the case of the various Sayyid families of the Arab world.
Why does the religion of the Old Gods lack any features of actual animistic folk religions? What sense does it make for Gods not to have names and for the only places of worship to be predetermined face trees meaning no shrines or temples like in Japanese Shinto?

The books are sleazy rollicking fun, full of betrayal and sex and killing with some alright written passages hear and there. Just don't go in expecting some kind of super realistic depiction of medieval politics and war. It feels like a video game.

Conlangs are hard as fuck without relex(substituting english words with your own made up sounds) thats why most fantasy authors have everyone speak the same language.

Whats retarded is that there is a steppe climate in the latitude of lower Westeros and the fact Essos which is obviously the landmass human civlization started in is so fucking empty of massive civilizations.

He didn't have a problem with making up words for Dothraki and High Valyrian.
I'm not suggesting that he go full Tolkien autism with the language, but how hard is to say "He spoke in Dornish to the men" or "The Reachman dialect he spoke was barely understandable"
there boom you immediately show that there has been linguistic evolution between the many regions of Andal ethnicity. It makes zero sense why a wildling from Beyond the Wall can converse without problem to a Dornishman.

A linguistics major made those languages user.

You are talking about the languages as they are presented in the television show. The books have only a few words of High Valyrian and Dothraki thrown in, for the tv show they brought in a guy to use GRRM'S made up words as a basis for a constructed language when the show required dialogue in those languages

Also why ar eall the namss fucking stupid stereotypical wank i could have pulled out of my arse in 10 minutes.

'Slavers bay'? Theres a whole fucking region the size of turkey called slavers bay? That would be like calling scandinavia 'pillagers peninsula'

And seriously, 'the north' like, come on, this is just assenine

Is it fiction? Then no.

I agree, though in the case of 'Slavers Bay' you could justify that the name is an exonym by outside peoples, the Ghiscari could have another name for it.

Genuinely good posts

Did you write this? I sometimes wish I was as knowledgeable about the stuff I dislike

these books are shit

>anime pics
didn't read

Missed out then user, it was a good read

Also you didn't write this, you attention-whoring fag.

warosu.org/lit/thread/9826095#p9831558

That was my first thought, but then I kept scrolling and saw the sheer mass of the writing and went back to the start. It is a good analysis
But he didn't claim to write it. And nobody in this thread would have seen it if he didn't put it here. You cuck.

>dude I could just post this cap and be done with it, but instead I'm going to make 11 pointless posts (with gay anime pics, nonetheless) so EVERYONE will be forced to read this shit and attribute the genius to ME!
I can say, with near certainty, that this was the EXACT thought process of that poster when he decided to post a single image in eleven separate installments. Fuck him and fuck you, you effeminate rat.

He clearly wanted to make people think he wrote that, look here
>you

Good point, but the posts he copied introduced me to this analysis I have never seen before.

Although he should have given credit.

Women have rights so no

Yeah, I agree after i read them yesterday, i pulled out my Edgar Burroughs books and started rereading some. Veeky Forums fag here, and I think i agree with it that writers can get caught up in making a fantasy world, with tons of histories and neglect telling a good story because it happens all the time with GMs, probably the most common problem

Dragons and the apocalypse for the non picky questions you have. I suggest you never read fantasy again.

>Elric

Never read moorcock, but how is he anti-conan? All moral and righteous? And Moorcock is the one who did the whole order/chaos that inspired Warham, right?

Seems like there's a bit of a chip on the shoulder feminist bend to this author. Also
>same thing never happens to a male character
Reek, the drowning god priest who was raped by his brother. And "More men get raped in the military than women" is a dubious prospect at best in the context of military sieges and war.

Also I fucking love Robert E howard but Verisimilitude, really? I much prefer the blood and guts heroism of Howard or mythological heroism of Tolkien but let's not pretend the Hyborian tales have any semblance of realistic storytelling. Only Hour of the Dragon does, maybe.

>fascist 'chosen one' monomyth

Kind of boggles my mind that someone with clear progressive sympathies will crucify Martin for that while lauding Conan. And the paradoxism of celebrating stories which abound in a chosen one monomyth (you know, Tolkien and Moorcock).

