Like many successful authors, Martin needed a wise, ruthless editor.

@Hfsm33

2 ай бұрын

Winds of Winter going over 1500 pages and still another book to go is insane. It's clear someone should have told him "NO" all the way back in Feast for Crows.

@AdamBlack

2 ай бұрын

@@Hfsm33 This is literally a Robert Jordan WoT retread. excessive plotting, die before finishing ( I was so bored of the HUGE "game of Houses" Backstory in wot i didnt initially see GOT )

@hamzamahmood9565

2 ай бұрын

​@@Hfsm33The thing is, he doesn't want to rush the plot in order to finish it within 2 books, that would make everything seem very forced and unnatural. This magical number of "7 books" is the great limiting factor for ASOIAF, and honestly, I'd just prefer him give us the 6th book and tell his fans to write up the ending themselves, however many additional books it takes.

@ninab.4540

2 ай бұрын

​@@hamzamahmood9565IT'S BEEN 13 YEARS SINCE HIS LATEST BOOK IN THE SERIES

@LordSluggo

2 ай бұрын

@@hamzamahmood9565 On the one hand, yes, no one wants a half-baked, rushed and unsatisfying ending. However, there's so many side characters, side plots, and fetch quests set up in AFFC and ADWD that it's no surprise he's had trouble bringing it all together. Likewise, while I understand all the symbology in his writings, his descriptions of feasts, banners, halls, etc., has just become rambing and self-indulgent. Having read AFFC directly after ASoS, it was blatantly apparant that George was already getting bored with his own story back then.

When the sun rises in the west, sets in the east, when the seas go dry and the mountains blow in the wind like leaves, _then_ ASoIaF will be finished

@maciejszulc2684

2 ай бұрын

I just realised this prophecy sounds awfully like a nuclear war.

@XUKcomic

2 ай бұрын

😂😂😂

@EvilDoresh

2 ай бұрын

@@maciejszulc2684 Imagine how many books he'd need for his world to enter the nuclear age

@ninab.4540

2 ай бұрын

I always understood it as BOW

@gorilladisco9108

2 ай бұрын

... and real socialism will be successfully implemented.

Hard to call him a gardener, when you consider that gardening consists to a large degree of cutting, trimming and removing stuff.

@Amantducafe

2 ай бұрын

He's a Bonsai gardener

@midgetwthahacksaw

2 ай бұрын

​@@AmantducafeExcept ASoRaF is a Redwood he's pruning not a Bonsai.

@christianpetersen163

2 ай бұрын

Oh but he does remove a lot of "stuff", doesn't he? 🤔

@anon2427

2 ай бұрын

@@Amantducafethat is the exact opposite of what he is. GRRM is a mint gardener if anything

@Amantducafe

2 ай бұрын

@@anon2427 No no, we all got it wrong, he actually likes animal husbandry

The Witcher series is even more pessimistic, but it is kind of Gilgamesh-like in its answer of "Oh well, life is shit and then you die, but do try to live as well and as kindly as you can while you still can."

@MagneMirare

2 ай бұрын

I do want to visit the Witcher in the future. I think it did right what ASOIAF missed. Part of it seems to be hidden somewhere in the undeniable Slavic nature of the books. And I think that you are onto something with concept kindness, but I'll have to think about it more.

@nebojsag.5871

2 ай бұрын

@@MagneMirare The books are violently anti-utopian. They wholeheartedly accept that the world is horrible, and if you read it carefully, you will find that there is a strong Marxist-materialist current in there, as an explanation for why the world is so horrible, but it rejects the Marxist call to political action, or any call to political action aimed at social transformation whatsoever, including Enlightenment imperialism, insurrectionary struggles of the colonized as well as scientific technocracy, but this denounciation is the crassest and least-skillfully written, by far. It is also deeply doomerist about climate change. There is an old joke from the 90s in East Europe that encapsulated the world-view. "Comrade, did you watch the news today? It turns out communism is bullshit, all the good things we were told about it were lies!" "Yes comrade, but we already knew this. Now capitalism is coming, and the communists most certainly did not lie about what capitalism is like"

@shorewall

2 ай бұрын

I was gonna say, at least the Witcher has its East European background as a reason for being pessimistic. :D

@ninab.4540

2 ай бұрын

​@@shorewallHmm. F***.

@TheTeodorsoldierabvb

2 ай бұрын

@@MagneMirare As a Slav, I can kind of confirm this. We never lived easy lives but the harder it is the more stubborn we become, as a culture. There's sort of... fatalistic heroism around.

GRRM subverted himself out of existence.

@heinricho

2 ай бұрын

💯Perfect!

@anon2427

2 ай бұрын

This is a problem with modernism in general. You can only deconstruct so much until you have nothing left. He is truly a product of his time

@petermuller9480

2 ай бұрын

Your statement is correct, but I would like to add, that there is nothing wrong with including a little bit of deconstruction. If it stays A LITTLE BIT, mind you. GRRM failed to understand the concept of moderation. It's like writing a story about war, but all you do is describe battles and nothing else. Of course, it fails as a story, because it doesn't function as a proper story anymore. @@anon2427

@wawawuu1514

2 ай бұрын

@@anon2427 Isn't deconstructing postmodernism, rather than modernism (as well as GRRM being time-wise postmodern, all the modernists gotta be dead for quite a while now) or am I confusing them?

@DyLeN17

2 ай бұрын

​@@anon2427metamodernism would disagree

The beauty of Martin’s failure is that it’s created a huge void for fantasy consumers that previously unrecognized/new writers can now potentially fill.

@kosmas173

2 ай бұрын

And that none of them will be ever universally recognized since they won't be written by Martin himself.

@franesustic988

2 ай бұрын

What about people that are now hesitant to read any unfinished series? Thereby killing off countless fantasy writers from the get go (since people are disinclined to buy a mere pt 1 of 5)? Did you consider that void?

@numb3r5ev3n

2 ай бұрын

It's him riffing on inspiration from Tad Williams and his Memory, Sorrow, And Thorn Trilogy. He made expys of some of the characters and copied some of the plot elements and went in his own direction with it, but he doesn't seem to have known really where he was going with it. Tad Williams has responded by writing a new trilogy as a follow-up to his original one, riffing on some of Martin's plot elements in ASOIAF. But he's managed to finish this follow-up trilogy in less than ten years. The final book is being released near the end of 2024. We've yet to get so much as a release date for The Winds Of Winter from Martin.

@a.j.carter2294

2 ай бұрын

@@franesustic988 Sure I considered that. I think that’s their problem. People will spend their money how they will. We can’t blame Martin for that.

@a.j.carter2294

2 ай бұрын

@@kosmas173 Lol okay? Most authors I’d say don’t care about “universal recognition.” That’s a vain pursuit. Besides, to say no other author will achieve a similar level of fame/recognition is ridiculous frankly.

Earlier today I came across this video by a KZreadr called Jess of the Shire about "The Lord of the Rings" sequel that JRR Tolkien attempted to write in the late 60s/early 70s. It was tentatively titled "The New Shadow" and he had completed 3 drafts of the opening chapter. It was set over a century after the end of The War of the Ring. I won't go into plot details you can hear in the video, but Tolkien finally gave up writing this because it is hypothesized that going into an re-emergence of Evil in a Human world without Elves and Dwarves was very depressing to him. Hobbits were not even mentioned so they may not have been central characters in this book either. Since "The New Shadow" book's proposed theme mirrored other cynical books that already dealt with this topic during his lifetime he lost his enthusiasm to proceed. Plus, he was still trying to complete what became "The Silmarillion" that was finished by his son, Christopher, after his death. Instead of extending his story into the 4th Age, he seems to have decided what he had finished in "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings" was enough. kzread.info/dash/bejne/mGx6rJdpk6m-nc4.html

@crusader2112

2 ай бұрын

I do think there was something interesting in the New Shadow, but I'm glad he didn't finish it. The story ends perfectly with the Lord of the Rings.

@SmarkAngel

2 ай бұрын

Ha! I came here from her video about things in the movie she doesn't like. Big fan of her work.

@CubeParrot1

2 ай бұрын

It wasn't interesting for him to continue on, if I recall he stated so himself.

@loqutor

2 ай бұрын

I came here after this video showed up in the recommendations of her video.

@Ushakov_Mykyta

2 ай бұрын

@@CubeParrot1 Yeah, because LOTR is ultimately about valar, maiar, elves, hobbits and orcs. In the 4th age all of these are effectively gone from the world, all that's left are humans in their shiny new golden age. There is little potential for interesting storytelling for Tolkien. The only thing he could do was to tell about corruption, decadence, cults and the sins of men. About how humanity with it's many achievements and great wisdom will come again to the same old BS that had them fall when Numenor sank, had Arnor fall to the Witch-King and nearly had Gondor fall during The War of the Ring. I can see how this can be depressing for a man of strong faith like Tolkien.

I don't think Martin helped himself by agreeing to his series being turned into a tv series before he'd finished it - particularly knowing how long he's taken to write each book towards the end. He gave D&D an outline for how he THOUGHT it would end (bearing in mind he's a 'gardener' writer at heart,) and they seriously dropped the ball with it, leaving legions of fans with a sour taste in their mouths that provoked a backlash about how much they hated the way it ended. So now he's stuck; does he risk continuing with his 'original' outline, hoping he can make it a better version than D&D's hated one? Or does he go in another direction entirely, to appease his disgruntled fans - but risk creating something they hate even more?

@Sorain1

2 ай бұрын

He should stick with it. Both because he's already done the work for it in the previous books and because it's the only way to stick it to them for spiking the ball instead of finishing the play properly. People on the internet speculated that he had them deliberately do a bad ending, so his ending would be better recived. I don't believe in that, but I can see where people get that idea from. Every attempt to rewrite the plots of major series to 'undo a spoiler' have been disasters, see Mass Effect 3 for an example of 'ending leaked, hastily rewritten, narrative disaster ensues' that is very fresh in mind.

@keybladechosn1

2 ай бұрын

JK Rowling wasn't done with Harry Potter when the film series came out. I f I recall the final book came out when Order of the Phoenix film came out. So that was 5th movie when she finished the series.

@jasonkerbs806

2 ай бұрын

I simply don't see how this could be the case, with what we saw in the show being the outline for what he had in mind. For one, the later half of the show left out many very important characters and plotlines which are very much active in the books (Aegon and the Golden Company landing in Westeros, and already taking castles, or Victarion taking his fleet to find Daenerys, or Euron raiding and invading the Reach, or the impending battle between Stannis and the Bolton/Frey armies in the North, Davos being sent to find Rickon beyond the wall, etc.) At best, he only told them a few key ideas, like the possible resurrection of Jon Snow, and Daenerys inevitably ending up a complete lunatic like her father which was always apparent anyways if you actually paid any attention to her characters actions

@muzgash

2 ай бұрын

Martin is laughing all the way to the bank. I doubt that he financially needs to create anything anymore and no doubt the thrill is gone with this story. The genie is out of the bottle and off doing his misdeeds elsewhere.

@LordSluggo

2 ай бұрын

@@keybladechosn1 JK Rowling also finished her series in less time than it's taken George to *not* finish one book. The problem was, the signs were there even back when George made his deal with HBO. A Dance with Dragons was allegedly mostly-done when a Feast for Crows was published (being it was basically one huge book being split into two parts) and it still took him six years to finish.

