#anti asoiaf

[bonniesfamiliar]

I HAVE TO RANT.

The only series of SJM I can ever read is TOG (Throne of Glass) and that's it.

That is the only one of her series that has the best worldbuilding, plot twists, romance and characters.

ACOTAR RUINED fantasy novels for me and not even in a good way.

I mean, in a bad way, that I can't pick up a fantasy novel anymore, in fear that it'll be like ACOTAR.

Yes, I used to be a sweet summer child who thought ACOTAR was amazing, Rhysand was so romantic and Tamlin was a tool.

I was the tool.

I'm now in college and I read ACOTAR & ACOMAF & ACOWAR last year.

I stopped after ACOWAR because NEVER FUCKING AGAIN WILL YOU CATCH ME READ THAT SERIES.

I can't even begin with the non-existent lines between misogyny and romance and hypocrisy and the lack of actual world-building and how I NEED to drag the Archeron Sisters FAR FAR AWAY, YES ALL THREE OF THEM.

[chaosandstardust]

The way that the ASOIAF fandom gaslights itself should be studied. Every once in a while I see posts from people going "I believe it's coming" or "maybe he's already written everything he just doesn't want to face backlash so he's gonna wait until he's dead then release it" or "guys obviously he's rewriting everything." I'm so serious, the faith that some of you have is kinda incredible. Give me some of it. 🫡

(The reason they will never be finished is because grrm doesn't know how to stop adding shit and as a result it's made it impossible to finish; you can't wrap up a million strings in two books, it's not possible, and the way he writes he'd add 10 million more in the process making it even more impossible. And he makes way more money doing TV.)

[tlaquetzqui]

George Rape-Rape’s thing about “oh Tolkien could afford to spend decades working out Elvish” is fucking ironic now that it’s been 12 years since A Dance with Dragons. You could’ve just said “Tolkien was a linguist and I’m not” and nobody would hold it against you. But you had to pretend he had advantages over you, which he absolutely did not, other than talent and not being a piece of shit.

Tolkien didn’t sit around with his thumb up his ass for three US election cycles while people mailed razor blades to his editor and gave one-star reviews to other fantasy writers’ first installments just for not being the concluding installments. You did, George.

[mneiai]

One of the things that has always bugged me about ASOIAF is that the weird seasons are clearly just there to be cool and different, but never actually factor into the culture all that much.

For a place with normally years-long winters, the North, for example, is only about as prepared as the average European-esque medieval kingdom would be for a normal winter of not even a whole year.

AGOT starts towards the end of a decade long summer, yet the northern houses did not make any clear improvements for when winter would be upon them. The only glass house in the North is in winterfell, after millenia of these odd winters, even the more well-off houses haven't built their own. The only innovation we really see in the North is how Winterfell is heated, but, again, it's the only instance of that.

Politically, it's also a mess. The North and Dorne, the two areas that would be the most affected by long seasons, barely have relationships with the middle kingdoms or with each other (and Dorne itself seems to have no real ill affect from a decade long summer, despite the amount of desert and lack of fresh water in many areas). During a long summer, ice shipped from the North would be incredibly valuable in Dorne, and something they could not "just as easily" get from the closer parts of Essos.

In fact, the only people who seem actually adapted for their location and climate are the Ironborn, which is in the worst, least sustainable ways possible.

In real life, climate is one of the largest factors in how a civilization develops, what it sees as important or not, and even how it interacts with its neighbors/outsiders. There was a huge opportunity to really show cultural differences in each of the Kingdoms, and have them be truly foreign places to each other, making the Conquest and 300 years of Targaryen rule over completely disparate people more impressive.

Anyway, what technologies or practices would you like to see from a kingdom based on the climate and weather they'd actually experience with the unpredictable long seasons?

[onewomancitadel]

I'm just gonna say it but the heart of winter forming the foundation for a semi-commonly held theory in the A/SOIAF fandom (where the most important protagonists will go find the heart of winter and kill it) is hilarious to me because it is a literalisation of a poetic device.

But what's even more beautiful is that if GRRM really did set up that idea so obtusely, 'a poetic device is literalised, and then summarily slain' is actually stunningly in line with the series' narrative ethos. That's it. That's the thesis!

[apilgrimpassingby]

Orthodox person (hence sharing a lot of rituals and sensibilities with Roman Catholics) with an interest in medieval England:

Where are the festivals? Where'd Corpus Christi and Candlemas go? Where's Holy Week? Did the quarter days vanish with having normal seasons? You could argue that we don't need them narratively, but festivals weren't just religious and social but also legal - rents were paid and servants were hired and fired on quarter days, marriages could not be performed during Lent, there were frequent legal battles between employees and employers over who covered the costs for missed work due to holy days of obligation, and so on.

Where are the sacraments? The sacrament of Holy Communion commanded intense devotion among medieval people, and does among Roman Catholics and Orthodox today, baptism and confirmation were and are major life milestones, and so on. Does the Faith of the Seven do anything except build temples?

We know their holy book but not their festivals? While the Bible was certainly important to medieval Christianity (most hymns and prayers came directly from or heavily quoted from it), it was something the average believer didn't directly engage with (because the average believer couldn't read), instead encountering it second-hand through icons, prayers, ceremonies and so on.

