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PaperclipPerfector  16d ago (text post)   30766 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024

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In Defense of A Song of Ice and Fire and George R. R. Martin

If you think the series is nihilistic, you haven't been paying attention

There are certain takes on literature and culture that make me want to scream and tear my hair out. Harry Potter being decried as a book that encourages satanic witchcraft, when the books are explicitly (and somewhat heavy-handedly by the end) Christian, is one of them. Another is the insistence that post-modernism, fiction like Cloud Atlas or Infinite Jest have nothing to offer us because they don’t follow some Christian or rationalist world view. I’m pretty sure the early Church Fathers read pagan authors and some (like St. Basil) suggested that Christians should actually be well versed in pagan texts like the Odyssey and Aeneid before tackling the Bible. Most rage-inducing of all however is the idea that George R. R. Martin and his magnum opus, A Song of Ice and Fire, is some kind of nihilistic, grimdark, pornographic deconstruction of all that is right and good in the world.

Now I think that many of those who make this critique haven’t even taken the time to read the books, much less the wealth of secondary analysis sources like [Race for the Iron Throne] (https://racefortheironthrone.wordpress.com) (RIT Steven Attewell), Mereenese Blot, Not a Podcast, or Wars and Politics of Ice that really clarify what the books are trying to say. The show, for all its success in adaptation during the first 2-3 seasons, unfortunately twists the message of the series towards nihilism and sex and violence for mere shock value. However, this is the fault of the show runners, and the requirements of television as a medium (once again Marshall McLuhan’s words ring true) rather than anything Martin wrote).

Rather I think Martin serves as convenient punching bag for people with a particular view about post-modernism (that it has been bad for human culture). He’s an easy target: he’s old, he hasn’t finished his series, and he doesn’t live a particularly healthy lifestyle. Many people have made these critiques, but the most uncharitable (and negligently so) on Substack comes from this post by The Brothers Krynn.

I found this essay repugnant in a number of ways, from its ad hominem attacks on Martin to the obvious fact that the guy clearly hadn’t read the books he was critiquing. However, I’ll do my best to give Krynn the critique that he fails to give Martin.

Krynn has three main points to make in this essay, which mainly revolve around critiquing a tweet that Martin made about hobbit sex, but he expands to the whole of the guy’s corpus.

  1. "The sole thing that inspires and motivates Game of Thrones is sex. Martin admits that it is what he views a most transcendent.”

  2. “His series is mediocre at best. It is not true Fantasy. It does not uphold the traditional values one should aspire to, it is not blessed with the Spirit of Truth that Fantasy embodies”

  3. “with regards to the ‘religious structure’ as all religious characters are insane, and the Church is mocked and shown to be little more than a political organization, and one that we don’t know the rituals, ceremonies, and the ideals of.”

I would respond to these arguments as such:

1.Martin is a Romantic and places a primal role on Romantic love (which involves sex) as a human motivation. This does not just mean sex but also protecting your family and community of love (which all too abstract in Tolkien’s Gondor, although not as much in the shire). Martin is also careful to point out how various sexual and romantic fixations can ruin people, families, and entire nations.

  1. There is plenty of truth in A Song of Ice and Fire. However, it is a (post-modern) novel that is by its nature deconstructive of traditional values. This deconstruction allows honest reflection on many traditional systems of values and myths that empirically don’t work (despite the lamentations of the trad caths and their ilk), and the reconstruction of a more truthful set of personal values.

  2. Every single major religion in A Song of Ice and Fire is shown to have some kind of actual supernatural power. While many religious characters are rather likable (Davos Seaworthy, Catalyn Stark), you also have your fair share of insane theocrats (Damphair), and people who cynically use the church as a political tool (Cersei). It’s not true that we don’t see religious ceremonies at all: the drowned God, the Seven, the old Gods, and the Faith of the Seven all have various weddings, funerals, baptisms, and worship services on camera. These churches are shown to be political institutions (if you don’t think the Catholic church was or has always been an extremely political institution you need to crack open both a newspaper or history book), but not mere tools of power (their functioning is heavily swayed by true believers and the supernatural).

Sex and Love

I’ll start off with a little bit about the personal philosophy of George R. R. Martin, which should help clarify his position on the sex vs. love question. Martin was born in 1948 in Bayonne, New Jersey in a working class family. Martin was raised Catholic, grew up reading comic books and adventure stories before beginning his writing career at Northwestern. Here he also was a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War. It’s also obvious from Martin’s early stories in Dreamsongs, that the guy is a Romantic (with a capital R), and extremely interested in beauty, gnostic individualism, and subjectivity. So we have an anti-war, Romantic, who still believes in many of the traditional virtues of Catholicism without believing in the faith himself. Given these things, the message of A Song of Ice and Fire starts to become a lot more clear.

So sex and love. Tolkien obviously thought love was important too, but he doesn’t take a Romantic view of it. Love for Tolkien is very abstract: for ideals (the shire), for peoples (the Men of the West), or for the idea of a person (which is what Arwen basically is). For Martin, whose is a Romantic, love is very specific:

Needle was Robb and Bran and Rickon, her mother and her father, even Sansa. Needle was Winterfell’s grey walls, and the laughter of its people. Needle was the summer snows, Old Nan’s stories, the heart tree with its red leaves and scary face, the warm earthy smell of the glass gardens, the sound of the north wind rattling the shutters of her room. Needle was Jon Snow’s smile. He used to mess my hair and call me “little sister,” she remembered, and suddenly there were tears in her eyes.- Arya, AFFC

Love for Martin is built on personal relationships, and to describe the personal you have to describe specific intimate moments, some of which are sexual in nature.

Now, as many trad people like to point out, sex is powerful, and when that power is not used in the proper context, it can have terrible consequences. Martin knows and understands this, and contrasts sexual dynamics in two different families: the Starks (healthy), and the Lannister’s (fucked up). Ned has a healthy sexual relationship with his wife, and the resulting children love each other, and their father. This dynamic is also reflected in the political realities of the North, in which vassals are willing to die to save “Ned’s little girl”. Contrast this to the Lannister’s, who all have various sexual traumas inherited from their patriarch Tywin, and fail to meet the personal and political challenges presented to them as a result.

Of course the Brothers Krynn Disagrees:

"Because of this Ned Stark is very much a buffoon, and the likes of the incompetent sex-addled, drunkard Lannisters must triumph."

Ned makes mistakes throughout the narrative, but very much dies because he needs to for narrative reasons, not because of any fundamental trait the he has. Ned is honestly a very conflicted guy: a lot of his inner monologue is PTSD from the last war, and his inner concerns have little to do with sex, instead dealing with the conflict between trying to protect his family, or doing what he thinks is morally right and honorable. The Lannisters' are no less complicated, and the idea that they do triumph is laughable: very quickly after their "victory", House Lannister is in shambles. In fact you can argue that sex is central to their downfall. The incest between Cersei and Jaime is one of the direct causes of the war that is central to the first three novels. Tywin and Tyrion clearly also have their own sexually-linked problems, and Tywin's sexual treatment of Tyrion's first wife DIRECTLY LEADS to his death and the downfall of his house/legacy. George clearly does not think "sexy Lannister's good", and if you think so, you can't read. When Tywin dies, the regime he built quickly falls apart, as it's constructed on a level of fear, violence, and cunning that his children can't maintain. He also, as many people in the novel point out, dies stinking of his own shit.

Ned's legacy on the other hand is such that his vassals will march to battle in the middle of a snowstorm to save his daughter from a marriage with a monster. All his children remember him fondly and try to live up to the ideals he taught them, as fate slowly brings the whole family back together. Who really is the buffoon there?

I want to live forever in a land where summer lasts a thousand years. I want a castle in the clouds where I can look down over the world. I want to be six-and-twenty again. When I was six-and-twenty I could fight all day and fuck all night. What men want does not matter. Winter is almost upon us, boy. And winter is death. I would sooner my men die fighting for the Ned's little girl than alone and hungry in the snow, weeping tears that freeze upon their cheeks. No one sings songs of men who die like that. As for me, I am old. This will be my last winter. Let me bathe in Bolton blood before I die. I want to feel it spatter across my face when my axe bites deep into a Bolton skull. I want to lick it off my lips and die with the taste of it on my tongue.-The King’s Prize, ADWD

Fantasy and Truth

The next banger from the Brothers Krynn:

The reason for this is that Martin is incapable of writing tales of honor, of chivalry, of faith, of goodness because let us be honest… he has precious little of it in him. He has no belief in it. He has only scorn for it, as is evident in all his tales.

This is just completely untrue as to be approaching the level of libel. The three prequel novellas, combined in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, are pretty much only about what chivalry looks like, and there are plenty of characters, ranging from Jaime Lannister to Brienne of Tarth who are supremely concerned with their own code of conduct. I mean how can you not read the following passage and not come away thinking that Martin has some idea about what faith, goodness, and courage actually are?

Willow stepped out into the rain, a crossbow in her hands. The girl was shouting at the riders, but a clap of thunder rolled across the yard, drowning out her words. As it faded, Brienne heard the man in the Hound's helm say, "Loose a quarrel at me and I'll shove that crossbow up your cunt and fuck you with it. Then I'll pop your fucking eyes out and make you eat them." The fury in the man's voice drove Willow back a step, trembling. Seven, Brienne thought again, despairing. She had no chance against seven, she knew. No chance, and no choice. She stepped out into the rain, Oathkeeper in hand. "Leave her be. If you want to rape someone, try me." - AFFC

George R. R. Martin is a Romantic who does believe in the ideals that you claim he scorns. But the world is complicated, and being a good person is not as simple as merely upholding those values because in the real world, those things are often in conflict with each other, and the institutions that claim to stand for those values are easily corrupted. We see this in the novels through the lens of the institution of knighthood, which confers honors onto to criminals like Gregor Clegane because of their noble status and physical stature, but fails to grant the same honor to people who actually follow the code due to their gender (Brienne) or social status (Dunk). It’s not that Martin wants us to believe that these ideals are a lie, but rather to critically recognize that institutions and symbols that represent said ideals are not 1:1 substitutes for them.

Tolkien recognized this too to some extent, especially in the Akallabêth in the Silmarillion: the kingship of Numenor as an office did not protect the kings from corruption by Sauron, and it did not protect their descendants in Gondor and Arnor from decadence. Yet because of the mythic quality of Tolkein’s story we do tend to get an exaggerated sense of trust of people and institutions as a collective rather than the personalities of the individuals that make up these groups. The Elves are all wise. The Rohirrim are all brave. The men of Gondor are all good. Of course there are some subversions of these expectations, most notably in the introduction of Aragorn (all that is gold does not glitter), but the pattern holds.