This. This has always been both his curse and blessing. GRRM's problem as a writer is that he doesn't see himself as a problem solver but a problem finder. I think it was Orwell commenting on Kipling. Some people remain ever in the mental space that it's them you tell you what's wrong and why. In simple terms a more modern expression would be "speak truth to power." They enjoy it because there's no responsibility in it. They don't really want to be in charge, they want to tell people in charge what to do. That way nothing is their fault. GRRM does this exactly in short works. He can zero in on something specific. ASOIAF is full of every example he can find of how a way of ruling can be or go wrong, or be undermined. But I don't think GRRM can actually find a way to write anything working. He can't take a position and say "this is better or best." Because someone (including himself) will always see a potential flaw. Played out in a short story focused on one side of a coin it's simple and straightforward. You don't expect an answer, just a critique. In these novels he's not flipping a coin or two, he's rolling dice. Worse, all his coins are tails and all his dice are loaded. He's too terrified of presenting anything as "the right way to do it." He famously critiques JRRT's Aragorn ending with "he ruled well and just." The problem now is, how do you end the story with Bran as a king? When people ask how Bran ruled what does he say? How does he tell us how Bran ruled well if GRRM can only criticize how it's gone wrong or will go wrong? He can put all the pieces in the place he imagines them going, but he can never tell you why they're the right places.

@MagneMirare

2 ай бұрын

This is great. "Problem finder instead of problem solver" really resonates with me.

@Hero_Of_Old

2 ай бұрын

Thats just a classic liberal lol

@mirceazaharia2094

2 ай бұрын

@@Hero_Of_Old I really do feel sorry for the classical liberals. They dare not move and struggle and fight, lest they commit mistakes and sins. They stand still and feel virtuous, and even throw out the baby with the bathwater. Because they always condemn old ideas which are nevertheless still useful and valid. We achieve nothing by throwing out the old which is still useful and good, or by being paralyzed by fear. Go on, move forth, struggle, fight, make mistakes, sin if you must. But don't rot in one place. Go forth, struggle, learn, dare to try to do better, and do not forget the ancient ideas which still work. We must sin and potentially risk committing atrocities if we are to have the chance to make wonders. Liberals don't want wonders. They just want the pain of living to stop. Poor liberals. Life is pain with a purpose.

@mirceazaharia2094

2 ай бұрын

@@MagneMirare I get it. George suffered from "feature creep" starting at the fourth book. He kept piling on things that added complexity WITHOUT necessarily accounting how that complexity will affect his ability to keep track of everything. Where people need to go in order for certain things to happen, the frame of mind and things that happen to them which push them into a direction or another. The more moving parts there are, the more interactions there are between those moving parts (characters, locations, themes etc). The more decisions there are being made, which play off other decisions or influence other people's decisions. ASOIAF is an enormous, hugely complex clock with a confused clockmaker, who has lost or burned the blueprints. Or maybe he assembled it by ear. Maybe there never was a blueprint. Maybe there never will be. However, for a complex story which keeps track of all of its parts, you might want to check out ONE PIECE. It's complex, and supposedly excellent, from what I've heard.

@jamesboulger8705

2 ай бұрын

Well written.

The Distributist did a very similar video essay on this topic several years ago, before the end of the tv series and was down voted to heck for pointing out that both book and TV show have no good way to end the same reasons you seem to be describing.

@chadnine3432

2 ай бұрын

Truth makes people angry.

@reactiondavant-garde3391

2 ай бұрын

It was pretty funny how right he was.

@ninab.4540

2 ай бұрын

That's the beauty of the truth. It never changes. It just is. ​@@chadnine3432

@adamnesico

2 ай бұрын

Well, the ending of the show wasn’t bad. The bad thing was the rushed and often nonsensical way to arrive there.

@reactiondavant-garde3391

2 ай бұрын

@@adamnesico But it was? It is not make sense thet Jon and the Wildlings go back to north (winter is still coming and it will be the harsest winter for decades), Sansa becaem queen of the north is pretty stupid (if anything Jon should), Bran became the king of Westeros when the same dynasty rule over the independent north is pretty retarded, worse, Bran is crippled so can't have children and can'T lead armise (both impotant things in the middle ages) and even even worse is thet Bran is not even follow the same religioun as the Westeros and he is basicly the leader of a different religioun. Imagine thet the Pope became the Kaliph in the middle ages, madness.

This in general is the issue you get with trying to rely solely on deconstruction and postmodernism from a philosophical standpoint. If there is no reference point to base you ideas on, you lose the ability to actually stand for anything which makes thematic clarity extremely hard to pull off. Deconstruction needs a constraint to turn it into a useful tool and not just a hammer of destruction.

@shorewall

2 ай бұрын

100%. The reason why Postmodernism has a bad rep is because it tore down what came before, without giving us anything good to replace it with.

@maxthepaladin2147

2 ай бұрын

There's no point in destroying a thing if you're not going to build anything from the pieces

@davejacob5208

Ай бұрын

@@maxthepaladin2147so getting rid of bombs is only good if we recycle the metal and chemicals? or what about getting rid of ideologies, like facism? "you mustnt just get rid of them! only if you have a new ideology that controles the state! anarchism isnt better than facism!"?

@maxthepaladin2147

Ай бұрын

@@davejacob5208 1. You're blowing my point way out of proportions. We were talking about art, not munitions or politics. I was just trying to describe my stance on deconstructing tropes. 2. Godwyn's law and whataboutism. 3. Your examples aren't actually wrong. Destroying bombs, while not a bad thing necessarily, will leave a lot of potentially dangerous debris. It's wasteful and careless not to do anything with them, or at least contain them. Similarly, if you leave a formerly-oppressive country in a state of anarchy, a new, just as oppressive regime will soon take its place. Just look what happened after the French revolution. Again tho, we're not talking about munitions and politics here, so this is as far as I shall delve in either of those subjects

@davejacob5208

Ай бұрын

@@maxthepaladin2147yeah, examples supposedly dont fit, because art supposedly does not deconstruct politics, especially within martins book, so its supposeldy all just whataboutism. also, "building anything from [a destroyed things peaces] is supposedly the same thing as handling the debris in whatever way necessary to make it non-dangerous. also, its supposedly self-evident that after facism, you cannot have anarchism stay or turn into any non-bad-system, because you can name examples where it did turn into a bad system (there are more examples of similar stuff happening, but no number of them will prove your point, since your position depends on all conceivable scearios where anarchism follows after fascim, not just some number of real ones.)

I don’t see how he can satisfactorily wrap up the story in just two books

@wawawuu1514

2 ай бұрын

He alluded to the possibility himself.

@jonathanemerling1071

2 ай бұрын

@@wawawuu1514 I don’t care if he has to write ten more books, I’d just like him to finish the story.

@wawawuu1514

2 ай бұрын

@@jonathanemerling1071 Me too. At this point, I wonder if he'll even finish TWoW.

@HiveFleetUlfang1

2 ай бұрын

The last two books didn't cover enough ground, because he wants TWoW to be the one that's made of reveals.

@ninab.4540

2 ай бұрын

​@@HiveFleetUlfang1Well I was a teen when he started to dro the chapters and now I'm 34. No one waits forever.

Ironically, the theme of failure runs as much through Tolkien's works as does Martin's. The Trees fail. The Noldor fail. Numenor fails. Isildur, the Wizards, Frodo, all fail. It is a given that if Sauron falls, tyat much will be.lost or diminished. Ellesar's dynasty, however long it will last, is a fading reflection of Numenor's glory. Still, despite all that, there is still hope and joy; still trust that eucatastrophe will occur again; that Manwe still sees and will send an Eagle from time to time; that the Song of Eru is still being sung; that above the deepest shadows, light still shines. That is what seems to be missing from Martin's wirk.

@sullivandmitry1416

Ай бұрын

Yes, this is however seeped in both religious allegory and historical understanding. The idea that Eru has all of this planned so it doesn’t matter, as well as the continuing diminishing ideals of the old world due to industrialization and spiritual disconnection. Tolkien and his work are and understanding that the world is easily corrupted, but so long as men strive to better life, it doesn’t matter how much evil prevails. Martin almost makes a point to say that man is just fucked forever and will continue to ruin shit forever. In every instance that a character tries to better or be better, they are cut down by either the world or others. Danny wants to free all slaves, but becomes a tyrant herself looming over what are essentially indentured servants. Jon believe in honesty and truth, but at every turn must fight off assholes who want him dead. Each character fails and fails and fails to be better and so the story becomes nihilistic to the max.

I always figured he was being a punk by doing one last subversion of just not finishing the story.

@Whippets

2 ай бұрын

Never thought of it that way, but yes. lol

@ptptpt123

2 ай бұрын

He will be left in the trash bin of history. No one will recommend to read his books, nor watch those garbage shows.

@davidmauriciogutierrezespi5244

2 ай бұрын

I thought the same thing, already making my own ending in a fanfic

@bulletghost3452

2 ай бұрын

​@@ptptpt123 I mean, the world of Asoiaf is grim dark and unique within fantasy novels but it would be a small mention in the comparison and mentions of other well made fantasy worlds.

@NoidoDev

Ай бұрын

@@davidmauriciogutierrezespi5244 And he once said he really doesn't like fan fiction.

I favor a simpler theory: that GRRM simply built up his own expectations for the ending of the saga, to the point where he knew he could only fail to meet those expectations. Once that happened, he has been writing away from the ending instead of toward it. This is literary procrastination at its worst. A story can always be finished. You just have to be willing to settle for the ending you can write, and not insist on the ending that you dream of.

@cinderbones

2 ай бұрын

Yeah, all this postmodernism talk is nonensense

@theonetypingthis7186

Ай бұрын

​@@cinderbonesmartin's idea and expectations for his ending are rooted in the postmodernism mentioned by this video

I laughed hard when you said Martin wants to be gardener in the Amazon

In Dreamsongs GRRM wrote "My career is littered with the corpses of dead series." He was talking about his short stories, which he spent his early career on. He switched to novels later, and they were all standalone until A Game of Thrones. He talks about his Tuf stories as breaking his curse, but he only wrote enough of those to compile into one "fix-up" novel, rather than a series of novels. His failure to finish ASOIAF may be less specific to ASOIAF and more to Martin just never being a person who has pulled off a series of novels. Contrast that with one of his inspirations for the series, Tad Williams. I haven't read Williams, but after he finished his trilogy of deconstructive fantasy novels he was able to write more series, finish them, and then go back to the world he created earlier. Benioff & Weiss had decided on seven seasons LONG before Star Wars became a possibility.

@ninab.4540

2 ай бұрын

One of them worked on the script of Troy (2004) because of family connections. Achilles being a pretty brute is his fault. Still haven't forgiven him.

@clownpendotfart

2 ай бұрын

@@ninab.4540 That was David Benioff, after The 25th Hour. What family connections in Hollywood does he have?

The more the time pass as GRRM struggle to release 1 book the more i appreciate the works of Tad Williams for releasing a new Osten Ard tetralogy in the same amount of time.

@protarngonist2449

2 ай бұрын

Yeah it’s pretty ironic that the guy who inspired George to write A Song of Ice and Fire, not only finished his series but is now working on a sequel series. Same goes to Steve Erickson who wrote Mazalan Book of the Fallen. The dude finished his original series, then a prequel trilogy, and now working on an sequel to the original series

@pietzsche

2 ай бұрын

@@protarngonist2449 Malazan is way better than ASoIF too imo

@ninab.4540

2 ай бұрын

​@@protarngonist2449How about the dude who released two books in 2 decades? His work is high fantasy too.

@adamnesico

2 ай бұрын

@@protarngonist2449Did those guys made a lot of prophecies in their books that his characters must fulfill? Martin has putted himself in muddy sands.

@LordVader1094

2 ай бұрын

@@adamnesico Almost every fantasy series has a bunch of prophecies, it's hardly an excuse lol Martin's entire style is not adhering to things like prophecies NEEDING to be true.

