Who is the greater author?

I don't see you complaining about the axe thread, or the numerous "stat me" threads. What is it about this thread that is especially egregious compared to all the other off topic things that you are perfectly willing to tolerate?

Howard.

Gee, it's almost like he's portraying a fantasy world whose workings are painfully close to our own world.

You can't inb4 your own post.
Also, inb4ing doesn't make it wrong when people call you autistic.

But I will thank you for my daily reminder that I'm not you.

Charles Dickens.

GRRM is the better author, Tolkien is the greater author.

What in Christ's name are you talking about?

What makes you think I didn't report them?
You already know those things are off topic, or else you wouldn't have mentioned them, so a reminder of the rule is not needed in those cases.
I still see people in this thread claiming that real life people are a traditional game. They must be corrected.

Tolkien. Came up with languages, gigantic history for his stories so they have real depth, not edgy even though he took part in the most soul crushing war ever waged in modern times.

I'm so happy I get to post this on Veeky Forums. Never in my wildest dreams did I think it could be true.

youtube.com/watch?v=XAAp_luluo0

Tolkien's work, unlike that of Martin, is not pure genre fiction. Now, I think Martin is good as far as genre fiction goes, but it hit's the limits pretty hard.

Martin creates a relatively compelling, highly consistent and very complex fictional world and like most similar fiction authors basically banks on the fact that after a while, the combination of consistency and build investment into the settings will sustain the reader and keep him interested. It's a solid strategy: you know the world and the characters, you know the rules, you familiarized yourself with the setup, you are more likely to continue reading.

Tolkien, on the other hand, looked for a bit more ambitious goal. He wanted to recreate the type of old, fundamental mythological narrative that he found in old north european epics and translate it into a more understandable, modern language. And he succeeded at that, which is truly remarkable. Mythological narratives are profound things, extremely important and very likely deeply connected with basic human psychological and cognitive structures, and translating those into a non-mythological language is really an achievement that very few people managed to pull off. Tolkien was one of the very few. That makes his contribution to literature so much more valuable than Martin's in my book.

> a guy who takes jabs at the standards
> the guy who set the standards
gee, idk!

...

The worst part is, I think this might actually not be intended as bait.

Mervyn Peake

Like it or not, there aren't any great heroes battling evil in our real world. There are only people working for their own selfish interests, and ultimately the only thing that makes right is might. This isn't edge, it's realism.

>I'll cleverly circumvent OP's post by introducing a THIRD author!

Nope it's edge. People are in it for their own interests but also for the sake of promoting good. The only reason there's not a lot of fighting evil is because there's just not that much of it to fight.

I hope that after I die people use my book covers rather than my mugshots to intice people to talk about me.

I honestly never know who these threads are about until reading part way through.
I guess I still have that petulent desire to leave the author faceless.
There's a certian amount of mystique lost in the process.

...On second thought, being remembered at all would be more than I can hope for.

Then who is Mr Rogers?

Mr. Rogers isn't evil you noamy cunt.

>This isn't edge, it's realism.
Realism, ironically enough, is a pretty inaccurate way of looking at the world, as the whole realistic literature fad had taught us back about a century ago. Although to be honest, that point might be misplaced because what you described isn't realism, it's jaded perspective of an inexperienced kid, especially the whole "only thing that makes them right is might" line which really sounds like something a 14 years old would say in an attempt to sound profound.

A saint.

Sad but true. More of one than many.

GRRM is a hack. 95% of his characters are caricatures of mustache twirling villains, and the remaining 5% are caricatures of Lawful Stupid, plus a couple of children, which he's convinced is a synonym for "retard."

Moralistic Zealot.

God damn it, I meant to reply to:

Realistically, most people are good people who want to make the world better. They just disagree on how to do that and typically fuck things up because they can't come to a reasonable consensus.

What's considered good is only a mix of culture and evolutionary psychology which promote the survival and proliferation of your own genes. Ultimately you're working for your own self-interests, as dictated by your genes and environment. There are no such things as higher morals, it's all about power and nothing else.

Okay Dawkins. Go write another book.

>There are no such things as higher morals, it's all about power and nothing else.
Yup, that's an edge.

>most people are good people who want to make the world better
I don't believe that for one second. Most people want a world where they imagine they themselves would do better, and then try and rationalize it by telling themselves that it would be a better world for the people around them as well. Why do you think so many married women advocate for a freer market, while single women advocate for an ever increasing welfare state? Because both are working to improve their own standing. The married woman doesn't want the state to take resources away from the man because she relies on him, while the unmarried woman relies on the state to extract other men's wealth and give it to her. Both rationalize it by telling themselves that they're working for the betterment of society as a whole, but ultimately they're only working for their own narrow self-interests.