Why do we not have proper monastic orders? A lot of people became monks and nuns, and not just because of piety - parents apprenticing children they couldn't afford, people who wanted to study medicine or Latin or what have you but couldn't get into a university for whatever reason, knights sick of violence and afraid for their souls, women fleeing abusive marriages, etc. How come the crime-ridden border patrol is more monastic than the actual clergy?

Where are the saints? Saints were a huge part of the religious life of medieval people, with particular saints' days being focal points for communities. Can't we get a few references to someone uttering a prayer St. Eddard, patron saint against poison, prior to going to a meeting with someone suspicious, or something like that?

Do they not have a doctrine of the afterlife? Heaven, Hell and Purgatory occupied much of medieval thought and culture; can't we get a look at what they think about that, even if it's just a generic Heaven and Hell knockoff.

[gojuo]

GRRM's newest blog post

[reneewalkersknives]

one egregious thing the game of thrones show misses out on is that the stark kids are CONSTANTLY thinking abt each other!! there isn’t like a single POV chapter from any of them where they don’t long for their siblings!! Jon wants to have a son and name him Robb!! Bran wants to be a bird so him and his siblings can live in a nest together!! Sansa prays for her siblings every night and makes the Winterfell castle and then gets upset bc there’s no one to throw snow at!! Needle IS Jon!! Arya’s list is her own prayer for her siblings, she doesn’t care that Joffrey is dead bc Robb is too!! Every single one of them believes that their big brother will come to save them!! there’s sm love and tenderness there and GOT missed out on lots of it bc it tries too hard for the grimdark angle without realising that the center of the stark’s story is their love for each other. anyways.

[grandkhan221b]

Part 9 of Drawing Asoiaf Characters That Have An AI Generated Image On Their Wiki Page - Alyx Frey ! One of the women that would have been presented to Robb to mary

As always I got carried away on the rendering lol

[wheel-of-fandoms]

He's such a hack. "What's Aragorn's tax policy"? Bitch, life on your stupid planet wouldn't look anything like life on Earth with "seasons" like that. Also *how* do those "seasons" work, physically, geographically? And yeah, it could be magic, but in that case you have to say so, and explain the magic of it to some extent.

(Granted I only forced my way through the first two books, but in those two he never addressed any of this, or even hinted he wanted to address it. And from all the discussion I see on here, I have seen no indication that later books did either)

Hang on… in Game of Thrones, a character, a lord, is called ‘soft’ for letting the peasants in his land into his castle to protect them from attacks.

… 

THAT’S THE WHOLE FUCKING POINT OF A CASTLE!!!!!

[a-chaotic-dumbass]

favorite thing in asoiaf is that the stark family tree is just filled with haters in every generation. theon stark brandon snow alaric stark cregan stark even ned's brother brandon and lyanna too. even the current kids jon snow robb sansa and arya all have some kendrick lamar level of beef w at least one person. brandon the builder spawned an entire genre of haters

[ophelieverse]

the green kids visiting their daddy death bed🥰

[tlaquetzqui]

The person in A Song of Ice and Fire who mocks a lord for letting peasants into a castle, is his sister.

What fucking “otome game villainess”-ass level of childish fucking idiot is this bitch supposed to be, exactly, George? Because “yeah honey the castle has to be so big so all the farmers can hide here if we get attacked, they grow our food” is a thing every noblewoman would learn around the time she loses her first baby teeth.

See this would be an example of Martin being a misogynist: clearly any day this bungler gets her coif and her smallclothes on the right ends of herself on the first try, is a good day. And Martin thinks a feudal society could afford to have any of its noblewomen remain so unspotted by the stain of basic sense? Women run castle logistics, you moron, she would know where the fucking food comes from.

[chaosandstardust]

GRRM wrote ASOIAF as novels because his pilots weren't being bought. He complained that networks weren't interested in fantasy. He is now contributing to the problem by taking up all the airspace because he's decided that the only fantasy stories worth telling are his. He could be uplifting other fantasy writers but NO. 25 different shows set in MY UNIVERSE plz.

The more I see and hear, the more I’m convinced that Game of Thrones did more to harm, or at least stagnate, the fantasy genre/industry than help it.

[mneiai]

The abuse apologism in asoiaf fandom is so strong it's honestly frightening sometimes that real people can come up with such excuses and defend them so fervently.

[greenqueenhightower]

Alicole was underwhelming, but B&C takes the cake as the worst adaptation of a single asoiaf/f&b event so far:

It was so rushed and whitewashed and did not focus on Helaena at all. Where is Helaena pleading for her son's life and offering up her own life instead? Where is Maelor whom Helaena was coerced to offer up as a sacrifice and does not bear to look at? Where is Heleana being forced to make a decision that haunts her entire life? She is obviously traumatized by what happened, but having her just say "they killed the boy" does not do her character and her grief justice. I really hope we get to see more of Helaena in episode 2 because it would be really upsetting if the show just brushes her off.

Not to mention Alicent's absence from the events of B&C. Alicent was really there, worried for her daughter's and grandchildren's lives, and was the first person to offer Helaena some comfort and consolation. The more I think about it the more mad I get because we got robbed of what could have been a truly harrowing and distressing scene that would do the events and the characters justice. Book!B&C was about two mothers and their shared agony, pain, and grief. It could have been powerful and shocking from an acting perspective alone if they had followed the events of the book.