A Medieval Fantasy novel doesn't talk about Taxes or other realistic things like A Song of Ice and Fire

ASOIAF tries very hard to be hard fantasy we get it that doesn't mean people want to read about fictional taxes George

>I don't know what happens to the orcs afterwars?
As in all good fairytales. They lived happily ever after.

This retard needs to stop filling his books with pointless details.

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 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--he isn't laying out a well-structured plot--he's just building up a character then killing them to defy expectation.

But the only reason we think these characters are important in the first place is because Martin treats them that way--as central heroes, spending time and energy building them. But 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 you could 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, end notes, 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?

LA 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

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."

Thank you. This is by far the best review of a book I've ever seen on this board.

I've screenshoted all of it

>reddit spacing
That aside, I enjoyed your (?) thoughts.

>the pseudo-medieval high-magic world from Tolkien
There is no magic in Tolkien's world.
>and the blood-and-guts heroism from Howard
Howard wrote existential horror (like Lovecraft), not stories about war heroes.

>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)
This is normal for any author who published a 'great work' and not something specific to Tolkien. E.g., Ralph Ellison.

No argument with GRRM being shit, however.

>weebshit at the end
Ruined

>no magic in Tolkien's world.
What?

You're in Veeky Forums

weebshit ruins that too

>There is no magic in Tolkien's world.
This is just retarded
>Howard wrote existential horror (like Lovecraft), not stories about war heroes.
Im pretty sure he's talking about Robert E. Howard, writer of Conan the Barbarian.

ASOIAF is low fantasy

other fantasy novels are often high fantasy

there you go OP

>asoiaf
>realistic
How does agriculture work when winter is coming?

Because what kind of escapism would that be???

>let's escape from reality to a world that's just as shitty as ours!

it doesn't, that's the point

>critically acclaimed bestselling series no one wants to read
good catch user

Its worse than ours

it's from Goodreads

>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).

I just felt like highlighting this in case anyone was wondering why it's taking Martin so long to write the ending. He knows it'll be bad so he's just not going to do it.

abandoning a one-in-a-billion chance to be part of the Western Canon forever because of angst and restlessness

Pathetic. Ruined his chance on purpose. He could've been Tolkien if he was willing to love this series and make it a cohesive whole. He gave up and now he's Zack Snyder. Oh well, it was good for a minute.

Smart

Any post related to this complete and utter hack should be banned, lest we turn into /r/books

>abandoning a one-in-a-billion chance to be part of the Western Canon forever because of angst and restlessness

At which point do you think the series had any "shot" at being considered part of the Western Canon?

...do you consider Harry Potter part of the WC too?

I read his shit books, and I don't remember a single mention of tax policy at all.

1) After A Storm of Swords caught fire and an exceptionally well-constructed postmodern challenge to the fantasy genre was halfway finished and had huge cultural momentum (in other words, before he forgot what he was doing and wrote 2000 pages of garbage)
2) Yes. You don't? When do you expect the entire western world to stop reading it? Today's 20-year-olds have based their entire moral philosophy on Harry Potter, not Aquinas or Spinoza. And those 20-year-olds are all getting pregnant as we speak.

>GRBoH

oh boy.

>After A Storm of Swords caught fire

what, did the original manuscript literally burned or are you talking about figuratively like "that shit fire"

>Yes. You don't? When do you expect the entire western world to stop reading it?

About the time they reach 16

I mean it was a bestseller, translated into every language, he was called "the next Tolkien" and was swarmed with TV offers

No, the series wasn't a household name like Harry Potter was in 2000, but it was blowing up (sorry, that's the same metaphor as "caught fire"). If it was a coherent story with the quality of the first 3 books, and finished by ~2015 it would be one of the best novels of the 21st century.

>No one over 16 reads Harry Potter
I have some bad news for you user, whether you choose to accept it is up to you

>I have some bad news for you user, whether you choose to accept it is up to you

They can read HP all they want, but I'd doubt any one would consider "Western Canon". Those who even knew what those words meant would either be reading HP for its nostalgia or as an easy way to pass time (and not consider WC), or would have stopped reading fantasy books altogether.

they moved to Norway and started playing black metal

>realistic things like A Song of Ice and Fire.
>Realistic

Realistic? Are you serious? Martin's characters have mono-dimensional and random behavioral patterns, their actions and not prepared in the script, they delve into erratic petty politics and schemes to provoke and impress the reader in a world that dragons existed and exist and in a world that shadows kill people from afar and magical frost themed outsiders threaten the lands.

How can that make sense? Why would you care about taxes and who your psychopath son will marry in his reign when there are priests who raise the dead and assassins who take whatever form they want in order to kill whomever they want, etc? This is an "art" that poses as pseudo-realistic, but in truth is an undecided mix of high fantasy, medieval pseudo-realism, porn, epic parody and Martin's personal complex about how cruel the world is.

The problem with his art is, that it does not make sense and it does not have cohesion and a robust core like Tolkiens art did. He fails because he has not decided on what the core of his work is. Hell, he doesn't even have the main story.