The other point that Martin wants to make is that it’s not always that simple to do the right thing. In Lord of the Rings, doing good may be hard, but it is always simple. There is never a question of whether the ring should be destroyed or Sauron resisted: the main questions revolved around the “how” of these things and the development of moral character to not breakdown when the going gets tough.

In A Song of Ice and Fire, doing good is not so simple. I think one of the best examples of this is Jon's story in the latest entry in the series. Jon is the Lord Commander of the Night's Watch, whose job it is to protect the world from supernatural evil. And he does this job very well in very difficult circumstances. However, in a nearby theatre of the plot (the North), there is a civil war going on between the forces of King Stannis Baratheon, and the Boltons, the later of whom killed all of Jon’s biological family (the Starks). It is very natural, and also certainly noble, for Jon to try and undermine the Boltons. They are evil characters who have done much harm in the story and deserve to be destroyed. But by acting on this noble impulse, Jon critically undermines his other duty of protecting the realm from literal ice zombies that want to kill all humans. And thus the folly of trying to follow all his noble impulses: which eventually gets him killed in a mutiny. For more info on this check out the essays on Jon over at the Mereenese Blot.

There are countless similar conundrums throughout all the storylines of all the novels. Martin is ultimately interested in exploring the ways our noble impulses come into contradiction with each other, and how simplistic morality stories can often get in the way of making good decisions. Life is not a song, sweetling.

Religion

This one is hard one to discuss because I think unfortunately many in the same space as the Brothers Krynn (and in my own parish) are in deep denial about the political nature that the church has now, and since the days of Saint Paul, has always had. Popes led armies into battle, helped to redraw the political maps of Europe, and had orgies in Saint Peter’s Basilica. Protestantism was just as much of a political movement as it was a genuine reaction to the spiritual excesses of the medieval church hierarchy. The Taiping Rebellion, still the bloodiest per capita war in Chinese history was spearheaded by a man who claimed to be the brother of Jesus Christ. And we don’t even need to start talking about the tight link between the political and the spiritual in Islam. Frankly, it is insane to not regard all organized religion as fundamentally political as well as spiritual.

Tolkien doesn’t even address this questions at all: most of the characters in the book are vaguely gnostic, despite the fact that we know the Eru Llúvatar (God) is real and acts in the world. I understand why he did this: he was writing a mythology for his own people. There was no need to complicate things with having the people in the myth have their own faiths.

Martin crafts a much more complex tapestry of faiths and belief systems in his world. There are at least four different faiths in the main continent of Westeros: the Faith of the Seven, the Drowned God, the Old Gods, and the Lord of Light, all of which have their own religious structures and various degrees of supernatural intervention. You have very religious characters, who clearly believe in their faith: Davos, Sansa, and Brienne are constantly making references to different members of the Seven, cynical atheists like Tyrion, and opportunists like Cersei or Stannis that use the faith as a political, or in the case of Stannis, supernatural tool.

We also get a fairly rich sense of what these faiths value. The followers of the Lord of Light are supremely concerned with coming Eschaton: a showdown between themselves and the great evil that lurks beyond the Wall. The Faith of the Seven is concerned with knightly values, while the old Gods are more concerned with traditional values that revolve around nature, the land, and the personal embodiment of justice.

And religious actions do have consequences. Cersei defiles the Great Sept of Baelor when her son orders Ned’s execution on its steps. This wins her no points with the Faith and leads directly to her downfall in the fourth book. Similarly, Stannis’ embrace of the foreign faith of the Lord of Light also makes it difficult to win over northern lords when his priests demand that their heart trees be burned. Beliefs do matter in this world, but so do politics.

Conclusion

Martin's fundamental critique of Tolkien is that the world isn't as simple as a struggle between good and evil. Yes there are elements of that, but often times it is our noble desires IN CONFLICT with each other that causes the real problems. From a Romantic (and gnostic) perspective each individual has to examine the contents of their own soul to make their own (subjective) decision. Of course there are general patterns to what is true and good and beautiful, Martin (and I) certainly think so, but the devil is in the details. And that is for each one of us to figure out: no one is coming to save you.

And that is why it is important to read these books, and everything else much more carefully than the Brothers Krynn. Even if you disagree fundamentally with what is being said, it does you no favors to claim that your enemies “have a black soul. have a wicked heart, and [don’t] believe in goodness. "[That they don’t] believe in righteousness," when that is so clearly not true. All that does is make you new enemies (me), and brings us further away from understanding the good, the true, and the beautiful.

I feel like people have forgotten what the general scene was like for Fantasy books in the 80s and 90s when Martin was making his bones. You could walk into any big bookstore (much hated at the time for driving out indie bookstores) and see shelf after shelf of books with swords and dragons on the cover. Most of them pretty bad, but still entertaining in a trashy way. Occasionally actually good. As a kid I loved them all, but looking back I have to admit that the general quality was not good.

Compared to that, Martin's books are amazing. If you want to compare them to some of the all time greatest books of all time, yes, they fall short, but that's kind of unfair.They're entertaining, have more depth than a typical fantasy novel,, and that's really all you can ask.

Comparing him to the general run of "extruded book product" is damning him with the faintest of praise. At least compare him to Feist, or McCaffrey or Bradley or Lackey or Eddings. Or, if you really feel like insulting him, to Piers Anthony.

Man, reading the Blue adept when I was nine years old was a TRIP.

yeah i'd put him up there equal or better than all of those writers, at least to the extent that I've read them and remember them. They all have some cool ideas for worldbuilding, some fun scenes or characters, but then also a lot of uh.... filller.

Or to put it another way, those writers weren't all that entertaining. For all Martin's faults, the first few books in the series were certainly entertaining.

This is a good essay, albeit, one that I disagree with vehemently, so I will attempt to rebut concisely and with the most gentle of rebukes.

If the sum of his contribution to the fantasy genre is that 'it's more complicated then that' and shades of grey, I'd reply: 'no shit'. He muddles... in a very liberal kind of way. In a way that does not add clarity, but obfuscates. In the way Samwell Tarly (his favorite character and probable authorial stand-in) is. Feast for Crows is him saying 'war is bad'. No shit! Don Quixote tilting at windmills. You mean to tell me that this author who desires to add nuance to the fantasy genre, comes up with the moral... war is bad'. Is his target audience literally children? Are they morons? Are they liberals?

He doesn't have to tell us that the world is full of piss and shit and cum and tax returns, we know that. There is a genre of Japanese novel, of which is called pillow books, which can be best summed up as... things happen. Things happen, in his underedited, over-bloated work, but nothing much of consequence actually occurs. (This is mostly talking about 4 and 5, rather than 1-3.) Contrast it to his own work - the Dunk and Egg novels, which are superior, which reiterate the core themes of ASOIAF - because they are short stories, and they are not allowed to meander into irrelevancy where things just Happen. They have plots.

To sum it all up (and to not be hypocritical about brevity being the soul of wit) if you're going to write a fantasy epic that is very long, write the transcendental and heroic. If you're going to be an indulgent ride where bad people do horrible things to worse individuals (Black Company is very fun) admit it. There's nothing wrong with that kind of writing. It's unpretentious. Don't be a fat fraud, a stammering pussy, and write about sex and gore and baby-smashing and then waggle your finger at the reader with liberal platitudes.

If Martin was honest about his anti-war and feminist beliefs, he would have written Vinland Saga, but he didn't. He chose to write this. And yes - we can judge him for it. He certainly doesn't hold back with his political opinions. He should extend his audience the same courtesy. But he doesn't. I think that sums it up very nicely.

To sum it all up (and to not be hypocritical about brevity being the soul of wit) if you're going to write a fantasy epic that is very long, write the transcendental and heroic.

I'm a bit confused. Why does the length of the work have to be so strongly coupled with its lens?

There are many short works that focus on the transcendental and heroic, as are many long works.

There are also many long works that focus on "it's complicated to do the right thing in a world with many loci of power" as are many short works.

Because if I’m going to spend lots of time with a book, I want it to be uplifting rather than the reverse. I can handle grimness for 20 pages, but not for 800.

This is a great example of what I was complaining about. This demand that the author take a strong and explicit stand and clearly spell out the moral of the story. Certainly the “message” of Martin’s novels, to the extent there is one, is far more nuanced and interesting than your juvenile “war is bad” interpretation. Even if it wasn’t, though… so what? Why is that an invalid message for a series of fantasy novels?

He doesn't have to tell us that the world is full of piss and shit and cum and tax returns, we know that. There is a genre of Japanese novel, of which is called pillow books, which can be best summed up as... things happen. Things happen, in his underedited, over-bloated work, but nothing much of consequence actually occurs.

I think that actually a lot of people do need the reminder that even the most lofty ideals and heroic rhetoric is ultimately describing a series of mundane, gross, and often brutish Things Happening. Part of Martin’s whole project is to showcase the dramatic irony between, on the one hand, the lofty chivalric self-image and self-importance of the power players involved, and, on the other hand, the grubby and venal motives underlying it, and the hideous reality of the real-world outcomes of all of that rhetoric. He’s forcing the reader to stare straight into the abyss of that discrepancy, rather than escaping into the fantastical good-and-evil stories which still dominate so much of the fantasy novel oeuvre.

if you're going to write a fantasy epic that is very long, write the transcendental and heroic.

Why?

If you're going to be an indulgent ride where bad people do horrible things to worse individuals (Black Company is very fun) admit it.

Why can’t it be something in between? Why can’t he write a series in which many good people earnestly attempt to do good things, and sometimes succeed but often fail? Why can’t he write about people who are situationally bad — pursuing motives and methods which are legitimate in some circumstances, but catastrophic under others? Why can’t there be both moments of heroism, and moments of Bad People Doing Horrible Things? I don’t understand the insistence of forcing the author to “choose a lane” like this.

If Martin was honest about his anti-war and feminist beliefs, he would have written Vinland Saga, but he didn't

I think he is very honest about these views, but I don’t think he beats the audience over the head with them in his works, nor does he appear to want to. I think he does have genuine affection for certain parts of the historical era about which he’s writing, and I don’t think he set out to construct a narrative in which war is depicted as 100% bad, or modern feminism 100% good, or anything quite so morally clean as that. I understand that his behavior on social media is suggestive of a simplistic morality, but I think his writing illustrates that he’s capable of far greater insight than his Twitter or his blog comments let on.

