A Song Of Ice and Fire

What was Tolkien tax policy

YOU TAKE THAT BACK!

Seriously though, Song of Fire and Ice is comic book level compared to Tolkien. Not that its bad, its just plebe-teir

Tolkien is to creative literary genius what Martin is to hack pulp idiocy. They both so far surpass anyone else in their field that they will be remembered 1,000 years from now as a kind of yin and yang of fantasy, a Manichaen duality of speculative letters. For every sublime, luminous beauty that Tolkien has gifted the world, Martin has cursed us with a tedious, banal ugliness. It is unfair to compare the two directly on any one point, because Martin is in every way the anti-Tolkien, patently sterile, parasitical, and inferior, but so much so that he becomes a monument in his own right, and counterbalances Tolkien. Could one exist without the other? Tolkien obviously could. But it is only by the contrast that Martin offers that we can truly appreciate the full depths and heights of Tolkien. Our understanding of Tolkien would be incomplete if Martin had never set pen to page. It is through only the abject failure and futility of Martin that we can approach an apprehension of the true scope and scale of Tolkien's hitherto inconceivable greatness. Perhaps this is what Tolkien had in mind when he wrote about the Music of the Ainur. If Tolkien is a subcreator in the image of Eru, truly Martin is like unto Melkor. It is only reflected in the awfulness of the one that we can fully see the goodness of the other.

I wouldnt go that far lmao, Martin is really good when he wants to be but he fucked himself with poor structure and direction.

Tolkien is top tier though.

Martin likes to write stories he doesn't like finishing them.
But by the same standard Tolkien liked building worlds, the story however in his works is great.

FPBP

LOTR character are pretty bland desu

>replaced it with realism

>jon snow

pick one
on god, as much as i adore these books, i hate every single time i have to read another one of this fucking angel's chapters

(only got done reading book 3 yesterday tho, and i really hope he changtes into something more human)

>(only got done reading book 3 yesterday tho, and i really hope he changtes into something more human)

he does in book 5, his storyline becomes the most interesting

He fucks himself over with too much P.O.V

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.

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 anyway, 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?

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 the 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 world building 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."

Jon Snow and Daenerys stormborn are fucking mary sues

>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.
This really is the core of the problem with the series. That, and the lack of closure.

>"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."
Interesting. Why is the chosen one monomyth fascist in a sense?

>Implying that's not the best of him

Care to expand?

Manichaean*
if you want to use big words to shitpost make sure you can spell them

I'm on a phone without spell check you tremendous FAGGOT.

The only interesting things are the maesters and Stannis and his crew.

>needing spellcheck
>on a board devoted to the discussion of words

he made the black company with better and clearer characters, that is all.

Holy shit no I do not have 100% perfect spelling off the top of my head on Veeky Forums posts, but I just sold another novel and a screenplay last month, so I guess publishers and producers or even editors don't mind spellchecking, only whining little nobodies.

I turn off my spellcheck on the phone too because on my texts its suggestions are often garbage when I slip and hit some random #

No its not

>means that literary agents are no longer accepting manuscripts for high fantasy series
They should just sign James Patterson to a contract. He'll deliver the book by the deadline, and probably throw in a couple of extra ones for kicks.

Yes he accomplished his grimnessdarknessquest and made boatloads of money. However his attempted continuance of the series has revealed his limits as a writer which I'm sure was not his intent.

>kill the longrunning High Fantasy series
>(yes i know this is stale copypasta but i have to respond. jg keely might be good at analysis but his knowledge of the industry is simply flawed.)
One author's failings have not impacted an entire subgenre. The continued popularity of Song (even in '07 at the time of the copypasta) meant there was a demand for high fantasy. One of fantasy's primary selling points is its sameness. It's ridiculous to believe the publishing industry as a whole wouldn't accept lesser imitations of a wildly popular series.
/rant

...

nice posts m8

>chosen one is fascist
>Fascist as a buzzword
You should tell that to J.K Rowling. Also
>Muh Tolkein is a racist
Yeah, sure. Let's just let orcs into Gondor, Orcs welcome! It's not that they're created to be evil or anything.

Even though i have found his books enjoyable, i feel like fiction without a theme or some sort of moral is just wannabe history.
So at that point why the fuck shouldnt i just read history instead?

