#grrmposting

[jozor-johai]

Because the concept of "historical accuracy" gets brought up in regards to ASOIAF despite it being a fantasy series and therefore not requiring historical accuracy, I think it's really worth realizing the degree and manner in which GRRM is drawing from history. He consults historical texts to be sure, but what he seems to focus on is how the style of older historical texts delivers these tales as stories, and how much hearsay makes it into the documents.

GRRM likes stories, more than history for its own sake, which makes sense; he's a storyteller. This appreciation is how we get Fire & Blood, plenty of attention to tales told rather than representative history.

Emblematic of this is his response to his inspiration for Stannis: GRRM says that Stannis is inspired by Tiberius Caesar, but he qualifies that this is "in some part Tiberius from history, but to a greater extent specifically Tiberius from the TV series 'I, Claudius'" (my paraphrasing). He's open with the fact that, rather than trying to mirror history, GRRM is drawing inspiration from other stories and media about history.

And so we should not understand ASOIAF as a fantasy filter over a historical framework, we should understand ASOIAF as building on and responding to stories first, both fantasy and history—and especially where the two get confused.

So when people complain that his feudal model is more rooted in pop-history and has little actual functionality, I think that's fine; perhaps it's even the point, whether GRRM intends it to be or not. ASOIAF is not the real medieval era, but rather has roots in the fantastic way that medieval aesthetics have been developed.

This is also applicable to his oft-cited inspiration for the series as a whole structure, the War of the Roses. GRRM frequently says that the War of the Roses was the single biggest influence, but lately I've been wondering if what he really means is that the Henry VI + Richard III Shakespeare tetralogy is the biggest influence, because in truth the Shakespearean parallels we find often feel more informative for the text of ASOIAF than the strictly historical comparisons.

[mouthlessmaiden]

grrm when there’s a female character he doesn’t know what to do with

[jozor-johai]

People all know about the "Meereenese Knot" now but there's an interesting phenomenon that I think has happened in the fandom here, and one that I wish people appreciated when considering the progress on The Winds of Winter.

In the last decade+, readers have done all sorts of investigation and prediction to guess about and suss out what made the "Knot" so difficult and what GRRM was planning ahead for. In the midst of that, I think it's gotten really underrated that we still don't actually know, really.

Even before A Dance With Dragons came out, GRRM was talking about the difficulty of unraveling the "Meereenese Knot," as he himself called it, but even after ADWD's release, he never actually explained what it is that he had to solve. And the reason for this is: the problems of the Meereenese Knot weren't problems with DANCE—they were problems in how to begin WINDS. GRRM had to plan ahead to make sure that his ADWD plotlines were syncing up and lining up correctly to make everything that he wanted to happen in WINDS possible.

During his ADWD book tours, he said he would finally explain when TWOW released, but since WINDS is still not out, still haven't really gotten the explanation for what his possible options were, what exactly he's aiming to achieve. We know it concerns the characters converging on Meereen, and that's it—the rest is fan speculation.

One reason it's unfortunate that this gets so underrated is because understanding this gives us some really interesting avenues of WINDS speculation in some of the the new POVs that he added in DANCE: Melisandre, Jon Connington, and Barristan. JonCon he's spoken about the most directly, but in the context that GRRM is still not talking about the Knot openly, its not enough to say that these POVs solved problems in ADWD, they were introduced because they solved problems in WINDS. This give us lots of interesting questions: what are the ways in which Barristan or Melisandre might be important in WINDS that we might not even know about yet?

And that brings me to the second reason I want to highlight this detail, the writing of WINDS. Since we know this is GRRM's process, it's easy to see how this process would make WINDS so incredibly taxing to write. For all that GRRM self-describes himself as a "gardener," we need to understand that does not mean is not planning; he is in truth planning a lot ahead.

If the difficulty with the Knot was in part the complexity of Meereen, and the difficulty of bringing storylines together in a way so the timing, logistics and character motivations all made sense to lead to the next step, then WINDS is going to see that exact complex scenario tenfold. Of course this is not a new idea: many people have pointed out that this is part of what makes WINDS hard.

But what makes the Meereenese Knot easier by comparison is this: GRRM only had to know enough of what happens in WINDS to get to the next step properly. For WINDS, it's not enough to just know the next step. The next step after WINDS requires planning the last step.

I think we can safely say that the ending to A Dream for Spring is what he's talking about here:

I know the broad strokes, and I've known the broad strokes since 1991. I know who's going to be on the Iron Throne. I know who's gonna win some of the battles, I know the mayor characters, who's gonna die and how they're gonna die, and who's gonna get married and all that. The major characters.

Finishing WINDS requires figuring out how to make everything line up to get to where ADOS begins, but that requires figuring out how ADOS begins, and figuring out how ADOS ought to begin means figuring out how to achieve this planned ending from where ADOS starts off.

So if Meereenese Knot required figuring out how WINDS began, solving the comparable "Knots" in WINDS requires basically being confident in his ability to see a clear shot from the end of this book to the end of the story, period.

I’m not saying I think GRRM is writing ADOS simultaneously, because an outline is not a book, but I am saying it makes a ton of sense why it's taking this long. Not only is it a very intensive process, there's a lot about it which is going to be like writing two books in this time. Not actually writing two books, but certainly solving two books' worth of problems.

[mouthlessmaiden]

literally no author does “minor character with memorable appearance and just enough backstory given to be interesting but still mysterious” better than grrm

[mouthlessmaiden]

happy 10 years guys i want to fucking die

[mouthlessmaiden]