So Veeky Forums, do you remember that the very world of ASOIAF is a cosmic horror story?

But muh Kahlessi

Wow, now I have even less reason to read ASOIAF! Thanks!

But, user! The books are redundant now! Only the SHOW is canon NOW!

How many millions are going to die by the time they realise they have wasted most of their food meant to survive the winter?

All of them. They're just going to keep dying and keep dying, because the books will never be finished.

user.... clearly you didn't get the message. Please see:
There will be no more books as the show is the storyline that's canon now and they've deviated too far for the books themselves to continue to be made and stay relevant.

doesn't mean I can't still be salty.

Neat. Do any of these background elements have any actual impact on the story or characters or could I rip them all out with no changes?

I really think HPL ruined a lot of what made his setting special by just straight lifting shit out of Chambers, like adding Carcossa to Yuggoth

You can rip them all out with no real issue as they were strongarmed in wholesale
They were ripped out of The Mythos entirely just to sort of spice up the abysmal lore they were trying to build in a sort of "what a tweest" moment to give you sort of an idea how shit the whole setup is.

It really isn't, it deals with none of the themes of cosmic horror. You can't say it's cosmic horror just because there are some big scary magic things, those are in all sorts of fantasy genres.

In what way is it a cosmic horror?

The world of Ice and Fire, a book with backround informations to the dynastys, nations and cultures in the known world, is filled to the brim with references, especially to Lovecraft.
Most of that will likely never appear in the books.

Those are references, they don’t actually shift the story’s genre

References to Lovecraft don't make it a cosmic horror story, it makes it a story with references to Lovecraft's work.

And I'm not knocking ASoIaF, at least not for that. I appreciate the small references here and there to something worse than the Others and wights and such. I know we'll never see Asshai, or Stygai, or find out what flavor of soul destroying evil Euron has been involved in, or where the Seastone Chair came from, but it's fun to think about.

In his defence, he was already dead when most of the really shitty shit got added.
Though, in keeping with his themes, that's not really an excuse.

Reminder that Euron Greyjoy, not the Others, will be the final boss of the series.

>“The bleeding star bespoke the end,” [Euron] said to Aeron. “These are the last days, when the world shall be broken and remade. A new god shall be born from the graves and charnel pits.”
>Then Euron lifted a great horn to his lips and blew, and dragons and krakens and sphinxes came at his command and bowed before him. “Kneel, brother,” the Crow’s Eye commanded. “I am your king, I am your god. Worship me, and I will raise you up to be my priest.”

I just want more info on the fucking Drowned God. He's done more than the bloody Seven anyways.

>So Veeky Forums, do you remember that the very world of ASOIAF is a cosmic horror story?
The correct name is 'Euron Greyjoy's Wild Ride.'

Khalessi is off the walls crazy

>lovecraft
>a setting
Oh wow

I really doubt he is, because one of the recurring themes of asoiaf is "the Ironborn think they matter, but they don't." They're a bunch of shitty fishermen who need to raid just to keep themselves going on their shitty little islands, and yet they've totally convinced themselves that they're the world's most feared and fearsome warriors.

In truth, they're the least consequential of the seven kingdoms. The other great houses hold them in open contempt, their military might is negligible (Balon invades the North while Rob's got all his banners halfway across the continent, and is able to seize... two castles, not including Winterfell, which only fell because of Theon's treachery), and whenever they try to rebel they immediately get their asses handed to them by one or more of the real powers in Westeros. They're grudgingly tolerated by their betters, but their heads are so far up their asses that they think the rest of the world trembles when they hear the name "Ironborn."

Balon tried to declare independence twice, and we saw how that went.

Theon's entire arc is about realizing that he's not shit, and the only way he can ever even begin to matter is if he takes his head out of his ass.

Victarion is to the Iron Islanders what the Iron Islands are to Westeros: he's literally retarded, but too dumb and full of "purpose" to realize that he's not a hero.

So to me, it makes perfect thematic sense that Euron considers himself this unspeakable badass, and that all the Ironborn are completely sold on him being some sort of cosmic horror in human form come to bring about the end times... but then, when he actually leads his fleet out and we get to see him from a non-Iron Island PoV, we find out he's just another shitty reaver who's going to do a little raiding before getting his ass ingloriously kicked by the Westerosi equivalent of a coast guard patrol.

The most thematically appropriate thing he could do, after all this build up is to... not matter.

In theory, couldnt the southern part of the Seven kingdoms keep planting and harvesting food even on winter?

I doubt snow would fall on drone and ruin their lemon trees...

GRRM stated that if they run out of food during winter, they just migrate south, so yes, it's entirely likely that Reach will keep producing food through the entire winter.
Crops will be different, but it will still keep on giving food.

Dorne will still be a shitty desert because Martells never invested into land reclamation.