There's a good side for the unfinishness of his work: we give it our own non-cynical ending.

@WeirdTale

2 ай бұрын

Or we can give it a tragic ending. I expected The Song of Ice and Fire in the end to be an Apocalypse Log of everything that lead to a Dark Fantasy monster infested icy wasteland as narrated by Brandon Stark. It's a good enough ending and what I expect from a setting that is morally bankrupt serving with as a grand fantasy Sodom and Gomora, and a warning of what happens when all the human flaws that allowed the White Walkers to do that to the world are not overcome.

@donaldhysa4836

2 ай бұрын

@@WeirdTale That would be cool but RR Martin had to plan for everyone to die cause global warming bad mkay? We are all gonna die mkay? RR Martin is a talented writer, but he is an idiot. A talented idiot

@lephinor2458

2 ай бұрын

That or if someone takes the throne I think it should be Stannis mainly because out of everyone else in the books he is one of the most honorable and just king.

@NancyLebovitz

2 ай бұрын

@@WeirdTale It can't remain an icy wasteland because spring is coming.

@brendanfoster5320

2 ай бұрын

@@NancyLebovitzAll we know is that there’s a dream of spring. Maybe that’s all spring will ever be - a dream, never to be realised again.

I refuse to read any of Martins other books or let myself get sucked into his worlds if he’s going to leave them unfinished. Plus his bad attitude towards fans is kryptonite

@mirceazaharia2094

2 ай бұрын

I dislike him and his values quite a lot, personally. But I do not think that he is talentless or completely incompetent. Read GoT, absorb whatever you find useful, discard what is not. Read those books to the point where the story leaves off. Learn what you can from it. Learn from its successes, and especially its failures. Apply these lessons to your own life, and if you're an artist, your own work. I find A Song Of Ice And Fire to be INFURIATING, utterly lacking in genuine heroes that I can root for. It subverts and desecrates tropes which I hold dear at nearly every turn. But it's compelling, kind of like a trainwreck, sinking ship, collapsing building. It's a spectacle of suffering, destruction and misery. An operatic catastrophe, with at least a fraction of the energy of the Tragedy of Siegfried and Kriemhild. Even from bad, unsatisfying or disappointing things, good and useful lessons can nevertheless be learned. Read it.

@hariman7727

2 ай бұрын

Please give other writers a chance though. If other writers can't sell their book 1, there will be at least a generation or more of authors who never write epics that will put GoT to shame.

@squamish4244

2 ай бұрын

@@mirceazaharia2094 These are all fair points. My biggest takeaway is that ASOIAF is not even a good tragedy. For that, the main characters have to possess an inherent nobility. Instead, most of them do not, and it is just a nihilistic mess, that tells us nothing about humanity that we can't find in the news every day. Nothing that appeared to be set up amounted to anything, not the Lord of Light, not the Others, not the Children, not anything. No cosmic message. No message other than "people suck and anyone can die". Really, George? That's you're brilliant insight? Good lord. F*ck off with that patronizing sh*t. What a failure of a series. Jesus Christ. Well, at least George tried. He made some narrative mistakes about 20 years ago, and never recovered. Too bad, so sad. He'll be fine with the mound of cash that he sleeps on for the rest of his life.

@mocha5742

2 ай бұрын

Can you really blame the man for being annoyed with some fans when they ask him the same question hundreds of times a day and insult him

@ChainedFei

2 ай бұрын

I dislike him not just because of that, but because of his disrespect for Professor Tolkien.

He subverted the expectation that a fantasy series should be finished

This is why you need to know how you end a series before you begin and do everything you can to make every action a brushstroke in that final piece.

@MagneMirare

2 ай бұрын

But that is impossible. There are enormous benefits when an author essentially tries to surprise himself. That's where the magic happens. It's simply not that easy, just as 'not doing it this way at all.

@blackchibisan8116

2 ай бұрын

@@MagneMirare Allow me as someone who surprised myself through minor changes that felt in character that changed the final painting completely to respond to your claim. When you surprise yourself and the plot begins to go somewhere you couldn’t have expected, you need to embrace it, but take some extra time to figure out what your new end game looks like. Because if you are not constantly keeping what your final chapter looks like in mind(even when you have to change it) your story can become an impossible mess of lore and character beats you can never properly pay off.

@MagneMirare

2 ай бұрын

Personally, in my own art, I do agree with you. But every author is different. Now Martin failed because he took it into incredible extreme. But for other authors this danger may still be price worth paying, and rightfully so. Their art is simply better for it.

@blackchibisan8116

2 ай бұрын

@@MagneMirare I’ve yet to hear of a single writer who doesn’t do this and is successful. Please give me a few examples for reference so I can look into this and see what merit there is in this.

@MagneMirare

2 ай бұрын

To a certain extent, I think that Sapkowski's Witcher really grew under his hand, from the first short stories through the saga itself. To what extent, I do not know, but I believe he is very similar in the writing mindset to George. But you know who I think is a prime example? Dante and his Divine Comedy. In Inferno, he is surprisingly petty about the whole thing. Of course, there is a grand theological narrative, but also very personal jabs at his rivals. He underwent incredible growth during his writing, and eventually, near the ending of Paradiso, he basically realizes how incredibly small his rivalries were in the face of the divine which he is trying to convey. His work is not only a piece of art but also a testament to personal spiritual growth. There is a certain documentaristic quality happening behind the scenes. And it's precisely this authentic growth, which gives reader the opportunity to walk the path with the author itself. It's much more personal and intimate. So, even if an author makes mistakes due to his... chaotic nature... these very well might be just part of the true quality of the work. There is certain "life-likeness" in uncertainty.

Man: So , Sir Tolkien. Do you believe in flat or round earth? Tolkien: Yes

@ninab.4540

2 ай бұрын

Tolkien do you hate Fashies? Tolkien: Yes I do Fashies: *NOO SAY IT AIN'T SO* True story

@TehZach1993

2 ай бұрын

@@ninab.4540 Wtf is a fashies?

@glenglen6386

2 ай бұрын

@@TehZach1993 It's an anagram of sea fish.

@supersuit5790

2 ай бұрын

Tolkien supported Franco, sooooo@@ninab.4540

@wilburdemitel8468

2 ай бұрын

@@glenglen6386 schizo

It’s a great analysis. But I fundamnetally disagree. Martin is not ultimately cynical. He’s a disappointed idealist. You seem to read it as nonstop grimdark with no hope or ideal. I don’t see that. I see that it is deeply about hope in a dark world. Belief and religion is not always bad. Brienne is religious and her love of mythology is central to her goal to pursue honour and goodness. Her goodness prompts the change to Jaime, whose redemption is also tied up with a reignition of mythic thought - naming the sword - oathkeeper- naming his horse - honour. They even literally embody myths within the universe- they are forced to reenact the bear and the maiden fair , beauty and the beast (roles reversed) and even Galladon and the Maiden (the maiden gave a sword to Galladon, as Jaime gives a sword to Brienne). It oozes hope amongst darkness. Sansa never has given up her sensitivity and love of songs. Arya is not giving up her identity because she hid needle. Theon recovered his self and chose to help save Jayne. I feel that perhaps you have been more influenced by the show than you think. The show also took your view and thought GoT was grimdark. They made Brienne a callous murderer (fuck honour), made Sansa into ‘dark Sansa’ to show she was a strong girl boss. They made Jon’s destiny and parentage mean nothing, and made Dany evil for no reason. And made Jaime revert his personality.

@MagneMirare

2 ай бұрын

I think you are right to some extent. Now, to me, disappointed idealist just sounds like cynic with a history. But yes, there are certain personal mythological qualities. I just think they too far and too few to keep Martin capable of handling it for 30 years. These glimpses of hope are beautiful for their intimate feel. But the problem is, that I don't think that Martin believes, that personal goodness is capable of saving the world, to make it better place. That's the issue that I think broke Martin. As for the show, for the last few seasons I paid attention mostly to different synopsis and reviews - specifically because I found the thing itself appalling and was interested mostly in it's eventual cultural impact. I don't really think my analysis is influenced by the show. But it most definitely stems from deep divide between my personal philosophy and the one that I feel is ingrained in the books.

@groglas

2 ай бұрын

If he's read the story as grimdark, I might say you've read it with rose-tinted glasses. The faith of the Seven is fundamentally gender divided, with very clear roles for men and women, it's influence is felt throughout the books (it being the catalyst for halting the sacrifices to the Others, you could argue they are the genesis of the entire story) not least by Brienne. Who even though she might pray to the Seven, is fundamentally in conflict with their teachings, and by extension with the larger society of Westeros, she is accepted by maybe a handfull of people, and only after having gone to great lengths to prove herself, the only exception seems to be her father (the man that always hired her singers because she loved their songs, and who allowed her to train as a knight, and sent her to join Renly), and we don't know if he would have been as accepting had he not lost his son Galladon (named after Galladon of Morne, the Perfect Knight), the only other family Brienne has any memory of, and for natural reasons idealizes. (i.e trauma to her and those around her when: 1, stillborn sister, 2, stillborn sister, 3, mother dies, and finally, 4, Galladon drowns, all this and she is only 4 years old) Brienne has spent her entire life trying to become Galladon, the Perfect Knight, the son her father should have had, because she wants to make her father (who obviously loves these stories too) happy, and in her mind she could never be the fair maiden... She is traumatized, and coping, and time after time she is learning that good vs bad is often a matter of perspective, and that honor, and oaths are false crutches, and that there can be no justice in an unjust world. Brienne undoubtedly influenced Jaime in many ways, not least when she recognizes that killing Aerys II was for the greater good, a perspective that might be easier for her to swallow than for regular dogmatics, but, Jaime is overtly being influenced by more mysterious forces also, it isn't until after his "fever dream" he goes back to rescue Brienne, a "dream" he has while sleeping in the moonlight, with his head on a Weirwood stump, to claim it is simply Brienne's goodness... Perhaps you're the one that has been more influenced by the show than you think...

@umwha

2 ай бұрын

@@groglas What exactly is the problem with the Faith being 'gender divided, with very clear roles for men and women'? That corelates to real history of Christianity, and sex role division is not inherently bad - in fact the institutions of convents were a great boon to historical women and a step toward female emancipation. The Faith operates almshouses and motherhouses - places for women to go with no other option. Septon Maribald is nice, and the quiet isle has female only accommodation. Is that bad?

@Fear_the_Nog

2 ай бұрын

Yes, this. Martin appears to be deeply idealistic. ASOIAF cannot be classified as grimdark. It's more a tragic heroic romance. It's more a Shakespearean tragedy than it is anything grimdark.

@Fear_the_Nog

2 ай бұрын

@@MagneMirare Personal goodness is and isn't capable of saving the world. It's both and neither. Because it obviously depends on the situation. That's Martin's point. It's neither smart to hold personal goodness as the only true solution to problems, nor is it smart to dispense with it. Which is why he is clearly setting up his most balanced characters like Tyrion and Bran and Varys, and even Jon to some extent to be flexible and manipulative enough in order to apply some pragmatism to goodness.

Martin just isn’t a devoted author. All of those problems that you listed, really aren’t reasons for the decline and self implosion of his story. He just isn’t devoted and doesn’t see a need to finish his books anymore. Postmodernism, complexity, and mythological subversion are all pretty important aspects of plenty of acclaimed writer’s wheelhouses, case in point Thomas Pynchon. V, Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason&Dixon, and Against the Day all possess those aspects, and are similarly pointed in ideological directions and all together are around the same length as ASOIAF(what they lack in bloated plotlines and throwaway chapters they make up with in quality). George has plain and simply lost his drive to write. An author who could stick to his guns and had a serious want and drive to finish his work would’ve buckled down and finished it.

