Is the War of the Five the most Accurate and Realistic war on any Fantasy Setting?

>Joffrey, Robb, and Balon have show designs.
>Stannis and Renly are book-based

Wut.

Depends, how important am I?

Because my perfect world is "Point out to Renly that Stannis has been married for years, and his wife can't seem to make boys."

Have him raven Stannis saying that he stands with him against these usurpers and bastards, and offer to serve as regent for any true-born son of Stannis, or humbly serve as his heir if the Gods be unkind.

Have my lord volunteer to serve as Stannis's chief diplomat, to sway the Reach and Dorne to support us.

We'll probably get boned in some way, but at least our side starts with a much better foundation.

>A chevauchée (French pronunciation: [ʃəvoʃe], "promenade" or "horse charge", depending on context) was a raiding method of medieval warfare for weakening the enemy, primarily by burning and pillaging enemy territory in order to reduce the productivity of a region

Nah you are wrong

If not for the wildfire Stannis would have won.

Stannis would have won if not for Renly's "ghost".

It gets even more retarded when you realize that scorched earth tactics are common place in a land where winter lasts fucking years and hoarding crops is a necessity.

Maybe the artist liked the show designs for some characters but not others.

Why would Tywin care if some fags at Riverlands starve to death?

The only way Stannis was able to get so far was by creating Renly's "ghost".

Because it weakens the country as a whole and will take years and years to build back up again. The peasants don't care who rules over them enough to fight you and they are the ones who'll suffer the most in the short term, while you can't get as much value out of the land (Or any value out of a lot of it) without peasants.

He has no reason to but at the same time that's just wasting precious resources you could use to feed your own massive fucking army you took into enemy territory or to ransom life nurturing food for soldiers or some shit.

This is probably the best way. Appease to Stannis' pride while setting Renly up for the eventual victory.

The only issue is Stannis' heresies.

>Because it weakens the country as a whole
Wrong, it weakens Riverlands. Nobody gives a fuck about Riverlands, and it has very little to offer to the crown even when loyal, nevermind in an act of active rebellion. Tywin is already allied with the Reach, that produces all the food necessary for his coalition, and more.

Would've honestly chosen the Iron Isles if it was ruled by anyone from way back during the Century of Blood.

Yeah and that is why Reconquista took 700 years. It's a fine tactic to skirmish when you have 1000 guys on a good day, but you ain't conquering much through algaradas.

Tywin didnt want to conquer the riverlands though.

the eintire reconquista had a big push once a generration but otherwise was a series of raids that targeted the enemy infrastructure - e.g. peasants

HE would have won if it were not for the Deus ex machina Martin handed to Tywin Lannister

Tywin suddenly making an alliance with the Tyrells?

yeah.

>Burning the second most fertile land in westeros while an abnormally long summer has been in place over westeros for the past 9 years.
He's screwing himself over in the long run. But given this is tywin i shouldn't be surprised.

Robb got hit by it even worse.

>Start Googling 'War of the Five' while thinking 'this better not be Game of Thrones'
>Goddammit

I wish I hadn't been conditioned to think that people saying 'realistic' meant A Song of Edge and Grognard and I doubly wish I didn't keep getting proven right.

>But given this is tywin i shouldn't be surprised.
where did the meme of Tywin being some strategic/logistic genius came from? He is ruthless bureaucrat with daddy issue "muah Lanister name" He got btfo by Edmur Tully

Don't confuse strategy with tactics.

Wrong

Wrong?

Tywin is a poor commander

>The only issue is Stannis' heresies.
He only seriously started with those after everything went pear shaped.

The church would bitch and moan, but unless some retard would allow them an armed brach, that wouldn't be much of a problem.

The reconquista was pretty much just looting and sending off useless sons to aquire more land given a fancy name.

His plans were good in the short term. But on the long term they were beyond suicidal.

Maybe in the tactical sense, but his strategy tended to be quite sound.

Hence myvpost about not confusing the two.

So much this. Killing peasants and burning productive lands to the ground in a world where winters can last decades it's just retarded.

As long as the damage is largely contained to the enemy's land, it seems like an excellent way of weakening your enemies.

Sort of.You may as well use them for your own profit since peasants rarely care to whom they pay tributes as long as it's not so abusive it causes a revolt. Sure, you weaken your enemy if you kill them and ravage the land, but what are you going to do if you have to face a hard and long-ass winter let's say, two years after you win the war?

I guess you could say they are just stupid enough to actually do this and I would agree with you that it's a certain possibility, but it's not the most logical thing to do.

