Game of Thrones Thread

[RadicalCentrist]

he's literally just playing with trains now lol

Spoiler: trens

View attachment 2013256

https://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/

Speaking of, its a wonder that we don't have a thread on train autists.

 

[CWCissey]

Speaking of, its a wonder that we don't have a thread on train autists.

We did at one point, but it got shit up by one of the cows.

 

[Stab You in the Back]

Sometimes I like to remind myself just how bad season 8 was.

 

[Secret Asshole]

Martin thinks he's better than Tolkien.

His books are 1000+ pages because he spends 40 pages describing weapons and armor and I can't even imagine how many pages on the fucking food, enough details so people can accurately put out recipe books. Stop. Just fucking stop. Your plot is so fucking unwieldy you've had to re-write it how many fucking times now? How many corners have you written yourself in George 'I hate magic but here's all this magic bullshit' Martin?

Killing off established characters for shock value, until you realize you only have a stable of so many well developed characters that people begin to lose interest because any attachment through the world was with the character they liked, who is now dead. Not some fucking realistic garbage.

Nobody reads fantasy for realism. Nobody wants to fucking read 'The hero was in the procession and his horse was scared by a wolf, and the hero fell into a one inch puddle of mud and his armor was so heavy he couldn't get back up and then he drowned'. Nobody gives a shit if that actually happens. Its fucking boring. I don't care about this retarded empire's 500 year history or tax policy or human rights shit, good fucking god.

Martin's lore reads like a worse Crusader Kings playthrough. I can load up Crusader Kings and fuck around and get a more interesting 500 year history of a kingdom.

I hate when writers use realism to justify shitty decisions. I think at this point Martin doesn't care about the story any longer. Its been finished for him, he completely lost control of it and has very little interest in finishing it because the major points have been plotted out for him. And they were massively fucking hated.

I honestly don't think many people expect him to finish except a few more diehards. He' rich so he doesn't need to write or really do anything. He saw them hit the major points (very very poorly) then just shrugged.

 

[Sithis]

Martin thinks he's better than Tolkien.

I used to respect fat cranky santa but at this point he's basically one of those shitty authors that Tolkien and CS Lewis would probably mock in the open. Old fucker needs to just put a pin in ASoIaF and realize he fucked up any realistic chance of his story having a good conclusion when he sold out without reading the fine print and then twiddled his fat fingers for a couple decades before making any more progress on the story.

 

[buying gf]

Speaking of the fat fuck never, ever finishing the books;
https://deadline.com/2021/03/george-rr-martin-hbo-deal-game-of-thrones-1234723072/
5 year deal with HBO, in the mid-eight figures, executive producer for a whole bunch of GoT spinoffs/adaptions of his lesser known works.

 

[God of Nothing]

His books are 1000+ pages because he spends 40 pages describing weapons and armor and I can't even imagine how many pages on the fucking food, enough details so people can accurately put out recipe books. Stop. Just fucking stop. Your plot is so fucking unwieldy you've had to re-write it how many fucking times now? How many corners have you written yourself in George 'I hate magic but here's all this magic bullshit' Martin?

Killing off established characters for shock value, until you realize you only have a stable of so many well developed characters that people begin to lose interest because any attachment through the world was with the character they liked, who is now dead. Not some fucking realistic garbage.

Nobody reads fantasy for realism. Nobody wants to fucking read 'The hero was in the procession and his horse was scared by a wolf, and the hero fell into a one inch puddle of mud and his armor was so heavy he couldn't get back up and then he drowned'. Nobody gives a shit if that actually happens. Its fucking boring. I don't care about this retarded empire's 500 year history or tax policy or human rights shit, good fucking god.

Martin's lore reads like a worse Crusader Kings playthrough. I can load up Crusader Kings and fuck around and get a more interesting 500 year history of a kingdom.

I hate when writers use realism to justify shitty decisions. I think at this point Martin doesn't care about the story any longer. Its been finished for him, he completely lost control of it and has very little interest in finishing it because the major points have been plotted out for him. And they were massively fucking hated.

I honestly don't think many people expect him to finish except a few more diehards. He' rich so he doesn't need to write or really do anything. He saw them hit the major points (very very poorly) then just shrugged.

