#hell i think he comes short in both craftmanship AND female characters wrt my favourite *male* sff authors

[laufire]

feel you about the pettyness towards asoiaf. yeah it was fun to read during my high school years yadda yadda but it steered like the worst discourse i've ever witnessed in my whole life and now we're stuck with people who think that any single female character who doesn't not passively accept gender roles has internalized misoginy. worse bc they act as if grrm is the only writer ever and lowkey forget that also women wrote fantasy since a while and that grrm isn't the only one who write women as protagonists in a fantasy setting lol

I could try to be fair and recognise the books' merits -something they aren't scarce of!-, but plenty of people sing their praises on the regular and frankly, the very idea exhausts me.

The fandom that surrounds the 'verse has succeeded in effectively ruining any joy I could've gotten out of it. It's not so much the Fandom Drama TM. Every large fandom has ridiculous in-fighting, shipwars disguised as clamours for justice, hypocrisy, rampant misogyny :)... I'm not new here. I've had a lot of practice, and I pride myself on how I excel when it comes to finding my own little corner to enjoy a piece of art to my heart's content no matter what anyone else does. But with this one, I'm unable to. At most I will passively reblog some occasional good edit or meta that crosses my path, but I don't think I could put anything of myself into it, iykwim.

And I won't lie, at least a large part of it IS the undue praise I feel GRRM receives. It pisses me off seeing how low people's standards still are regarding the treatment of female characters. That makes me resent the canon 'verse, not just the fandom's interpretation of it. Over the years I kept seeing him getting compared only to male writers such as Tolkien; and yes, I agree, prominent female characters >>> no female characters of importance, LOL. But, seriously? Is that really all we're going to demand here? For fuck's sake. The bar is below ground.

How about we compare him with female SFF writers and see how he fares? I haven't read a tenth of what I'd like from Ursula K. Le Guin, and I already think her inventiveness is beyond his scope. Ana María Matute was a Spanish author that often wrote medieval-adjacent fantasy and her prose was vivid and lovely and heartrendering in a way GRRM could only dream. Angela Carter depicted the very horrors he embeds his stories with in a far more chilling way he ever could. Their female characters certainly surpass his. And that's just scratching the surface.

As I said, I wouldn't erase it from existence because I still think some of the female characters books & show have given us are beyond amazing. I love Catelyn, and Cersei, and Brienne, and Daenerys, and Arya, and yes, Sansa! (my issues with her fandom's tradwifery nonsense, I liked her from the beginning and I still do when I put them aside, that's just a fact). But "I wouldn't erase this particular canon from existence" is not exactly a great endorsement xDD