When you look around at the world you start to see that such imposing false gravitas names are asinine. Seas or regions are named after peoples, and even if the name has a direct translation for the people living there it's not some childish grimdark kind of title. Tyrrhenian Sea ("Sea of the Etruscans"), Aegean Sea (named after a city or queen, or maybe 'wavy sea'), Peloponnese from Pelops son of Tantalus, once and awhile you can find an outlier like Himalayas (Abode of Snow). When I saw those maps showing the etymology of place names they almost never are so sexy and epic. It's more "People who talk weird" "Big hills" "Many forests"

well, since the dragons left, which made keepinmg it together easy, there has been numerous rebellions.
The first men spoke the old tounge and now all Westerosi speak the common tongue except for some northerners and free folk
because there are swords that can slice through steel in Westeros
the iron islands used to own most of the riverlands, this is where they used to get most of their shit, now theyre essentially pirates
because it makes the dothraki cooler kek
there are hundreds of descendnts of the Starks, most of the North actually makes up stark or bolton blood its just the very specific nuclear family that its focused on

They're very realistic, but not realistic medeival life. Just realistic in the sense that the things that happen in this world given the circumstances is pretty realistic

Not everyone is cynical, and if it seems like most are, remember it IS still fiction so the author's view point/bias is unavoidable. It has themes after all(mainly anti war).

>Kind of boggles my mind
100 percent agree. While good points are brought up the analysis is incoherent contradictory and abecdotal than actually a tighly knit argument. Its only impressive because of its length but it could have been written in one or two posts and come across just as effectively. I say this withouth liking or having read the got books

what steppe climate?
You don't mean Dorne do you?
that's supposed to be desert.

Let us not forget:

King's Landing: Constantinople
The Iron Islands: Vikings
Valyrians: Romans
Braavos: Greece
Titan of Braavos: Rhodes Colossus
Westeros: British Isles
Essos: Eurasia
Narrow Sea: English Channel
Dorne: Spain (with muslim influence)
Greyscale: Leprosy
Stonemen: Lepers
Valyrian Steel: Damascus Steel
Wildfire: Greek Fire
Faith of the Seven: Christianity
High Sparrow: Martin Luther/Francis of Assisi
Summer Islands: Africa

He did not. It's by an user from goodreads that someone from Veeky Forumscopy pastaed.
though it is entirely possible that this good reads user could post on lit.

Dothraki sea

Braavos is far closer to Venice.

Sothoryos is Africa.
>the nigger continent has no known civilizations
What did GRRM mean by this?

>High Sparrow: Martin Luther
Luther? More like Savonarola.

No its not. proof? The Summer islands are Africa or is inhabited by people who are blackish. Look up Alyaya. She is from there.

Summer Islands are a piece of Sothoryos you fucking retard, the blacks in GOT come from Sothoryos its even mentioned having UNENDING JUNGLES which is Africa to humans in West Eurasia at a certain point in time.

As far as fantasy goes, Witcher 3 nails medieval aesthetics far better than Game of Goys.

The Witcher 3 is a mix of late medieval and early Renaissance, with places like Oxenfurt being very reminiscent of Northern Italian cities of culture and sophistication like Florence, Milan, etc. during the late 1400's and very early 1500's.

even with the spikey shoulderpads? also isnt Witcher high medieval while ASOIAF is low/middle medeival?

Middle Ages and Renaissance aren't mutually exclusive terms. They're overlapping periods.

High Medieval is "middle" medieval (basically from the Norman Conquest to the Black Death. The Witcher is more late medieval (basically the mid-14th to late 15th century).

>the blacks in GOT come from Sothoryos
No, they come from the summer isles. The people of Sothoryos are non-humans with brindle skin and piglike features. Humans can't live in Sothoryos, no humans have ever survived there due to disease.

>The people of Sothoryos are non-humans with brindle skin and piglike features.
Thats a way to describe african niggers.

