"Ah, ha ha, *munch, munch* ol' J.R.R., didn't, ah, see you come in! -burp- No please, please, [smack] sit down, sit down, there' something we, (pant) need to talk about. *farts* Heavens excuse me, oh ho! Well getting down to 'brass tacks' - or brass tax, I might say SNORT! - yes, well I was sitting, counting the money coming in from, slurp, my show - terribly taxing ah yes? - when the thought occurred me, watching that money from my award-winning show... [belch] from my, (siiippp) award, award, awar... sorry, I lost my breath, award-winning books, that I [chews] that I can't seem to recall you mentioning [more chewing] anything about Gondor's *blows nose* taxation policy. Surely I must have -releases one long wet smelly fart - missed it while glancing through the pages (cough). You did [scratches ballsack] say something about it, right? Sales tax? (sweats) Value-added tax? *licks lips* Don't just sta - oh my my heart - stand there my man, out with it! Surely the, the thought has crossed your mind?! -chuckles until accidental urination-"
"Ah, ha ha, *munch, munch* ol' J.R.R., didn't, ah, see you come in! -burp- No please, please, [smack] sit down...
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haha he maek noise
>The best fantasy is written in the language of dreams. It is alive as dreams are alive, more real than real... for a moment at least... that long magic moment before we wake. Fantasy is silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli. Reality is plywood and plastic, done up in mud brown and olive drab. Fantasy tastes of habaneros and honey, cinnamon and cloves, rare red meat and wines as sweet as summer. Reality is beans and tofu, and ashes at the end. Reality is the strip malls of Burbank, the smoke-stacks of Cleveland, a parking garage in Newark. Fantasy is the towers of Minas Tirith, the ancient stones of Gormenghast, the halls of Camelot. Fantasy flies on the wings of Icarus, reality on Southwest airlines. Why do our dreams become so much smaller when they finally come true?
>We read fantasy to find the colors again, I think. To taste strong spices and hear the song the sirens sang. There is something old and true in fantasy that speaks to something deep within us, to the child who dreamt that one day he would hunt the forests of the night, and feast beneath the hollow hills, and find a love to last forever, somewhere south of Oz and north of Shangri-La.
>They can keep their heaven. When I die, I'd sooner go to Middle Earth.
But of course, tax policy memers don't know that GRRM said that.
I am unfamiliar with these memes, thought OP wasn't very funny.
Care to explain the autism?
Basically, GRRM and Tolkien have different approaches to writing, which GRRM has once brought up. He phrased it very oddly, in a way that implies that Tolkien's works are somehow worse because he doesn't detail Aragorn's tax policy.
This is, of course, not what he actually believes, and if you listen to things that Martin says about Tolkien, it's clear that he admires him very much. GRRM is also on the record saying that Tolkien probably wouldn't like his works.
Not him, but it also shows he's rather ignorant about Tolkien's work in general, which is at odds with his professed admiration.
I'm pretty sure the original intent of the "Aragorn's Tax Policy" line was to show the differences between his style of writing and Tolkien's. It was illustrating a difference in tone, and the further interview past that often-quoted line shows that.
>I'm pretty sure the original intent of the "Aragorn's Tax Policy" line was to show the differences between his style of writing and Tolkien's. It was illustrating a difference in tone, and the further interview past that often-quoted line shows that.
The quote, as I'm aware of it, reads as follows.
>Ruling is hard. This was maybe my answer to Tolkien, whom, as much as I admire him, I do quibble with. Lord of the Rings had a very medieval philosophy: that if the king was a good man, the land would prosper. We look at real history and it’s not that simple. Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn’t ask the question: What was Aragorn’s tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all these orcs? By the end of the war, Sauron is gone but all of the orcs aren’t gone – they’re in the mountains. Did Aragorn pursue a policy of systematic genocide and kill them? Even the little baby orcs, in their little orc cradles?
Even before you get to the "what was Aragorn's tax policy", you have several statements about how Tolkien's writing works, that it's a "medieval philosophy", and that if the king is a good man, things will turn out fine, that are very much not supported in the books, and one only has to look at the examples of Theoden and Denethor (the latter isn't a king per se, but he's acting as a de facto king), to see that they can be good men and bad rulers. Hell, I would go further and say that Lord of the Rings is a quintessentially early 20th century work, and would certainly not have the same kind of impact to people who haven't had a WW1 style experience.
And that's before getting into the fact that Tolkien actually did consider these questions, and just didn't decide to publish it because he thought a sequel wouldn't be worth it.
why does GRRM trigger neckbeards so badly?
