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