>Oxenfurt
You mean Toussaint? Oxenfurt is a typical northern German city.

oops thats what i meant

Some of their points are valid but you do have to sort through the wheat and the chaff. My own complaints of GRRM from a historical kind of view:

-Monolanguage for the size of Westeros. Even in the Roman Empire only cities and colonies had Latin predominate, vernaculars survived and predominated in the countryside.
-Inaccurate sizes/makeups of feudal based armies. Shit is numbered in the range of ancient Rome if I recall right. Not her enemies, but Rome itself, you know, 100,000 men for a kingdom being average. Don't recall the Diadochi running around with that kind of army willy nilly.
-Unsullied are stupid shit. Slave warriors no, but castrated slave warriors yes. Especially with that over the top grimdark "Have to kill a puppy they adopt" that's been a meme about super hardcore warriors as long as I can remember. I recall hearing it in the 90s about some South American Commando regiment.
-Dothraki didn't from what I recall in the books emphasis the use of the bow. Rather it was that stupid khopesh.

On a whole though I don't find the grimdark complaint as accurate. The conduct of the Byzantines in courtly intrigue, or that surrounding Nadir Shah all match or exceed Westeros in brutality and malice. One would expect in a less volatile period that the intrigues and violence was less obscene. And for all the talk of knights being rapists he offers us a lot of decent and benevolent knights, too. It's a very even handed picture, not just shitty grey and black knights and then one white knight.

My bigger complaint is literary and the fact that his ostensible 'harsh realism with no plot armor' is just that - ostensible. It existed to make you think Jon and Daenerys were in danger when in fact they are pulp fantasy protagonists in a setting trying to be Hyboria.

Dorne is 110% Spain as the salty/sandy/stony Dornishmen almost perfectly correspond to the Andalusian Muslims (Salty), Berber Moors (sandy), asurians and christian Iberians (Stony).

Someone explain to me how Valyrian Empire collapsed again.

Dothraki Migration

ummm that isn't how you spell Thomas Cranmer sweetie

it's an accurate view of the modern life

Not to be SJW or anything but anyone kinda bothered by orientalism in the book? He made Slaver's Bay edgy as possible (dude crucify slave children lmao) and Dothraki aren't smart as Mongols to conquer much of the continent.

>Volcanoes blow up because of some magical fuckup
>Capital and entire peninsular gets Atlantis'd
>Remaining colonies fight each other to gain control
>Dothraki pillage everything east

...

...

...

MOOOOOOOOOOOOOORE WIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIVES.

the iron born are half savages and the wildings all savage. It's not like whites are seen as always right or more intellectual so I disagree. One can argue they are hypocrites. they have a social order of feudalism that bad I call treats most people as slaves yet scoff at the idea of slavery. Lords have the ability to kill/torture their serfs at will. Not that they usually do this but one can argue that we didn't see all the slavers so we don't know that they all do this.
Also DANY is the pov and she is naive and is probably making these assumptions I just mentioned.
it's pretty lame he didn't develop the summer isles much though.

The Dothraki aren't really Mongols, even in-universe they're acknowledged as awful fighters and more like Mad Max raiders who get rekt when facing actual resistance. But yes, it's very orientalist and retarded. The clothes and customs of the people of Essos get increasingly cartoonish the further east you go.
>AMAZING
>PENIS
>POUNCERS
>OF
>QARTH

awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Jalabhar_Xho
get fucked, losER
Summer islanders are described with very dark skin. Ebony sometimes.
and no , brindle and pig nised us not how anemone describes negroids.

>Was this an accurate view of the medieval way of life?

If you want accurate history, don’t try to get it from a fantasy novel.

That said, GoT isn’t necessarily inaccurate (though there is illogical stuff going on) as it’s not our history, so GRRM can do whatever he wants.

hey brainlets. did you ever consider the possibility that maybe, just maybe, the person who originally wrote it and the person who copied and pasted it are the same person?

The damn thing is pasted from a goodreads review, even.

>The Dothraki aren't really Mongols

They're more like American Plains Indians.

wasn't this on Veeky Forums? regardless, only a fucking retard would take it as accurate. it is high fantasy after all. or do you think the ironborn wouldn't have been long genocided for their pirate/thrall antics?
dumb nigger, blacks are summer islanders, and they're more comparable to aztecs more than anything else. fucking read the books or shut the fuck up about it

>I suggest you never read fantasy again.
Fuck you faggot

So where is the empires to fill in the gap?

Dead

> So where is the empires to fill in the gap?

You’ve presumably read the books, right?

it looks like it was drawn by an autist.

Considered it, but then thought it was more likely that hes attention fagging
(This user)

>autist

...