The Red Wedding is his Greatest Strategy plan. That should tell you something

A chevauchée, assumes:
1. You understand the enemy supply lines
2. You are basically in a civil war, so you can't actully defend or hold land properly
3. You are THE MONGOLS, even if they did prefer to take the nearby city states and demand said grain in taxes

chevauchée is a good term because it allows people to confuse pillage with burn.

>Feudalism
>Enemy lands
No such thing user. Its a core tenant. And that even includes massacring nearby villages to replace their population.

This is an example of how Tywin is actually pretty shit as a general. His scorched earth tactics are directly contradictory to his ideology of accepting the surrenders of surrendering enemies. He wins through politics, not battles.

>"Joffrey, when your enemies defy you, you must serve them steel and fire. When they go to their knees, however, you must help them back to their feet. Elsewise no man will ever bend the knee to you."
Tywin’s words and his actions don’t mix.

You couldn’t tell by the picture?

The teleportation back to King’s Landing on time was the big thing.

So if Renly had 'bent the knee' to Stannis, he would have had:

The Reach
The Stormlands
Dragon Isle

Additionally, this united front of Baratheons would grant him greater legitimacy, potentially leading to the Starks submitting to their rule.

>mfw

>GoT
>Realistic or accurate

Becaue tywin was a hypocritical powerhungry retard. He got what he deserved

The thing about Tywin is that he’s likely super emotional deep down. Some of these actions are nothing short of anal pains.

Blame Highreach for distracting Renly with the hottest boipucci in the kingdom this side of Rhaegar.

>No, because contrary to Martin logic deliberately attacking peasants in a war was both rare and incredibly stupid, since they are what makes land valuable in the first place.

nani?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrying_of_the_North

>The King stopped at nothing to hunt his enemies. He cut down many people and destroyed homes and land. Nowhere else had he shown such cruelty. This made a real change. To his shame, William made no effort to control his fury, punishing the innocent with the guilty. He ordered that crops and herds, tools and food be burned to ashes. More than 100,000 people perished of starvation. I have often praised William in this book, but I can say nothing good about this brutal slaughter. God will punish him.

>Best aesthetic
>Best history
>Better token autist than Stannis
>Religion is metal as fuck sea-themed death cult
>Superior waifu
>House motto is literally "lol farming is for fags"

Zero reason to not throw in with the Greyjoys.

they're literally literally retarded

So is Stannis, but at least the Greyjoys are honest about it.

>I want to build a legacy
>Better treat my chuldren, on whom the longivity of that legacy will depend, like shit
He was a retard both as a strategist and a tactician

The fanboys, GRRM sucking his dick real hard, and plebs who can't think for themselves.

I mean, if Euron was king when it started defintely considering that fucker is somehow wrecking shit up on what is apparent ally the cosmic scale decked out in motherfucking Valyrian Steel Plate Armor.

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 a 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."

>animu picture
opinion discarded

Wait, so what you're saying is, Tywin is a hypocrite, and probably not a good guy? Who would have thought.

Ah, the animu dude posting that one guy's vicious review on good reads. Knew this thread was missing something.

I've never had this pasta before even though I go to ASoIaF threads whenever they pop up on this board. Is this a spicy new meme or am I that out of the loop?

It is stupid but it was common practice. The early states were in a constant struggle to fund their armies during wartime and a soldier actually recieving their pay was the exception rather than the rule. In order to prevent an army deserting en masse (Desertion was common in every army) soldiers were allowed to loot and it was treated as a necessary evil. Certain states like the Dutch negated this somewhat through innovations like borrowing from merchants and offering favourable rates (i can't recall the actual name or specifics of these loans though).

It's the typical response a GoT/ASoIaF thread gets on Veeky Forums.

They are, by their own admission even, Inhuman warmongering pirates that cant build conquer for shit without a massive advantage in technology.

Bitch please, they're badasses who can do amazing things when they aren't governed by a fucking dumbass.

>bitch please
>>>/2009/

>when they aren't governed by a fucking dumbass.
Said dumb asses are running things 99.99% of the time

No. The only one that looks like Ned is Arya.

Which I think is great because it makes Robb into a Northern king who looks a lot like a Southron lord, which is probably why the Riverlords so readily swore fealty to him.

But 1 and 2 were totally valid.

And what's not to like about that? They are by far the funnest faction in the whole series.

Jon also looks like Ned.

As for the Robb thing, you may be reading too much into it. I think it has more to do with the fact his mother is a beloved lady and daughter of their popular liege, who also married a man universally respected for his sense of honor and justice. The only people who didn't like the Starks were the ones with reputations for treachery and/or bloodthirstiness.

>cliche, fascist 'chosen one' monomyth,
>monomyth
>fascist
How many levels of progressive ideology is this guy on?