I have two, perhaps not disagreements, but counter points. Firstly, and something you danced around but did not quite get at, is that Martin does not actually have principles at all. That may sound a but absurd, but everything he believes in a spiritual, political, and philosophical level is a rejection of something else. He affirms nothing, denies everything, and so can not say anything meanful. Secondly, deconstruction is useless if it results only in an analysis. It must be able to contribute to reconstruction and reconciliation or it is a waste of time and breath - as all the knowledge in the world is so much air if it does not contribute to something.

@ghgtare

Ай бұрын

To say that GRRM, the man who wrote Brienne of Tarth, "does not actually have principles" is to say that you know nothing about the man or his work.

@dszuch1084

Ай бұрын

@@ghgtareuh huh. Take his little pinky out of your mouth.

I remember when George RR Martin would critique Tolkien and thought to myself, “at least Tolkien finished his work. George’s legacy will be that he had written great books but could never finish his masterpiece and left it hanging with no answers to problems he created and no ending.”.. there will only be the HBO series as an ending and boy what a stinker that was. I’d hate for my legacy to stand on the last season of Game Of Thrones. I also remember that when the media asked him how he felt about fans being worried that he might die before finishing the story of A Song Of Ice And Fire, his answer to his fans was, “fuck’em!”. I think those fans have a very real worry since Martin is getting older each day and certainly isn’t the picture of a healthy man. I lost all respect for him at that point.

@lettuce6749

2 ай бұрын

I don't think he ever critiqued Tolkien? He just said he has a more white/black version of good and evil, which is true. But sure, Tolkien will always be the father of modern fiction, all books of fiction somehow derived from his

@Elyseon

2 ай бұрын

And Tolkien wasn't an edgelord like him.

@rajasmasala

2 ай бұрын

Who, Tolkein the Franco supporter who tried and couldn't finish the LOTR successor because that was supposed to exorcise his fascist demons but he couldn't do it? Lol.

@squirrelsyrup1921

2 ай бұрын

Christ is King

@jesseoreilly1792

2 ай бұрын

His critiques of Tolkien seem to be greatly overstated. He is, at the end of the day, a big Tolkien fan by his own admission.

In a way ASOIAF not ending is kind of the perfect ending for it. For a series of despair with no hope or satisfaction leaving the audience hanging with no resolution is very fitting. Not that Martin intended for that to be the case of course, but it is funny how it worked out that way.

There's a non-zero chance that the streaming show was completely faithful to his outline for the ending. He can't finish it, because of how much people hated it.

@solidpython4964

Ай бұрын

There is a zero percent chance of this lol

Fun fact about John Waterhouse @ 00:06:50 John Waterhouse's shockingly beautiful wife - although she was painted during the late Victorian period - was in so many fantasy and medieval paintings that she became the enduring standard for what a medieval or magic waifu should look like. Since then, other fantasy artists have been drawing her without even knowing who she is. And for fantasy worlds or creatures, the defining standard is Arthur Rackham's enormous and stunning body of work. If Rackham had lived another 10 years, he almost certainly would have illustrated Middle-Earth, and his art style would have defined the visual aesthetic, and made its' way into the movies as well.

@schoo9256

2 ай бұрын

Fascinating information but maybe you should put her name in. It was Esther Kenworthy Waterhouse.

Am I the only ASOIAF fan who finds hope and meaning in his various stories and characters?

@maicoxmauler2825

2 ай бұрын

No, you're not. George doesn't. That's the problem.

@sullivandmitry1416

Ай бұрын

The author doesn’t. It’s the same for Cormac McCarthy and his books like The Road. People see the story as hope and inspiration, but he manages to write it with the plot making absolute sure that no one will be alive in 20 years. Hope all you want, it won’t matter.

The point about Martin (and the show) writing a work that averts the "chosen hero" trope is fascinating to me. I think this is very clearly one of GRRM's beliefs and goals for the series but the story he crafts inadvertently undermines this authorial intention. People in A Song of Ice and Fire are, ultimately, meant to be normal, flawed people rather than chosen heroes born with a special destiny or marked for greatness by ancient prophecy. And yet, the books are full of characters who are very obviously possess superhuman capabilities. Daenerys can walk into a burning pyre and emerge unscathed, the Stark children are wargs and otherwise possessed of abilities all but forgotten south of the Wall. While these powers are not consistent (they seem to be capable of "skipping a generation" or not passing down to certain individuals, such as Viserys, who lacks Dany's fire resistance) they do very clearly and indisputably originate from blood lineage. Bran Stark, for example, is a warg *because he's a Stark*. While he has to improve on his skill and powers like any other skill, the mere ability to do it is something he and very few other people possess. I would argue that, while fascinating, this element of the story undermines the deconstruction of the chosen hero and also the story's emphasis on the injustice of Westerosi society. The story shows us again and again that being of the right bloodline or coming from a great house is no guarantee of greatness or moral virtue. Quite the contrary: many characters from great and powerful houses are arrogant, corrupt, and complacent in their power and wealth. But like, the Starks literally *can form telepathic bonds with and control animals or even humans* in a way that Lannisters or Tyrells or Baratheons cannot. It makes the Starks (and Targaryens and others who have such abilities) into something more than normal humans which undermines the theme of the story about being flawed, normal people trying to make do in a world of chaos and violence. It's hard to say that special destinies don't exist when they very clearly do.

@wesbaker2447

Ай бұрын

Your point about the sharks is interesting. Yes, they are special in their way of warging, but that doesn’t break George’s theme of deconstructing heros. The starks arnt all great awesome people who arnt flawed and terrible at times. Yes they have powers, but George doesn’t argue their blood makes them morally supioror or better at ruling. Ned, for example was a good ruler because of moral fiber, not his warging abilities as he wasn’t a warg. Jon, who is special because he is a warg, makes questionable decisions as a heros and lord commander. He is a warg and still deconstructs the classic hero idea.

@annafdd

Ай бұрын

Great point, although the special abilities of the Targareyns and Stark may well come from the fact that they are hybrids of the dragons and the Green men respectively.

@HellqueenRoz

21 күн бұрын

@@wesbaker2447 On that point I would definitely agree. The Starks are not *innately* superior in terms of morals. The morality (or immorality) of various Starks is shaped by upbringing, personal disposition, deliberate choice, surroundings, etc. In other words: the Starks are not destined to be any more or less moral than anybody else in the story but rather are shaped by their experiences and situations. So I completely agree there. Where I think GRRM arguably undermines some of his own points is the fact that the Starks' special abilities are very obviously and clearly derived from their blood. I think GRRM's story is, to some extent, meant to reject the idea of people who are marked by their birth and lineage for greatness. We can see aspects of this in the Lannisters and particular characters such as Joffrey. Joffrey comes from a prestigious bloodline (albeit with complications) but he's an arrogant, entitled monster who happily abuses his power and position at every opportunity. Joffrey is the villain we all love to hate, but he's also a representation of the themes of the series: that being from the "right bloodline" doesn't make you any innately better. Which is VERY much a prevalent theme in many fantasy works where being the "true king" or the like is literally informed by one's blood. In many classical fantasy tales, notably LotR: the right king is also generally understood to be the king with a true and legitimate lineage. I feel like the Starks *as characters* deconstruct the fantasy hero but the specifics of having special abilities from their blood undermines this somewhat because it kinda still inadvertently reinforces the idea of people from a particular lineage being marked by special powers that only they have. IMO it would work a little better in the story if maybe Northerners in general were shown as having some magic in their blood. Call it the lingering influence of the Old Gods or the strong legacy of the First Men, however you want to cut it. But as it stands, only one family in the entire North is able to do these things (one would think that at LEAST it might be a thing among say, the Karstarks who are canonically closely related to the Starks and descended from a Stark bloodline).

At the current state things are in, the only ending that would be tonally consistent with the rest of the story would be having the White Walkers win.

Fascinating analysis. The story starts with an existential threat and the challenge to galvanise humanity to drop its petty squabbles and band together. But that humanity turns out to be so dark and appalling, from sadistic killers to innocent little girls-turned, er, sadistic killers, that we're at the point of no credible endgame. Still love it though!

@NancyLebovitz

2 ай бұрын

An alternate view would be that humanitiy can't surmount too much bad luck. An unsettled situation led to rise of Robert, a great warleader and a bad king, and that set a lot of suckage in motion. On the other hand, Martin keeps enforcing bad luck.

@TheCreepyLantern

2 ай бұрын

also it's so far into the story and basically no one even knows about the existential threat so it's kinda meaningless. a man is at work, with zero idea his wife's in danger and his house is being robbed. Ice and Fire is like saying that man is awful for being mad about the payroll being late as a petty squabble compared to the big threat.... that he didn't know about

@DeadpoolX9

Ай бұрын

It’s basically a race to the bottom for the degradation of humanity You don’t read because you WANT things to get better You read because you want to see how compellingly he can write a fucked narrative.

A few quibbles: Tolkien did actually get lost in the Silmarillion. His son and Guy Kay Gavriel had to hack the final text together from drafts written across decades and even add new sections to bridge existing texts together. Also, he abandoned the idea of Middle Earth being a mythology for England long before his death, likely when he abandoned the Anglo-Saxon frame story.

@mistersharpe4375

2 ай бұрын

He definitely removed many of the "mythical origin story" elements referring to England specifically. Although what remains is a mythology for Elves, and an origin story for their mixed reputation in English folklore. He never really abandoned the idea that the stories take place in our forgotten past.

@worldbigfootcentral3933

2 ай бұрын

Of course the Silmarrillion was unfinished, that was Tolkiens notes, not something he ever intended to publish. Derp

@EyeOfEld

2 ай бұрын

@@worldbigfootcentral3933 That was, quite literally, my point. I was objecting to a point specifically raised in the video.

@MagneMirare

2 ай бұрын

Thank you, I will be thinking about it.

@itstayna_abreu

2 ай бұрын

But this supposed "mythology for England" was not proposed by Tolkien, but by some biographer that made up some things in his book

Feast for crows is genuienly very thematically cohesive. Great read

In my opinion, his works strongly point towards one ending. The prayer to the many faced god is to be taken literally: "all men must die". The happenings in the north could only be overcome if all the kingdoms would work together, yet they are not, as the books clearly imply. The ending I see is the houses war-ing as they always do and the whites attacking from the north. A selected few protagonists realize the futility of it all and flee further south where the whites cannot reach. Then depending whether you want a happy ending they succeed doing so or don't. All the others die in the long winter. As the magic system in the books is soft, he does not need to tie all loose ends.

@laurashortill8623

Ай бұрын

Yes. If I recall correctly that GRRM said if he had to pick a God to worship, it would be death, I knew it would that the series would likely be unfulfilling for me. I expect it will end like Fire and Blood, which I find unsatisfying. I liked season 1 of House of the Dragon because the adaptation changed Viserys’ story into a more Aristotelian tragedy rather than a relentless parade of unlikeable people doing unspeakable things stopping at a random point.