Iron Islands have a mineral wealth though. It is a place of military importance as it does have the capabilities of producing wargear from ships to arms and armor whilst being defensible.

One wonders why they haven't been kicked out of he Isles after all the conquests and replaced with a rulers that can actually make that worth something.

Explain

There's spooky shit far up north and far to the east, also the local pirates worship something called the Drowned God. People with no imagination and and an inability to describe things without comparing them to other works of fiction thinks those makes it a work of Lovecraftian cosmic horror.

Like I really enjoy ASoIaF but cosmic horror it is not.

I fucking hate showfags who keep spamming this quote. It's like they forget that the very show that had Ramsey say it, also had Ramsey die in the most fanfiction, yaas queen slay manner, after losing in to Jon Snow in an extremely fanfiction manner.

Hell, I've seen Warcraft described as Lovecraftian horror.

GRRM stole a whole bunch of shit from lovecraft when building his setting, and threw in some "weird" stuff to try and make his setting seem deeper than it is. It feels like an ancient and historied world when in reality it's just a whole load of disjointed nonsense that doesn't work together.

OP, having clearly never read the books, thinks the lovecraft references mean something, and with the way the show recently turned into a high fantasy farce, is now convinced the show will end with cthulhu eating everyone, because they're confusing references and worldbuilding with foreshadowing.

I do wonder how they'll address the "happily ever after" they're setting up involving wincest, but it's very clear that in the end, the good guys will win, whoever they turn out to be. The only twist GRRM can pull off to end this thing without ruining its core conceit would be a "Aha! You thought these guys were evil all along but they were just misunderstood! Moral relativism!", but D&D may just as well not so the pub crowd stays happy and doesn't get their poor little brains confused.

Honestly, this makes more sense than calling ASoIaF cosmic horror.

What makes something "Lovecraftian" is the themes, not the spooky monsters and threat of annihilation from big ol' space monsters.
Life in ASOIAF is nasty, brutish and short. Virtue isn't always rewarded, in fact it's usually the arseholes who get the top spot. But at the same time, the lives and deaths of these characters matter. They're not just vehicles for making a point about how insignificant and alone we really are.
So no, ASOIAF is not "Lovecraftian."

Wait no it isn't, it's post apocalyptic. There was a precursor civilization that was destroyed by nuclear winter, and everyone had to live underground for centuries.

>But at the same time, the lives and deaths of these characters matter. They're not just vehicles for making a point about how insignificant and alone we really are.
Way to reduce Lovecraft's cosmology to one single meme theme.

Preston, go to bed.

That in no way makes it "cosmic horror."

Most of Lovecraft's themes were deeply personal and only really make sense when you look beyond his fiction. His nihilism is really the only thing that his successors can write about while still remaining true to Lovecraft, because writers like GRRM don't know what it's like to spend a lifetime fearing that you're genetically predisposed to insanity.

D: Quentyn's alive damn you

Warcrap has its own genre.

No seriously, what Lovecraftian theme (not reference) is relevant?

Don't just say "LMAO spooky shit"

No. Martin just copied some lovecraftian stuff and put them far away from the plot

So, the ironborn will win in the end

Relevant to what? I'm not saying ASoIaF is Lovecraftian. I'm saying you're pigeonholing Lovecraftian into one extremely narrow theme that doesn't even apply to all of his stories. This isn't any better than Derleth's misinterpretation, it's just another misinterpretation.

People have pretty low standards for labeling something cosmic horror. I'm surprised people haven't started calling the Chronicles of Narnia cosmic horror just because of Jadis.

If Narnia is Lovecraftian, then the Bible is as well.

>flaming bush telling someone the words of god to create a cult with
>genetically engineered the human race out of a single being
>mind control, monsters out of the deep and the sky, and demons representing forms off world destroying apocalyptic forces
Are you saying it isn't?

>So Veeky Forums, do you remember that the very world of ASOIAF is a sword and sorcery story?
>So Veeky Forums, do you remember that the very world of ASOIAF is an epic story?
>So Veeky Forums, do you remember that the very world of ASOIAF is a coming of age story?
>So Veeky Forums, do you remember that the very world of ASOIAF is a cosmic horror story?
>So Veeky Forums, do you remember that the very world of ASOIAF is a dark fantasy story?
>So Veeky Forums, do you remember that the very world of ASOIAF is a gritty fantasy story?
>So Veeky Forums, do you remember that the very world of ASOIAF is a new weird story?
>So Veeky Forums, do you remember that the very world of ASOIAF is a political story?
>So Veeky Forums, do you remember that the very world of ASOIAF is a kaiju story?

please kys and your shitty meme OP. it was, is, and always will be the stalest of breads

Wtf I love jewish fairy tales from the Stone Age now

Great, so you're another pseud who thinks that knowing about Derleth makes you an expert on Lovecraft.

