/lit/ - Literature

it was too long, didnt read

>>11154122
Love it so far.

I read them all, hard read at times but a lot of stuff is different from the show in a better way.

Honestly though unless you just want to burn time there are books perhaps more worth it. But hey at least you can tell chicks you read them!

>>11154122
i heard some show got made out of it, anybody ever heard of it?
it can't be too popular if a fat fuck like him wrote it

>>11154122
Shit written by a chronic masturbator.

>>11154122
I enjoyed reading them but sadly it was probably a waste of time as i doubt he will finish the series

>>11154122
I read 3 of those books but honestly is there any point in continuing the series if there's no guarantee that he's finishing it? He said he wouldn't let anyone continue his series if he accidentally dies or something.

>>11154122
not enough about tax policies

>>11154355
>it's only good if it has an ending
>as long as it has an ending i like it
genre fiction readers in a nutshell

>>11154122
>More Targshit history

Why does the fatman think his fans care about this? Can he just finish the fucking TWOW? Or at least write something more interesting like pre-conquest history of Westeros or Valyria.

>>11154248
my diary desu

I tried reading the first volume. I was so bored by it, I decided to read The Sun Also Rises instead.

Random guy with a spear should have killed Drogon. The entire Daenerys plot is horrible. None of them are great though.

Good deconstruction of medieval heroic expectations and story arcs, but kinda terrible at being a book at the same time. Oh well, many love it. Let them have their peace.

Probably the worst editted books ever sold. He should habe finished already because more than half of what is available should have been cut. So fucking self indulgent. Great ideas and world building and fun characters no doubt. Fuck GRRM.

>>11154379
There is NO way he lives to complete two more books. Just watch the show its streamlined which improves the narrative a lot.

>>11154953
>show goes to shit the moment they run out of original material to adapt.
Not worth it.

>>11154122
It's an okay series written by an absolute hack.

He wanted to make a fantasy version of I, Claudius but completely lacked Graves' talent or life experience.

>>11154398
Pretty much. I read them all and enjoyed them for what they are, even if he never completes the series.

>>11154122
Great for it is, a fantasy series with an interesting setting, lots of houses and characters you can relate to or hate, and yeah violence and constant plot twists. I highly enjoyed reading it, the first three at least, the fourth was boring as hell and fifth though better than the previous was not that good and sometimes I felt Martin was trying to hard. Maybe it's overrated, it's definitely not the best book series ever written, but it's not bad either.

I think most of the hate it gets comes from the enormous popularity of the TV show, and you not being able to be anywhere without people not shutting up about a new episode, spoilers, and how Martin is a genius because he kills characters and that Game of Thrones is the greatest thing ever made, which is definitely cringy and insufferable.

>>11154122
There are plenty of fantasy authors who claim to be doing something different with the genre. Ironically, they often write the most predictable books of all, as evidenced by Goodkind and Paolini. Though I'm not sure why they protest so much--predictability is hardly a death sentence in genre fantasy.

The archetypal story of a hero, a villain, a profound love, and a world to be saved never seems to get old--it's a great story when it's told well. At the best, it's exciting, exotic, and builds to a fulfilling climax. At the worst, it's just a bloodless rehash. Unfortunately, the worst are more common by far.

Perhaps it was this abundance of cliche romances that drove Martin to aim for something different. Unfortunately, you can't just choose to be different, any more than you can choose to be creative. Sure, Moorcock's original concept for Elric was to be the anti-Conan, but at some point, he had to push his limits and move beyond difference for difference's sake--and he did.

In similar gesture, Martin rejects the allegorical romance of epic fantasy, which basically means tearing out the guts of the genre: the wonder, the ideals, the heroism, and with them, the moral purpose. Fine, so he took out the rollicking fun and the social message--what did he replace them with?

Like the post-Moore comics of the nineties, fantasy has already borne witness to a backlash against the upright, moral hero--and then a backlash against the grim antihero who succeeded him. Hell, if all Martin wanted was grim and gritty antiheroes in an amoral world, he didn't have to reject the staples of fantasy, he could have gone to its roots: Howard, Leiber, and Anderson.

Like many authors aiming for realism, he forgets 'truth is stranger than fiction'. The real world is full of unbelievable events, coincidences, and odd characters. When authors remove these elements in an attempt to make their world seem real, they make their fiction duller than reality; after all, unexpected details are the heart of verisimilitude. When Chekhov and Peake eschewed the easy thrill of romance, they replaced it with the odd and absurd--moments strange enough to feel true. In comparison, Martin's world is dull and gray. Instead of innovating new, radical elements, he merely removes familiar staples--and any style defined by lack is going to end up feeling thin.

Yet, despite trying inject the book with history and realism, he does not reject the melodramatic characterization of his fantasy forefathers, as evidenced by his brooding bastard antihero protagonist (with pet albino wolf). Apparently to him, 'grim realism' is 'Draco in Leather Pants'. This produces a conflicted tone: a soap opera cast lost in an existentialist film.