The folly of realism is that reality is so much more complex and bizarre. Constantine, Alexander, Genghis Kahn, Nobunaga, Atilla, and so many others are remembered for the nearly impossible achievements they made. Martin's world is horribly static, retardedly so when you have dynasties ruling for several thousand years without a single change in who has the crown. How much shit happens in a single year alone in this period of unprecedented peace? When all is said and done, jackshit is Martin's world and plot.

 

[RomanesEuntDomus]

His books are 1000+ pages because he spends 40 pages describing weapons and armor and I can't even imagine how many pages on the fucking food, enough details so people can accurately put out recipe books. Stop. Just fucking stop.

I dunno, to me, those parts are very interesting, cause it fleshes out the setting with neat details. When I first read LOTR, the parts about how everything looked felt like boring and meandering filler while I was waiting for epic battles to go down. When I re-read it years later, those parts were the ones that appealed to me most, since it allowed me to dive into the world. Then again, I also love old war chronicles and enjoy all the tiny bits and details about a certain person's armor, since it brings those times back to life to me.
Martin describing small details isn't really the issue with his writing, it's that the plot frayed on all seams like an old carpet, with so many loose ends that it's pretty much impossible to tie everything back up.
Pratchett once wrote that certain side-characters have a bad habit of becoming independent from the writer and doing things he never intended, the same applies to every single named character in Martin's books. They are littered across a giant setting with stuff going on everywhere and the only way to get that stuff all back on track to one unified end is impossible without forcing it, which will inevitably cause problems.

A large part of the appeal of Martin's writing was realism - or rather internal consistency: The world felt realistic, cause everything tied together in a logical and consistent manner. When tax policy is the reason that a certain character is way more powerful than his family background would suggest, that is relevant to the plot. To understand certain aspects of the plot, you need context and just giving a one-liner "Well, he's good with money" is less interesting than a longer explanation - especially when large swathes of the book deal with how one character out-schemes another. What's more interesting? Seeing Tyrion outsmart someone by showing how he does it or "Tyrion outsmarted Pycelle and Pycelle was thrown in jail."
It's not just about the result, it's also about how it happened and how it was possible in the first place.
Of course, the pitfall that you need to avoid is to assume that giving any kind of detail will automatically make for a great story. The details given should have some merit for the plot or the understanding of the characters. The writer shouldn't get lost in meaningless details, but that doesn't mean that small details don't enrich the story itself.

Especially in stories like LOTR and ASOIAF, you have countless instances of small details breathing life into the setting.

Martin's world is horribly static, retardedly so when you have dynasties ruling for several thousand years without a single change in who has the crown. How much shit happens in a single year alone in this period of unprecedented peace? When all is said and done, jackshit is Martin's world and plot.

To me, that is the worst aspect of his storywriting and the most juvenile (if that word even applies). It's a very childish attitude of "Large numbers mean the setting is super fleshed out and important." Cut down everything in history of Westeros before the arrival of the Targaryens by a factor of 10 and the setting becomes much more sensible. Instead of 8000 year old prophecies in Oldtown, you suddenly have 800ish years and it makes a lot more sense. From our perspective, some of the things that characters nonchalantly talk about (like the founding of the Night's Watch) happened so long ago, in terms of our own history, that stuff would predate the earliest stages of the Egyptian high culture by more than 2000 years.
Let that sink in: The difference itself alone is about as much time between our modern day and the birthdate of Jesus Christ and that timeframe itself is just a quarter of the actual timespan.

Just imagine some IRL order of warriors, sworn to do something for their entire existence, that predates the Sumerian culture by a couple hundred years - and we have almost seamless documentation of their doings for thousands of years.

To me, it's something that seems like a very immature thing to write, like the author wants to highlight how awesome his setting is just by using inflated numbers, but it does raise the question: How does anyone in the setting know about any of this?
It makes sense in LOTR, since there's literal eye-witnesses of some of this stuff going down millenia ago, but in a setting entirely reliant on human chroncilers and bookkeepers like ASOIAF, it's plain ridiculous to imagine that they'd have the faintest idea of what happened even just half as many years in the past.
IRL, we have a very dedicated scientific community, using a plethora of methods to meticulously and systematically puzzle together historic events and we still don't know many basic things of more recent history (like the exact location of a battle in the 14th century), now imagine if we barely understand what happened in Egypt 4000 years ago, what chance do Westrosi have to understand what happened 8000 years ago?

tl;dr: I dislike that Martin puts events thousands of years in the past and treats them as somewhat factual accounts of historic events, rather than entirely fabricated legends by people predating shit for political reasons.