>the guy behind the flaming bush loves you and will kill the people that try and fuck you over
>he's also ridiculously petty and will freak out over the same shit that would piss you off
>good things happen to good people
It isn't.

No. I think that having read I am Providence makes me an expert on Lovecraft.

It doesn't. It's the textbook example of high fantasy.

You obviously didn't take much away from it if you can't even name the "Lovecraftian" themes you think that ASOIAF conveys.

Are you literally retarded? Look and read:
>I'm not saying ASoIaF is Lovecraftian

No, LOTR is the literal textbook definition of High Fantasy. Warcraft is a bizzare kitchen-sink of high fantasy, sci-fi, weird fiction, and mythology, with no interconnecting anything and no consistency whatsoever.
Note that I am talking about modern WoW here, the current state of the "warcraft" setting. The original RTSs were definitely High Fantasy, but WoW is a special breed of retarded that defies classification.

Ironic. They couldn't make the rest of the setting fit Lovecraft's themes, but did themselves.

Aegon almost roasted the whole island but the Lannisters and the Tully's got into landtism over it. So he couldn't get rid of them.

So how would you go about making an actually interesting, not a rip off Cosmic Horror set up Veeky Forums?

The show's going to end with a big bloody battle and Status Quo Ante Bellum. We'll mourn all the good characters that died and some of the shit ones and the show ends with Aegon and Dany mounting the world.

It's a shame that Martin isn't willing to take things to their logical conclusion, that being that winter actually comes and people continue to fight through the snow, Russian Winter style, adapting over time to continue being utterly feral fuckers.

>Dany & Jon defeat the others, but jon dies
>Dany goes full targaryen
>becomes queen
>does as targaryens rulers do
This is how it should end

It does break a man's mind trying to figure out why someone would run Yogg-Saron

>literally two rectangles
This always bugs me

Yeah, maybe before they went full fanfic.

What's with all the lovecraftposting?

You've very clearly never read the bible and don't know who nyarlathotep is.

Yeah it's so fucking ugly It hurts.

mandatory

>good things happen to good people
Depends on God's mood in that particular moment. See Job

people have gone mad and died while playing warcraft, so it's up there

>can directly correlate the exact decline of my mental health and deteriorated world view with the timeframe where Young Me's WoW habits took off
Well shit.

That was a good thing though.

It's really sad when you realize their golden age was just them ruling a few irrelevant places like Bear island. And the riverlands, but everyone's had a turn at ruling them.

probably based on something like this

>terrible memory
>can only vaguely remember things using dates from other events
>lfg mag lair
>''good luck finding a group with the expansion around the corner''
>sep 2007
>Trial of the Crusader server first with guild
>august 2009

LotR is classical fantasy. High Fantasy is something like Golarion.

So Asha is the only sane one?

>random ass forests, swamps and deserts placed just wherever
>Shrinking sea and poison sea are endorheic basins with no rivers
>Islands are completely random
>Vast majority of essos has zero drainage
>Only sandy desert is apparently in a HUGE tectonic rift, because that makes sense
>Random mountain chain perfectly bisecting the essos rectangle
>Westeros coastline more eroded on side facing other continent, coast facing giant open ocean is significantly smoother
>summer isles are a penis
>Zero deltas
>every interesting location is either a reference to something else or complete nonsense we will never hear about in full
God I hate this map

It is a shit map. Especially the eastern continent. Holy shit just draw a big oblong and call it a day tier lazy.

Also OP image make it look like there is a land west of Westeros. Is there?

[laugh track]

>Everything falls apart as her death and nothing changes.

GRRM bases a lot of his magic on lovecraftian horror

Her whole thing at the moot is calling on the ironborn to get their shit together and stop pretending that they can matter if all they do is launch doomed coastal raids on far superior opponents, so... yes.

GRRM can use magic?

Not sure about him, but he did write a long blog post addressing people's concerns he'll die before finishing the books because he's a fat fuck. He said he wishes he could die already, and in fact had, but Dan and Dave use eldritch magic to keep him alive.

I like how he sidestepped the issue of fatness.

A bit of a tangent, but can Roadside Picnic be considered Lovecraftian?

>sidestep
>fatness
hehe

All they amount to is en epilogue that says: And then maybe Cthulhu ate them all

Take what you're afraid of and then turn it into an allegory. Afterwards, apply that allegory to the setting.
You follow a similar formula when writing horror stories but instead of applying that allegory to the setting, you apply it to a specific character/situation.

The problem with most "cosmic horror" stories is that the people who write them either don't have the guts to really examine and play with their fears or they live too comfortably to even recognize their fears. Either way, they default to doing what they believe other people will find scary on superficial level: spooky tentacle monsters that cause insanity and lack empathy towards humans.