>Hell, I would go further and say that Lord of the Rings is a quintessentially early 20th century work
This.
This is what I find strange about GRRM's comments. I'm sure he admires Tolkien but I'm not sure he understands him or his writing.
Because Game of Thrones is currently mainstream, and Veeky Forums hates everything popular. I'm not implying GoT is good, though - it's fucking horrible, and it's an insult to everything ASOIAF is about.
I can't speak for anyone else, but at least for me, I got introduced to ASOIF back when I was in college, sometime around 2005 I think. And I heard it recommended from a friend, who advertised it as epic fantasy a la LoTR, but much more realistic.
So I picked up the books, and I enjoyed them. But they're not realistic at all, and if that was GRRM's intention, he failed badly. They're a mishmash of dung ages tropes laid over a pastiche of some kind of pseudo-machiavellian backstabathon. My biggest complaint with the series is that I don't find the setting plausible in the least, and if that's its selling point, it's a weak one. The machinitions themselves were all right, but that only made the book enjoyable to read through. I never really understood why its more rabid fans stick to the books, and then of course it broke out to much greater visibility with the television series, and at least in my opinion, it's more on the basis of shock value than any real merit. (Although I must admit, I haven't watched the show.)
To see it in such a popular position and not works of fantasy that are enormously better written is a bit galling.
>The battle between Good and Evil is a theme of much of fantasy. But I think the battle between Good and Evil is fought largely within the individual human heart, by the decisions that we make. It’s not like evil dresses up in black clothing and you know, they’re really ugly. These are some of the things that Tolkien did; he made them work fabulously, but in the hands of his imitators, they become total clichés. I mean the orc-like creatures who always do dress in black and... they’re really ugly and they’ve got facial deformities or something. You can tell that if somebody’s ugly, he must be evil. And then Tolkien’s heroes are all very attractive people and all that, of course, again this became cliché in the hands of the Tolkien imitators.
"GRRM Interview Part 2: Fantasy and History", interview with TIME Entertainment (18 April 2011)
Got was goat for seasons 1 through 4. Then it became woat
It's an insult to a bloated, meandering mess?
Considering the war is won by a hobbit resisting the temptation of power, not the prodigal king fighting the horde of ugly monsters, isn't LOTR exactly the same as ASOIAF?
(Or at least, how we assume ASOIAF will end, since it "obviously" won't just be Jon slaying all of the Others with his magic sword. Or so people say.)
All the GRRM v JRRT skubfests are so silly. While GRRM might style himself as the anti-JRRT, at the end of the day, they are really only different on the most superficial of levels: yeah one really likes wholesomeness, and one really likes raunch, but their writing styles, and the problems therein, are practically the same.
>but their writing styles, and the problems therein, are practically the same.
.t has not read either.
>ASOIAF
>Actually getting an ending
This is getting to 'O MY RUBBER NEN' levels of complete retardation and secondaries memeing falsehood into truth.
After GRRM dies and another author finished his series.
Won't happen, GGRM wrote into his will that all his notes are to be burned if he dies before finishing the series.
Only way we'll get a proper ending is if Santa can deliver before he croaks.
Those sorts of wills aren't always honored. Terry Pratchett was quite fortunate that his will was.
GRRM has successfully triggered all his original fanbase, from people who have read his books in 1996 to 2011, we've all been waiting for years, and seen his quality of writing steadily decline along with his general health and work ethic. there is little hope of ever having a satisfying ending to his story, his supposed magnum opus, which he now seems to hate himself for making in the first place.
doesn't help that the show fell off a cliff past season 4, with all intrigue now transparent and former masterminds like littlefinger reduced to bumbling fools when put on the spot.
George doesn't have any asshole kids that can fuck him over, pretty sure everything will go to his wife. She'll already be turborich from his estate so I don't see what incentive she'll have to finish the series against his wishes.
you know what rich people like? more money. she'll sell out if she's offered more than a hundred bucks because there's fuckall chance she actually gives a shit about his "legacy" or whatever the fuck.
Getting someone else to finish means someone to split the royalty bux with. Why do that when the HBO cheques alone are enough to make her a millionaire?
>Silmarillion goes on for pages about irrelevant genealogy for seemingly no reason.
>ASoIaF goes on for pages about genealogy because they passed some statues... also there's tits.
>LoTR overdescribes landscapes for pages while some people are on a walk on the way to put a ring in a volcanoe
>ASoIaF overdescribes landscapes for pages while some people are on a march on the way to a battle where some people will meaninglessly die... also there's tits
>LoTR thrusts a midget who just wants to relax in wholesome-town into an adventure to save the world from a ring
>ASoIaF thrusts a midget who just wants to relax in hooker-town into an adventure to save the world from his sister and her shitty kids.