It's copypasta from goodreads

This is why Tolkien is head and shoulders above most authors, everything from his worldbuilding to conlangs was connected to his larger themes, it wasn't just wanking off.

This will make good pasta, good work.

They're as "bland" as the great figures of myth and legend. If we were saddled with their emotions, their personalities, their banal wants and desires, they would be simply human. And myths, legends, those aren't about humans. They're about heroes. We don't need to know Achilles beyond his pride and his rage. To know him intimately would do nothing but serve to drag him to our level.

I thought goodreads was full of people who couldn't write reviews longer than 3 lines
Are reviews usually that well written

>Care to expand?
As said, until now I only read the first three books, but in all of these Jon Snow feels just too perfect of a human being to be true. He never has any malevolent or selfish thoughts in him (except maybe that one flashback where the child-him wanted to become heir to Winterfell), and all of his actions are more than reasonable from a humane viewpoint.
Also, his over-the-top innocence can be pretty annoying at times, for example when it takes him like a whole book to get behind the fact, that he's the new Lord Commander.
And even then, when everyone is celebrating and the big, bad Janos Slynt sits brooding in his corner, dutiful ole Jon Snow takes one, but only one swig of wine (Martin even cared to mention that Jon Snow would not drink any more that night) and grimly awaits the dawn when his duties begin.
Everything about him that could be considered "bad" about him is either not his fault (bastard-born) or more than excusable (Ygritte).
That perfectness and over-exaggerated humbleness paired with his extraordinary skills in battle make him a more than unbelievable and thus rather boring character.
Jaime Lannister for example is (in my eyes) way more believable, his skills made him arrogant, and only being captured beat some humility into him.

Martin paints a realistic view of the human nature and makes ASoIaF miles above Tolkien.

LotR is just a sexist, pseudo-chevalresque drivel.

That's one of Keely's reviews. And no, while there are plenty of others who write long reviews, his are about as good as it gets on that site.

tfw some people actually believe this

>low quality bait

Here's that you wanted.

The only thing he really achieved is the destruction of a genre.

Now if only modern fantasy wasn't filled with pre-teen books about vampires and werewolves so it could take High Fantasy's place.

Hilarious considering Tolkien is the most jerked-off writer on reddit. You reek of a redditor trying to hide. Get the fuck out.

I applaud whoever actually wrote this.

Holy shit, give it up. You guys are all so obsessed with justifying your nostalgia that you pretend he's some literary God. Tolkien wrote children's novels, Martin writes pulp trash. Get over it.

hobbit feet are gross

here you go

Every time Keely has been mentioned on Veeky Forums before he's been called a pseud

Post this review without his name and people here praise it. Maybe Veeky Forums were the pseuds all along.

this pasta is bad and you should feel bad.
redditors will upboat this and claim it is deep.

To save everyone time
>classic tropes replaced with nothing
>flaws of realism without benefit of fantasy
>poorly written females
>poorly written plots tied up only by cheap twist-like death
>no closure
>his writing is more "quantity" than anything
>muh soggy knee because raep xd
>No gays (muh diversity aka not a real argument)

He's also full of shit when he started talking about dialogue. Literature has more options for dialogue than TV scripts.

well the review is clearly something written by a guy who primarily reads genre fiction so..

is he diddling his eunuch-stub in this pic?

We were always pseuds

not an argument

Redditors hate this review: just google search Keely's name.
You, my friend, are a contrarian's contrarian, very impressive.

Why do they hate him

But then we can never... Oh.

George pls leave

desu this review sounds like he read what people said about the series but didn't actually read it.

asoiaf is full of absurd coincidences and straight up high fantasy shit. in light of that the "but truth is stranger than fiction!" complaint makes no sense. why the fuck does tyrion escape form the sky cells and wander into his father's war camp? plot magic. why does every character in the series run into every other character at the same inn? plot magic.

They see him as a condescending elitist who enjoys shitting on popular literature for its own sake.

nobody under sixty says 'blows it out of the water', its like a gentlemans tie forum thing, successful troll

Yes it is.

well its actual content for a change so either explain why its 'bad' or stfu you worthless troll

Is either The First Law trilogy or The Black Company(?) series any good?

Do both of them talk about taxes?

Not an argument

upboat

>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.