I agree with your contention that ASOIF grew complicated beyond Martin's control and won't and can't be finished, but I understood the reasons for this a little differently. Ill admit i haven't read any of Martin's other works or looked into his personal beliefs at all, so maybe thats why. I hadn't heard about ASOIF until HBO, but before I'd finished watching Season 1, i had read all the books. And the feeling i got was not that Martin was trying to tell a different mythology or subvert mythology or the fantasy genre, but rather that he was trying to write fantasy that was as plausible and realistic as possible, and failed to account for the fact that stories have endings and real history does not. The series reminded me more of the way i felt when I read Froissart's history of the Hundred Years War than when i read Lord of the Rings or any other fiction. I didn't really ascribe the bleakness of ASOIF to postmodernism or draft-dodge guilt (probably because Ive never studied Martin outside the books). Bleakness, overwhelming complications and the futility of grand designs is hard to avoid when reading history as well. Sure, a lot of history Ive read was probably written by recent historians who themselves have a postmodern and cycnical bent, but thats why i mentioned Froissart. He can't be considered revisionist because he was basically the first draft. The subject matter is just factually pretty dark. People are always dying of the plague or infection before they can complete their political goals. Sons throw away the lands their fathers died to gain. The people remembered as heroes, like the Black Prince and Henry V and Jean D'Arc, are all the ones who died young with great potential, the ones remembered as villains are those who grew old enough for their mistakes to catch up with them. The war went on longer than Froissart could keep writing about it, and nearly as soon as it petered out, the equally complicated Wars of the Roses started up in England. The technology and society of ASOIF matches up really well to the 14th and 15th century in Europe, so that is the easiest comparison, but the same things pop up all over history. So to me, when i read ASOIF, it really felt like Martin was always asking himself "would this really happen this way?" And whenever it came time for the plot to branch, the answer was "yes it would." And whenever there was an opportunity to resolve a complication, the answer was "no." And also, early on in the books, i thought he was setting up a world where the magic would grow more and more powerful, as an intentional subversion of the trope that is represented by Tolkien's elves and wizards being on their way out of the world. But he didn't really do that at all. By the later books i kind of felt like he was trying to tone it down and rationalize it, almost as if he was ashamed to have brought it in to begin with. (Obviously, in this regard, and in regard to trying to tie up loose ends quickly, HBO went in completely the opposite direction as soon as the written source material ran out). So my take is: he tried to write a dramatization of an imagined but very realistic history, and he forgot that history has no end. We pull stories from history, and clean them up so that can have a beginning and a middle and an end and a message. That is how myths begin. It is super, super hard to break out a meaningful bit into a story without also breaking the reality of it. Martin took a pretty good run at it for 30 years, but i don't think he's going to make it. History isn't a garden. It is the Amazon, and i absolutely love that metaphor you made.

@kai_plays_khomus

2 ай бұрын

That's a great analysis I can get behind.

@fuzzzone

2 ай бұрын

This strikes me as a far more cogent analysis than that of the video.

@jameer7565

Ай бұрын

These are my thoughts as well before knowing anything about him. I truly thought ASOIAF as a show and book were "Real people in a fantasy world". Even the way his prequel works are like historical retellings feel like someone trying to make some alternate history timeline. The flaw as you've said, is that a historical retelling framework makes an extremely strange story as a whole. Where do you choose to stop telling it in a natural feeling way besides total apocalypse? Similar reasons the anime and manga One Piece bothers me. The adventure is important yeah, but I'd like an end that won't feel underwhelming to all the time and energy you put into hyping it up. 'Winter is coming' feels like the fantasy version of "I'm going to be king of pirates". Like I'm probably going to be 20 years older when that happens and will have read multiple more satisfying conclusions rather than consuming the same story most of my life then getting blue balled. And yeah, the magic is tonally one foot in and out, purposeful or not, it feels forced now in some indescribable way. His prequals feel so different tonally when it comes to magic, it doesn't feel like this dramatic religious force that controls fate, but its own type of unknowable science, it does truly feel like he's just figuring it out as he goes in the main story.

@solidpython4964

Ай бұрын

I like how u put it, imo it makes a lot more sense

@DeadpoolX9

Ай бұрын

@@jameer7565who the fuck wants real people in a fantasy world? That sounds like actual brain damage

Tbh I always thought the point of ASOIAF was to end on a hopeful note. The books are a long dark tunnel but isn't the point of such a tunnel to reach the light?

@MagneMirare

2 ай бұрын

Oh I would think that too. Or at least that would be my hope. I just think he did such profound job with the "long and dark" part, he is missing the strength to create adequate light as counterweight.

@Thagomizer

2 ай бұрын

More like a long dark maze.

@ninab.4540

2 ай бұрын

​@@ThagomizerWith that lighting in the episodes no wonder the characters can't find their way to happiness

@dupin2010

2 ай бұрын

No, I really don't think so, that's why I stopped reading after the third book, it's just things happening, just people dying , there is no hope, no lesson, no arch, no journey, no story in the classical sense, it's not a fantasy book (that means mythological as is brilliantly explained in the video), there are dragons and zombies, but no fantasy.

@TheCreepyLantern

2 ай бұрын

the problem is we're this far in, it'd feel so insanely jaring for things to start getting hopeful again. unless a bunch of people that are good, competent, and powerful show up out of nowhere, i don't feel like our world HAS any way to actually end up as anything but picking through the wreckage of a broken world.

I only got half way through the last published book. I KNEW at that point that Martin had lost control and could not finish. His narrative was already starting to wander.

I said “wow” out loud multiple times while watching this. Such an insightful and profound framing of Martin and his struggle, and a powerful critique of postmodern nihilism as a writing lens! Thank you for taking the time to make this. Very happy to have found your channel.

Very thoughtful analysis. It’s ironic: I see ASOIAF as Martin’s attempt to take up the challenge Tolkien declined when he abandoned his LOTR follow-up, and now, hearing your view, I see Martin finding himself in Tolkien’s position: unwilling or unable to find a reason to complete that challenge.

This is an outstanding analysis. I don't agree that the story cannot be finished, but I do see your point. I always took the A Song of Ice and Fire series to be a sort of commentary on the ultimately self-defeating futility of constant warfare (the "Game of Thrones") while ignoring existential threats (the Others/White Walkers/"Winter Is Coming"), with a small glimmer of hope coming from a few very flawed people who would somehow manage to put aside their differences at the last minute, deal with the threat, and then restore some kind of peace in the lands. I think that, that's still possible to do; but I think that there's the "meta" situation to keep in mind: George Martin has made his money and he's getting old: he has no incentive to finish the story and he is probably just getting mentally and physically (as well as spiritually) exhausted. On top of that, consider that popular culture has changed since the story started, and the "gritty, realistic" albeit extremely cynical things that caused the story to be so popular in the beginning (e.g., the shocking violence -- to include mutilation, torture, murder, and rape -- as well as exploring taboos such as incest) might open him up for the kind of intense criticism that he would rather not deal with. But yeah, having such a pointless nihilistic world-view probably contributes to his lack of drive. And maybe, as you said, not finishing the story is the most appropriate way to end it.

Because it's basically a soap opera. I don't think it was ever intended to have a hard ending.

@clownpendotfart

2 ай бұрын

No, soap operas are written MUCH more quickly. This has none of their best quality (which is to say, their quantity).

@careyfreeman5056

2 ай бұрын

@@clownpendotfart But it's the same premise in that it was never designed to end. Just keep moving the plot along.

@clownpendotfart

2 ай бұрын

@@careyfreeman5056 There's a promise of an ending for ASOIAF.

@careyfreeman5056

2 ай бұрын

@@clownpendotfart Promises, promises. . . but never a plan.

Beneath the Santa Claus beard and a chin that has more sequels than his legacy, GRRM's face looks like Hide The Pain Harold when you zoom in on it.

The purpose of art isn't to merely recreate life, but to carve away the trivial and distill life down into only what is meaningful. Muddying things up with Gondor's tax policy does not create sophistication, it just makes things unfocused. The juice is half pulp.

@Viffido

2 ай бұрын

You do not dictate what art is.

@MCArt25

2 ай бұрын

The funny thing about that quip is that Martin's worldbuilding is actually quite inconsistent and betrays an ignorance of premodern society not present in Tolkien, who was capable of inferring quite a lot from his own deep knowledge of medieval literature.

@ionbing2884

2 ай бұрын

Gondor's tax policy would have huge implications for...Gondorians/Gondorites and would reflect the moral values of their government especially their king. There is no reason tax policies cannot and should not be important plot points. The problems is that GRRM is a bad writer.

@Miraihi

Ай бұрын

I don't agree at all. Putting the familiar concepts into another world operating by another set of rules adds to the immersion and the sheer physicality of the fictional world immensely.

Paraphrasing Vargas Llosa: "The novelist is obligated to choose what he will tell. He cannot tell everything there is, for life is insurmountable, always expanding, and in failing to do so, he would never finish writing it".

I think the main issue is that Martin isn't 100% focussed on finishing the book and instead chooses to do other things like writing the story of Elden Ring or House of the Dragons. If he was focussed on WoW he would be done by now imo.

Wow yes thank you. I always felt this, I never finished Game of Thrones nor the House of the Dragon because they are so incredibly depressing. I don't need to see Oberryn get his face smashed in nor do I need to see a boy getting pulled to shreds by a dragon. Why? The heroes keep dying! It's terrible. I know his writing is supposed to reflect reality but even our world has some hope, acts of greatness and kindness. During the war of the roses great acts of cruelty where commonplace but honour as well. Humans come with this darkness and light in them, Tolkien took this fact and built a world around it. Martin seems to concentrate on just the dark.

@shorewall

2 ай бұрын

Also, I think we need hope and idealism to strive to a better reality. It's the difference between aiming for the stars and landing on the rooftop, vs. aiming for the rooftop and landing in the alleyway.

@ninab.4540

2 ай бұрын

It's funny. Hero used to be mean divine birth back in Ancient Greece times. Now it means noble stuff against all odds

People need to have in consideration that Martin and Tolkien are extremely different writers and although he hugely respects Tolkien, he purposefully goes against him. Tolkien is not part of his inspiration when talking about themes or tone, he's attracted to the sort of Frank Herbert or Lovecraft, he definitely takes more inspiration from them than from LotR. George has writen dozens of horror short stories, so his fantasy epic leaning on the grim dark side is expected, it's his thing. That being said, if you say there's no hope in ASoIaF you haven't read it properly, there's a lot of hopeful moments, heroic moments, moments of "we're getting justice for the atrocities commited againts us". Lord Manderly's speech about the North remembers, Arya thinking of Jon's smile while she hides Needle, Brienne's "No chance, and no choice" badass moment while she risks her life to save orphans, etc etc. By the end we will see house Stark on top, that's for certain, the original title for the last book was A Time for Wolves. "To touch the light, first you must go beneath the shadow" I'll just agree that the story got too big and he's having issues because the monster grew too many tentacles, I want to think he will finish it, but every year that passes I doubt it more.

The problem with Martin is 3-fold: 1 - He's never treated it like a job. There's an old writer's panel where he was sitting with Stephen King and King couldn't believe Martin's attitude. To paraphrase King - "I write. I sit down every day and I write. It doesn't matter if it's good, bad, or doesn't make sense. I write my book and let others tell me if it's any good." Martin is all about taking his sweet time to slowly polish his work. 2 - He's OBSESSED with being a "gardener" to the point of using it as a crutch. It's his free pass to allow the plots threads to go out of control. 3 - By his on admission, he practically writers out a skeleton overview of every branching decision in his stories like some demented "choose your own adventure" player who is trying to find the route he prefers, rather than just writing the story and reworking things as he goes.

Given how grimdark he made the series into, far darker than even real-life Medieval Europe, it's hard to make a good ending. If the "good guys" win, then the grimdark fans bitch about how much of a cop-out it was. If the ending is grimdark, then people lose investment in the characters because the story is practically torture porn already, and more bad things happening isn't going to change the views of the audience.

@karlzuhlke3114

2 ай бұрын

It is possible to do that look at the First Law Triolgy.Its prob more grimdark than AoS and the Ending is perfect. I just dont think Martin did the actual buildup for something like that

@HolyknightVader999

2 ай бұрын

@@karlzuhlke3114 Exactly. His only buildup is to subvert, so if he has a happy ending, the grimdark fans get pissy, but if he has a sad ending, the fans get depressed.