Not that user, but you are discounting that people do naturally feel guilt cause of herd-instinct and all that.
So while people may be self-interested, they do take things like guilt and familial ties into account, unless they can justify to themselves that those things don't matter

Chauvinistic mysogeny and edge fedora-lordism in the same post. Congrats.

Warhammer Lotr is Veeky Forums therefore it's lore is Veeky Forums
Game of thrones has boardgames and card games. It's lore is Veeky Forums.

The funny thing is that it's precisely the two fields: studies of culture, and studies of evolutionary psychology, that both prove you completely and utterly wrong. You have clearly understood or studied neither in any aspect.
Go read Tomasello's "Why we cooperate", anything by Dan Sperber, or anything by Jordan Peterson. Evolution equips us for complex and universalistic moral capabilities, role of society and culture exists specifically to mitigate the concept of self-interest (which by the way, does not work the way you think, because "self-interest" does not mean the same as selfishness, even Dawkins recognizes this with his concept of gene-centric evolution). We have - evolutionary conditioned - capacity of such amazing feats as complex symbolic cognition, agent neutral perspective, fairness-recognition capacity.
Power is a laughably stupid and meaningless, shallow understanding of the processes that shape evolution. Marxists, feminists, critical theoreticists believe that everything is about "power". One thing they all share together is a profound hatred of all things related to evolutionary psychology, cognitive sciences, neuro-sciences.

Tolkien.

How is this even a question?

>Most people want a world where they imagine they themselves would do better, and then try and rationalize it by telling themselves that it would be a better world for the people around them as well.
Most people behave according to incredible complex cultural and evolutionary models that exist independently of individual for thousands of years. You have no fucking clue what is actually at play when we talk about moral reasoning in humans. Like, not a fucking clue.

>How is this even a question?
millennials

Nowhere in this post did you point out exactly where I was wrong.

Are you saying Martin doesn't go into excruciantingly long descriptions that lead no where? Let me tell you about boats.

Yes. Boats.

When you put a character in a boat, he has to leave point A, get to point B. He might fight pirates or a kraken on the way, he might get sea sick, or homesick, he might get captured by pirates or the ship sinks and he wakes in a desolated island. The thing is, those are boats (in any story not focused on boats that is).

A good author won't waste 200 pages and 5 chapters in a boat trip unless his book is a nautic novel. You get in the boat in a chapter, you might even have a whole chapter to portray the hardships of boating, and then you get off the damn boat.

When tyron got into a fucking boat, we had to suffer through useless, contentless, uninteresting page after page of bored sea-dwarfism. And that, my friend, isn't what GRRM does with just boats. Everytime someone goes somewhere in a song of ice and fire, the journey is long, boring and pointless, described in details that are repetitive. You pick a GRRM martin book and they are superthick. But they are not full of content. Actual content. The things a reader wants. They are not filled with poetic prose and good pacing. They are fillers. 90% of that is sawdust, only 10% is meat.

GRRM is like dragonball z, in a way. Where you have 20 minutes of talking, BORING talking, to each minute of fighting because it's all fillers. If you read the books, you know that to be true.

So what you're saying is, OP has a contender for biggest faggot?

It's summer

>Let me tell you about boats
Oh boy, here we go.

Except that studies can't stop you from being put up against the wall and shot. Power can,a and it can put you up against the wall and shoot you.

Ideals=/=reality.

>Nowhere in this post did you point out exactly where I was wrong.
Actually, it is there: your idea of "self interest" as well as the specific means that evolution shapes us are between insanely simplistic, and flat out wrong. Explaining how these things really work is completely beyond the possible scope of Veeky Forums discussion, which is also why I provided references to authors to further study. Why we cooperate is a thin book, you should probably start there.

You quite literally view evolution as "being a selfish asshole doing everything you can to improve your standing". This is, quite literally, a perspective that Darwin himself REPEATEDLY stressed out to be entirely wrong understanding of how evolutionary theory really operates. Virtually all further research done on this aspect further confirms this.

Nice strawman.

You'll find out where you were wrong when you do the research necessary to back up your claims, rather than just shit buzzwords out of your mouth. You were given a few good starting points.