There's also lots of sex and misogyny, and 'wall-to-wall rape'--not that books should shy away from sex, or from any uncomfortable, unpleasant reality of life.

>>11155261
The problem is when people who are not comfortable with their own sexuality start writing about it, which seems to plague every mainstream fantasy author. Their pen gets away from them, their own hangups start leaking into the scene, until it's not even about the characters anymore, it's just the author cybering about his favorite fetish--and if I cyber with a fat, bearded stranger, I expect to be paid for it.

I know a lot of fans probably get into it more than I do (like night elf hunters humping away in WOW), but reading Goodkind, Jordan, and Martin--it's like seeing a Playboy at your uncle's where all the pages are wrinkled. That's not to say there isn't serviceable pop fantasy sex out there--it's just written by women.

Though I didn't save any choice examples, I did come across this quote from a later book:
"... she wore faded sandsilk pants and woven grass sandals. Her small breasts moved freely beneath a painted Dothraki vest . . ."

Imagine the process: Martin sits, hands hovering over the keys, trying to get inside his character's head:

"Okay, I'm a woman. How do I see and feel the world differently? My cultural role is defined by childbirth. I can be bought and sold in marriage by my own--Oh, hey! I've got tits! Man, look at those things go. *whooshing mammary sound effects* Okay, time to write."

Where are the descriptions of variously-sized dongs swinging within the confines of absurdly-detailed clothing? There are a set of manboobs (which perhaps Martin has some personal experience with) but not until book five. Even then, it's not the dude being hyperaware of his own--they're just there to gross out a dwarf. Not really a balanced depiction.

If you're familiar with the show (and its parodies on South Park and SNL) this lack of dongs may surprise you. But as Martin himself explained, when asked why there's no gay sex in his books, despite having gay characters, 'they’re not the viewpoint characters'--as if somehow, the viewpoints he chooses to depict are beyond his control. Apparently, he plots as well as your average NaNoWriMo author: sorry none of my characters chose to be gay, nothing I can do about it.
And balance really is the problem here--if you only depict the dark, gritty stuff that you're into, that's not realism, it's just a fetish. If you depict the grimness of war by having every female character threatened with rape, but the same thing never happens to a male character, despite the fact that more men get raped in the military than women, then your 'gritty realism card' definitely gets revoked.

The books are notorious for the sudden, pointless deaths, which some suggest is another sign of realism--but, of course, nothing is pointless in fiction, because everything that shows up on the page is only there because the author put it there.

>>11155263
Sure, in real life, people suddenly die before finishing their life's work (fantasy authors do it all the time), but there's a reason we don't tend to tell stories of people who die unexpectedly in the middle of things: they are boring and pointless. They build up for a while then eventually, lead nowhere.

Novelists often write in isolation, so it's easy to forget the rule to which playwrights adhere: your story is always a fiction. Any time you treat it as if it were real, you are working against yourself. The writing that feels the most natural is never effortless, it is carefully and painstakingly constructed to seem that way.

A staple of Creative Writing 101 is to 'listen to how people really talk', which is terrible advice. A transcript of any conversation will be so full of repetition, half-thoughts, and non-specific words ('stuff', 'thing') as to be incomprehensible--especially without the cues of tone and body language. Written communication has its own rules, so making dialogue feel like speech is a trick writers play. It's the same with sudden character deaths: treat them like a history, and your plot will become choppy and hard to follow.

Not that the deaths are truly unpredictable. Like in an action film, they are a plot convenience: kill off a villain, and you don't have to wrap up his arc. You don't have to defeat him psychologically--the finality of his death is the great equalizer. You skip the hard work of demonstrating that the hero was morally right, because he's the only option left.

Likewise, in Martin's book, death ties up loose threads--namely, plot threads. Often, this is the only ending we get to his plot arcs, which makes them rather predictable: any time a character is about to build up enough influence to make things better, or more stable, he will die. Any character who poses a threat to the continuing chaos which drives the action will first be built up, and then killed off.

I found this interview to be a particularly telling example of how Martin thinks of character deaths:
"I killed Ned because everybody thinks he’s the hero ... sure, he’s going to get into trouble, but then he’ll somehow get out of it. The next predictable thing [someone] is going to rise up and avenge his [death] ... So immediately killing Robb became the next thing I had to do.

He's not talking about the characters' motivations, or the ideas they represent, or their role in the story--he isn't laying out a well-structured plot, he's just killing them off for pure shock value.

Yet the only reason we think these characters are important in the first place is because Martin treats them as central heroes, spending time and energy building them.

>>11155269
Then it all ends up being a red herring, a cheap twist, the equivalent of a horror movie jump scare. It's like mystery novels in the 70's, after all the good plots had been done, so authors added ghosts or secret twins in the last chapter--it's only surprising because the author has obliterated the story structure.