So fucking different.
>But user, the tits
Yeah, that's basically the difference.
so in other hands, the Tolkien would be have been improved by the addition of tits.
>for seemingly no reason.
Nigga that's the whole point of the Silmarillion.
Jesus OP, that's about the longest and most roundabout way to tell us what an annoying faggot you are ever.
Next time just say it.
Because frankly his books are terrible. GRRM hawks about world building when he hasn't actually done any real world building that makes a single lick of sense, and as a medievalist makes me want to rip my eyes out whenever I read it because of just how WRONG things are.
People are too stuck in their ways to admit that Tolkein himself was a hack in many ways, and GRRM brought the fantasy genre up to modern literary standards.
Okay, I'm not much of a fan of GRRM, but the guy deserves a bit better than to be meme'd into DarkSydePhil.
the simarillion is literally a worldbuilding book you shitter, it's not supposed to be a storybook
>Lord of the Rings presents you with an unreliable chain of narration, and deliberately inserts causative errors, not in terms of plot, but in terms of tone.
>ASOIF does nothing of the sort.
>LoTR operates on poetic logic; while not written in verse, except for some internal poems, it uses the sound and order of words to convey information, you can see things like Isildur's antiquity by the fact that he uses anglo-saxon sentence structure "This I will take" instead of "I will take this"
>ASOIF does nothing of the sort
>Lord of the Rings is designed so that you need to actually pay attention, close attention, to notice things, like how Aragorn speaks in a superbly chameleonlike style, often using the patterns of those he talks to.
>ASOIF, when you stop and think about it makes you wonder why places like the Riverlands don't have bridges or barges, or just how the fuck bronze age barbarians can shoot people on top of a 700 foot tall wall.
They are extremely different. You're just a pleb.
In reality it's a matter of preference. Wholesomeness vs raunchiness is the battle we all contend with. I lean wholesome. You lean Raunch. You're in a different place in life. Let's not quarrel. We're both just fantasy nerds trying to contend with the fact that reality often leaves us short of what we hope for. I don't see why there's trouble between fans of their works.
>GRRM brought the fantasy genre up to modern literary standards.
it really didn't.
he just had a schtick, like every other writer has a schtick.
Y'know you could have just typed "I don't like GRR Martin." and saved yourself a lot of time and embarrassment, right?
I think he likes to pretend George is reading it.
Two different but indisputably influential fantasy authors have different writing styles and content and are both good at some things and bad at other things. Who fucking knew.
Oh yeah, you didn't because you're a shitposting limp dick retard who hasn't had his fill of slurping up hot wet shits into his gaping mouth at the shitpost buffet. Well let's just shovel some more shit in there to get it over with, you'll go septic soon enough.
...
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Mah nigga
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Good job you post those in every one of these threads of yours you BONELESS fuck
Yeahhh um Id like a thread please.. an make that shit BONELESS
I only post in these threads because I don't understand Tolkien's success. Did he make a deal with the devil or something?
Where does this "overdescribes" notion come from? I mean, yes, there's no accounting for taste and all that, but Christ, are you illiterate? Is your ideal novel paced like an airport thriller? I just don't get it.
Well, my stories tend to come to me in a montage, conveying a large amount of information in a short amount of time. It generally leaves unimportant details up to the audience to guess.
Writing is actually kind of boring, since to me, I'm just fleshing out the story and giving it more depth.
It's because you're a tasteless pedestrian.
Tell me which fantasy authors you like, please do.
Not him, but Roger Zelazny is my #1 fantasy author.
Okay, he doesn't do regular fantasy much.
If you want stock high fantasy whoever did the writing for Age of Wonders 1 defined high fantasy for me.
Tolkein is p. cool too though.
One was possessed and the other obsessed. They had plot reasons for being bad rules other than incompetence
because tolkienfags can't stand anything that could be conceivably interpreted (whether rightly or wongly does not matter to them) as criticism of JRRT
i cannot speak for his position in literature but GRRM has changed television. ned stark's death (and all that followed) are a step in the deconstruction of the formulas that television shows relied on in the past.
(the original twin peaks show was also a step in that direction; whether the new season will do that is doubtful - it probably will rather stand on its own.)
>because tolkienfags can't stand anything that could be conceivably interpreted (whether rightly or wongly does not matter to them) as criticism of JRRT
Are you me? I was gonna add "If we were thirty years prior with access to this level of internet, they'd be memeing about Moorcock for the same reason."