The real world doesn’t have “a plot”. It’s not a series of carefully-woven interlocking events all building toward some satisfying conclusion. To the extent that Martin is going to fail to land the plane of the series, it’s because a novel must to some extent differ from the real world in that sense, and Martin couldn’t thread the needle between the parts of the form which are necessary, and the parts which can be effectively deconstructed. To that extent, I agree that a novel can’t simply be a bunch of Things Happening. But I don’t fault Martin for making the experimental effort to see just how far the deconstruction could be taken before it fell apart.

But I don’t fault Martin for making the experimental effort to see just how far the deconstruction could be taken before it fell apart.

I guess I disagree? You absolutely can end a novel in the "real world" style. History books also end, and it often does seem like a fitting place to end them. And a more dramatic and interesting story thats still "realistic" could have artistic merit, but a lot of people would be disappointed. The way I see it, ASoIaF starts off promising cynical realism, and then moves back to a more traditional plot, until you get something like the TV ending, where even ignoring the loose ends, "Who has a better story than Bran", really? TF is this? Thats even more fantastical than some good guys winning.

And its an extremely predictable problem. You seem to think theres some marginally less deconstructive version of what hes doing that succeeds, and I dont see what that would be. If you dont ride out the "reality is cruel and unfair" thing till the end, then its not a weaker version of that, it becomes "hold out even when all hope seems lost".

The way I see it, ASoIaF starts off promising cynical realism, and then moves back to a more traditional plot, until you get something like the TV ending, where even ignoring the loose ends, "Who has a better story than Bran", really? TF is this? Thats even more fantastical than some good guys winning.

Warning: LIkely unpublished book spoilers ahead.

Bran, as a figure, is the philosopher-king, the ideal ruler. He's totally detached from the past, without personal ambition or a desire for power. He sees the world from a perspective beyond mortal concerns, literally and metaphorically, freed from the bonds of human desire. For Tyrion, who is more than deeply aware of the consequences of dynastic power struggles, Bran is the ideal candidate. But there’s more here. Tyrion’s line is ironic not just because of Bran’s role but because Tyrion's biography and story is absolutely more tragic, complicated, and ultimately selfless than Bran's. The entire speech is probably lifted directly from Martin's canonical ending.

Tyrion's true story is that he is the son of the Mad King Aerys II and Joanna Lannister (heavily signposted in A Game of Thrones from the first pages as much as Jon Snow). This fact, known only to Tyrion, Bran (due to Bran’s connection to the Weirwood Network), and possibly Sam Tarly, is the only way to understand the ending of the series. Tyrion’s life is nothing but story after story of appearances being deceiving. He never gets his due, not because of legitimate reasons, but because of the deformity of his birth. But despite this, Tyrion spends his life trying to do what is right, and, in the end, he understands that his story—who he truly is—must remain untold so the world can move on. It's not about him.

This moment is the bittersweet denouement that Martin promised. The one person who could have claimed the throne by right--legal and practical--and who has a better story than anyone else chooses to remain in the shadows, his legacy untold, in order to ensure the end of the very conflict that would have finally given him the acknowledgment that was always rightfully his.

Tyrion’s story, then, is one of ultimate self-sacrifice. He is the bridge between the old world and the new, but he must remain unseen, his identity as the son of Aerys II irrelevant, because only by sacrificing his claim can the world heal and break free from the chains of the past.

Tyrion's remark is not just ironic. It is a resigned acknowledgment of the cost of peace, the painful but necessary erasure of the past. The true tragedy of Tyrion’s life is that his story--one of intelligence, compassion, and the weight of his heritage--will never actually be told (in world, anyway), but that is the ultimate sacrifice he has to make to end the dynastic wars and ensure that Bran, the outsider from the North who accepts the role, because all the principal actors have exited, can lead the new world.

It's an inversion to the ending of Hamlet.

HAMLET: "You that look pale and tremble at this chance, That are but mutes or audience to this act, Had I but time (as this fell sergeant, Death, Is strict in his arrest), O, I could tell you— But let it be.—Horatio, I am dead. Thou livest; report me and my cause aright To the unsatisfied."

[...]

HAMLET: "O God, Horatio, what a wounded name, Things standing thus unknown, shall I leave behind me! If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, Absent thee from felicity awhile And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain To tell my story."

[...]

HORATIO: "And let me speak to th’ yet unknowing world How these things came about. So shall you hear Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts, Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters, Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause, And, in this upshot, purposes mistook Fall’n on th’ inventors’ heads. All this can I Truly deliver."

Whenever I've told people about this, people typically fall into two camps. There's "Oh not another fucking targ!" or they say something like this cheapens Tyrion's and Tywin's arc, so it can't happen. The former is aesthetic. The latter is just untrue.

It really makes both of their arcs more substantial. Tywin doesn't hate Tyrion because his birth killed Joanna, nor that he was a dwarf. He hates him because Aerys II, master of karmic injustice, showed Tywin to be just like his cuckold father. All Tywin's bluster about putting the House first was hypocrisy. "I've gifted you a Lannister heir to the Iron Throne," cackles the Mad King, "All you have to do is acknowledge him." He doesn't, so Aerys appoints Jaime to the Kingsguard to further rub salt in the wound. "The only patrimony that doesn't matter to the House of Lannister, Tywin, is your own" cackles the Mad King, again. Martin even has Tywin's final words being the only acknowledgement he'll ever make of the truth of Tyrion: "You're no son of mine."

Anyway, there's a lot more subtext that points towards Tyrion's parentage that can be sniffed out if you're reading it closely, but ultimately the show's ending was the book's ending, but done so inartfully that actually accepting it requires a leap of faith. But I don't know if Martin will leave it as an exercise to the readers or actually confirm the denouement. And since Martin will likely never finish the book, this is about as complete an ending as I can expect to get.

Thats all very interesting, but... my problem isnt a lack of thematic impact in the ending. I had my own theories about those, though not as good as yours. The problem is that it betrays the beginning. How does Neds death contribute to any of this? The original tone survives quite long in Daenerys arc, which is consistent with the machiavellian reading all the way until we see her suffering from insanity at home after burning Kings Landing. He doesnt end that story; he just starts telling a more traditional one and ends that.

Separately:

All Tywin's bluster about putting the House first was hypocrisy.

Really? This would require that the revealed bastard both counts as part of house Lannister, and takes priority over the legitimate Targaryen children in inheritance. Those seem unlikely even individually, and extremely unlikely simultanuously. Besides, he does eventually get Joffrey on the throne, who is just as related to him officially as Tyrion would have been, and more so biologically.

The real world doesn’t have “a plot”. It’s not a series of carefully-woven interlocking events all building toward some satisfying conclusion. To the extent that Martin is going to fail to land the plane of the series, it’s because a novel must to some extent differ from the real world in that sense, and Martin couldn’t thread the needle between the parts of the form which are necessary, and the parts which can be effectively deconstructed. To that extent, I agree that a novel can’t simply be a bunch of Things Happening. But I don’t fault Martin for making the experimental effort to see just how far the deconstruction could be taken before it fell apart.

This is really what plagues the conclusions to a lot of media that attempt to be unvarnished reality. The main ones that come to mind are the finales of The Wire, Seinfeld, and The Sopranos.

You can have all the chickens come home to roost and rug-pull your universe (Seinfeld).

You can treat it like a nihilistic meta pop song that has no ending and simply fade out (The Sopranos) and rug-pull your audience (What did you think was going to happen?)

Or you can attempt to have your cake and eat it, too (The Wire) and rug-pull both; collapse the hard-fought reality into a one-dimensional fable to say it's all, like, cyclical and meta, man. Vanitas vanitatum, dude.

None of them are cathartic by design, but I'd rather be audience to the creation betraying the creator than the creator betraying the creation. But either is still preferable to betraying both. That needle can be thread (see season 3 of The Wire, Mel Gibson's Apocalypto and Blood Meridian). When it's done well, there is at least an ambiguous hope in the nature of the cyclicality that implies something different.

But Martin wants The Last Question and isn't disciplined enough to get anywhere close to it.

Another part of me thinks that he might have done this all unconsciously by design. That Martin calls his house Terrapin Station is so wonderfully meta that perhaps he just wanted to rug-pull everyone from the beginning:

The storyteller makes no choice

Soon you will not hear his voice

His job is to shed light

And not to master

Since the end is never told

We pay the teller off in gold

In hopes he will come back

But he cannot be bought or sold

I don’t think you have to write a didactic piece with an explicit moral (making sure to whack the readers over the head a few times in case they weren’t paying attention).

However, I assert that any reasonably competent work is going to convey something, and I think it matters what that is. I don’t like books whose soul feels ugly, to put it as unhelpfully as possible.

(Some books convey “the real world is far too complex and messy to convey anything” but that’s still a message to me).

I think that actually a lot of people do need the reminder that even the most lofty ideals and heroic rhetoric is ultimately describing a series of mundane, gross, and often brutish Things Happening. Part of Martin’s whole project is to showcase the dramatic irony between, on the one hand, the lofty chivalric self-image and self-importance of the power players involved, and, on the other hand, the grubby and venal motives underlying it, and the hideous reality of the real-world outcomes of all of that rhetoric. He’s forcing the reader to stare straight into the abyss of that discrepancy, rather than escaping into the fantastical good-and-evil stories which still dominate so much of the fantasy novel oeuvre.

A fair point. Maybe people do need to hear this, and I’m stuck in the echo chamber of 2000s cynicism which permitted nothing that was good or true to exist. But I’m not sure it’s true, and I’m not sure that the people who need to hear it (e.g. fanatical NATO or EU flagwavers IMO) are hearing it. Personally I couldn’t continue with Martin after Ned Stark was executed, my spirit rebelled.

Before I address the essential thrust of your argument, I would like to state that although many people say that Martin's work is morally complex, I believe that it is not true. To say that 'war is bad' is a rhetorical tool is comic over-exaggeration. In truth, I believe that his work is not even strong enough to state such a thing definitively. That is the nihilism of which people speak. There is no message. Things happen. There is no meaning in the cruelty and goodness of these characters: it might as well not have been written. Their deeds don't effect the world. At times, they hardly effect themselves.

It is an exhausting and alienating element of which detracts from the work as a whole.

And that is the fly in the ointment. You can get away with things happen (that's what slice of life is all about, after all.) If the characters are compelling and interesting enough, you can get away with it. But he has slaughtered his best characters and introduced new ones which also meander around, and in an even less interesting fashion. The Dornish characters, Quentyn and Arriane, exemplify the issue the best. Brienne of Tarth wanders around in a futile quest looking for a girl who we know isn't there... Sansa cools her heels observing intrigues that strain the memory to remember.