AHAHAHAHA Jesus fucking Christ are you serious?!
God fucking dammit: how old are you? You should really stop talking about things you don't fucking know first thing about. Go read some Solzhenitsyn on top of the authors I've provided, then we can talk about the relation between power, truth, ideas and reality.
Until then, I strongly recommend keeping your mouth shut while the grown up's talk.

Bait thread

Best posted

Everything else doesn't matter and this thread should be purged

>Angsy teen-tier cynism
>"It's realism"
No user, that's shit writing in full galore

Do you even know what the words "straw man" mean? You really are one pathetic little fuck.

Yes, that's what those posts do. Well spotted! You're really astute.

...

basically this
GRRM is enjoyable and thrilling with his plots, but there is not much behind it, worldbuilding is bland and shallow, fantasy elements are quite meh, and i don't mean the power lvl (I actually love low fantasy) but general feel and atmosphere.
Howard's shit writer.
Had good ideas, that were latter developed by third parties, but as far as he goes for actual writing style, plots (mostly plain and not really interesting) and characters (like, nobody cares about other characters than the main one, who, be it Conan, Kull, or Bran or other fucker, is pretty much a sue that is better than anyone else in the setting in basically everything that matters - every field where he's not the best guy around is generally treated as negative). Much of appeal of howard's work is actually appeal of works based and/or inspired by it, mostly visual arts like illustrations and movies, which gave his world a very strong and distinctive feel.

Jesus man, calm down. You used a straw man. No reason to get upset, that's just a common logical fallacy that I'd like to point out for you.

Yeah but neither are quest threads and guess which one of those two is more likely to leave.

>the rule is written
And nobody but you gives a shit

No point in following a rule if no one cares about it and wants the contrary

Don't want to break it for you, you fucktard, but quests got their own, brand new board now. So at least find new "argument" when trying to defend rule-breaking threads, you fucking cunt.

Are you an anarchist? Nothing can function without rules and a strict adherence to said rules.

>We shouldn't self-control ourselves, because there is set of rules
>Instead, unless banned, let's shitpost
Veeky Forums is cancer
No, wait.
Internet is cancer

>someone, somewhere, once made a traditional game about X, therefore all aspects of X are a traditional game
Do you really want to open that can of worms? Do you have any idea how many licensed card games exist?

The only good thing G.R.R. wrote was Plague Star and its sequel Tuf Voyaging.
THAT'S LITERALLY IT.

Except I did not. Not every paraphrase is a straw man, only those that change the nature of your opponents argument are.

Consider these statements:
>Ultimately you're working for your own self-interests, as dictated by your genes and environment. There are no such things as higher morals, it's all about power and nothing else.
>Both rationalize it by telling themselves that they're working for the betterment of society as a whole, but ultimately they're only working for their own narrow self-interests.
And tell me where I actually misrepresented those in my post.

>There are only people working for their own selfish interests

Ironically, it's this teenage angst that creates the sentiment in others.

>man, look at those people being selfish bastards
>I better be one myself!

OP posed a question on who's the better author between the two. He does not give a fuck about other authors because it is not about who the best author was, just who was better of those listed.

The greatest trick the devil ever played, was convincing the world he didn't exist.

Evil is quite real I see it every day and I'm just a beat cop.

Both those greentexts seem reasonable to me. Can you point out how they're incorrect?

Tolkien, by a margin wide enough as to make this comparison offensive, offensive like loudly broken wind in a quiet room.

I think he's talking about skill (better) and influence (greater).

I mean, he's WRONG, but I figure we should all be on the same page about him being wrong.

Martin is a much greater author.

At least if you measure by mass.

LITERALLY JUST DID THAT IN LIKE FOUR POSTS ALREADY.
Read:

>Are you an anarchist?
You don't need to be an anarchist to think a rule is shit and shouldn't be enforced in every scenario

>Nothing can function without rules
Correct
>and strict adherence to said rules
Top fucking kek
Guess we shouldn't look at individual cases anymore at all, people.

>actual discussion
>shitposting

Let's see.

>Writer who single handedly revives Anglo-Saxon mythology and how it interacts with fiction in English Literature.

Vs

>An American adding dragons into the War of the Roses after he read about it in a book.

This.

And then there's the whole point of Tolkien's prose being immeasurably beautiful and Martin's being kind of ugly yet servicable. It gets the job done and conveys meaning but does so with no flavour and certainly no beauty.

I don't see how those posts disprove anything. All you did was complain about Marxists and recommended reading a few authors.

Furry agenda detected

GRRM's stuff is good, but he got to popular for his editor to reign him in, and it shows in the last few books. It's also newer, and is more contemporary in language and style, so its more accessible. Getting someone into Tolkien can be a bit of a drag, because it was written almost a century ago, and we've moved on.

