#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.

[eonweheraldodemanwe]

Right now A Song of Ice and Fire is like Tolkien stoped writing at the end of The Two Towers and started writing The Silmarillion and the other First and Second Age tales.

Imagine leaving the story of The Hobbits unfinished to write instead about Elrond relatives.

That's what Martin did with the unfinished Starks tale and all these Targaryen books and shows.

[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?

[aegor-bamfsteel]

Are Dothraki inspired from Mongols or Amerindian tribes?

According to a 2012 response by GRRM, they are: “The Dothraki were actually fashioned as an amalgam of a number of steppe and plains cultures... Mongols and Huns, certainly, but also Alans, Sioux, Cheyenne, and various other Amerindian tribes... seasoned with a dash of pure fantasy. So any resemblance to Arabs or Turks is coincidental.”

According to this long essay written by Bret Devereaux, an ancient & military history PhD and ASOIAF fan, who did some comparative analysis on the Dothraki and the cultures GRRM mentioned: “We may, I think, now safely dismiss [GRRM’s cultural comparison] as false. What we have found is that the Dothraki do not meaningfully mirror either Steppe or Plains cultures. They do not mirror them in dress, nor in systems of subsistence, nor in diet, nor in housing, nor in music, nor in art, nor in social structures, nor in leadership structures, nor in family structures, nor in demographics, nor in economics, nor in trade practices, nor in laws, nor in marriage customs, nor in attitudes towards violence, nor in weapons, nor in armor, nor in strategic way of war, nor in battle tactics. We might say he has added ‘dashes’ of pure fantasy until the ‘dash’ is the entire soup, but the truth is clearly the reverse: Martin has sprinkled a little bit of water on a barrel of salt and called it just a dash of salt. There is no historical root source here, but instead pure fantasy which – because racist stereotypes sometimes connect, in thin and useless ways, to actual history – occasionally, in broken-clock fashion, manages to resemble the real thing.”

As for myself, I’ve read Mulan fanfiction that was more tasteful and accurate in its depiction of Fantasy Mongols than ASOIAF is with the Dothraki.

[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!

[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!!!!!

[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.

[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.

[ophelieverse]

the green kids visiting their daddy death bed🥰

[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.

[apilgrimpassingby]

Really good analysis, and there's some of my own I want to add on:

I read a lot of critiques of Martin's worldbuilding by Lyman Stone and A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry in my mid-teens, around the same time that I read the first two and a quarter books in the series (lapsed out of reading them and never got back into it, and I hated them anyway). Most of that stuff is cool from a nerd perspective, but pretty vacuous from the perspective of literary criticism. There is, however, a piece of literary criticism I can draw from it.

There's a fundamental tonal dissonance in Martin's work - it's supposed to be an expose of the real unjust and dirty Middle Ages, while set in a world that is, in many ways, far more fantastical and exaggerated than Tolkien's. For example, the only settlement in The Lord of the Rings that's beyond what's plausible for medieval analogues is Minas Tirith, which is explicitly a relic of an age of magic and wonder, whereas all the castles (the Red Keep, Harrenhal, Winterfell, etc.) in A Song of Ice and Fire are absurdly huge by historical standards Just Because.

For Westeros, this isn't story-breakingly bad (especially in the show where budget requires toning things down), but Essos ... there are 1930s pulp novels that are less cartoonish and racist than any given chapter with the Dothraki or Slaver's Bay. The thing that kept me going as long as I did was the comedy value of those chapters.

(Also there's the series' other big flaw - being incredibly immature in regards to sex, violence and especially sexual violence).