>lists minor difference
>They are extremely different.
okay, whatever tolkienfag
Tolkien was just "borrowing" from William Morris anyway.
>Is your ideal novel paced like an airport thriller?
There has to be a happy medium between dry walls of seemingly intentionally dry text meant to appeal to other linguistics professors, and "airport thriller." However, if you're going to err, I'd always advise erring on the side of faster pacing and more action. If err on the side of slow pacing and go too far, you maintain your value as "high literature" but you're boring as shit, and if you err on the side of fast pacing, at-least you're a fun pulp. Personally most of my favorite fantasy authors wrote not necessarily before Tolkien, but before hippies made Tolkien THE DEFINING WORK OF FANTASY in the 60's
>Howard
>Burroughs
>Vance
>Arthur Conan Doyle (The non-Sherlock-Holmes work was quite fantasy, and quite fun.)
... and I find that most authors who write fantasy post-Tolkien's-ascendancy-in-the-60's suffer from the exact same pacing, tone, style, and over-description issues as Tolkien, and with very few exteptions, if I'm going to read an author who published Veeky Forums-related fiction in after the 60's, I stick with Sci-Fi, not because I have a particular preference about the content one way or the other, but because Sci-Fi doesn't have its own Tolkien who universally defined the style of the genre to emulate him for decades after, and if it did it would be Asimov who's best works were collections of well-paced short stories. Hell, even the fantasy novelists who basically admit to churning out valuless pulp crap that serves only to entertain take stories that could have been told in 300 pages and pad them out to the thousands for seemingly no reason.
The two notable exceptions to the "if it's fantasy after tolkien it's boring" rule I've found are Moorcock, and my guilty pleasure of the Ice-Age trilogy of MTG novels.
thats pretty profound
>>Silmarillion goes on for pages about irrelevant genealogy for seemingly no reason.
faggot
GRRM's views on society are fundamentally informed by Marx.
He believes everything boils down to the struggle for power.
The clergy, the nobles, royalty, all their motives are selfish and greedy.
I mean, it's pretty explicit.
His theory of mind is absolute garbage for most of the books as well.
His people aren't people, they're these weird monstrous beasts that only vaguely resemble humanity. Their desires are always grotesque, some more obviously so than others.
Sounds like you're a monstrous beast in denial
>His people aren't people, they're these weird monstrous beasts that only vaguely resemble humanity.
if i look at modern day politics, i see lots of assholes, straight-up assholes, on all sides. it's not hard to see how civil war could break out and things devolve into a game of thrones.
if you disagree, you don't understand people, especially ambitious people in positions of power. their conscience will always take a backseat to ambition, their misdeeds will always find some inner justification and they will do what they think they can get away with.
the poublic these days is doing a lousy job of reining them in.
...of course most of it is a vivid food analogy...
Hear! Hear!
I don't want to be that guy, but can you please punctuate and capitalize when you use this site? Thank you. Also, you should probably stop with the reddit spacing, and sage if/when you reply to this post, since it's not really Veeky Forums related.
Too bad none of his writing has any of that.
How could GoT be good when ASOIAF isn't good?
I mean he also doesn't get that LOTR isn't meant to be realistic in any way. It's meant to be a bible-like story and if you actually read the Silmarillion that + how predetermined everything is makes perfect sense
He shoulda read a book instead of spouting nonsense
Historical materialism and dialectical materialism were hugely influential within sociology for a reason. They're both effective explanatory techniques for the progress of history.
>reddit spacing
If you're not using a line indentation, you're supposed to leave a line-break between paragraphs. This meme is stupid, and you need to learn proper formatting.
>i cannot speak for his position in literature but GRRM has changed television. ned stark's death (and all that followed) are a step in the deconstruction of the formulas that television shows relied on in the past.
Is GoT literally the first TV show you've ever watched?
>I mean he also doesn't get that LOTR isn't meant to be realistic in any way.
What something was "intended" to be does not determine what it can be criticized upon. Your reasoning is what leads to people doing shit "ironically" as a means to deflect criticism.
Dude what
no
i have been watching shows since the early 80s, user
Exactly what I said. The fact Tolkien did not intend something to be realistic does not mean it cannot be criticized upon the grounds of not being realistic. Otherwise you legitimize the hipsters that say they're doing something to be "ironic" as a means to escape any criticism (after all, it wasn't intended to be good).
>i have been watching shows since the early 80s, user
Then why are you spouting such nonsense?