Perhaps this is more realistic. But he has gone too far. He has deconstructed not just his predecessors, but his own story, and he is unable to put together his magnum opus. If the true quality of stories is the human heart in conflict with itself. then why does his later books make me feel nothing? Why do I feel bored? Why should I give a damn about his silly characters if they do things that change nothing?

Martin's characters are hypoagentic: the plot (read: his notional outline that grows increasingly distorted as characters spin their wheels, waiting for their cue) drives them where they need to go. They have no volition of their own, they are constantly driven by circumstances beyond their control. Neither heroes or villains, just people... perhaps a poignant philosophical point, but terrible for a coherent narrative. He looks into the abyss and sees in it reflected his own helplessness and lack of meaning.

There is nothing romantic about that.

This is a really frustrating comment because I don't feel like it engages with what I wrote nor, nor with the comment above, nor even in good faith with the author's work. You are doing the exact same thing that I come down on the Brother's Krynn for: engaging in bombastic, exagerrated critiques of the book that have much more basis in your reactions and emotions to the book rather than what is actually in the text. Now unfortunately I have quite the large rhetorical advantage here because I've read these books many times and love them, and so have many more resources to draw upon to contradict your rather juvenile interpretations of A Feast for Crows in Particular.

Let's start with the first point.

To say that 'war is bad' is a rhetorical tool is comic over-exaggeration. In truth, I believe that his work is not even strong enough to state such a thing definitively. That is the nihilism of which people speak. There is no message. Things happen. There is no meaning in the cruelty and goodness of these characters: it might as well not have been written. Their deeds don't effect the world. At times, they hardly effect themselves.

I'm not sure how you can say this given millions of people have gotten so much out of these books, but I disgress. A Feast for Crows is certainly the easiest of the books to pick a fight with in this regard, but again I think it's pretty easy to prove you wrong. Let's go through the major plot points of AFFC and see if anything "happens"

  1. Cersei in King's Landing: Without Tywin/Jaime/Tyrion to keep her in line, Cersei descends further and futher into an egoistic spiral where she becomes increasingly paranoid, easily manipulable (and fatter), and begins to take on all the characteristics of her dead husband who she hated. This culminates in her misplaying her hand and being arrested by the faith militant Themes/messages: corrupting nature of power (even for someone already clearly corrupt), complicated relationship between love and hatred (Cersei sure spends a lot of time thinking about Robert), fear of declining sexual attractiviting when one's power is derived from appearances.

  2. Sansa in the Eeyrie: Sansa sinks deeper into her identity as Peter Baelish's stepdaughter. There's some minor politicing in the Vale of Arryn, but I found most of Sansa's sections to be focused on her struggles with her own identity and her own ideals. So much of Sansa's story is about her obsession with some knight or hero coming to save her from the trials and tribulations she's been put through, and this part of her arc is about her slow realization that hero has to be her herself. She has to be the one who plays the game and embody the ideals of her father. How is this not a powerful message.

  3. Dorne. Arianne and Ser Arys plan to crown Myrcella Baratheon queen and rebel against the Iron Throne after the death of her uncle. This goes horribly wrong when her father finds out, and Myrcella is maimed, Arys dies and one of her co-conspirators escapes. Her father confesses his own long-planned moves against the Lannsiter regime. Themes/messages: the innocent are always those who suffer most in war, vendetta's never solve anything, thinking carefully about a plan doesn't necessarily make it so it's going to work out. Adam Feldman has some great essays on this plotline at the Mereenese Blot

  4. Iron Islands. Balon Greyjoy is dead so there's an election for a new King. Balon's brother Euron wins the election through the promise of even greater booty through the continuation of raiding/reaving, this time in the south. Asha is unable to articulate her reasons for peace, and Victarion is unable to effectively form a coalition with her because of his views on gender/general dimwittedness. There's some more reaving in the Shield Islands off the coast of the Reach where it becomes increasingly clear that Euron merely views the ironborne as a tool for his lovecraftian plans. Themes/messages: The seductive appeal of war, manipulabiliity of democratic institutions, problems with holding to tradition when tradition clearly no longer works.

  5. Arya. Arya trainsto become an assasin in Bravos. At the end of the book she has to give up Needle, which is her last real memory of home. Like Sansa this section is very much about identity. Arya has worn so many faces throughout the series and been forced to do some pretty horrible things (remember she's an 8 year old when the series starts). These sections made me think about how we shape and form our own identities: is there some deep core of who we are, or is it more dependent on our environment.

  6. Brienne. Brienne wanders the Riverlands looking for Sansa, which we know is a futile quest. That is not to say nothing happens: each chapter is a little adventure in of itself, and serves as a vehicle to explore the questions of knighthood and chivalry. Does Brienne still embody Knightly ideals even though she doesn't have the actual blessing of the institution of knighthood? Even though her quest is pointless? Yes, yes she does. She kills outlaws, she protects the innocent from violence (which I quote from the text above), and she trains a squire in this image. Martin is trying to tell us her that you don't need a grand quest or instititutional approval to be heroic and to live up to your ideals.

  7. Jaime. Jaime has a lot of parallels to Brienne's story. He spends all of this book mopping up the last bits of Stark resistance in the Riverlands. Knighthood is also central to this arc. Jaime spends most of his life scoffing at the institution because of its apparent contradictions. Yet in this book Jaime realizes that those contradictions mainly involve other's perceptions of you: you always have a choice to do what you personally believe is right and thread the narrow needle of all your conflicting vows.

  8. Sam. Sam only has three chapters in this book, so his arc is rather short. Sam and Maester Aemon are sailing to Oldtown but get stuck in Braavos. Maester Aemon ends up dying, and Sam comes into conflict with the other brother of the night's watch who is shirking his vows. Sam finally ends up standing up for himself and his beliefs and ends up finding passage on a ship because of it. In contrast to your point, this is an arc about gaining agency by standing up for one's beliefs, even in the most desperate of times.

I just gave you eight character arcs with various levels of plot and character development. It's okay to not have enjoyed these arcs, to think the book as a whole is too slow, or to think that some of these arcs were poorly done. What is not okay is to claim that it all means nothing, that there's no message here, that the character's lack agency in their own stories. That is just so clearly false. Just because the stakes aren't world shaking, doesn't mean that the character's lives and actions don't have meaning. Brienne might not find Sansa, but she saves Willow and her siblings from being murdered and raped. Jaime might not be able to turn back the clock on the whole of the war of the Five Kings, but he does use diplomacy to prevent a bloody battle over Riverrun.

You and all the other people in this thread need to be better readers. Not only does Martin's work clearly not support a nihilistic world view, but my own essay very clearly argues against that. All you all have to offer in return are word salads about your emotions reading the book, rather than actual textual evidence.

I think I somewhat agree with the arguments written by The Brothers Krynn, though I don't have such a negative reaction to GRRM and ASOIAF, just a mild dislike.

Martin may have said that the ending will be a bittersweet one, and the finishing moments of the last two books + the chapters he already revealed of Winds may also setup that, minus the whole Euron plot that just got started, but since he will probably die before finishing it, that leaves what has already been written, which is mostly good guys lose, bad guys win, which ends up defining the books. I also don't agree with your point on religion, sure they are involved in politics, but GRRM's secularism leaves them mostly bereft of spirituality, most characters feel like cultural christians who go to church and pray sometimes, but don't really believe in the tenets of their faith like Transubstantiation, the Bible's less liberal parts, the Trinity or such (it doesn't help that most spiritual beliefs aren't really touched at all, we know how the Westeros religions operate, but not what the content of their beliefs). This essay by Bret Devereaux, even if it mostly focuses on the show, does a good job of showing that, https://acoup.blog/2019/06/04/new-acquisitions-how-it-wasnt-game-of-thrones-and-the-middle-ages-part-ii/, and the other two parts of the series also shows other problems with the supposed realism of the series.

Life is not a song

Life is a song. But sometimes, that song is a dirge.

Anyway good post. I appreciate the analysis.

But by acting on this noble impulse, Jon critically undermines his other duty of protecting the realm from literal ice zombies that want to kill all humans. And thus the folly of trying to follow all his noble impulses: which eventually gets him killed in a mutiny.

This isn't necessarily related to your overall point, but this plot point is probably the show failure that pissed me off the most. In the books, the brothers mutiny against Jon because he broke his oath. Whether one agrees or disagrees with their actions, they had a reasonable motive for what they did. The show abandons the nuance entirely and just rounds the brothers' motive off to "hurr durr racism". It's infuriating.

This is exactly related to my overall point. By the later seasons the show has very much returned to this black/white way of seeing characters, but this time woke. Jon couldn't possibly do anything wrong, it's just the evil bigots who hate wildlings trying to sabotage him. While in the books there is an element of bigotry in the mutiny, Bowen Marsh does let the wildlings through the wall. It's Jon doing what the readers want him to do (using the Night's Watch to fight the Bolton's) but breaking promises that causes the mutiny in the end.

This isn't actually directly related, but I have a lot of thoughts on Martin and A Song of Ice and Fire for which there's no good place to put on the internet.

I first read A Song of Ice and Fire in 2006. I eagerly awaited A Dance with Dragons for years, read it, and was totally disappointed. I spent years afterwards re-reading the books, reading the meta, trying to get into Martin's brain, and looking for other works that would scratch the same itch. After the HBO finale aired, I got the closure I wanted because I could easily fit the non-D&D components into the framework I had of Martin and his oeuvre (and it would totally work if he finished the books).

But ultimately I began to loathe the entire thing.

As an attempt to scratch the same itch, I ran into Dorothy Dunnett (and her Lymond Chronicles, the House of Niccolo, and King Hereafter specifically). Her work is everything that aSoIaF notionally aspires to be (and happens to include elements that match with aSoIaF so well that I cannot assume it to be coincidental).

I've come to realize that A Song of Ice and Fire is poorly written historical fan-fiction (poorly written compared to Dunnett or O'Brian, not to Sanderson or Rothfuss, compared to them, it's practically Shakespeare), but instead of being constrained by historical fact and the ambiguity of written records, he simply lays on another flavor of breadth for his lack of discipline to go in actual depth.

It's clear that he wanted to originally write a purely fictional account of the War of the Roses after reading Dorothy Dunnett and Maurice Druon but fell prey to the same problem he now faces with finishing the series--He knows how it actually ends and lost any desire to finish it. He literally says he has this problem in the letter attached to the original draft to his editor: "As you know, I don't outline my novels. I find that if I know exactly where a book is going, I lose all interest in writing it."

