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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'.
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.
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