Ruling is hard. This was maybe my answer to Tolkien, whom, as much as I admire him, I do quibble with...

>Why does everyone conveniently ignore LOTR is supposed to be a fantasy-mythology, not some medieval historical fantasy + elves?
We don't; OP just spams this same pasta every few days.

firmly back in the wannabe knight mode

because then they couldn't bitch about it

interestingly enough, not questions even Tolkien had answers to. He never was satisfied with the Orcish question. It nagged at him until his death.

His tax policy was probably a standard fuedal one built on a castle economy, with free trade with the men of Bree and Rohan

He probably did maintain an army to keep the peace and drive away any lingering orcs.
To be fair, because Tolkiens autism meant he world built to excess.

We do know for a fact however that he ruled well and the west prospered until the end of his days and beyond, we're told that much explicitly iirc

>And then he names the mountain Doom
Are you aware that the term Doom, as used throughout Tolkien's works, has a deeper meaning than "scary thing you should be afraid of"?

how would aragorn's rule even fit into the tone of the story? The book is suppposed to be the Red book of westmarch which is a retelling of the account of the war of the ring and the accomplishments of the fellowship.

of course not.

>Moorcock
Horrible writing and terrible politics mixed together and you get that faggot

Why do people get so salty about this quote

Except it has a FAR more in depth history than most others, but seems to miss a few mundane details rather consistently.

what was his criticism?

Aragorn's rule would be exceedingly boring to read about unless it had vivid descriptions of all the hot sex he had with his banging half-elven wife

otherwise it would just be the mundane dealings of governing a prosperous, peaceful nation.

>GRRM didn't write about good rulers
I'll fight you.

>Why do people get so salty about this quote
Because Aragorn was literally divinely appointed to the job and didn't need a tax policy because his mere presence meant good times for all, so Pudge's complaints are pointless.

Mainly people are annoyed at OP for spamming this thread so much.

honestly we don't, it's amusing and slightly dumb.

It's Moorcock we get salty about.
I know the show does terrible character assassination on the Mannis, but you know he's never gonna be the goddamn king.

Imagine you step outside your house, and step on dogshit. Fine, you'll clean and leave.
Then it happens again.
And again.

In the end you'll be very pissed.

>but you know he's never gonna be the goddamn king.
He's already a king, him not sitting on the throne is a technicality.

"Too Tory".

Basically he dislikes it because it doesn't strive to explore social themes like he does, and it can be taken to be aligned with Conservative Party views.

I'm not sure that many people on Veeky Forums are very familiar with more cock these days.

Tolkien also doesn't ask the question of what happened when a character had diarrhea.

This makes him an objectively better writer.

Any criticism of Tolkien on Veeky Forums is enough for an immediate argument.

On top of that, the person making the criticism is a relatively polarizing author.

On top of that, the criticism itself is asinine.

>Because Aragorn was literally divinely appointed to the job and didn't need a tax policy because his mere presence meant good times for all, so Pudge's complaints are pointless.
Though I would like to see how well Aragon was able to rule when spending most of his life as a ranger.

Then again, Elrond probably could've taught him how ruling works fairly well.

>brittle moralist hypocrite into human sacrifice

He's LN falling to TN, not LG.

>but you know he's never gonna be the goddamn king.
If he isn't, he'd damn well better be either a dragonslayer or a realmsaver.

you kidding? Veeky Forums loves to wank Moorcock and his torrid garbage

His writing put me to fucking sleep, maybe if I was a housewife high on betties i'd find the purple prose and icy mc cruel elf fuck's angst more compelling

As it is if I wanted to read about irredeemable fuckwads i'd buy a newspaper

> muh realism

Tolkien was into language and mythology, not political science. His world building was purely in service of those interests.

Unless all of the keys of power in the area you're claiming as your kingdom agree that you're the King then no, you're not.

He thinks LoTR orcs have babies.

Aragorn is in his early Hundreds when he takes the throne.