But he promised a fantasy novel to his publishers and the man has to eat and has bills to pay. So he did what fantasy authors always do when they have no original ideas. He filed off reality's serial numbers, put on Working Man's Dead, sparked up a jay, flipped Great Britain upside down, called it Westeros, and started editing what he had into a giant historical crossover after he got bored of playing Darklands ("What if the mythological beings of the middle ages were actually real?").

And I think this is ultimately why George R.R. Martin hates fan fiction. He has never read a historical anecdote or a piece of fiction that he didn't lift, lightly edit, and pass off with a wink. It's entirely a series of calling rabbits smeerps. I'll be the first to admit that he's a master at doing this, but it's solely a vehicle for him to play at writing historical fiction without any of the accountability or constraints that Dorothy Dunnett, Umberto Eco, Patrick O'Brian, Robert Graves or other masters of the genre display.

These historical fiction authors are exemplars of what Chesteron wrote of trains: 'Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street, or to Bagdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria.' Martin wanted a train that could go anywhere, discovered that trains that go anywhere must in the end still arrive somewhere, and abandoned it with token resistance. He's no longer a man with bills to pay.

The problem with Martin himself is that the charity that he affords to the gray morality of his own characters is never applied himself to those actually living in reality. He'll undermine his own antagonists and demand empathy from the reader for them, but never for his real life personal antagonists. Martin and Rowling both have the rich, white, blue blooded child as their only one dimensional characters for a reason. Being rejected for being poor and lower class is the one dragon they've never actually slain (and is at the root of both their seminal works). I believe Martin will also be treated by time as a relic of the 1960s counter-culture with the same problems that Terry Pratchett, John Cleese, and Seinfeld will have. You can't build on top of traditional mores by undermining them and then expect that your work will stand on its own when the bottom of tradition falls out.

Admittedly with all this said, he is still leaps and bounds of ahead anything else in contemporary high fantasy, but it only works so long as you remain outside the reality that he's pointing towards. Yeah, yeah, institutions are corrosive and pollute the human spirit. Yeah, yeah, it'd be great if there was an omniscient philosopher-king that ultimately inherited authority and legitimacy from the destruction of the powers-that-be and reaffirm that the Good exists, is One with the World, and shepherds the world to heal from the weight of past sins. And it'd be great if the legitimate and unknown Rightful King declines to assume the office to allow this all to happen. But try to make it happen in real life, George. You could save everyone a lot of time by not needing to preface everything with "it's actually a commentary on..." and forcing your readers to deference every pointer you make to the real world.

I've come to realize that A Song of Ice and Fire is poorly written historical fan-fiction

Agreed, Martins writing style was good for the tone of the subject matter covered in GRRM, which ultimately is the mundanity of perceived evil. Evil acts are just acts that happen in the normal grind of a shit world with shitty actors.

The problem is that after he got tied up rewriting Dance Of Dragons and Feast Of Crows for years, he just lost interest in plotting a path to the end. Autistic commitment to the mundanity of terrible things happening to good people means an autistic commitment to timelines, and GRRM got sidetracked in his main plot, introducing new characters primarily as a plot progression point - Quentyn to bring Dany out of Mereen, or Aegon II to get Tyrion out of Braavos - and the concepts he could write into that character to show how shit life is for heroes became more interesting to write than Dany fucking about as a shitty administrator, and it just became a sprawling web of concepts vaguely anchored to a main plot GRRM lost interest in literally last century.

I don't actually think GRRM is smart enough a writer to really walk the talk of criticizing the lack of 'Tolkeins tax policy' or whatever smugfuck Gritty Real World concept must be elaborated on to refute the narratives of high fantasy. The construction of his world is shoddy enough to begin with, but how a world is constructed is never the point of a story. A world is simply the skeleton on which the flesh of a characters interactions are draped onto, and GRRM was pretty good at having character moments. The problem is that his characters needing to mechanically interact in consistent manners meant he had to work more on that skeleton, and the failings became increasingly untenable to work together. A particular irritant I have is his concept that economic prosperity of Westeros was founded on Lannister gold and later the largesse of loans taken from the Iron Bank. Like, what the fuck bro, your main setting literally is about multiyear winters, fucking spend more than 10 lines talking about agriculture if you're so committed to subverting the handwaving of Tolkeins economics-free world. At least Tolkein talked about the sacking of the Shire and the terribleness of replacing pastoral idyll with industrialization, whereas GRRM spends way too much time tracing incestuous bloodlines instead of making his world not revert to 'eternal refrigeration'.

Like, what the fuck bro, your main setting literally is about multiyear winters, fucking spend more than 10 lines talking about agriculture

As much as I enjoyed the first couple books and most of the short stories this has always been my biggest beef with ASOIAF. A multi-year long winter is a potentially civilization-ending event for a preindustrial society, made even worse given they occur at irregular intervals (limiting the ability to plan for it). This ought to have massive downstream effects on social organization, economics, military planing, and (ironically given Martin's complaints about Tolkien) Taxation, yet we don't see this. The Westeros we are presented with is basically just an ersatz renaissance Italy with dragons and ice liches.

Finally I've always found Martin's critique of Tolkien (he says that Aragorn was a good and virtuous king, but what about his tax policy?) to be somewhat facile. If Aragorn was virtuous i think it is reasonable to presume that his tax policy was at least moderately fair, and if he was a good king, i think its reasonable to presume that it was competently administered. What more do we need to know? LotR is a fantasy novel, not a economics treatise.

Martin may as well be hating on a fairy-tale for ending with "and they lived happily ever after", because no matter how happy Snow White and Prince Charming are together they will eventually grow old, suffer from back pain, and die. Like, what the fuck bro, that's not the point of the story, nor does it change anything.

Did you ever try the Malazan series? It seems to have the highest reputation for critical value in fantasy.

It never came on my radar and honestly I don't really do fiction anymore (besides what I read to my kids and an occasional revisit to a classic).

I read the first one and it was shockingly bad. I don't understand how that bad of a book got published, much less made into a series with fans.

I think the critique is pretty spot on. To me his issue is that he’s so busy commenting he’s forgetting to tell a story. And I do think part of it is actually that most of his stuff seems to be a reskinned version of something that already exists. In short his world-building sucks. Theres just nothing unique and interesting about the story. It’s basically the trope of feudal society with lords fighting for power, set in I can’t believe it’s not England, and filled with the fashion for grey morality even when it hurts the story.

Honestly, that’s why I like Sanderson a bit better. He’s not the best at plotting, but when he creates a world, he doesn’t just plunk a bit of magic into a setting. The entire world is alien and works off of completely alien physics and biology. His world likewise seems to flow from those assumptions. The shards can bend matter, and thus people use them to make buildings.

Sanderson? Sanderson is the most banal, extruded fantasy product workmanlike writer to come out of the RPG/fanfiction sphere, and his main virtue is base-level competence and being extremely prolific. Problem is his extreme prolificness doesn't even produce interesting books (like Stephen King did in his coke fiend days), just more and more and more of the same. Fictionalized RPG worlds complete with entire extra continents and secret prestige classes and bonus spell lists and artifacts and new monster manuals, but the stories are all basically Protagonist Figures Out Cheat Codes.

I have no problem with people who think Sanderson is more enjoyable than Martin (I have read more Sanderson than Martin), but whatever you think of Martin and his morality, his writing is far better than Sanderson's.

Like any famous author, Sanderson has leaned a bit too far into the aspect of his work he’s famous for - all the magic systems stuff - and he tries slightly too hard to be topical. But his early work is fantastic, especially the first Mistborn series, and his later work is often good too.

Beyond all that, though, he was special to me as a modern fantasy author who didn’t seem corrupted by the nihilism of our age. He wrote about princes genuinely trying to be good leaders, priests in a corrupt priesthood losing and regaining their faith, how to trust in your friends when you have no guarantee that they won’t let you down.

I don't care what others think, I like Kaladin and I will fight you to the death in defence of his wholesome bridgemen.

But I will agree in part that Sanderson does not know how to write a convincing heterosexual relationship. I suppose it would be too much to ask a Mormon to write erotica. But then again, Meyers of Twilight fame can do it, why can't he?

I liked Kaladin in the first book, but Words of Radiance was so boring I decided there was no way I was reading eight more books of this (I think the Stormlight Archives is meant to be 10 books, which knowing Sanderson means it will actually be three 10-book series). That is pretty much my experience with Sanderson; first book or two in a series is good, after that it becomes crap. (Mistborn is an exception, though the third book was very flawed, and the second trilogy did not hold my interest at all.)

I liked Kaladin in the first book

I thought, initially, that I was reading about a depressed man. It turns out that Kaladin is actually a man "suffering from depression", which is quite a different thing.

I'm not sure if I'll read book five. It's just too tiring for me.

Agreed, and that makes sense if his main talent is creating an interesting world/magic system. Once that's been outlined and a few adventures have occurred, there's not a lot of meat left.

I did like his early novel(la?) about the protagonist with multiple personalities.

I don't agree that Martin's writing is far better than Sanderson's. They are on the same level imo. I honestly have no idea how you can say he doesn't produce interesting books, when almost all of his books (except Elantris, which was a snooze) absolutely gripped me. The fact that he's prolific is just icing on the cake. Extremely well written books which also come out once a year? Yes, please!

They are interesting in the way a comic book is interesting. Martin's prose is far better, and Sanderson just has no depth. But I realize that some people don't care about that at all (hence the enormous popularity of fanfiction and litrpgs), and I admit I am pretty judgmental about writing quality. That's why I made the distinction between good and enjoyable; I have read a lot of his books, after all (and enjoyed most of them).

I find this such an alien viewpoint; once writing has reached a (fairly low) bar, I find it to not really matter towards my enjoyment of a book.

The part of the book I have always felt matters is what it says, not how it says it. Caring about the quality of the writing seems like receiving a gift, and discarding it because the wrapping paper was poorly chosen.

I found ASOIAF to be utterly predictable, save for the character deaths (which I suppose is a twist, in its own right). Someone like Feist, Sanderson, or Cook may have flaws in how they write, but the stories themselves are way more interesting to me.

Some people care about wordsmithing and sentence crafting, some people only care about story. There are definitely people who don't understand why anyone would care about the other thing, just as there are people who don't understand why anyone would read fiction.