 

[RadicalCentrist]

*this snibs the snab*

I mean the Egyptians didn't have a reality defying magic wall that stretched over the entire border into the sky, neither.

I mentioned this earlier but GRRM approaches this shit from a very modern perspective. Everything is written down, somewhere, by a secular order devoted to knowledge that has chronicled all history since the bronze age. Oh and they serve knowledge itself, despite handling the political elites communications and being quartered in their castles. Paper isn't hugely expensive, education is somewhat available despite this knowledge not having any practical purpose, feeding them isn't a big deal, etc etc. To make a long story short, the reason most people were downtrodden peasants in *Ye Olden Times* was because you needed the vast majority of people working agriculture to feed everyone.

Oh! I said the knowledge doesn't have practical use but these same people, the Maesters, have a practical method of mass communication in the form of raven craft. No, this isn't used to facilitate trade. Merchant guilds haven't formed around raven networks. Greater knowledge of trading conditions in real life is what led to the stock market. Instead in AGoT it's mostly used for gossip and political communication. Once it was used for propaganda. Once. Nobody even thinks it's a big deal "Oh I can write the Lord of Dorne from Riverrun in, oh, a week tops. It's whatever. I don't like him so fuck him."

 

[vulg]

To me, that is the worst aspect of his storywriting and the most juvenile (if that word even applies). It's a very childish attitude of "Large numbers mean the setting is super fleshed out and important." Cut down everything in history of Westeros before the arrival of the Targaryens by a factor of 10 and the setting becomes much more sensible. Instead of 8000 year old prophecies in Oldtown, you suddenly have 800ish years and it makes a lot more sense. From our perspective, some of the things that characters nonchalantly talk about (like the founding of the Night's Watch) happened so long ago, in terms of our own history, that stuff would predate the earliest stages of the Egyptian high culture by more than 2000 years.
Let that sink in: The difference itself alone is about as much time between our modern day and the birthdate of Jesus Christ and that timeframe itself is just a quarter of the actual timespan.

Just imagine some IRL order of warriors, sworn to do something for their entire existence, that predates the Sumerian culture by a couple hundred years - and we have almost seamless documentation of their doings for thousands of years.

To me, it's something that seems like a very immature thing to write, like the author wants to highlight how awesome his setting is just by using inflated numbers, but it does raise the question: How does anyone in the setting know about any of this?
It makes sense in LOTR, since there's literal eye-witnesses of some of this stuff going down millenia ago, but in a setting entirely reliant on human chroncilers and bookkeepers like ASOIAF, it's plain ridiculous to imagine that they'd have the faintest idea of what happened even just half as many years in the past.
IRL, we have a very dedicated scientific community, using a plethora of methods to meticulously and systematically puzzle together historic events and we still don't know many basic things of more recent history (like the exact location of a battle in the 14th century), now imagine if we barely understand what happened in Egypt 4000 years ago, what chance do Westrosi have to understand what happened 8000 years ago?

tl;dr: I dislike that Martin puts events thousands of years in the past and treats them as somewhat factual accounts of historic events, rather than entirely fabricated legends by people predating shit for political reasons.

I really hate that stuff as well, a lot of it is just FEUDALISM BUT BIGGER!!!! If you're aiming for accuracy, then you'd understand why feudalism was the size that it was.

I've seen people try to make excuses, that the inconsistency of the seasons don't allow for development, that constant warfare doesn't allow for development, that there's a secret sci-fi order holding society back, etc. These are all excuses for a critical lack of accuracy in an accuracy based series and don't explain things like how the "common tongue" is able to be spoken across an entire feudal continent for 8,000 years.

We also get fucking juvenile absurd events like the High Septum, the stand-in for the pope, being fucking DEVOURED by a mob. Imagine that: the pope being DEVOURED by a medieval mob. Fuck off.

Bottomline - a lot of the early lore established in the first book was probably him winging it and the dedication to accuracy/realism was a later development. This makes him posturing about Tolkein's lack of focus on state management even more pathetic because he's pretty bad at it himself.

I mean the Egyptians didn't have a reality defying magic wall that stretched over the entire border into the sky, neither.