He has had a long time to learn a lot of shit.

he's also a literal ubermensch

fuck off DABID.
>stannis sacrificing his daughter
the only person who is going to do that is selyse

undecided/true neutral. he started chaotic neutral with chaotic stupid leaning but is slowly changing to lawfull.

Started Neutral evil

Slowly rising to Neutral to Good

What are the alignments in ASOIAF?

Well technically he does say the the Seven Kingdoms are broke as fuck every 20 pages. But yeah, he doesn't really say how Stannis managed to make them better: you can't really make me believe a fucking knights' tournament was a huge drain on something the size of South America, George.

Anyway it's interesting that the quote isn't really that informed. Gondor maintened a standing army and the freed enemies had a reserve in Nurn.

didn't many orcs sue for mercy after sauron's downfall? i assume it was at least considered. why would tolkien even mention it instead of "and then gondor killed all the orcs" if it wasnt?

True, but aside from his life in Rivendell, he's not had much time to learn how to actually maneuver a kingdom like Gondor, even before it reunited with everywhere else.

Goodness knows realms have crumbled because of their rulers not knowing what to do. Or the rulers have ended up being carved up by the military/population.

Truth. I find the political intrigue and relentless sadism pretty enjoyable since that's the kinda guy I am, but the worldbuilding is very weak. Even if you don't compare it to Tolkien with his languages and myths, Westeros is just an insanely bloated western feudal kingdom while Essos is a bunch of exotic archetypes from premodern travel writing slapped together, which is something Robert E. Howard did much better.

Underappreciated burn.

>There will be no burnings, pray harder

Kill yourself, showfag.

Moorcock's. Pretty much everyone worth his/hers salt always shrugs and says "Did he even read the books?". And then he has the whole "Tolkien was a crypto fascist" thing going on.

No, he was not a "worldbuilding whore", because your special blend of bullshit time-wasting autism did not exist in his day. He made shit up because he enjoyed making shit up, not because he felt his world needed any particular elements to be in any way "complete".

Fuck Gondor's religion - what about the fact that a full half of Middle Earth is completely goddamned empty for no good reason? Arnor fell to the Witch-King a full 2000 years before the War of the Ring, leaving Arnor and Eriador as uninhabited wasteland. Apparently no-one since then saw any point in recolonising all that land. In 2000 years we went from Christian Rome to the fucking moon, while the Hobbits apparently spent two millenia growing pumpkins and fucking each other inbred.

Tolkien didn't give a fuck about realism.

I know nothing about game of thrones. Is it worth watching or reading? You guys would gibe a better answer than Veeky Forums or /tv/

The books are, the show has kinda lost the spark now that it's overtaken them.

>more insufferable

>logic

>insufferable

Yeah, that makes sense.

because the realm of gondor was going just fine for the most part and it is feudalistic in nature. Aragorn was trained by the elves about everything regarding history and he also has people like faramir

Ehhh... It's alright for the most part. It's not stellar in any respect. If you've got nothing better to do, read or watch it if you want to.

The axis of law (realm serving, neutral, self-serving)
The axis of honour (honourable, neutral, treacherous)
The axis of will (true iron, slimy, toady)

For all it's stupidity, you would probably end up really enjoying it. The show has very high production values, some great actors and a decent cloak and dagger plot going on. Just know when to eject.

Despite the hate it gets in Veeky Forums i enjoyed the books

Anyhow the main issue here is that LotR isn't meant to be the history of another world. It's meant to be myths and legends of another world. Also, Westeros is hysterically bad if you try to interpret it as HISTORY rather than as an excuse to write Accursed Kings in a fantasy setting. You are forced to assume that, for instance, it is plausible for Starks and Lannisters to survive for millennia. And that's saying nothing about stuff in Essos. It's a feudal intrigue series and a decent one at that but not terribly realistic as far as history goes. Gritty, sure, but not realistic.

(The Witcher series strikes me as having much more believable "history in a gritty fantasy world", by the way. It at least has various historical changes and dynamic borders and dynasties.)

