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Notes -
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.
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