My theory is that it depends on reading speed. Slower readers (me in foreign languages) care more about sentence crafting because they spend more time with each sentence, whereas in English I am naturally a very fast reader and ‘reading’ a page is a bit like looking through a transparent pane glass.

@Amadan, how much time would you spend on one of Martin’s books, if you don’t mind my asking?

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I’m not talking about his plotting. His stories are honestly fairly predictable from my point of view. But he does create worlds that don’t feel like they’re transposed versions of medieval Europe. Martin doesn’t do that part well at all. The Religion of the Seven is a reskin of Christianity more or less. The plot is pretty much War of the Roses. It’s just like if you’re creating a fantasy world, I think you should put a little effort into making the world something other than our world.

China Miéville is alien. Sanderson...

Dalinar finally turned and stalked back down the corridor to his rooms. Where was that package Navani had given him? He found it on an end table, and from inside it removed a leather bracer somewhat like what an archer would wear. It had two clock faces set into the top. One showed the time with three hands—even seconds, as if that mattered. The other was a stormclock, which could be set to wind down to the next projected highstorm.

How did they get it all so small? he wondered, shaking the device. Set into the leather, it also had a painrial—a gemstone fabrial that would take pain from him if he pressed his hand on it. Navani had been working on various forms of pain-related fabrials for use by surgeons, and had mentioned using him as a test subject.

He strapped the device to his forearm, right above the wrist. It felt conspicuous there, wrapping around the outside of his uniform sleeve, but it had been a gift.

Then there's the time he filed off the serial numbers of six sigma slop:

“Tradition? Kadash, did I ever tell you about my first sword trainer?

Back when I was young, our branch of the Kholin family didn't have grand monasteries and beautiful practice grounds. My father found a teacher for me from two towns over. His name was Harth. Young fellow, not a true swordmaster -- but good enough.

He was very focused on proper procedure, and wouldn't let me train until I'd learned how to put on a takama the right way. He wouldn't have stood for me fighting like this. You put on the skirt, then the overshirt, then you wrap your cloth belt around yourself three times and tie it.

I always found that annoying. The belt was too tight, wrapped three times -- you had to pull it hard to get enough slack to tie the knot. The first time I went to duels at a neighboring town, I felt like an idiot. Everyone else had long drooping belt ends at the front of their takamas.

I asked Harth why we did it differently. He said it was the right way, the true way. So, when my travels took me to Harth's hometown, I searched out his master, a man who had trained with the ardents in Kholinar. He insisted that this was the right way to tie a takama, as he'd learned from his master.

I found my master's master's master in Kholinar after we captured it. The ancient, wizened ardent was eating curry and flatbread, completely uncaring of who ruled the city. I asked him. Why tie your belt three times, when everyone else thinks you should do it twice?

The old man laughed and stood up. I was shocked to see that he was terribly short. 'If I only tie it twice,' he exclaimed, 'the ends hang down so low, I trip!'

I love tradition, I've fought for tradition. I make my men follow the codes. I uphold Vorin virtues. But merely being tradition does not make something worthy, Kadash. We can't just assume that because something is old it is right.”

I tried desperately to read Sanderson on the recommendation of a very good friend of mine so we could talk about it, but once I encountered a thinly veiled "Parshendi Lives Matter" rant, I just couldn't do it anymore.

I'm also enjoying Dorothy Dunnett, and I find that Guy Gavriel Kay scratches a similar itch (he isn't explicitly historical but its extremely clear what his inspiration is, so he constrains the story that way).

I'm not sure Martin's problem is a lack of interest, or frankly even in skill. He's far too much of a perfectionist, and the amount of moving pieces that he has to manage in TWoW is staggering. The reception of the later sessions of the show I think caused some quite extensive rewrites from him, which is why we are seeing such a huge delay. Interesting that Dance is your least favorite book in the series: I just did a reread this summer, and while I found I didn't like Dance as much as I used to (was my favorite book in the series from about 2012-2022), it still held up pretty well thematically.

I'm not sure the blue-blooded characters are all one dimensional in ASOIAF. Joffery is probably the least well developed of these I can think of, but he still clearly has reasons for his shitness (absent, whoring father and doting/controlling mother). Even in Harry Potter this isn't true: Draco gets a redemption arc in the last few books.

One of the critiques was that Martin cannot finish his work because he killed off too many “good” characters: what do you think of this critique?

I think this isn't the main reason. I think unfortunately his ego is very large, and the poor reception of the ending of the show means he has had to rewrite a lot of the books until he believes that they are perfect.

One of the tendencies on the Online Right with which I often find myself in conflict is the insistence that good art ought to be didactic. The idea being that the purpose of art is to model and reinforce traditional virtues. Under this framework, of course Martin’s work is degenerate and poisonous: it provides a very persuasive, entertaining critique of the overly simplistic nature of those virtues, as well as the clearly disastrous historical consequences of a single-minded commitment to them. (Particularly, as you note, when those virtues are worn as a skin-suit by powerful men who need thousands of less-powerful men to die horribly on their behalf.) I’ve mentioned before how when I read about something like the Wars of the Roses — a barbaric affair unworthy of a virtuous civilization — I feel the instinctive pull of the liberals (and later Marxists) who grasped the profoundly predatory core which underlay the supposedly chivalrous institutions of feudalism.

I love Lord of the Rings for what it is - an escapist fantasy and an elaborate ersatz mythology for the ancient peoples of Britain - but frankly I don’t think it has much to teach us about the real world. Its story is contrived to contain purely-evil villains, allowing it to sidestep complicated questions of conflicting virtues and the possibility of non-violent resolution of conflicts. (Tolkien himself would have recognized how little the real war in which he participated — a pointless bloodbath which devoured the lives of the men who served under him — resembled the chivalric heroism which his novels depict.) Personally, I don’t want to have my legs blown off on some foreign shore because the men who have power over me decided that the real world can be modeled as a conflict between blameless heroes and mindlessly-evil orcs. I can recognize the so-called Classical Virtues as an interesting thought experiment and as something to aspire to, but when it comes to applying them to the modern globalized world, I think I’d much rather that the powerful people keep in mind the critical voices of writers like Martin.

but frankly I don’t think it has much to teach us about the real world

Using it as tech manual is not going to be effective. But for example some dose of stories about heroism, with part of them about openly fictional one, seems a good part of information diet.

And world built by Tolkien has enough complexity and thought put into it to be useful as a toy model. See for example https://acoup.blog/2019/05/10/collections-the-siege-of-gondor/ as a small example of that.

allowing it to sidestep complicated questions of conflicting virtues and the possibility of non-violent resolution of conflicts

This was also present in books...

but frankly I don’t think it has much to teach us about the real world

I've heard it said that it offers a surprisingly realistic description of what it's like to be a regular soldier in an extended war. Not the big fantasy battles with Gondor and Rohan, but the endless march of Frodo and Sam. Every day they're cold, hungry, and tired. They very rarely fight, mostly they just try to avoid the enemy. They are of course terrified of the enemy, which has magical powers that could kill them at any moment, but their more immediate concern from day to day is just getting enough food and finding the strength to keep marching. "All Quiet on the Western Front" had a similar feel to it.

Not the big fantasy battles with Gondor and Rohan

and these were also quite good representations (before someone will complain about Nazgûl" morale is actually important in real world).

https://acoup.blog/2019/05/10/collections-the-siege-of-gondor/ is the best that ACOUP produced and has quite good analysis of that

I'm also a fan of ACOUP, but I feel like he's talking about something very different there. The siege of gondor is written from the perspective of high-level commanders, with a god's eye view of the battlefield and full intel. Even today, there's very few generals who would have that level of intelligence and control over an active battle. The "fog of war" is very real, and Tolkien would have known that since he was just a regular lieutenant in the trenches leading enlisted men. Admittedly he didn't last there long before getting disabled by trench fever.

I agree with you but it's not confined to the online right, at least in a different context than literature. Moralism has infected horror movies with fervor lately. All logic and/or narrative is thrown out the window in favor of making sure the point of the movie is stamped onto the screen in big bold letters.

Take "The Substance" there are massive leaps of logic and narrative flaws that abound but, because the movie has a message, it's acceptable and celebrated. It often reminds me of Yud's Universal Fire. "Who cares if it doesn't make sense this story has magic and monsters." Whether it's laziness or a lower bar horror has just become mostly this now. There was a horror movie that I quite liked a few years ago called Relic that essentially just gave up at the end and had a sequence that made no sense so they could spell out what the meaning of the movie was and it almost ruined the entire thing for me because the narrative itself completely collapsed at the very least so they could stamp the message of the movie on the screen for idiots.

I feel bad saying that this is kind of a sexes thing but it kind of is and I don't mean to say that women are bad at making horror movies, they usually make 2/3 of a great horror movie and then the last third is a muddled mess that could probably be saved but because people aren't willing to criticize them about this and the breadth and depth of horror movies sucking beyond this is unimaginable to people who don't follow the genre, then the movies keep spiraling into deeper and deeper into "no plot, only message" until we get something like the Substance where it's filmed and presented like a David Lynch movie except where every single metaphor/motivation/symbolic thing is cudgeled into your brain rather than being mysterious or even hiding the story.

I think it started in earnest with how well the Babadook was received and even though it's a woman writer/director I don't put it on that movie, the fact that the story can be a metaphor is one thing, the problem arises when it's literally the only thing it can be because every other possibility has been burned to the ground with sequences that make no sense. But it's an increasing trend that I hate because it ruins the narrative at least every single time because no one bothers to just weave it into the film they just give up near the end and say, "here's the moral" and then because it's horror most people just clap.

I remember listening to Joss Whedon's commentary on Serenity and through it he kept saying things about the plot to the effect of, "if this were a movie then this bad thing wouldn't happen but it's not a movie." Essentially, the world has to exist in shades of grey and darkness to reflect the reality of the situation, until there is a reflective point and things become black and white, the moral highground is taken and the good guys can win because it is now a "movie." Thinking of this it just made me think of Tarantino's take on how he must write a plot in a meme format compared to that take and him just saying something like, "The plot is this way because it's cool."

I know most people would consider them on par and plebian but the messaging, academics, morals of a piece of art becoming louder than the rest of it just serves to make it worse in my opinion but every time it's done its celebrated and used as a shield in the same way you can't complain about a plot of a fantasy novel because there's dragons, you can't complain about the plot of these movies because it's a metaphor or even a better refrain being that you just don't get it.