@karlzuhlke3114

2 ай бұрын

@@HolyknightVader999 That and the other problem is he just added plot over plot. For every claimant he killed of he added like two more. There is no way to get a satisfying ending in 2 books

@HolyknightVader999

2 ай бұрын

@@karlzuhlke3114 EXACTLY. Which is why the idea that he can fart out a good ending for the series is a joke.

@LordVader1094

2 ай бұрын

@@karlzuhlke3114 Oh don't worry he'll TOTALLY get a satisfying ending in 2 books, by making those 2 books as long as 4+ books each.

Hi, so I'm dealing with some of these issues. Any advice? The world got too big too fast and then I ended up terrified of screwing up my vision. So far I've just been subtracting complexity in ways I'd consider more imaginative than what put me in my frozen state. I typed this comment before finishing the first part and was going to keep writing the post as you made your points. I thought I'd have more questions but I feel much better about my situation and decisions. I don't think I can remember the last time I clicked a video looking for answers on how I should be moving forward and actually finished the video with actual answers. Thank you! Idk if this video was meant as writing advice but it did exactly what I was hoping for when I clicked it. So seriously, thanks.

@thunderthrust9273

2 ай бұрын

Same problem here, the one solution i have got is to quickly finish & show things here or there as glimpses, as if u can weave these themes in sequel book(which ofcourse is a false hope.). Any solutions from ur pov ?

@caesertullo1824

2 ай бұрын

@@thunderthrust9273Actually yeah. I guess first of all I don't consider any sequel books as false hopes. I mean our stories are our stories. If we sit here and only plan success in one you aren't planning on telling the full story. Lately I've been planning each of the trilogies. As writers we need some knowledge of where the story WOULD go even if most series fail. I don't find this way of thinking a waste of time at all. I've been able to write around a lot of plot holes and just parts of the series I've been consistently unhappy with by thinking through the entire sequence to it's conclusion. I've also been focusing not only on the main themes of the series but where the consequences of those thoughts can lead which helps branch out the world. I've watched a few people who talk about how "Characters aren't people" and I disagree with this advice for writers esp with fantasy. The magic of the genre to me comes with the ability to separate reality while being able to hold a mirror to whatever part of real life we as writers are trying to highlight. I'd had less success here but I think I'm on the right track. The best recent advice I stumbled upon but is also floating around the internet is the idea that your writing isn't concrete just yet so killing an idea for the betterment of the story is something we should be looking to do. At the very least we should keep it in the back of our minds. All I did recently to get me going much faster was change the way a single race uses magic and it hurt because I was attached to the idea of it set in it's way. It took so long to get to the point I was willing to make these changes which helped strengthen the story. After I did all of this I was finally able to start an actual outline. I was so happy. It's not like my writing style at all. Once I got to this point it wasn't even MY story anymore. I could sit there and fantasize for lack of a better word how each character could contribute to the themes and the natural consequences of those themes to the rest of the book. Lasty I think we need to admit to ourselves these projects are our babies. If we've gone this far trying to make it work there's an importance as to why we are so adamant. I don't really care what advice I'm given if it doesn't help me grow the story. None of us here in the comments would just want to give up so lets not. Novels are living, breathing tangible ideas that can help us understand and navigate the world. This might be the most pretentious way of saying "Convince yourself that your story is worth telling in the first place. We need to believe in ourselves to be able to be able to say the things we want. This is as far as I've gotten. I'll keep you updated if I figure anything else out. Oh! idk about you but I've had this complex that I didn't study writing in school and that too held me back a bit. I really hope something here might help. GL!

@thunderthrust9273

2 ай бұрын

@@caesertullo1824 Thanks For the Tips & and Motivations.Hope you will do well in this field

@caesertullo1824

2 ай бұрын

@@thunderthrust9273 You too! Once you get past that stuck feeling it flows so much easier. Hopefully we can trade signed copies one day!

You know, even at the time I was in love with ASoIaF the most, I thought there was something off. About a decade later, there is a KZreadr to formulate it pretty well. Good job and I hope you get more subs soon.

@MagneMirare

2 ай бұрын

Yeah, I know what you mean. At that time the series hype went high and I was not a very good reader at the time. It took me until now to somewhat decode the philosophical pitfalls plaguing the books. Thanks.

@billjones3963

2 ай бұрын

I’ve always hated that people feel a story needs to have a moral or point. It reduces the story to just moral grandstanding in my mind. I like that his characters don’t follow tropes and their arcs change because that’s real, people don’t have clear arcs in their lives. And the world mythology is very grand. I see no reason to downplay it just because we don’t know the specifics and it’s original source was a bit dry.

@MagneMirare

2 ай бұрын

@@billjones3963 Well stories are vessels for meaning. The point is always present in some sense - it doesn’t need to be explicitly stated and it doesn’t need to be moral. It may very well be something as simple as “here is the mundane realism of someone's life”. That still is the point of the author. You can’t as an author create without point - without meaning. Even the most dadaistic absurd piece of art is still embodiment of its own statement. The world is not lacking mythology, in sense that it has mythologized history - The books contain mythology. But they themself aren’t one. Lord of the ring is mythology in itself. Now I am not pointing to this as something that makes the books bad. I like them. I am just showing that the very same design we like and find compelling, is the reason why Martin may probably never finish it.

@fuzzzone

2 ай бұрын

@@MagneMirare "Well stories are vessels for meaning." That's an opinion, a perspective, even a highly typical tendency, but not an absolute rule.

@LordVader1094

2 ай бұрын

@@billjones3963 If a story has no point, one questions why it exists at all.

The truth is: GRRM will never finish his story.

Martin should have focused on telling a straightforward story with a beginning, middle, and end instead of trying to deconstruct EVERY fantasy trope and convention under the sun just to show everyone how SMRT and superior to Tolkien he is.

Many of these points of criticism apply to the genre of Grimdark in general. And if you combine it with the Four-Turnings view of history (the “hard times, strong men” cycle, whatever you wanna call it), the assumption is that Grimdark stories would only resonate in a real world that is itself Grimbright. Meaning, when trust in institutions is low and people feel powerless to change things, but the world around them is (still) in comparatively good shape. Yet, for precisely these “grim” reasons, everyone feels things are going downhill - sliding into a Grimdark future - and that’s why people develop a morbid obsession with fiction like Martin’s. Even though it’s frightening, you can’t look away. The worst effect of Game of Thrones however was how it pushed Grimdark into main stream sci-fi - even into former “Nobledark” shows, like Star Trek. I mainly blame Game of Thrones for Icheb getting his eye ripped out on-screen in Star Trek: Picard. 😁 The difference is: In fantasy, especially if it looks like historical fiction (Game of Thrones is very similar in concept to The Tudors, Borgia etc.), Grimdark feels like the dark past we left *behind* us. Kind of like people in the enlightenment (i.e., the Borgia days) liked to look down on the “barbaric” Middle Ages. Sci-Fi, however, is usually set in the future. If you make sci-fi Grimdark (and it’s not the “far future”, like in the namesake Warhammer 40,000), suddenly, the worst feels like it’s still *ahead* of us. And guess what - if you instil that attitude into enough people, it might just turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This is a very interesting video, but as a ASOIAF fan I have to disagree. (For the record I’m not gonna disagree at all with your complexity point as I think it is great and very accurate.) George isn’t inherently a cynic though. I do think he comes across more cynical for a few reasons: 1, characters like Briene, Tyrion, Sansa, have been to hell and back for their best deeds. For example, Tyrion saves kings landings and its thousands of inhabitants and in turn is brutally punished for it. Similar with briene. However the story isn’t done yet. Although Tyrion is in a very dark place in ADWD I think he will likely, after he does terrible things with Daenerys like burning cities, redeem himself in the war against the white walkers. Furthermore, a character like Jaime is all about redemption and trying to become better. He has been called a terrible, dishonorable person for all his adult like, but (especially though Briene) he learns to try to be a good person despite those things. The world punished him for his best deed, and yet he has been convinced to try to help people nevertheless. George makes it hard for Jaime, but Jaime is still shown to be doing the right thing by trying to help people. I also believe you are mixing the realism in ASOIAF with cynicism. Yes, George does deconstruct the honorable characters like Jon and make them do questionable things, but that is life. People are not perfect, good people do bad things. I would also like to talk about the whole how will the world end and everyone will die thing. This story isn’t about people all dying to the white walkers, it is about unifying against them. Jon and Jaime both break ideas of typical honor, Jon by breaking his oaths and Jaime by killings by aerys, to do the right thing. George criticizes flawed systems and shows that good, not perfect, people can persist and do good things. Furthermore, Jaime’s killing of Aerys demonstrates that the good actions of one person can help actually make a difference for many people, as thousands would have died if he hadnt done what he had done. George’s story is about deconstructing stereotypical heros and replacing them, but replacing them with people who can still do good , despite the terrible world around them. It’s about legends of hero’s beating the evil white walkers while showing all people, even heroes, have flaws. History has shown in this mythology the long night can be defeated, light can prevail over darkness, yet in a nuanced way with human characters Finally let’s look at Sam. George claims he is most like Sam. Although Sam is initially cinical, after being convinced by Jon, he gains courage to persist through the darkest most painful times beyond the wall and does good things along the way. He believes in helping the nights watch defeat the white walkers and accomplish long good deeds, despite the traumatic bullying and pain he has been through.

In my mind HBO already finished it, horrible as it was. I have no desire to read anything more from Mr. Martin. That boat has sailed. He had ample time to write the ending he wanted but couldn't be bothered. I just don't care about it anymore.

you sure do a lot of making claims and very little (aka none) providing support. You throw buzz words around like "post modern" to make your unexplained opinion sound more smart and intellectual so people leave this video thinking they watched anything of substance. All you did was record yourself stating Martin is a hippie and you don't like how his story doesn't have one big, clear message of hope or how to make things better. Write a better video. Idk that you disagree with what you think Song of Ice and Fire is trying to do. At least support your ideas.

@forsensfishbox

Ай бұрын

yea its really just a dude mad martin has been compared to his god tolkien so he goes out of his way to shit on, and paint ASOIAF in its worst light. he says the central message of ASOIAF is that life is futile, when GRRM himself has said many times the central theme of the series is "the human heart in conflict with itself"

In anime they often take something cute and pair it with some very dark story elements, not to destroy the whole genre but to make it more interesting. Madoka Magica would be a good example. Or the other way would be, to take interesting setups like post-apocalypse and make something relaxing out of it, where not much happens. Girls Last Tour would be the best example.

The most important thing in a phantasy story is the question regarding the economic policy of the king and how he dealt with climate change.

as a gardener my self with a degree on it (finally i can flex) I think the metaphor is very accurate. as task would be to create human order out of natures chaos and then maintain this order. there is never a point where one can sit back and actually enjoy the garden, only to stand up and observe where is the next problem to be corrected. it is all a great cycle of work. but his garden is just all over the place. his flowerbeds might not have weeds but the flowers bloom all at different times and half wont survive the winter, decision that was only driven solely because he happened to like how they looked, not by how it all looks like in the end. it is like he is entertaining ideas and disregarding them once he looses interest. which does not create order or controlled chaos, but rather merely a new chaos. if his books were a rose bush, it would be wild and festering thing that would be better dug out and tossed than corrected. he is definitely not André Le Nôtre thats for sure. he would be more suited to scrub slime out of the fountains.

