Do y'all actually hate this guy?
While his prose is sometimes below average, I think he's a pretty talented writer with a masterful grasp of characterization and continuity. His craft is much more sophisticated than that of his genre fiction peers, and despite his blunders his work is pretty damn impressive.
Who is that cutie pie? I would love to put her beard in my special place, if you know what i mean.
Jokes aside: GRR Martin is a very original writer for his genre. He essentially set in motion a revolution on how we understand fantasy worlds and in using them to reveal deep human tensions and motivations, making us examine the rich psychology of his characters in order to better understand his world. He is essentially manipulating us into examining our reasons, through cruelty, cynicism and an exhuberant imagination.
>continuity
disgusting. lots of us hate Gass, so yes, we hate this hack of all hacks. "good at writing genre fiction" equals "wipes his ass neatly after he shits on my mother's grave"
you've wasted years of your valueless life reading him.
>blunders
Which ones?
I don't see this at all, i think everything he writes about are already well established fantasy tropes, a lot is directly taken from real historical events, and his characters are 2 dimentional at best.
>rich psychology
...such as?
The characters are boring and develop in an incredibly slow pace. The narrator spews the same trite traits of them over and over again until reading becomes an annoying chore.
It's just rudimentary psychology with little to no philosophical meaning behind it.
>genre fiction is bad
>why user? It can be pretty deep too
>it's just bad.
That's the imaginary conversation i have with myself every time i read about how genre fiction is just some sort of inferior literature. Some people just don't even dare to examine either why they believe what they believe or the reasons and intentions behind some work of art, even if mediocre and simple.
Tyrion is a pretty complex guy for instance. So was Ned Stark, Cersei Lannister, Jorah Mormont and many more.
Not everyone though, i may grant you that. Sansa for instance is just a doorknob.
He makes some poor decisions in narration and plot, but covers his tracks amazingly well. He completely shot himself in the foot with the entire Daenerys storyline after she leaves Qarth, but managed to handle it so gracefully that most audiences won't realize how horribly he fucked up.
If anybody isn't aware, GRRM planned a 5-10 year time skip before he realized that was fucking stupid. Daenerys overthrows the slave cities of Ghiscar way, way too early, because he initially planned to cut to her, years later, as a seasoned but troubled ruler with a public who has since turned against her.
Similarly, GRRM was forced to come up with largely pointless plotlines for both Jon and Arya, as both of them were clearly supposed to be an experienced leader and assassin after the time gap.