What's the band name

lol

burzum by count grishnack

Also his original band that was actually called Uruk'hai

This guy has said a lot of stuff, a lot of it slightly dumb bullshit, a lot of it stone cold dead ass facts, but this post right here is pretty much dead on. Edge-fantasy is always disappointing because there can never be a satisfying conclusion to it, since you can't have some kind of Jungian archetypical monomythic ending (happily ever after or hero sacrifices himself to save the people), so they either a) write an unsatisfying conclusion, b) use an archetypical ending where it doesn't fit and make people hate it, or c) they fucking die before they have to finish it.

I thought this when I read it

well, they actually do that, at least they mention it in the books (one or two times)

>How does agriculture work when winter is coming?
like this user already said, it doesn't, but I guess, the people prepared for that
and what I know, cuddle could be still feed during winter

You do know you could always plant crops in winter

What are the slight bullshit you speak of?

Veeky Forums has always been ruined

Not always

It's another user doesn't know the definitions to words but insists on correcting someone by being wrong episode. Google is your friend.

Enlighten us then

IMO the series can still end fine if he manages to reconcile the realistic medieval side and the fantasy side, while somehow resolving the civil war, dragon/white walker plot and the Targaryen pretension plot. It could even be a happily ever after ending but I'm guessing it's going to be a "and life goes on" type of ending with most protagonists, if not all not getting what they truly wanted.

>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.

Miura > GRRM confirmed

>IMO the series can still end fine if he manages to reconcile the realistic medieval side and the fantasy side, while somehow resolving the civil war, dragon/white walker plot and the Targaryen pretension plot.

But he can't.

For someone as limites as Veeky Forums perhaps

>He knows it'll be bad so he's just not going to do it.
It's taking so long because he wants to try and fight the inevitable shittyness like the delusional fool he is. I think he figured he could make it work somehow closer to the ned, you know later, in the future, but now that future is here and he's no closer to making it work than when decided to worry about it later.

Didn't he realize he fucked himself over from the beginning?

I think he had a sense of where he was going initially, and was working towards it, but then got sidetracked and didn't realist how far off target he had drifted until it was too late to fix it.

>I think he had a sense of where he was going initially, and was working towards it,

"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.

I don't think he did.

>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.
So he was supposed to change who is viewpoint characters were just so he could include gay sex in his book. Wow.

>So he was supposed to change who is viewpoint characters were just so he could include gay sex in his book.
I think it was to attack his weak excuse as to Why?

How is it an "excuse"? Genuinely curious here.

Yeah is there a quota he failed to meet or something?

>However, there is one thing Martin has done that no other author has been able to do: kill the longrunning High Fantasy series.

Good riddance.

Why the fuck would a FANTASY novel talk about Texas? Are you retarded?

I disagree that dialogue being realistic is bad, I actually enjoy it more because it can help theme your scenes or provide subtext to a relationship just like it often does in real life (person who is not confident stuttering and fucking up his word choice, dominant characters interrupting at weird times, etc.) but that's a minor disagreement and I can see his POV

Yea you have more wiggle room in literature to characterize compared to a play due to the sheer flexibility of prose. He made a mistake trying to compare the two so grandly.

Based dyslexic user

I would read the shit out of a fantasy novel that somehow involved Texas. Maybe this is because I am a native Texan and I have a deep, ravenous love of my state.

Its a bunch of commie drivel I'll tell u hwat Bobby

>That's not to say there isn't serviceable pop fantasy sex out there--it's just written by women.
Haha no

OP, if you want taxes and similar other things, go to the real life.
I read books to live adventures, get into fantastic worlds, etc.

>He doesn't even know that GRRM criticizes Lord of the Rings for not going into detail about Aragorn's tax policy

I think you're ignoring the long line of 'gritty' Marxist literature and film set in the 'dark ages'.

Taxes are a central feature.

Basically dismissed like all of kafka's work baka

At least GRRM has some subtlety.

Why did he criticize lord of the rings?

>he forgets 'truth is stranger than fiction'

We live in the post-truth world now, get on with the times, grandpa

Rude

Post-truth?

>hard fantasy

wut

no magic like the vidya kids today understand it. There are only five wizards that are literally angels sendt by god to keep one of their own contained.

>Yes kill off an entire Genre simply because I don't like it.
KYS

Still magic

He has an ending but he has nothing to gain from actually finishing the books because he knows the fans are going to hate it. If he finishes the books and the fans hate it, his legacy is destroyed. But if he dies before he finishes it people will always wonder "what if?" It's like that Seinfeld episode where George would make a joke that went over well with the room, when he stayed he would inevitably follow it up with another joke that bombed. When he started immediately leaving the room after his first joke the people started loving him more and remembering him more fondly. Martin is trying to leave on that high note.

What's going to happen is that after Martin dies his estate will hire some sucker writer to go through Martins notes and finish the series as planned. It will bomb and the new writer will take the blame while everybody continues to love Martin and remembering the series fondly. His legacy will be preserved and students 100 years from now will be studying a Game of Thrones.