This, for me, is one of the challenges of the “gardening” method. If you start out with no story to tell, but simply hoping to “discover” the story as you write it, you run the risk of ending up where Martin has: five books in to a seven book series, and you still haven’t really found the story you’re looking for. Especially when you add to that Martin’s commitment to Postmodernism and his refusal to let any of his characters be “the Good Guy” he DOESN’T really have a story to tell. And he’s largely hidden this under all the complexity - part his style and part to cover up his lack of any real narrative goal. Reading up to where the books have gotten, it almost looks like the story will end Night of the Living dead style where everyone is so busy fighting over the damn throne the zombies ultimately win. Martin almost instinctively doesn’t want a hero to rise up, unite Westeros, and successfully fend off the Nightwalkers - so much so, that if the final season of the TV series accurately reflects Martin’s plan, the defeat of the Nightwalkers is almost a distraction to the civil war over the throne (instead of the main reason it needs to be resolved) and the way that struggle even turns Deanaris into a psychopath. All he’s done in the end is rip off Lloyd Alexander’s Westmark Trilogy, but made it “grimdark”.

It might be a mess. But it's the most amazing mess I've ever seen and when I start to read it, I cannot stop.

Martin may well make another book, but at this point, I wouldn't be surprised if the story is never finished. Part of me even wonders if that might not be for the best. I only ever learned about Martin's other works after reading the books, and they all led me to believe that if the story did ever end, it would be a depressing one. There is nothing but misery to be had out of the story at this point and going forward.

People kept comparing him to Tolkien when the series came out. I kept tellin' 'em...

Or we can give it a tragic ending. I expected The Song of Ice and Fire in the end to be an Apocalypse Log of everything that lead to a Dark Fantasy monster infested icy wasteland as narrated by Brandon Stark. It's a good enough ending and what I expect from a setting that is morally bankrupt serving with as a grand fantasy Sodom and Gomora, and a warning of what happens when all the human flaws that allowed the White Walkers to do that to the world are not overcome.

@Noqtis

2 ай бұрын

it's not a good ending for TSOIAF. I know the show made the White Walkers into stereotypical bad guys but in the book it's not that clear. I mean they do kill and are kinda evil, but in many occasions there are hints that they themselves are pushed by the same motivation as humans (survival) and just do what they have to do. They also seem like they have a culture. It would be a huge break in tone if the white walkers would end up bad because there is no other fraction in TSOIAF that is just bad. Every time you think that way about a faction it changes after some chapters.

@Fear_the_Nog

2 ай бұрын

The Others. I hated that the show used the Wildling label and just went with White Walkers, and made them into essentially draugr instead of graceful but scary ice elves. Calling them Others would have driven home that this was a separate race alien to the normal life in the world.

@WeirdTale

2 ай бұрын

@@Noqtis No offence but the more I actually read the books the more I think that no one in that shit show deserves jack and it that the world should start over. White Walkers wiping Westeros and blowing whatever little humanity is left back to the damned stone age seems like a net positive because the actions of the rulers prove that they deserve no less than the Old Testament Yaweh.

@Fear_the_Nog

2 ай бұрын

@@Noqtis I agree. The Others aren't evil. Martin himself said as much. They are different and they are dangerous, but they are chiefly a different sort of life. Now, whether or not that's changed in his mind is up for debate.

@Noqtis

2 ай бұрын

@@WeirdTale why should I be offended. That's literally the perfect ending for the saga but it should be done in a way in which the others aren't just evil but have to do it because of circumstances. Imo that would be a great ending and I was partly reading the books to find out the nature of the others. I really thought he would at some point introduce us to their culture and in the end we would have a hard time deciding who to root for because every side will have an understandable motivation for their actions.

@5:00 - how is daenyras not a chosen one? How are the white walkers not real magic? Is there anyone this side of psychopathy very enthused about the death and destruction coming with war? @9:00 how are the many generations surving thousands of years portrayed less than hopeful? Etc.

@ninab.4540

2 ай бұрын

Dany was supposed to be Henry Tudor with dragons. You can't turn her into Mad King George outta the blue even with genetics.

What you go over in this are the strengths of the work. It is, like life, meaningless and unheroic. That is the truth people react to. Only the second issue is an actual issue for the work - far more nihilistic and deconstructed novels and series exist and succeed. The problem is the real world doesn’t really make for great fiction; and the complexity of the cast and the threads running through the work are difficult to work back down to a single coherent thread. Again like life, but not great for a narrative.

@MagneMirare

2 ай бұрын

That's it. It's great precisely due to the same reasons why Martin struggles to finish it. [Edit. misread this one; life is meaningful]

@mnk9073

2 ай бұрын

But even life has conclusions, if even the 100 years war can have a satisfying climax then aSoIF can have too.

@donaldhysa4836

2 ай бұрын

@@mnk9073 He didn't write it to have a satisfying climax from the very beggining . Thats the problem

@michaelbasileos

2 ай бұрын

Life isn’t meaningless. The fact that you decided to post a comment on KZread proves this. Doesn’t matter what you *think*. It simply is.

@donaldhysa4836

2 ай бұрын

@@michaelbasileos Precisely. Any work of fiction relies on life having meaning in order to get us emotionally invested in it. Because if nothing has meaning then it would ve impossible to be emotionally invested in anything

We keep forgetting that HBO’s only focus was and is Profit, it hasn’t any artistic nor philosophical aspirations.

@undeathmetal1717

Ай бұрын

Then surely they should have recognized that profit comes from great things that people want; rather than horrid meaninglessness.

@TarpeianRock

Ай бұрын

@@undeathmetal1717you have a point of course but have a look at the trash that is produced by TV channels : the output of really bad material vastly outweighs quality products. Making trash seems to be the default setting for TV material. If they can get away with making trash that is cheap they will do that.

@magikman481

Ай бұрын

@@undeathmetal1717 you should see the videos of crowds in bars reacting to later game of thrones episodes. no subtitles so you cant hear the dialogue, and they cheered during the petyr baelish death scene despite it being a bastardisation of the character of littlefinger. Intricate storylines dont sell, fire dragons and big expensive battles sell

I think critiquing ASoIaF from a pop culture perspective is insufficient. I think an academic perspective works better. GRRM doesn’t subvert expectations at all, he litters his books with foreshadowing and clues about what is coming. He also doesn’t randomly kill protagonists, that is a misconception perpetuated by the show that bleeds into the books because most people read the books after watching the show. Further, the many layers of reference to real-world mythologies echoed in the in-world mythology, which are each in turn echoed within the characters and plot structure through the application of archetypes disprove the idea of subverting mythological structures. In fact, the writing strongly upholds them. The books are complex for sure, and he is struggling with finishing them, but I think it’s because he isn’t writing a straightforward pop narrative. These books are written to be studied by literary scholars, and they are layered with references and meaning that most readers will never understand.

Now I know some people have issue with Brandon Sanderson but in the Stormlight Archive he sets up 3 characters in the first book and of those 3 each get their own book in a sense. Two additional characters are introduced over those books who also get their own books focusing on their perspectives and they don’t just pop out of nowhere like Dorne just appeared out of nowhere for ASOIAF. There are also interludes which show you other perspectives, characters and places. Even these make it into the main story as well. He apparently plans to finish this series with the fifth book and there will be another part consisting of another five. There’s also an apocalypse in this series as well where two races are fighting for their survival and also some revelations along the way. All of this ties in with the universe that is expanded by several other series with some reoccurring characters. Especially Hoid, who is kind of the Loki of the universe in that he brings change and a little bit of chaos wherever he goes. There’s also calamity and destruction but just as much room is left for hope and redemption. Anyway, that’s just my take on it and that man writes like a machine too.

A fascinating video, which I had to keep pausing to better absorb your points and also look at the very appropriate visuals. I guess your argument relies to some extent on the contention that Martin's original vision was, 'Nothing works, and everything turns to shit.' I'm wondering if that was actually true, or if there was the idea that there's a whole load of shit the main characters have to wade through before establishing some kind of firm ground ... eventually. This would be closer to the classic fantasy journey established by Tolkien (and his literary predecessors). The Heroes Journey, in fact. But looking at the ASOIAF works we actually have, its hard to argue that we are on track for anything like that. There were signs in the early books that some of the protagonists were making progress towards something constructive: notably Dani, John, Tyrion, Arya and, later, Jamie and Brienne. But in every case, their arcs have been wrenched so badly in a negative direction that its hard to see them recover without something earth-shaking. We would need multiple examples of Tolkien's eucatastrophy! And of course, Martin is known for just the opposite to this! Worse still, in many cases the negative directions are those of character and not circumstance, Tyrion and Arya being the most notable, and that's probably the most difficult to remedy. It is perhaps possible Martin wandered off track because of the 'gardening' approach to writing, even if his intention was originally something different. (I agree with you btw about the virtues of this method, from personal experience ... indeed I consider it almost something mystical). And so we are in a situation where all the protagonists are failing, despite their good intentions (to over-simplify somewhat). That would make Martin a pretty poor author though, having completely lost his way. Or, as you say, the intention was to cause this failure in the first place. And, I am increasingly forced to agree with you about this, because all the signs are that Martin has wrought this path of destruction intentionally. Even if it evolved organically, the overall direction seems increasingly clear ... downwards into chaos. In which case the novels could still be salvaged as a success (from GRR's POV), but the ending would be Ragnorok not Revelation. And, like you, I'm sceptical that the general audience would receive this with joy.

@MagneMirare

2 ай бұрын

Thank you for sharing your thought process. I shall be absorbing it. But what I want to add right now is: You can go even further; gardening is not almost mystical, it simply is mystical. It taps into the same imaginative realm; it is the same process.

Ive just started writing a novel and a book and in bough of them the goal is clear. The novel is a thought experiment, what would I do if I could magicalgirl transform in to Adam Taurus with his powers on the upper side of the scale. Maintaining my secret identity would be key as conquering Kaļiņingrad to establish my absolute Kingdom of Prūsija would make me more enemies than anyone can count. I could enjoy my life being rich in secret, while as my public persona having helped secure NATOs eastern border, even if they slander me for being roofless and mercyless, and thus the existential threat to my nation reduced. The book starts with me getting the ability to time travel (to a paralel world to not have paradoxes) and then starting from the year 1000 being a benevolent sheperd for my own people, uniting the greater nation, ablolishing the tribes, bringing internal peace, ending harmful superstition, passing in to existance the laws of good men, repelling foreign invasion, abolishing slavery, hand picking the next king to always ensure high quality leadership, educating everyone, ... It is told form the POV of my servants thus I dont have to explain complex technoligy they wouldnt understand and also the story can be a happy one with my servants not knowing my own nihilism and only revearing me as at the very least an immortal wizard whos been looking out for them and their ancestors for generations. And in the end a much better world is built, one where the northern crusades where quickly repelled, one where Ruthenia was freed much earlyer, one where the triangle trade never happened, one where the most powerful empires leadership is never eager for war for they where taught of WW1 before it ever had a chance to occur.

I have a feeling that Frank Herbert's Dune, is where GRRM got a lot of his inspiration. From his old sci-fi stories, to the first book in ASOIAF being very close to original Dune book, and the anti-religion, prophecy and monarchy themes are present in Dune too.

"Martin is trying to be a gardener in the Amazon." Loved this bit.

What isn't postmodernism these days?

A friend of mine just made this observation about why Martin won’t finish WoW: “The thing is, if somebody has had a very hard life and had to work every minute of his time to just keep his head above water, and you give them a whole sackload of money, they might discover there are better things in life than glueing your butt to a chair writing for eight hours a day.”

Even the original Warhammer and 40K had the vain slimmer of hope in the settings. Think about that, two settings that were made to be as bleak as possible had what A Song of Ice and Fire lacks.