I think honestly there is a lost art of didactic fiction aimed at adult readers. The current fashion of grey morality and grim dark gets a bit tiresome simply because you have so much of it made. Even when a character is supposed to be the hero, he’s almost never earnest about believing anything. It’s all cynical. I don’t think heroes need to be goody-goods all the time, but I want to read about worlds in which people actually believe in being good as possible and trying to do the right thing. They can (and frankly should, at times) fail. They should wonder how to be good, or have to choose between two good or two bad choices.

The current fashion of grey morality and grim dark gets a bit tiresome simply because you have so much of it made.

I don't think it's quite that, at least to me. It's more that there seems to be this strange idea that every work absolutely must have the protagonists - and by extension the reader - suffer losses by having characters the reader cares about suffer or be outright killed. This ends up killing any real optimism and the best you get is "Yay, they mostly won in the end... I guess?" This would be fine if they were skillfully written into the story from the beginning to drive the plot but that of course is rarely the case and instead they end up feeling as if the editor told the author "This is otherwise good, but you need to kill characters A and B near the end". An example that comes to mind is Harry Potter where Fred Weasley's deathin the final battle adds absolutely nothing to the story - besides of course driving home that you, the reader, must be made to lose characters you liked.

Martin's writing doesn't have this problem as it's established already in the first book that anyone can die, most protagonists are more or less villainy and the reader really shouldn't hang onto any of them. It does however need balance from more optimistic stories, only that balance has been lost due to this trend.

One the tendencies on the Online Right with which I often find myself in conflict is the insistence that good art ought to be didactic.

You're right, and that is just a bizarre desire when you think about it. Probably the most right-wing fantasy novel you could ask for, Lord of the Rings, is from an author who explicitly hated allegory and trying to make art into a lesson. It seems like some people need to learn from the good professor about allegory vs applicability.

I feel the instinctive pull of the liberals (and later Marxists) who grasped the profoundly predatory core which underlay the supposedly chivalrous institutions of feudalism... Personally, I don’t want to have my legs blown off on some foreign shore because the men who have power over me decided that the real world can be modeled as a conflict between blameless heroes and mindlessly-evil orcs.

I think it's interesting you relate this to chivalry and feudalism given Liberalism and Marxism joined forces on the most destructive war in human history, ostensibly over Danzig, and retconned it to a fantasy between the lines of blameless heroes and mindlessly-evil orcs. Not that you agree with the framing, but I question the relation of that behavior to chivalry and feudalism.

Martin's critique of classical virtues fails because he has not and it seems cannot finish the story. So people who find Martin's critique cogent should also realize he was unable to finish the story, likely because he is unable to do so without leaning heavily on the values and archetypes he has deconstructed.

Martin is not saying that classical virtues don't exist. He very obviously believes they do exist. He just doesn't think it's as simple as Lord of the Rings makes it out to be. It's hard to walk in the Shadow to Mount Doom, but it's also extremely hard to make a decision between two things you value and love when they are at odds. It's not enough to just do what the church, or Plato, or Aristotle tells you because in the end you will be the one who has to choose.

The first (and second) world wars are great examples of this. People choose governments and institutions that claimed that they stood for these high-minded ideals, which were in reality just neo-feudal skinsuits for individuals/nations that wanted wealth/territory/power. Those ideals were why we could not back down. You get similar, although more personal, conflicts like this in the Middle Ages like the Wars of the Roses, Castillian Civil Wars, Thirty Years War, etc. People are so steeped in ideology, either personal or abstract, that they can't live up to the ideals that they want to. At least that's my reading of Martin.

I think it's interesting you relate this to chivalry and feudalism given Liberalism and Marxism joined forces on the most destructive war in human history and retconned it to a fantasy between the lines of blameless heroes and mindlessly-evil orcs.

Those wars were only as destructive as they were because of the level of technology available to the combatants at the time. Had the Holy Roman Empire and its enemies had access to machine guns and mustard gas during the Thirty Years’ War, we can be certain that the casualty figures in that war would have been even worse than the over 50% fatality rate suffered by many of the affected areas.

I think it’s very difficult to argue that the world is not more peaceful now — less wars per year, and less wanton destruction and predation toward civilians during the wars that do take place — than it was under feudalism. The nations of Europe were in a state of near-constant military conflict with each other for over a thousand years after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. (Which was itself a massively violent expansionist military power engaged in constant wars.)

Obviously I’m not in favor of the World Wars. I was tearing up just a few hours ago listening to the famous anti-war WWI ballad “And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda”. The worst thing about those wars is that they were (in the minds of the powerful men who engineered them) fought for the same reasons as feudal wars were: competition over territory and resources, imperial competition, grievances between powerful individuals, etc. But they were sold to the public as being fought for liberal, messianic reasons — every bit as moralized and totalizing as the “traditional chivalric virtues” which those liberal values had originally hoped to supplant. And clearly to some extent this is still happening (the Iraq Wars and the current Ukraine conflict come to mind), but the fact that there hasn’t been a war of anywhere remotely near the destructiveness of the World Wars in 80 years is, I think, instructive of the fact that globalist liberalism is, overall, more conducive to peace than feudalism was.

Had the Holy Roman Empire and its enemies had access to machine guns and mustard gas during the Thirty Years’ War, we can be certain that the casualty figures in that war would have been even worse than the over 50% fatality rate suffered by many of the affected areas.

I see no reason to believe that this should be the case.

  • My understanding is that the 30 Years War was as lethal as it was because the fatality rate is measured by the population in the area the war was being fought in, not by the population of the belligerent states involved.

  • Technology shapes conflicts decisively. Had the Holy Roman Empire had machine guns and mustard gas, and presumably also telegraphs and railways and steam ships and modern farming, I see no reason to believe that the war would have played out the way it did only with increased lethality. It seems to me that what would actually happen is, essentially, something like World War 1 on the tactical level, higher lethality for the military forces and much, much lower mortality for the general population of non-combatants. You might even get significantly lower mortality for the soldiers; the Christmas Truce didn't emerge due to Materialist Rationality, after all.

The demand for unconditional surrender was justified on liberal precepts and was very much unlike all those feudal wars throughout history in which it was SOP to sue for peace and come to a political arrangement. In WWI this outcome was disrupted by American intervention, and in WWII this outcome was enforced on the altar of liberal values. So the liberal/Marxist demand for unconditional surrender, directly related to their own fantasy-crafting about the "good vs evil" nature of the conflict, has to be related to the massive destruction of that war in addition to the technological improvements. And likewise the technology has to account for the 80 years of relative military peace due to the threat of MAD from not just nukes but conventional warfare.

But if we are going to do an account of "80 years of peace" under liberalism, you also have to account for demographic replacement in the US and Europe. Maybe abandoning certain values and sensibilities reduced the frequency of armed conflict, but it has led directly to demographic suicide. That's not a "peace" in my book.

Edit: January 1943, that's when Roosevelt and Churchill publicly and officially made the war aim "unconditional surrender." How does that not make you rage with anger? That is justified with liberal platitudes, show me a feudal conflict like that, as bloody as they were...

The allies demanded unconditional surrender citing the "barbarian leaders" of the enemy and then proceeded to firebomb and nuke hundreds of thousands of civilians while declaring themselves the blameless heroes. You can't let liberalism off the hook for this or even compare it to feudal conflicts which do not at all appear to have been motivated by this distinctly modern "good vs evil" narrative-crafting.

Maybe abandoning certain values and sensibilities reduced the frequency of armed conflict, but it has led directly to demographic suicide. That's not a "peace" in my book.

Let's not redefine words. If things are peaceful, they're peaceful. They still might have other undesirable features, like demographic collapse, or things like natural disasters, disease, famine, etc.

The shakers died out completely peacefully. Nobody forced them not to reproduce, they made the choice themselves.

80 years of peace is actually bull. Look at the history and there are lots of wars. The reason they’re not happening to you isn’t “liberal democracy’s boon” it’s geography. If you’re American, you basically live in a fortress — friendly governments on our two land borders and two entire oceans between America and the rest of the world.

And there have been wars. They’ve just happening in Africa, MENA, or South America. We’ve blown up lots of real estate during the Great Liberal Peace. Further, I have long suspected that the intervention of international organizations has made wars worse rather than better. In the bad old days, you’d fight until victory or defeat. Once the other side knuckles under, the thing is done, and you accept whatever the results were. If you fought beyond the point of futility, that’s on you. Now wars are more common because nobody is decisively defeated. The international community sees to it by putting in peace keepers or demanding ceasefires when they decide that the weaker side is losing too badly. This not only delays surrender, but because the weaker side never loses badly enough, the war flares up again as soon as the losing side can rearm.

I think demographic replacement is fundamentally different from the low level of violence that permeated the middle ages at all times. Yes it absolutely sucks to see your culture be flushed down the toilet, but it's absolutely not the same as having your farm burned down, your daughters raped, and winter food stores plundered every 10-20 years.

Is accute disease worse than chronic? If I'm healthy for one to two decades between bouts I may choose accute episodes.

But if we are going to do an account of "80 years of peace" under liberalism, you also have to account for demographic replacement in the US and Europe. Maybe abandoning certain values and sensibilities reduced the frequency of armed conflict, but it has led directly to demographic suicide. That's not a "peace" in my book.

Global liberalism is still very young! Feudalism lasted for more than a millennium, and both its forms and its ideological underpinnings evolved substantially over the course of that time. Global liberalism was birthed in the slaughter of the World Wars, but it still has a long time to internalize the lessons from that transition. And the same is certainly true for mass immigration! The signs are all around us that the nations of Europe are beginning to wake up and prepare for course-correction on that issue. Keir Starmer of all people is out here openly admitting that mass immigration to the U.K. was both disastrous and intentionally engineered over the objections of the public! We are at only one early stage in the development of what will eventually be the flowering of the Globalist Age; the kinks are still being worked out! Who knows what fresh Renaissance will arise in response to the mistakes and overcorrections of our era?

Oh I agree we are in a Globalist Age, and many others on the Online Right are wrong to deny this or think it's even avoidable. But is clinging to Liberalism really the best path forward given this reality? Pax Americana is not even close to a worthy justification for clinging to the noble lies of Liberalism. It's actually a reason to jettison it.

I think Liberalism can be tweaked and refined significantly. For example, its claims of universal human equality made more sense in the context under which they were developed. However, now that we have a much larger exposure to the full breadth of global humanity, we can observe conclusively that this supposed equality is not the reality on the ground. So, we can refine liberalism to take that into account - either by limiting its universalist commitments, or by using the technologies we have available — and the even better ones yet to be developed! — to actually make that equality a reality through eugenics.