All plots are made up of arcs that grow and change, building tension and purpose. Normally, when an arc ends, the author must use all his skill to deal with themes and answer questions, providing a satisfying conclusion to a promising idea that his readers watched grow. Or just kill off a character central to the conflict and bury the plot arc with him. Then you don't have to worry about closure, you can just hook your readers by focusing on the mess caused by the previous arc falling apart. Make the reader believe that things might get better, get them to believe in a character, then wave your arms in distraction, point and yell 'look at that terrible thing, over there!', and hope they become so caught up in worrying about the new problem that they forget the old one was never resolved.

Chaining false endings together creates perpetual tension that never requires solution--like in most soap operas--plus, the author never has to do the hard work of finishing what they started. If an author is lucky, they die before reaching the Final Conclusion the readership is clamoring for, and never have to meet the collective expectation which long years of deferral have built up. It's easy to idolize Kurt Cobain, because you never had to see him bald and old and crazy like David Lee Roth.

Unlucky authors live to write the Final Book, breaking the spell of unending tension that kept their readers enthralled. Since the plot isn't resolving into a tight, intertwined conclusion (in fact, it's probably spiraling out of control, with ever more characters and scenes), the author must wrap things up conveniently and suddenly, leaving fans confused and upset. Having thrown out the grand romance of fantasy, Martin cannot even end on the dazzling trick of the vaguely-spiritual transgressive Death Event on which the great majority of fantasy books rely for a handy tacked-on climax (actually, he'll probably do it anyways, with dragons--the longer the series goes on, the more it starts to resemble the cliche monomyth that Martin was praised for eschewing in the first place).

The drawback is that even if a conclusion gets stuck on at the end, the story fundamentally leads nowhere--it winds back and forth without resolving psychological or tonal arcs. But then, doesn't that sound more like real life? Martin tore out the moralistic heart and magic of fantasy, and in doing so, rejected the notion of grandly realized conclusions. Perhaps we shouldn't compare him to works of romance, but to histories.

>>11155269
So many words spilt to express banal ideas about such worthless books. Get your life in order.

>>11155271
He asks us to believe in his intrigue, his grimness, and his amoral world of war, power, and death-not the false Europe of Arthur, Robin Hood, and Orlando, but the real Europe of plagues, political struggles, religious wars, witch hunts, and roving companies of soldiery forever ravaging the countryside. Unfortunately, he doesn't compare very well to them, either. His intrigue is not as interesting as Cicero's, Machiavelli's, Enguerrand de Coucy's--or even Sallust's, who was practically writing fiction, anyways. Some might suggest it unfair to compare a piece of fiction to a true history, but these are the same histories that lent Howard, Leiber, and Moorcock their touches of verisimilitude. Martin might have taken a lesson from them and drawn inspiration from further afield: even Tolkien had his Eddas. Despite being fictionalized and dramatized, Martin's take on The War of the Roses is far duller than the original.
More than anything, this book felt like a serial melodrama: the hardships of an ensemble cast who we are meant to watch over and sympathize with, being drawn in by emotional appeals (the hope that things will 'get better' in this dark place, 'tragic' deaths), even if these appeals conflict with the supposed realism, and in the end, there is no grander story to unify the whole.

>>11154122
I unironically think Martin is a great writer if you want to learn how to do third person limited correctly.

>>11154122
His imagination is greater than his skill in prose. Your love for the characters and the world has to keep you going. I remember skipping paragraphs about the dozens of flags and their crests, and the every dish at the great feast. I had friend who skipped chapters by their least favorite characters. , honestly, would never have finished the series if not for a soul crushing LA rush hour commute and audiobooks, but GRRM does have something to offer.
But after watching someone play Witcher, I think he might have stole a lot of shitfromthedude who wrote that.

His prose is cringey at times but they're fun books

>>11155285
>>11155271
>>11155269
>>11155263
>>11155261
quick question anon: what the fuck?

>>11155261
what you're saying is true, but what's wrong with challenging the zeitgeist? if everyone played by the rules, lots of great things wouldn't exist, even if plenty of garbage is created in the process

The wheel of time is better
*smooths skirts* *tugs braids*

Longwinded anon posts truth

>>11155261
>>11155263
>>11155269
>>11155271
>>11155285
I can't believe I've read all this garbage. First of all, ASoIaF isn't unpredictable at all - it's pretty clear from the start that the kids won't die, nor characters like Tyrion. They're all special snowflakes.
As for the rest of what you said, not only is Martin considered a hero by feminists, but he considers himself a feminist as well, and the purpose of his setting was to show how horrible the patriarchy is and how unfair hierarchies are.
I agree with the stranger than fiction thing, that's true. I can't think of a single character in this series that keeled over from disease or something else, even though that happens all the time.