Yes. I would say what he does good are actually the characters. The story is... hrm, I would say soap-operish with tons of blood, but it's not a problem per se, it's just that honestly I think the characters is what get you hooked.

Veeky Forums often shits on GRRM 'cause 1) it's mainstream now 2) it's not really the usual mildly retarded fantasy tropes taken at face value

>feuds

>gondor

>actually, Middle Earth

Show is trash, books are good - the first three are GOAT in particular.

Veeky Forums loves to hate and hates what it loves, on average we're tsundere for it, like mtg, d&d and 40k.

I never watched it, but very much worth reading if you like gritty fantasy, distinct, memorable characters and feudal intrigue. Some of it has a Veeky Forums storytime quality. It's not perfect and certainly not "realistic" but it's fun, inspirational, mostly well-written and suspenseful. A bit overrated by pretentious edgelords for whom the idea that anyone can die is just so amazing, but still good.

To be fair, some maesters think that the "one unbroken family ruling for thousands of years" is baloney.

The lands of what was Arnor are not uninhabited. Also they were sparsely populated when Arnor did exist.

He made shit up because he felt context was necessary to make his pet languages more complete, for the most part.

>you can't really make me believe a fucking knights' tournament
The problem was multiple tournaments, hunting a lot and doing a shit ton of other expensive things.

>The words "feudalism" and "feud" are related
HOLY SHIT WHY DIDN'T I NOTICE THIS BEFORE?
Am I dumb?

Also the fact that the entire economy of Westeros is run on prostitution.

>In 2000 years we went from Christian Rome to the fucking moon
We also went from Pyramids to more pyramids, so that´s not saying much

Can somebody post the one with Euron?

He was really pressed for time when he was writing the books under "The Return of the King". You can just see how much he wanted to talk about all the shit inside Minas Tirith, and how he wanted to elaborate on that one random prince (god he was mentioned in like 5 pages but fuck even I wanted to know more about him) who was being set up as somebody from some friendly lands in/around Gondor, but he needed to wrap it up, because deadlines were deadlines, and he wasn't nearly financially stable enough to blow off his publishers, so he simply couldn't elaborate and worldbuild as much as he wanted.

It's actually sad that he'll never write that post LOTR book after Aragorn's death that he wanted, the idea was legit.

Because he inherently missed the point of the story

Is Beowulf realistic? No. Is it a classic fairytale that has stood the test of time? Yes.

probably, or you probably learned the word feudalism before feud, but never made the connection

then bobby was a key investor.

I don't think the Stark's rule is that absurd. I mean, the japanese imperial family sat on that throne for perhaps 1800 years.

It's the STASIS that's hard to swallow. He does kinda hint in the book of lore that presumably not every Stark king was in a position similar to Eddard's, but...

He's not that wrong tough. I'm re-reading LOTR these days and you know what REALLY doesn't make sense? Eriador's trees.

No, seriously.

There are no masses of orcs there. There is a shitton of ghosts hautings and some trolls, but it's not really something that could justify anything like that. The land should be free from any forms of woodcutting, and as we can see from the Shire, the climax vegetation should be at least sparse trees. I can dig that Hobbits are awesome gardeners, but they're not fucking Galadriel, right?

Despite this, the land didn't recover at all. It's barren, apparently wouldn't even support sheeps.

The only answer I could have is that Sauron's power do kinda fuck over nature by default. Or that Angmar did poison it mildly, for all we know. And it's a fucking weak answer.

>I do assume that JRRT had Eriador's history more or less already down at the time of the Hobbit, granted

Humans were also busy spreading into every available habitat they could find. There is literally nothing to indicate that Eriador and Arnor were unsuitable for re-colonisation, outside a handful of places like the Old Forest and the Barrow Downs, and the Ettenmoors way up in the furthest north.