Thats literally retarded. Its like saying "this fantasy book isn't sci-fi". Not everything has to be realistic and theres something for everyone
If GRRM says "omg lotr isn't realistic" thats not only retarded criticism its also misunderstanding the source material - the silmarillion
>If you're not using a line indentation, you're supposed to leave a line-break between paragraphs. This meme is stupid, and you need to learn proper formatting.
The issue is that line-break formatting causes the post to take up an excessively large amount of screen space compared to the posts around it, which greatly distorts the aesthetic of the site, and looks like shit. Also, I'm sure you're doing it deliberately, but even when using line-break formatting, there's no reason to insert an additional one after a direct quote, since the paragraph change is supposed to imply a progression to another idea, which is unnecessary when you're directly addressing the quote, and it's already in another color to separate it.
kil urself muh man.
So are hipsters now immune to criticism for saying that they're doing things to be ironic? Because that is the alternative.
We can evaluate the merit of the criticism on its own merits (in this case, "I want to explore this where he didn't") or we can say that you can't criticize things based on what the author "intended" (as though author intent has any merit in evaluating a work).
Nigga wtf are u talking about with that hipster crap i dont fucking give a shit
>The issue is that line-break formatting causes the post to take up an excessively large amount of screen space compared to the posts around it, which greatly distorts the aesthetic of the site, and looks like shit. Also, I'm sure you're doing it deliberately, but even when using line-break formatting, there's no reason to insert an additional one after a direct quote, since the paragraph change is supposed to imply a progression to another idea, which is unnecessary when you're directly addressing the quote, and it's already in another color to separate it.
I've been here longer than you, have formatted my posts exactly like this the entire time (as most posters have until we engaged in this idiotic tribalism with Reddit), and you don't get a say in what "distorts the aesthetic of the site" you fucking wendel. The quotation in this context is a separate paragraph, and it's not as though space is ever at a premium in this site.
Eat shit and learn how to format properly.
His writing itself was rather bad but he had most of the starting ideas of fantasy. (Someone will shriek about Conan but while the writing was good it didn't invented a lot of fantasy ideas)
you haven't made your case how and why it is nonsense. i can easily make the case for my claim - both regarding the impact of twin peaks as well as of ned starks death. there's tons of reviews of game of thrones that support my claim.
>I've been here longer than you
Lmao
>LoTR overdescribes landscapes
This is something I really haven't noticed.
Are there any examples?
i love the reddit spacing meme morons. they are just setting themselves up to get triggered.
every fucking time.
Have +5 internet points. Don't forget to use them to upgrade your account!
suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com
October 2007. People predominantly format their posts correctly.
>Not him, but Roger Zelazny is my #1 fantasy author.
Mine melanin enhanced compadre
Besides isn't middle earth modelled after the early medieval period, when taxes weren't periodical payments but money raised by the king for one specific project?
Im no expert so it would be nice if someone could verify or deny this thing I heard.
You know, I actually didn't, but I just gained a lot of respect for the man
I still think his books are mostly garbage, but that is nicely written little piece of wisdom, there.
I study history and taxes did exist. Then again i'm not a good student but surely im not wrong on this one
jesus fuck even when they're telling op to eat cocks their being more helpful.
>dry walls of seemingly intentionally dry text
Tolkien has almost none of this apart from The Silmarillion, which, again, was quickly thrown together from his notes by his son after his death. Tolkien did intend to eventually get it published, but not in the form we have today. His style is very sparce on description in general, much like the Norse and Anglo-Saxon texts whose style he tried to mimic.
Oh, he does. The memers are too retarded to realize that he just wanted a fantasy series that also looks into more realistic looks at ruling and power.
They're influential because the soft sciences are so envious of the hard sciences. Do they ape everything.
Dialectical materialism doesn't make fucking sense. It's more soft school faggotry in which butthurt people craft awful tools only because they need to feel like their particular field had actual worth.
High verbal IQ jews with below average mechanical IQ. It means they can create grotesque towers of words stringed together into a single system. But suck at actually verifying if it actually works.
This
Why do people think that VtM get as big as it did back in the day? As a modern power fantasy the two other core game lines of white wolf were far better, and even had better editing in their core books by a small touch.
Why was there so much interest in the 3.5 book cityscape?
Why did old shadowrun become so big? All of those things touch on the subject of ruling and power in a fantasy even if they did it in a different way.
>at the end of the day, they are really only different on the most superficial of levels
this is absolutely wrong. fuck, you could not be more wrong. that whole post is terrible.
i'm hoping this is a troll post. then its a good troll. otherwise its someone talking out their ass.
Obligatory