Yeah my bad I asked about their opinion and assumed it would be a spoilered addendum or something.
On topic, I really feel bummed seeing so many people jump back on trying to vilify Tolkien's work or to try to tear it down in some fashion. I still remember the huge spike when the movies came out (and as games continued to arrive) of your usual hand-wringing about racism. At the time people weren't so gung-ho to jump on the woke train and they received a good bit of flak, even genuine effort to counter their arguments.
That's the problem with having works written by guys who lived before the 50s. Everyone in modern media and academia sees them as racist, sexist, bigots, even if the so-called "evil race" like the Orcs are not even a race unto themselves, just elves and humans who were twisted and turned evil. Of course, back when the LOTR trilogy came out, it was still the early 2000s, so people still had a modicum of common sense at the time.
Then there are the super smug comments that are all based off George Argh-Argh Martin's comment about Tolkien's book being ungrounded in reality due to lacking tax policies. As stupid as those takes were I prefer them to the resurgence of woke bickering over how a man who lived through the first world war and is now dead in the ground isn't espousing modern day politics in his long since published works.
Funny thing is, we also don't get tax policies much in ASOIAF. I was expecting some grey area for the Lannisters since they're already wealthy as fuck, and in the books, they didn't run out of gold, so comparing them to Robert Baratheon who plunged the country into massive debt despite inheriting a full treasury from the Mad King, one would think that Robert's regime taxed the living shit out of the populace to pay for that debt, and then when Joffrey came to power, they lowered the taxes because grandpapa Tywin was willing to foot the bill for everything so long as his grandson's ass is sitting on the throne.
Meanwhile, everything Martin sees as a flaw of Tolkien isn't really a flaw. Here are some of his complaints, which are nonsensical to anyone who had a working knowledge of LOTR:
"Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn’t ask the question: What was Aragorn’s tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all these orcs? By the end of the war, Sauron is gone but all of the orcs aren’t gone – they’re in the mountains. Did Aragorn pursue a policy of systematic genocide and kill them? Even the little baby orcs, in their little orc cradles?"
He asked if the Gondorians went off to kill Orc babies, when there are no Orc babies, they were either twisted humans or elves, or they grew from the ground like fantasy versions of clones as adults ready to kill. He asked why Aragorn didn't have a tax plan, even though the story ends where he gets crowned. They obviously still had a standing army, and the Orcs were just left to wither away so long as they didn't attack any human settlements. Maybe if Tolkien managed to write that sequel to LOTR he was planning, we would have gotten some stuff about Aragorn's tax plan and ruling style.
"Ruling is hard. [A Song of Ice and Fire] was maybe my answer to Tolkien, whom, as much as I admire him, I do quibble with. Lord of the Rings had a very medieval philosophy: that if the king was a good man, the land would prosper. We look at real history and it’s not that simple."
Anyone who knows Lord of the Rings would know that it isn't that simple. Aragorn is a good king, but not just because of blood rights or being a good man, but because he's seen the real world far from the ivory towers of the ruling class. He spent years being a ranger, honing his combat skills and learning different languages, and he knows how the real world outside of the royal palace works, so he would know how to run a kingdom, since he has a practical idea of what's going on in the real world.
I find it funny that these idiots always have to separate being good from being practical, as if being practical means you have to do some evil things, yet the natural answer would be that yes, having a good person as a ruler would be more practical, as not only would they seek to be responsible for their rule, but people will trust them more and the system will run better, as opposed to someone who isn't so good and pure, who will have to spend resources keeping their own people down while foreign powers look upon their lands with hungry eyes.
These assholes are aggravating. Tolkien did far more worldbuilding for Middle-Earth than George R. R. Martin did for his world. Martin is telling a more grounded story compared to Tolkien's "my characters never stop in one place long enough ask about the plight of the common peasantry or the inflationary effects of dwarf gold" tale, but there are dozens of pretentious video essays on youtube rightfully picking apart Martin's lazy worldbuilding. It's not that he's a bad writer: he's very competent. But he really should have restricted the scope of his work: his let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may writing style resulted in him completely losing control over his own story.
The problem with Martin is that he doesn't have an outline for where the story will end. He used to, but then he went off-script and by the fourth and fifth books, he was just writing whatever came to mind. He basically went from the western version of Romance of the Three Kingdoms to Naruto filler before he stopped writing books. Tolkien had an outline, a history behind his work, and a beginning, middle, and end. Martin went off the script and was just randomly meandering around by the time of the fifth book. Then he stopped writing for his main book series altogether.
He's being hailed as some sort of writing god because he wrote a nihilistic fantasy story where people actually fuck. Fucking yay. It's interesting how we went from the romantic optimism and epic (in the original sense of the word) storytelling the Lord of the Rings movies revived in the early 2000s, to this shit we're currently in only twenty years later.