After two millenia, the borders of the Shire should have been under a lot more pressure than they're written to be. Hell, even if Men didn't go there, the Old Forest should have expanded and engulfed everything instead. Forests can grow really fast when there's no-one around to chop them down.

>You are forced to assume that, for instance, it is plausible for Starks and Lannisters to survive for millennia.
The Counts of Holland believed (or tried to make others believe) that they were direct descendants of the Trojans. For faux-medieval families thinking you can trace your lineage back a 1000 years isn't weird at all.

First three are good, after that meh. Since it's chaptered with character POV's, some POV's are good and some can be skipped.

>The Counts of Holland believed (or tried to make others believe) that they were direct descendants of the Trojans. For faux-medieval families thinking you can trace your lineage back a 1000 years isn't weird at all.
It isn't presented as faith or belief in the ASOIAF universe, but as a fact. Starks are a 1000 year old family really. It isn't a family legend or a myth.

It's stands apart from most fantasy novels. It is by no means unique. Frankly I find it somewhat trite. If you enjoy "gritty realism" then you would probably enjoy it. Frankly I find his grasp on socio politics and military history to be lacking personally. He also relies a great deal on shock value, and once you get used to his style it becomes pretty easy to predict everything. But if you need reading material you could do worse. I myself read it while overseas because it was literally the only english book seties on sale in that miserable asian hell hole, and while I can't say I was overly enamored with them I did continue to read them and bought them all.

This is what makes Game of Thrones worse than LOTR. Not bad, but still worse. See, GRRM doesn't realize that he can't, and shouldn't, focus on every small detail. Tolkien didn't include Aragorn's tax policy because he neither cared about it nor was his story focused on it. GRRM does care about those things, but he doesn't know enough about them to write them correctly. He should just focus on the knife and dagger and cultural and religious aspects of his stories, but he overextends into supply lines and ship navigation and other stuff he has little knowledge of.

>The Counts of Holland believed (or tried to make others believe) that they were direct descendants of the Trojans.
The earliest stories had the original britons as a boatload of lost trojans too.
>skipping parts of the book

Romans also believed they descended from the Trojans

>There is literally nothing to indicate that Eriador and Arnor were unsuitable for re-colonisation,
Once again, . Eriador and Arnor were not uninhabited, and there is a damn good reason why no-one started effectively recolonizing it.

You mean like the "fact" that Lannisters are descended from a guy who stole gold from the sun and lived for 300 years?

There were people who believed they could trace their lineage back to Adam mate. If the starks wanna claim a thousand years that's not that big a deal in my opinion.

...

>It isn't a family legend or a myth.
It is though, because you read everything through the eyes of the characters itself. They believe that shit they think and say, but because nobody has ever told them otherwise they truly believe that the Starks were around 10.000 years ago.

Read the encyclopaedia of ASOIAF, that whole thing is supposed to be written by a maester and it shows, a lot of shit characters in the books take for granted (unbroken line of starks, kings living more then 300 years) this guy asks the real questions and marks some things as untrue.

GRRM uses the unreliable narrator, that goes especially for history and the like.

eriador has trees, it's just that the lands themselves are wilderness because there are too many orcs from the misty mountains and no kingdom to secure them.

>>skipping parts of the book
Oh no! I missed Brienne's pointless filler chapters!

To be fair the maesters' alllknowing and almost protoscientific concept always seemed propaganda to me. Don't really take their opinions for granted.

There are alignments in ASOIAF?

I think the Dutch and English stole that whole thing from the Romans desu

those medieval guys really liked larping as Romans.

>Lord of the Rings
>ASOIAF
>Not Veeky Forums
Get the fuck outta here.

You do realize this is a fantasy novel right? A fantasy novel where ice demons command legions of the undead, men can walk in the skin of beasts, a woman can give birth to a murderous shadow, and there are religious assasins who steal people's faces. Magic, we ain't gotta explain shit.

He burns several people (what a king allows to occur a king sanctions) in the books. several of the kings men burn after the failure of the blackwater

fuck off you fucking fucker