You’ve misused the word “ironically,” which must posit a shift in reality away from meaning or expectation; something you’ll find quite impossible without modifying the subject of your first sentence, and then providing quotations from both Goodkind and Paolini, two authors who owe all their success to the generic nature of their stories. That would be ironic. But you haven’t done these things, and it’s not. Oh, and, hey, the author of A Game of Thrones is George R. R. Martin. This fact makes your first paragraph irrelevant, and a fallacy called a Red Herring.

>The archetypal story of the hero, the villain, the great love, and the world to be saved never seems to get old, and there's nothing wrong with this 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 cliché copy of the old masters, and the worst are more common by far.

Ok, cool, creating a little hierarchy of possible outcomes given a story containing heroes, villains, a great love (or two, hopefully), and a world in need of saving, which I hope is pretty much every novel, if we limit “a world” to that portion of the universe relevant to the narrator.

Might I point out however that “at the best” is a constipated phrase? Most people say, “at best.” Also, “the worst is more common” is oxymoronic, since “the worst” describes a degree of badness that is unsurpassable. “The worst” can modify only one item from any given set, and it, therefore, cannot be a common trait. We cannot all be the dumbest, or the tallest, although someone out there surely is both of those things, statistically speaking not at the same time.

>No doubt, this wealth of predictable, cliche romances are what drove Martin to aim for something 'different'. Unfortunately, being different isn't something you can choose, you have to come by it naturally.”

Wow, is that really what inspired him? The cliché romances that you have not mentioned yet mysteriously refer to out of thin air inspired the greatest fantasy writer of all time? Damn.

>Martin rejected the moralistic romance of the genre, and tried instead to create a realistic world.”

What user is trying to say here in broken English is that most epic fantasy novels have a clearly delineated, moral dichotomy of good and evil, etc. His use of the word “romance” is misleading; he’s probably applying it in the anachronistic classical sense.

That comment was so bad it gave me cancer when I first read it.

>Martin rejected 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. And replaced it with Realism.
He didn't do that at all. His books are filled with standard tropes and cliches. They're just grittier.

Who hurt you to make you like this?

Is that from rick and morty?

No, from Steven Universe

Not an argument

top fucking kek

He dies so I think that'll humble him some. Besides in book five he goes through a major self doubting phase. He fucks himself over simply bc he's too proud to explain to his 'brothers' the truth of things. You think he's flawless? The guy literally gets killed bc he thought he knew more than the rest of the watch about the others since he happened to kill a wight and whatnot, and that that would excuse letting thousands of wildlings across the wall. Guess what? He gets stabbed and dies an awful honorless death. We know that resurrected characters come back as fucked up versions of themselves so he might come back darker and more cynical.

>And replaced it with Realism.
It is realism through 21st century perception of medieval caste system. Which is heavily skewed by Hollywood "aristocrats are mostly retards and plebs are just like your knights". Everything is distorted by context. Remember you are children of plebs who Revolted against rotted aristocracy. This is you point of view, this your reality.

Good

You seem like the kind of person that thinks reading your way thorough ASoIaF is some sort of lifetime accomplishment and also as the kind of person who watched the LOTR movies but never read the books because they had too many big words and you got confused.

>) this lack of dongs may surprise you
Wut? There are tons of dick descriptions in ASOIAF. Maybe not quite as many as breast-related, but close.
Tyrion's cock is described many times, clothed and naked. So is Jaime's. Others whose junk I remember being mentioned include Sam, Robert, Theon, Hodor, Brandon, Jonas Bracken, Dontos, Pycelle, Daario, Euron, Qarl the Maid, Osmund Kettleblack...I'm sure there are more.

>desu this review sounds like he read what people said about the series but didn't actually read it.
He straight up said that he read 400 pages. What is that, maybe ten percent of the series? One of my major gripes about goodreads is how many reviewers openly admit that they only read a fraction of the material and still believe that they are qualified to cast judgement on the work as a whole.

>The guy literally gets killed bc he thought he knew more than the rest of the watch about the others
Although it's true that many of the Watch were unhappy with his decisions regarding the wildlings, I think the last straw was when he announces his intention to march on Ramsay. Which is a bit of a selfish move, definitely not flawless.
Snow makes tons of mistakes. I don't understand why people call him a Mary Sue. Maybe he is on the show, I wouldn't know.