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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.
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.
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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?
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.
Why?
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.
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.
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".
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.
[...]
[...]
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:
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.
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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:
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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).
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.
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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.
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"
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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