I agree. I also think the Kingkiller Chronicle has the same problem. Scope creep basically made it so sprawling that it will take far more than the projected number of novels to finish the story.

"no complex world can prevail if it lacks underlying mythological value" You have me already

Just found out this video and your channel. Love it. Translate everything I had in my head, to myself

I think he suffers from a great deal of hubris, as a renown author. He tried to achieve too much. The mythology of Westeros plus it's 300 year history was A LOT, but he decides to tackle the same for Essos, it's thousands of years of history plus the mythology. Ugh just stop GRRM. Of course he can't do it. Your analysis is brilliant by the way 😊

Congratulations, you have a new subscriber. I look forward to seeing more of your channel.

I wouldn't be suprised if the ending of the TV series that people hated was infact based on his notes and directions, on seeing the reaction Martin realized he couldn't use that and is unable to create anything more.

@seanemery1917

2 ай бұрын

Some of it is, Bran becoming king was apparently hinted at since he was the first character to have a chapter

@orcocan

2 ай бұрын

i don't know why people keep bringing this up, he was already years late when season 8 came out (and ADWD was years late...) so clearly the issue existed already 2020 was the year in which he wrote the most pages of TWOW so that disproves the theory completely...

@Navigatortrue

2 ай бұрын

@@seanemery1917 I would say that it showed how Martin didn't take into account the mindset of the medieval mind where a "Crippled King equalled a crippled realm" and his rule would be marked with having to constantly put out the fires of rebellious lords until a fit healthy candidate could be found and then Bran would fall out a 2nd window.

@seanemery1917

2 ай бұрын

@@Navigatortrue Did that happen in history?

@clownpendotfart

2 ай бұрын

He was slowing down well before the TV series even began. I think the more important effect of the series is that it made him so rich he doesn't need any more money, and his publisher can't force him to release an incomplete novel like A Feast for Crows.

17:28 you just described Hideaki anno with Eva gelion right there😂

@ninab.4540

2 ай бұрын

I was a teen when the remake started and in my 30s when it ended. I'm done with EVA too.

ASOIAF is the quintessential rationalist's mythology. Everything must correlate to our reality. Spirituality must be scrutinized out of existence. The problem is the stories we use to understand reality and our place in it cannot appeal solely on reason. They appeal to our desire to be good. And feel proud of ourselves. This need cannot be quantified. There is nothing materially logical about it. He once gloated that Tolkien took for granted that Aragorn's good character automatically meant a sound tax policy. How many people does he need to point out to him that fiscal policy is not what the LoTR is about?

@MagneMirare

2 ай бұрын

Well, precisely. We cannot live on graphs and math alone. We need to dream. It is even a biological necessity. Ultimately, it's this contemporary soul crushing materialism, that I want to oppose through the medium of Magne Mirare.

@seto_kaiba_

2 ай бұрын

Except it is heavily implied that some form of spirituality (and magic) does exist in the world. Its just extremely ambiguous.

@phnompenhandy

2 ай бұрын

That wasn't his point. He wanted to challenge the assumption that winning a throne justly presupposed ruling wisely. His presentation of Robert and Daenerys illustrates his point superbly.

@seto_kaiba_

2 ай бұрын

@@phnompenhandy Exactly. Plus Martin was a massive fan of Lord of the Rings. He just has his own perspective and vision for his work. Too many Tolkien fans seem to see Martin as like the enemy of Tolkien but this couldn't be further from the truth.

@Oszczywilski

2 ай бұрын

Let's be clear. This remark about tax policy was so stupid. 1. the LotR isn't about this stuff, the same as it isn't about sex, despite we know that this thing also exsist in this universe, because characters have children. 2. ASoIaF worldbuilding despite Martin's boasting and his fan admiration is bad and full of holes. Taxes also aren't very well described, the political system of Westeros is not very realistic and workable. When in the LotR those things aren't important, beause that's a larger than life epic story. Grimdark stuff is relegated to some mentions in Appendixes, or to Akkalabeth, which itself is a great tale of the fall of a great kingdom.

would perhaps be a compelling argument if the only two Authors you had ever read were Tolkien and George RR Martin ... why do ASOIAF haters always insist on drawing a false dichotomy between the two of them ? A much more reasonable comparison is with any historical fiction set in our own world, which faces all the same problems you claim make Martin's books unfinishable ... the most direct inspiration, Maurice Druons The Accursed Kings series, which by the way encompasses all the complexity of medieval France and the lead up to the 100 years war, and is as cynical as anything Martin has written is pretty emphatically finished ...

In your view what is the narrative or thematic purpose of the Others?

@MagneMirare

2 ай бұрын

I believe they are just another branch of humans, one with a bloody and terrible history of conflict with the rest of humanity. In the deep darkness of the past, an agreement was made to divide their land. It was they who, together with people, were capable of building literal walls of ice with the idea that "good fences make good neighbours" - echoing Robert Frost's poem "Mending Wall," which depicts a wall continually damaged, perhaps by frost or perhaps by elves. There was also an agreement to pass illegitimate babies to others to maintain their population's genetic diversity, a typical theme Martin uses in his science fiction stories. This was done through the secret tunnels under the wall. But eventually only Kraster was left to keep this ancient tradition Through various misfortunes and encroachments, the deal was forgotten, possibly due to the insidious machinations of the vengeful Children, with the idea of letting both sides destroy each other, another of Martin's favourite themes.

@umwha

2 ай бұрын

@@MagneMirare That sounds good an resonates with other theories and Martins prior work. I don't think this is the case though. I don't see any evidence that babies go back and fourth. It seems like babies only go to the Others. There are no Other looking people this side of the Wall, or north of it. The babies who go to the others do not seem to be raised, and integrated into their population through breeding. I say this because the Others look so different to humans, they don't seem to have a close relation to humans. The Others are 'twins to the first' showing they looks similar to each other, and there doesn't seem to be any genetic diversity. The elephant in the room is the fact that the Others have armies of zombies - something that suggests they arent just another group of humans with normal concerns.

@user-dw9ly4ij7i

2 ай бұрын

@@MagneMirare Just my thumbs up for the Wall being put up by the Others - I always belived that. There is no even remotely similar construction in the entire world. All the human megastructures of the past are from the black stone (dragon stone). Strange more people do not think that living Ice humanoids with magic might have something to do with the giant wall of ice.

@umwha

2 ай бұрын

Additionally, George was a tree hugging hippie. I don't see him making the tree worshipping fairy people the true bad guys. They are amoral - they do dark fairy things yes - but they arent the evil masterminds. Thats like an anti-environmental anti-pagan message.

@ninab.4540

2 ай бұрын

A lost echo of the mongols to the unprepared world. They were an unrelenting wave of death whereever they went. Europe is lucky the second son of Temujin loved his giant cup of wine more than expanding his father's empire.

Beautifully constructed video, I'm looking forward to watching more of your work!

Deconstructionists: "It takes too long to mow the lawn. I must take apart my lawn mower and re-assemble it as a better machine that will cut the lawn in faster time." They just smash it with a hammer, leave the broken pieces lying around, and blame John Deere when their lawn is 16" tall and snakes are coming into the house.

The only evidence you have for your point about GRRM’s approach being postmodern deconstruction without any analysis is the lack of an ending. That’s not persuasive, what would’ve been persuasive is showing us how each storyline lacks any solution to the problems of the World of Ice and Fire, but we can see in the story that this is untrue. We see consistently where faithful honor and cooperation and legacy provides character triumphs, like how Ned’s honor comes back to bite the Boltons in ADWD as the North turns against them, or how Arya survives the Faceless Men’s attempts to divert her identity by committing to it and using warning to move past their manipulations. The story does seem dark and depressing, but it does have antidotes as well as poisons.

@PodreyJenkin138

2 ай бұрын

Their virtue counts for something sure but in the case of ned his death is to show what "honorable men get in westeros" and the north turning against his killers and revolting is still set up and demolished as a futile effort since all war has to be folly for draft dodger martin It doesn't actually result in anything positive and gets his family killed, revenge, revolt, war and honor are all folly The ending choom, you have to pay attention to the ending which is why he will never write one, there's no way to end it without being utterly hopeless which will taint the legacy as "that franchise with two bad endings" or leave it unfinished in which case people can still remember the books for what works and are left "wanting more"

@kaleb749

2 ай бұрын

@@PodreyJenkin138 You only responded to one of my two examples and your evidence for "the North being setup and demolished as a futile effort since all war has to be a folly for GRRM" is literally nothing, just a dreamed up scenario to ensure the other guy's dreamed up scenario remains right. It's silly to base your opinion as to why there's a lack of an ending only on the lack of an ending, it's circular and unproductive. "GRRM hasn't resolved the story because he only knows how to create thematic conflict, not resolve it." is entirely unbased in anything and is proven outright bullshit by the existence of stories within published ASOIAF that *have* resolved like Dunk's victory in the Trial By Seven or his victory in the conflict with Eustace Osgrey, both of which are well regarded as good stories beginning to end by the fanbase. A simpler explanation is that ASOIAF is a complex series that acts as a book series for several different primary protagonists each with their own set of worlds, secondary protagonists, antagonists, and casts that GRRM has to weave into each other to make a good ending. We know that this is the official reason ADWD took forever, and it's probably the reason TWOW is taking forever. The series is famous precisely because it's so different than other series and for whatever reason fans have ignored both GRRM's highly inefficient writing style and complexity, instead comparing his writing speed to simplistic authors like Stephen King yet still somehow expecting the same GRRM results. The lack of an ending does suck for sure, but only because the same processes that have allowed GRRM to make it compelling in the first place have the unfortunate consequences of being slow. You can't simultaneously complain about the product being unfinished when it's only unfinished because of the reasons you liked it in the first place

@ChairZomg

Ай бұрын

@@PodreyJenkin138 "draft dodger martin " why would anyone even engage with you beyond this point? its clear you have a massive bias against GRRM

In the end, cynicism is the snarky, scoffing voice frequently chiding, "How childish, I could do better." Then when it finally gets a chance, it dreams big, admittedly, then devolves into shock horror, vulgarity and then pisses about not getting to an ending because, well when nothing matters, it's hard to leave an impactful ending, isn't it? Because by the end of this, who's going to care?

@MagneMirare

2 ай бұрын

Peterson said something very interesting. Cynicism is a good step from naivety. But it's only one step, not the end of the road.

@nicholauscrawford7903

2 ай бұрын

I don't usually presume to say I could do better, but if something is no good I can usually think of at least a dozen other people who could, in fact, do better.

An excellent video! Really articulated the sort of stuff I had been feeling for a long time, but couldn't really put into words. I loved the Amazonian jungle line. Perfect.

After the last 12 years of waiting, I feel like we're all ready to join house stark for how long we've been saying 'winds of winter is coming'

Did you even read the books? If you did, it must have been a long time ago. This video seems to be more about an extremely general idea of what the books appear to be, than what they really contain. You actually say very little in this video about the books.

Great video! I am glad to see the views go up! Keep it up!

Edgar Allan Poe said that a good author always starts off with the conclusion and a bad author leaves the conclusion for last.

Fantastic esaay! Is there a way to listen to the full version of music compositions used here?

@MagneMirare

2 ай бұрын

Thank you very much. I am really glad that you noticed the compositions. I compose on the fly for specific needs of the channel, so they are not that much developed and don't really lead nowhere. But I do have a vision of molding them one day into something coherent.

@yuliakalashnikova6161

2 ай бұрын

@@MagneMirare oh, you are extremely talanted!

@MagneMirare

Ай бұрын

New channel is up and running with the developed version of the channels main themes. kzread.info/dash/bejne/dXyX0K56ibadaaQ.html