Song of Ice and Fire

>reading books for the story
go back to /got/

It's okay if you like the books and some Veeky Forumsposters don't like the books, user. Taste is personal, people don't always agree on matters related to it

I'm a fan of the story, too. The world Martin creates is unique and I like it. The main argument against it would be that it's quite popular and a majority of people see it as a great piece of literature, when in fact it's not - there aren't any fresh ideas, there's no exploration of philosophical topics, and it's generally long and dry in it's prose.

The show is awful. Did you see that Terminator scene?

This I can agree to. Thank you, user. I understand now.

It's amongst the most 'literary' genre fiction of all time.

The show is decent TV, and the last season was fantastic. The plebian element of Game of Thrones originates in the books.

Martin is okay at worldbuilding, and he's created a few memorable characters. However, his kernel of quality characters comes from the law of averages. He's created thousands upon thousands of named characters, and so at least a few of them have to stick.
Thematically, the overarching plot is relatively contained, but the six-dozen different subplots distract from this, and there's no real sense of cohesion or direction. As far as plot structure, he sticks to the basics: every main character has their own cookie-cutter monomyth. Still, the gaggle of plots and subplots and sideplots and plots within plots -- while it makes for some memorable intrigue and room to manoeuvre within the story -- ultimately harms the consistency and clarity of the tale.
Of course, Martin's bare prose is horrific, enough to relegate him to the dung-heap of dimestore fiction. There are far too many pink masts and shitting scenes you can find posted daily to this board and elsewhere for me to bother offering examples. His style is blasé and lackluster, and couldn't hold an autistic's attention if you arranged the words in a pyramid. Even worse, his pacing, both on the macroscopic and microscopic scale, is terribly off. He has no rhythm, no timing, no beat, no understanding of how humans see words on the page and turn them into sounds, or how those sounds flow together. Everything is syncopated, either too rigid or too loose, and endlessly tripping over itself. Reading GRRM's writing is like watching a retarded orangutan dance.
He also attempts to gain the sympathies of feminists (who he doubtlessly knows will be miffed over his rape-scene-every-fifteen-pages policy) and sacrifices many of the principles of the world he's created in order to satisfy their need for gender-equity, creating "strong female characters" ("people", in his own smug words), and in the next scene are strutting around like Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada. Martin does this with all of his characters, but he does it more often with women and retards, sacrificing the rules of his story for a payoff in the neoliberal target demographic.

The show manages to fix many (but not all) of Martin's problems. It cuts the subplots in half; it cuts the list of named characters by 90%; you don't hear his pig-scite prose except in dialogue filtered through teams of professional telewriters. This doesn't solve all of his problems, but it does solve some of the worst, and the result is pretty good TV.

Only the first three books are worth reading. If for whatever pissbrained reason you decide you love the series, or if you're particularly interested in how historical realism has interacted with the fantasy genre in the last 20-30 years -- the primary value of Martin's work -- then pop some aspirin and read the latest two in the series.

Well its not irrelevant, but the story is not that great anyway.

It does not have to be literary, fuck those snobs.
The oroblem is that it is just tepid and pedestrian.

>the bible

>The baby was in his crib, when he heard a dragon in the distance.

>From the black mountains over the horizon, a terrible roar was heard, that echoed through the valley like the last thunder of the world, born out of grey clouds of ancient brimstone. The newborn child heard the terrible sound and was amazed at the wonders of the world he was born into. And the unspeakable horrors that awaited.

It's the same story. Only the narrative changes. I feel that it's the problem that ASOIAF has. Having a good story is not enough. And, for the record, the story is just good, not great. It started of as a story with great potential, but somewhere along the way lost it.

Sorry for the green text prose, i'm a terrible writer, just wanted to prove a point

>just wanted to prove a point
Uh... what point?

>It's the same story. Only the narrative changes.

Narrative makes all the difference. The story is just the story, could be told in a million ways. It's the writers duty to find the best one. And mr Martin is not good at it.

It's garbage that goes on for too long, goes for shock value, and seems to make every character horrible save for Stannis and those associated with him.

Tyrion is shit despite what retards think. The show is even worse making absolutely no sense and not because it's too hard to follow. Characters will act extremely, well, out of character. For example: Stannis tells Davos that when he watched his mother and father die in the bay near their castle after their ship went down he swore off all gods and put his faith in justice. Show Stannis might as well have Melisandre's hand in his asshole because he is a puppet. Stannis and his army are stuck in a storm that's only getting worse. His advisers advise him to burn a few non-believers of Rllhor in order to have him raise the storm and have men stop dying and starving. Stannis says his army is half non-believer and tells them to pray harder. Show Stannis burns his daughter. Welp.

What's the point in adapting something to simply butcher it? ASOIAF wasn't exactly great literature, but after my idiot friends gushed about it I figured i'd read the books. Took me a week and I felt like I had wasted my time.

The show is decent TV, and the last season was fantastic. The plebian element of Game of Thrones originates in the books.
How can one post be so wrong.

I don't know which one Martin wrote.

>genre fiction

It's pretty boring. Rapes happen all the time. Chars. die before anything interesting happens.