I mentioned this earlier but GRRM approaches this shit from a very modern perspective. Everything is written down, somewhere, by a secular order devoted to knowledge that has chronicled all history since the bronze age. Oh and they serve knowledge itself, despite handling the political elites communications and being quartered in their castles. Paper isn't hugely expensive, education is somewhat available despite this knowledge not having any practical purpose, feeding them isn't a big deal, etc etc. To make a long story short, the reason most people were downtrodden peasants in *Ye Olden Times* was because you needed the vast majority of people working agriculture to feed everyone.

Oh! I said the knowledge doesn't have practical use but these same people, the Maesters, have a practical method of mass communication in the form of raven craft. No, this isn't used to facilitate trade. Merchant guilds haven't formed around raven networks. Greater knowledge of trading conditions in real life is what led to the stock market. Instead in AGoT it's mostly used for gossip and political communication. Once it was used for propaganda. Once. Nobody even thinks it's a big deal "Oh I can write the Lord of Dorne from Riverrun in, oh, a week tops. It's whatever. I don't like him so fuck him."

An allusion of realism is provided but so little about his world makes sense from a technical perspective. That doesn't mean I don't find the absurd societies of Westeros and Essos entertaining, but people claiming there's "meticulous accuracy" aren't looking at the story close enough.

George will make similar claims about his world being very accurate which is obnoxious because it isn't.

 

[RadicalCentrist]

An allusion of realism is provided but so little about his world makes sense from a technical perspective. That doesn't mean I don't find the absurd societies of Westeros and Essos entertaining, but people claiming there's "meticulous accuracy" aren't looking at the story close enough.

George will make similar claims about his world being very accurate which is obnoxious because it isn't.

I mean it's fine if you just want an interesting setting. I would consider it a missed opportunity but that's my opinion. The problem is when this fat fuck claims that somehow he is more "accurate" or "grounded" than Tolkien. Tolkien's fiction was an exercise in how language and myths inform culture. But because he didn't consider tax policies it's somehow juvenile and ill formed. Hey GRRM, you want to know what Aragon's fiscal policies would have been? The same as the last fifty guys who ruled the country, because taxation (The entire relationship between individual and state, really) would be grounded in common law that the Monarch is seen as both the font of, and arbiter of. The same common law that informs our language and laws today. I bring this up because this whole series is just The War of the Roses: Coldsteel edition, so maybe read what prominent individuals at the time thought of taxation too GRRM.

You fat lazy fuck. Instead you examine the results of dysentery on your barely legal waifu with her retarded love affairs.

TL;DR - I've forgotten how asshurt this series made me.

 

[CWCissey]

We also get fucking juvenile absurd events like the High Septum, the stand-in for the pope, being fucking DEVOURED by a mob. Imagine that: the pope being DEVOURED by a medieval mob. Fuck off.

Tell that to Johan DeWitt.

 

[Ginger Piglet]

We also get fucking juvenile absurd events like the High Septum, the stand-in for the pope, being fucking DEVOURED by a mob. Imagine that: the pope being DEVOURED by a medieval mob. Fuck off.

To be fair, there was one article I read about some guy's Crusader Kings game where he set himself as his objective that he would eat the Pope.

GRRM has no sense of scale either. He said that the Wall was 800 feet high. Then he was shown some early fan art of it, and said to the artist, "Isn't the Wall a bit high?" and the artist said, "But you said it was 800 feet," and GRMM was all "I thought that was more like Hadrian's Wall. Oops."

Hate to say it, but Joe Abercrombie's The First Law series gets the statecraft aspect of world building so much better. The Union is explicitly stated to have been founded by the setting's rough equivalent of Charlemagne about 570 years before the first novel, and has had three different dynasties in that time. It uses as its calendar the date since it was founded. While the Renaissance Italy cognate, Styria, is mentioned as having been founded as the "New Empire" by exiles from the magical cataclysm of the Old Empire (think Ancient Rome but on the Russian steppes) before collapsing into warring city states.

Better still, no medieval stasis! Banking and developed trade and commerce are a major factor in the first few novels, gunpowder ("Gurkish sugar") is developed and sees actual battlefield use in the 4th novel to undermine and demolish the walls of Fontezarmo and in the 5th novel cannon make an appearance. Handguns are alluded to but still at the "too slow firing and inaccurate to be actually useful" stage. In the 7th novel early industrialisation is underway and in the 8th the steam engine puts in an appearance, at least in experimental form. It's kinda the sort of technological development you might get in a game of Civilisation if you deprioritise the cultural advances in favour of the more material and engineering related ones - for instance, there's very little interest in astronomy other than as a navigational tool, religion is absent outside of Gurkhul, and republics are not a thing that exists. Possibly because the setting is being manipulated by rival immortal magi in a battle against each other so would of necessity prioritise technological rather than cultural advances.