Liberalism is built for 130-IQ Anglos — so, let’s make the rest of the world more like 130-IQ Anglos! I also think we can syncretize liberalism with the more communitarian aspects of Asian societies, strengthening both traditions through fusion. There’s a lot of room for intellectual and political developments to obviate some of the worst and most deluded/obsolete aspects of Classical Liberalism.

Liberalism was built by and for 130-IQ Anglos, which leaves me wondering why you think the rest of the world will be as passionate about muh Social Contract. It was created as a post-hoc rationalization for their own political and imperial and separatist ambitions. Muh Social Contract and "inalienable rights" are nothing except noble lies they made to justify their own expansion of power. It's not suitable for the Globalist Age foremost because it's not true, and secondly, like you said, it was made by and for them, not for a Globalist Age.

Liberal values are the greatest opponent to eugenics, this should be obvious.

More comments

Thank you for the thoughtful reply! I totally agree about feudalism. I find it quite amusing how many people on the right stan monarchy when it is quite obvious from the historical record that good rulership, peace, and stability were the exception rather than the rule. While I'm often frustrated with how democracy works in practice, at least we don't have civil wars every twenty years when we change administrations.

It seems hard to deny that A Song of Ice and Fire is a nihilistic deconstruction of high fantasy (Lord of the Rings and its literary descendants). You can't blame this on the adaptation. Twincest was in the original. The Red Wedding was in the original. Ned Stark being true to his morals resulting in not only his death but disaster for Westeros was in the original.

Martin himself is also a blatant culture warrior, having been involved on the establishment (winning) side of the Hugo "puppies" battle. My impression of him is he's got an ego the size of Achilles and holds everyone else (particularly including other writers and SF&F fans, most particualrly his own fans) in contempt.

Right but neither the red wedding nor twincest actually work out for the perpetrators. The Frey's are being slowly murdered by outlaws in the riverlands. Cersei is on trial by the faith of the seven for fornication, and Jaime currently hates her. Meanwhile Ned's former vassals are marching on Winterfell to save his "daughter" from unwanted marriage and sexual violence.

No disagreement with you there. George's twitter is pretty bad.

neither the red wedding nor twincest actually work out for the perpetrators

A major attraction of the book series was seeing how the situation would get even more and more fucked for pretty much everyone. I consider it less nihilistic and more a semi-gleeful entertainment to be enjoyed with virtual popcorn, but maybe that's just me. Ned Stark's fate was a brilliant way to drive home the point that anyone could die at any time, even people who would in other works be protected by being considered protagonists. "Truly anyone can die and almost nobody has plot armor" may not be a big deal nowadays (because so many people have been influenced by Martin), but it was very much different from the norm when the first book was published in 1996.

I would say that it the eventual abandonment of this "no armor" stance is what made the books (and by extension, show) weaken so dramstically. By book 4, there is no one left to die: Bran, Arya, Tyrion, Jaime, and most of the other good characters could no longer be killed because they were needed for the end game, but the books continued to introduce an unending cast of disposable, boring POVs (e.g., everything to do with pirates, the stupid Lady Stoneheart plot). Even Jon Snow's resurrection was predictable.

You aren’t entirely wrong. IMO having Jon Snow be safe and Tyrion probably but not quite guaranteed safe was fine, but the rest should have been as disposable as everyone else. Also agreed about the extra plots.

Right but neither the red wedding nor twincest actually work out for the perpetrators.

Nothing works out for anyone. It's nihilistic. Probably one of the reasons Martin hasn't written more is the only thematically appropriate ending is "rocks fall, everyone dies".

The twincest produces the insane Joffrey, in addition to its other issues.

I reject this framing completely. Is Macbeth nihilistic? Romeo and Juliet? King Lear? Just because it's a tragedy doesn't mean that the author and the writing don't believe in anything.

Wrong Shakespeare plays; you missed Hamlet. Where the White Walkers (or at least Norweigans) do indeed take over Denmark.

The last episode of the show that I watched was the one where the wall is finally breached. My headcannon is that everyone died after that. The End. I have not and will not watch the next episode. It would be a fitting end to Martin's story.

I actually pissed him off enough to get him to reply to my comments multiple times on one of his LiveJournal posts many years ago. The post was something about feminism, I don't recall the details though. The man is most definitely a culture warrior, and a terminally online one at that.

He's also probably the sole driver of traffic to LiveJournal unless he finally moved on at some point.

I do not care that someone on the internet may actually bring to life the strawman assertion that "[A Song of Ice and Fire] is some kind of nihilistic, grimdark, pornographic deconstruction of all that is right and good in the world". Your essay remains a response to a strawman. For comparison, here's the whole text under the "Criticism" of GRR Martin's wikipedia page:

Martin has been criticized by some of his readers for the long periods between books in the A Song of Ice and Fire series, notably the six-year gap between the fourth volume, A Feast for Crows (2005), and the fifth volume, A Dance with Dragons (2011), and the fact that The Winds of Winter, the next volume in the series, hasn't been published since. In 2010, Martin had responded to fan criticisms by saying he was unwilling to write only his A Song of Ice and Fire series, noting that working on other prose and compiling and editing different book projects have always been part of his working process.

I have went through all five stages of grief and have come to accept the fact that the last two books in the series will likely never be written, with the HBO's crappy last two seasons will remain the one-and-only allowed fan-fiction. I am at peace now.

So I have to be honest with you: I did not read your essay past the first three paragraphs. The framing of your essay is I-will-put-on-full-armor-and-destroy-this-strawman, and it turned me off so badly from what you have to say about one of my favorite fantasy series that I don't want to read the rest--even as I recognize by skimming the headlines that you may have something interesting to say about ASoIaF.

And maybe that's just me, and other people here will find the strawman a delightful hook. However, if you do get similar complaints, please consider reposting a revised version of your essay, where instead of this-nobody-thinks-X-but-I-think-Y framing it's just Y. I will gladly read and engage with that essay then.

This is not a strawman. I'm quotting from an actual article that someone wrote on substack that I linked to it.

That's why people came up with the concept of "weakman". It may not be literally a strawman to treat an extreme minority opinion on the Internet as if a substantial number of people believed it, but it may as well be.

There needs to be a name for when people pretend that nobody believes something that people absolutely believe.

Nobody is doing that. This post is a response to one person's opinion, not a claim that most people share said opinion.

It's not an extreme minority opinion. I see people on the right bashing on GRRM all the time. This guy's post got hundreds of likes. It's a real opinion. You can see many examples of it upthread

Martin is a Romantic and places a primal role on Romantic love (which involves sex) as a human motivation. This does not just mean sex but also protecting your family and community of love (which all too abstract in Tolkien’s Gondor, although not as much in the shire).

This comes out a lot in his book Dying of the Light, where both romantic and fraternal love come up against a very rigid and misogynistic honor culture.

Characters drive themselves to ruin because love demands things of them that their social rules simply cannot accommodate.

It's been a while since I read it but seeing a main character risk death because he cannot bring himself to accept the socially mandated restitution for an injury done to his lover because it would enshrine her lower status, because it would limit the outrage to a mere insult to his own honor, makes it hard to conclude that all Martin cares about is sex.

Your analysis looks cogent. I think the portion you are missing, the reason why Martin is such a punching bag (especially for right-leaning fans) is pure culture war. It's not really because he's fat and unhealthy; that's just a convenient reason to mock someone they already dislike. It's not because he's gotten rich and lazy and is almost certainly never going to finish the series (both because he has little motivation to and because he appears to have written himself into a corner, as well as being overtaken by the direction the show went) - his actual fans are mad about that too.

The reason is, simply, Martin is a rich liberal Democrat, and he's gotten in a few notable spats with right-fandom, which put him on their enemies list. Remember JK Rowling was equally hated, until she went "TERF," and most of the right still mistrusts her and sneers at her for being a lefty feminist, but holds their fire because they like it that she fights with trans activists. Stephen King has taken a lot of shit over his Democratic and anti-2A stances, but he's literally too big (and too old) to care; while he posts on Twitter a bit, he does not really get in fights with people, and thus isn't entertaining. But Martin is vocally leftist, active on social media, posting shit about the NFL instead of writing (say what you will about King - he is always writing), and he feeds the trolls, thus encouraging the trolls to keep baiting him.

I trace this back to Vox Day (anyone remember him?), who started the narrative that Martin is a pervert who hates everything that is good and decent and Christian, largely because Martin was one of the first big names who spoke up about booting Vox Day from SFWA.

So Martin is a big name lefty responsible for a major portion of contemporary pop culture, and thus part of the culture war even if he doesn't see himself as a culture warrior.

Martin's post-modernist epic fantasy is, as you say, Lord of the Rings without Tolkien's romanticism. His critiques of Tolkien (generally beloved by right-leaning fans as a trad-Cath, though Tolkien's defense of the Jews and other classically liberal views would disappoint them if he were alive today) and Lord of the Rings have been read as Martin "trashing" Tolkien and thinking he is better than the Old Master. When in fact his critiques are clearly coming from a place of adoration; Martin loves Tolkien (he's said he rereads LotR every few years) but thinks his work was lacking in some dimensions that Martin wanted to explore.

For all the complaints about Martin's "perversity" and grimdarkness, there are authors who've written series with a lot more deviance and pointless, nihilistic violence. There are also authors far leftier than him and far more critical of Tolkien. Michael Moorcock, for instance, who actually does think Tolkien is shit and wrote a series about a sort of effeminate elf prince with an evil sword that's actually a demon that eats people's souls, and the protagonist kills everyone he loves and worships a demon god, and this is a classic in fantasy literature. But Moorcock, again, is too old and not online enough to have really drawn fire from the right.

I trace this back to Vox Day (anyone remember him?)

I stopped reading him after the 2020 election, but dropped back in after this last one. He's apparently writing a furry comic now?

Thanks, this does help clarify things, although I wish people would read his books at critique what was actually there, rather than this strawman that they want to exist. That's far too much to expect from people who are hyper-online probably.

In terms of the other authors being far worse than Martin, I can't help but agree. Joe Abercrombie is another example of a contemporary writer who is much more nihilistic than Martin. I mean the conclusion of his first trilogy is that the world is run by a magical deep state that is impossible to undermine or fight against.

In terms of other positive reinterpretations of Tolkein, I've really been enjoying the saga of the borderlands by the Argentinian author Liliana Bodoc. It's also inspired by the Spanish conquest of the New World. I know your woke radar is probably going off by now, but I actually found it to be much more focused on ecology/preservation of nature (which Tolkein would have agreed with) rather than white-bashing.

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