Also, Tolkien finished his damn story.

>revives Anglo-Saxon mythology
Isn't the majority of his works inspired by Norse mythology?

Using "great" in the sense of "large", Martin is obviously much greater. By which I mean that he's fat.

>Being this much of a pleb

Norse Mythology = Ango-Saxon pre-Christanity Mythology.

Much of Tolkien scholary work was on how the Northern mythologies and their writing was so similar and he pushed forward Beowulf as his example.

But if you want direct comparisons, Norse literature and folk tales make very few mentions of Dwarves, and when they do, they sound like Elves who live underground.

Anglo-Saxon folklore however has Dwarves being stocky hairy funny folk who fill the same role as Norse Dwarves.

Also Tolkiens Elves make very obvious use of the English "Fey" mythology brought forward by the Celtic roots. And indeed much of Tolkien brings forth comes from Celtic roots also.

Aragon being the perfect example of the non Franco-fied King arthur legend for example.

Then you are a moron. There is really nothing more to say here. If you don't understand how "everyone acts like a selfish asshole because evolution" is a completely misguided understanding of the actual process, I really don't fucking know what to tell you.
The idea of "self-interest" is completely fucking questionable on the basis of a gene-centric model of evolution, proposed by Dawkins and generally still considered a most effective and reasonable evolutionary model (if you don't know what it means, LOOK IT FUCKING UP YOURSELF).
The models that promote evolutionary advantageous behavior are also far more complex and in their majority deeply pro-social (READ THE FUCKING AUTHORS MENTIONED), with the individual and his motivations being largely irrelevant in the larger process, as those are mostly overriden larger, long term behavioral patterns usually coded in cultural form. As these behavior codes are pro-social, the "narrow individual interest" is actually the last thing that really matters in the long run.
Moral systems are an example of such complex cultural codes and behavioral patterns, and are directly related to human fitness, as they are the number one regulator of social behavior, while social behavior is our single most powerful evolutionary tool of survival.
The whole thing is pretty fucking complicated, which is again, why I refered to better authors that can actually explain these systems and process in great detail.

Anglo-saxon mythology has roots in Norse, coming into the British isles from the invasions.

I don't see the appeal in GRRM's books. It feels like he's trying too hard to push the whole 'EVERYTHING IS EVIL AND RAPEY LIKE MEDIEVAL TIMES REALLY WERE' angle, and it just ends up crossing the line into pointless shock-value and darkness induced apathy.

Actually it's the other way around.

Norse Mythology comes from Germanic Mythology which Angles and Saxons were older tribes at the time.

People seem to be forgetting Wodan and Tor. Or Odin and Thor, were worshipped before Rome even stuck it's head out of italy.

I guess there's nothing wrong with discussing the James Bond films, exclusively the films, not the game, on a traditional games board then.
And MLP since it has a card game and a roleplaying game, both officially licensed and produced by professionals, can't get more legit than that.
And Harry Potter, and Pokémon, and World of Warcraft, and pretty much anything that has a fandom, because someone somewhere will inevitably make a homebrew d20 system out of it.
Oh, and let's not forget LITERALLY ANY ANIME AND MANGA EVER because OVA exists. Let's just shut down /a/ now, it's clearly redundant.
Let's shut down /co/ too, because the existence of games based on comics and cartoons makes it okay to discuss comics and cartoons on a traditional games board.
Let's shut down /v/ and /tv/ and all the other media boards. And boards about real life such as /pol/ because real life can serve as inspiration for a traditional game.
Let's shut down /mu/ because "what music do you listen to during game sessions", and Veeky Forums because "what food do you eat during game sessions", and /toy/ because most toys can POTENTIALLY be used as tabletop miniatures if you so choose.
Let's just have one big board where literally nothing is off topic. That won't be inconvenient at all!
Veeky Forums - Literally Any Topic Imaginable

>"everyone acts like a selfish asshole because evolution"
Isn't there archeological evidence that even pre-civilisation there were cavemen expressing altruism, in the form of skeletons with signs of serious disabilities that nontheless lived into fairly old age?

Let's bring /mu/ here as well, so we get ourselves a nice cozy interboard gangbang action in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=XAAp_luluo0

What are some books I can read on this kind of folklore? My only experience with Anglo-Saxon mythology is Beowulf.

>Getting butthurt about one topic based on something Veeky Forums very much likes.

Why are you acting like such a fucking retard.

Are you autistic?

Yes, and?