 

[Absolutego]

GRRM has no sense of scale either. He said that the Wall was 800 feet high. Then he was shown some early fan art of it, and said to the artist, "Isn't the Wall a bit high?" and the artist said, "But you said it was 800 feet," and GRMM was all "I thought that was more like Hadrian's Wall. Oops."

He also claimed Westeros was the size of South America, until someone pointed out that all his travel times are like 1/10th of what medieval transport would be able to do at that distance and admitted continental Europe was probably more accurate.

 

[LionoRaptor]

I highly recommend Archive of Our Own. Its a fan fiction site where fans wrote better endings to S8 than the two fucks who are at Netflix now.

Better still, no medieval stasis! Banking and developed trade and commerce are a major factor in the first few novels, gunpowder ("Gurkish sugar") is developed and sees actual battlefield use in the 4th novel to undermine and demolish the walls of Fontezarmo and in the 5th novel cannon make an appearance. Handguns are alluded to but still at the "too slow firing and inaccurate to be actually useful" stage. In the 7th novel early industrialisation is underway and in the 8th the steam engine puts in an appearance, at least in experimental form. It's kinda the sort of technological development you might get in a game of Civilisation if you deprioritise the cultural advances in favour of the more material and engineering related ones - for instance, there's very little interest in astronomy other than as a navigational tool, religion is absent outside of Gurkhul, and republics are not a thing that exists. Possibly because the setting is being manipulated by rival immortal magi in a battle against each other so would of necessity prioritise technological rather than cultural advances.

In the show, I had hoped that Tyrion would end up invent the printing press (with help from Bran of course). Given his family is now poor with no gold, he would then become the richest man in Westeros. This time self-made. He would also pass knowledge throughout the land and books became cheaper and more accessible.

there's also the story claiming he was raiding in WoW when snyder called him to tell him he got the role so didn't pick up, till he checked his phone and then called him back.
also apparently was bit of a fatso growing up, so if there's one guy you could believe is a "gamer" it's probably him. but even then still a nice enough guy from what you hear, so there's that too.

Yeah apparently when he was younger, he lost a role. It was a role he really wanted. His parents never told him why he lost it. Then he overheard them talking about it and they said that he was too fat for it. From then on, he went on a diet and lost weight. He has stayed like that since then.

 

[Activelo]

I highly recommend Archive of Our Own. Its a fan fiction site where fans wrote better endings to S8 than the two fucks who are at Netflix now.

Any particularly good ones?

 

[Ginger Piglet]

Its a fan fiction site where fans wrote better endings to S8 than the two fucks who are at Netflix now.

That's kinda damning with faint praise.

 

[LionoRaptor]

Any particularly good ones?

Home. This one is highly rated.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/11999049

My peronal favourites are the ones where Jon brings Ghost with him to Dragonstone at start of S7.

 

[7he47r0n]

To me, that is the worst aspect of his storywriting and the most juvenile (if that word even applies). It's a very childish attitude of "Large numbers mean the setting is super fleshed out and important." Cut down everything in history of Westeros before the arrival of the Targaryens by a factor of 10 and the setting becomes much more sensible. Instead of 8000 year old prophecies in Oldtown, you suddenly have 800ish years and it makes a lot more sense. From our perspective, some of the things that characters nonchalantly talk about (like the founding of the Night's Watch) happened so long ago, in terms of our own history, that stuff would predate the earliest stages of the Egyptian high culture by more than 2000 years.
Let that sink in: The difference itself alone is about as much time between our modern day and the birthdate of Jesus Christ and that timeframe itself is just a quarter of the actual timespan.

Just imagine some IRL order of warriors, sworn to do something for their entire existence, that predates the Sumerian culture by a couple hundred years - and we have almost seamless documentation of their doings for thousands of years.

Isn't that one of the reasons why Preston Jacobs believes the entire setting is a post-apocalyptic science-fiction one disguised as fantasy?

 

[RomanesEuntDomus]

Isn't that one of the reasons why Preston Jacobs believes the entire setting is a post-apocalyptic science-fiction one disguised as fantasy?

For all we know, it could be set on Mars in the distant past.