Good to know that they're still stuck-up elitist assholes

Martin's plots are certain complex when compared to genre fantasy, but that's not very high praise since most genre fantasy takes the form of a cookie-cutter monomyth built around a power fantasy.

I didn't say adding sex and violence made the book immature, but neither does it automatically lend maturity. If it did, then furry Harry Potter fanfic would be the most mature writing there is.

Adding 'adult' material to a work without a mature worldview and philosophy behind it merely makes the immaturity of the work stand out all the more, like a penis drawn on the wall of a boys' bathroom.

It's not simply adding those elements that make a book 'realistic', it's how the author uses them. Martin seems to be adding these elements like you said, as a 'reaction to Tolkien', Martin is trying to set himself apart as different.

His inspiration is not realism, it's a need to set himself apart. To paraphrase Quentin Crisp: originality isn't the act of scrutinizing everyone else and behaving contrarily, it's it's building and acting from some coherent philosophy.

Martin uses death and sex conspicuously, to try to convince us of how different he is from genre fantasy. Using shocking elements extraneous to the plot to capture the audience isn't some great achievement, it's the mark of porn, slasher movies, and yellow journalism.

In that sense, it's no better than trying to capture them with an escapist display of heroism, like most genre fantasy does. It is no more complex or mature, though it is more 'dirty'.

The amusing thing about this lunge at maturity is that the underpinnings of the book are still very aligned with genre fantasy, as evidenced by the handsome bastard anti-hero (and his albino wolf). This seems a clear nod to the influence of Moorcock, the original anti-Tolkien, but Martin is less rebellious than his predecessor.

His is another epic tale of righteous fighting men, but played straight instead of taking Moorcock's satiric tack. I think it was this fundamental conflict that threw me off. The world was supposed to be 'original' and 'realistic', but the underpinnings were predictable and heroic.

I suppose this is why it appeals to a lot of genre fantasy readers, who want something different, but not too different. Martin gives a veneer of faux-realism in the same way the 1980s post-Miller comic books did: black colors, hopelessness, and lots of 'badass' anti-heroes.

But just like most of them couldn't compare to Miller (or Moore), Martin is not at the same level as Moorcock, and certainly not Peake. I'd agree there isn't much intrigue in genre fantasy, at least not that I've read, but celebrations of the morality of power have rarely been known for their subtlety.

His intrigue isn't as good as Dumas, nor Orczy, nor Moorcock's 'Gloriana' or Poe's mysteries or the economic machinations of Mieville. It also doesn't compare with non-fiction works of political history, such as 'A Distant Mirror', or 'The Affair of Poisons'. A perusal of 'The Prince' would show a complexity of politics and war that Martin's world never represents.

I'm not saying all books should have to match these historic works, there's nothing wrong with a fun adventure, but if we're discussing intrigue and realism, then we must compare the book to realistic depictions of politics, and it simply doesn't match up.

The riverlands is the second biggest contributor towards overall food production. Without the riverlands, King's Landing would have to rely entirely on The Reach for food as has been stated, which gives the Tyrells massive stretch over the Crown. Just because Tywin is allied with the Reach doesn't mean that they won't screw him over at the next possible case scenario, or won't budge out his family in offices and power over time.

Stop being such shit-for-brains.

What the fuck does Yellow have to do with this, though?

the irony

Basically this. United Baratheon front stomps everyone, even Robb if he doesn’t bend the knee (who might even join the fun).

Succession goes King Stannis to Renly to Renly’s children (if he can get it up long enough to get a male). This pleases the Tyrells since it ensures an eventual Tyrell Queen and half Tyrell King, giving them immense infleunce in the future.

Holy fuck dude, just make an image already and stop posting in seperate posts. You did the same thing in Veeky Forums

Unless Stannis has a son.

You wrote 3.2K words about a series you only read 1/10 of the content it has? Where you barely even scratched the surface, and admitted in your giant thesis that you pretty much only get the barebones of the plot from the show seemingly or popculture references?

You are a faggot, go wank in your mother's basement as you contemplate so much about why your life sucks.

You seem to even hate the fantasy genre, which is funny, considering you are so obsessed with it, and as well, you criticize GRRM for using so much length when you far and above outclass most posts in here. Why do you need all that length to spout your shitty thoughts? Do you truly think you are changing anyone's minds?

And if you think High Fantasy is going away, you are double on-pants-on-head retarded.

Don't you know that Jon Snow is going to stay dead and won't be anywhere near as a protagonist? The protagonist is the lying, cheating, whoring dwarf that is as ugly as a turnip. You are truly deluded.