If having stories where people fuck and have casual dialogue about sex makes a work groundbreaking, then the Old Testament would be the most groundbreaking piece of literary work in history. The amount of sex, violence, and utter mayhem and destruction there would make Game of Thrones look like the Hobbit in comparison.
Also, I can't get why people celebrate having such dark works be the norm. Sure, a bit of darkness here and there adds weight to the story, but making the story grimdark just makes me stop caring about things. If all the major factions are dickheads, then I won't care who wins or loses, if they're all dickheads, they all deserve to burn.
It's part of the reason why I'm not a big fan of 40K's "grimdark" atmosphere. Because they're all just assholes, anyways. Even if everything went right for the Imperium, like by some miracle, they manage to revive the Emperor of Mankind, he rallies his forces and all of humanity to him, he goes on a second Great Crusade and eradicates every Chaos cult and xenos race in the galaxy, he's just going to go back and be an arrogant, atheistic, fedoralord shithead forcing his will on everyone at the point of a bolter, so it won't take long for the Chaos Gods to find new patsies as people obviously would get tired of that, just like they did in 30K, and the whole cycle of violence will repeat, over and over again.
George RR Martin is for people without internal monologue.
George RR Martin is for people who haven't read anything darker than My Little Pony. His stories were good, but he got lost along the way, and his comments on Tolkien were stupid as fuck.
Because deconstructionist writing removes all the heroes.
And the bugmen hate heroes because rather than see them as something to strive toward and emulate, they feel like a hero personally calls them a failure and reminds them that daddy loved them too much or not enough.
Mostly because these people are failures. They have not struggled to create something good, and they know it. And so they just lash out at any genuine heroes, believing that being "diverse" and "standing up to the man" is enough to be a hero.
It's like an all-girls' high school all over again. Any girl who is genuinely good gets picked on by the selfish twats who are at the top of the social ladder, because those selfish twats are shallow and self-absorbed, and they know they're not as good as the people they're picking on.
Their's nothing wrong with Martins style. The fallacy is when people presume that his way is the correct way when their is no correct way. What's interesting is how many rudementry errors that salamander faggot made about tolkien.
Martin's early writing was better than his later writing. His early writing was focused on twists, schemes, and shock value, which was good for entertainment, while his later books just got lost with details and barely went anywhere. It's telling that he designed the story to be unfilmable, and the moment the TV show picked up steam in 2011, he stopped writing books for the main series altogether. The show crashed and burned in 2019. It's 2021, and that fabled sixth book has yet to show itself.
What Ultramarine fanboys? We have reached a point in time where if someone is playing Ultramarines they genuinely like them. The true autism in the space marine fanbase is that people LOVE overpowered marines but the minute they are blue they are "mary sues" look at Astartes people love space marine wank just take out the toilet symbol and blue and its okay. If anything the chapters the fandom overrate nowadays is so boring Black Templars and Lamenters being the big 2 I see.
I always find most of the chapters to be overrated anyways, hence why I prefer homebrew chapters with a few links to the old Space Marine Legions of the past.
No arguments there. But I should have been more specific. I know there are people who genuinely like the Ultrasmurfs and aren't spergy idiots that give me a years long diatribe of "Actually, Ultramarines are best Marines." Just let me like what I like and make my outdated jokes.
Most Ultramarine fans are just decent folk who like their blueberry boys. It was Games Workshop and Matt Ward that pushed the whole "Ultramarines are the best" line. A few diehard Ultramarine fans hung on to that meme, but most aren't that bad. It's like how the Mandalorian fanbase is now: some diehards hold on to the Karen Traviss line of "Mandos rule, Jedis drool", but other Mando fans like other Mandalorian sects, like the Neo-Crusaders, the Death Watch, and some even like the Pacifist Mandalorians (I know Lorerunner and SF Debris love them) without shitting on the Jedi or anyone else.
Personally I think Ultramarines are more Luke Skywalker Mary Sues (in that they get most of the focus). The real Mary Sue bullshit comes from the Space Wolves, and since Space Wolf players REALLY want Russ to come back like Gulliman did...
Then in that case, they aren't Mary Sues, they're just the main characters. They're only Mary Sues if they're undefeated and they always come out on top despite logic demanding otherwise.
The Black Templar thing seems to mostly be for the meme. No clue where the love for the Lamenters come from. Aren't they just Blood Angels who figured out how to do the hair flippy thing and actually cut themselves?
Black Templars are mostly just meme generators at this point. It's like Sandor Clegane or Bronn from the Game of Thrones TV show. The Black Templars are there for the "purge the heresy" memes, like the Grey Knights, just as people pay attention to Sandor Clegane for chicken jokes and people want to see Bronn say the word "cunt" over and over again.
Bah. Wokeism ruining shit yet again. Apparently if you're white you can be one-note and brutal, but anything else? Seriously, fuck these woke man babies.
And yet they cream their pants at things like Omni-Man brutalizing the Guardians, or Homelander imagining himself lasering an entire crowd. You're only allowed to be brutal if the story is woke, dammit!
