This isn’t bad writing so much as its a first-bookism/change of path but Stannis just sitting around on Dragonstone doing nothing for a year, and also waiting so long to declare his kingship.
I just finished re-reading the first book, and you're absolutely right. What was he waiting for? He already knows everything, and he already has the evidence.
Honestly it seems a bit contrived in order to explain/justify the North declaring independence instead of siding with Stannis, who Ned was trying to put on the throne. Unaware of the incest or why exactly Ned was imprisoned and executed, Robb feels he can’t side with Stannis because Joffrey and Tommen are ahead of him in the line of succession, which then leads to his vassals declaring him KITN.
I mean what was he going to do before Robert died. He says himself had he brought the incest claims to him, it would have been seen as a self-serving attempt to put himself first in the line of succession.
The waiting after he died can probably be explained as him gathering his strength for the inevitable civil war before making himself a target.
He took longer than Robb to gather his forces? Remember Robb had time to gather an army march from winterfell to the Riverlands fight two big battles before stannis even declared himself king. Also he did exactly zero work to actually have any evidence to prove his claims. He just spent a year sulking in dragonstone not even getting a hold over any of Robert's bastards
If Stannis called his banners how many men would he realistically be able to muster? He doesn’t inspire loyalty to begin with and the houses he does eventually get to his side are very small. Remember Renly is the Lord Paramount of the Stormlands, not Stannis. Stannis has the loyalty of the lords along the Narrow Sea, which are few and far between.
1. Hiring sellswords & pirates takes longer than just calling your banners. Stannis had to actively go around the narrow sea and painstakingly pay off & promise things to various mercenaries to supplant his meager bannermen.
2. Robb was explicitly trying to get to King’s Landing as fast as humanly possible to rescue Ned.
3. Edric Storm is Renly’s ward, what justification was he going to use to take him?
Stannis has a brain and a disciplined mind, not just rushing into the fray. He is a man of strategy and tactics.
While Rob was a boy with many banners and a father in prison. Call the banners, we move to war.
The one thing I’ve thought of is inviting Ned to Dragonstone under the guise of wanting to inform the Hand about naval matters and then share the findings. From there a plan could be made to keep Robert alive and expose Cersei, maybe even get Renly in since he’s got the Stormlords and could convince Mace to marry Margaery to Robert (or himself if Robert refuses to marry again)
didnt ned also write him? if stannis had ask ned to visit him at dragonstone everything would have turned out different. Or if cat would have stopped at Dragonstone
AGOT Eddard VIII
>It struck him suddenly that he might return to Winterfell by sea. Ned was no sailor, and ordinarily would have preferred the kingsroad, but if he took ship he could stop at Dragonstone and speak with Stannis Baratheon. Pycelle had sent a raven off across the water, with a polite letter from Ned requesting Lord Stannis to return to his seat on the small council. As yet, there had been no reply, but the silence only deepened his suspicions. Lord Stannis shared the secret Jon Arryn had died for, he was certain of it. The truth he sought might very well be waiting for him on the ancient island fortress of House Targaryen.
He didn’t have the ships or swords. He spent the time hiring Salladhor Saan and sellswords from Essos. Had he declared immediately before gathering forces it would have gone less well than it did. Also there isn’t really evidence against Cersei, or at least not definitive like a DNA test. Jon Arryn died right after Stannis brought him in and he did not know or trust Eddard. Bringing it forward himself was useless especially after Robert died.
My headcanon explanation for this is simply Stannis being resentful of Ned over his relationship with Robert. He didn’t know if he could trust ned, and the incest allegations would look self-serving.
Stannis’ whole character is defined by slights he has received,whether they are real or perceived. Sometimes people don’t make the most savvy political moves, but instead act out of personal emotions and ignorance. To be honest I just think it was an oversight by Martin.
Stannis didn't do anything because he couldn't. He had no men and most houses in the Stormlands refused to support his claim. I'd imagine his time during Book 1 is spent trying to fortify Dragonstone, establishing alliances with pirates like Salladhor Saan, and trying to wrest control of the Stormlands from Renly.
Stannis has been shown to be indecisive at times. He takes a while to make his next move after defeating the free folk and after the Battle of the Blackwater. He probably just wasn’t sure what to do.
I mean is he not sitting there knowing Ned has been taken into custody or beheaded, he lacked support and troops.
He a careful commender and supposed be a real procatinator like in the last book at the village.
The Dothraki. Real life steppe peoples were masters of war and logistics. The dothraki mostly use one handed sabers and charge spear walls head on. Any culture that intept would have promptly been rolled over by one that was smarter.
Real life steppe nomads: *colorful, interesting and unique clothes in many colors, often detailed embroidery, jewelry and accessories*
Dothraki: *painted leather*
You know how people joke that the British colonised half the world for spices just to never use it in their food?
The Dothraki raped and pillaged through half of Essos for its riches but refuse to wear anything but horse leather.
It also doesn’t help that the only things they seem to do are fight, rape, and enslave. There’s really no reason to look on them as anything other than monsters. GRRM might as well have taken Tolkien’s Orcs and given them horses and long hair. Hell, the Orcs had more instances of individuality than we’ve gotten from the Dothraki.
Their nomadic lifestyle of constant war seems really unsustainable, especially for how many there seem to be.
Real world analogues like the Mongols actually had pretty sophisticated systems of government.
Another thing to consider is that the Mongols still had a society, not every mongol was a warrior riding in the horde, like previously stated they had extensive logistics. Mongol horses were also smaller so they could be sustained on grass. But something George fails to take into account is that riders required spare remounts, each warrior had 3-4 horses minimum.
The entire world is unsustainable though, and it lacks a lot of the historically-realistic nuance and details that exists in other series like the Witcher and WoT, ASoIaF is more anachronistic and the rule of cool prevails on work much more than George would like to admit. George doesn't really seem to have a strong understanding of medieval warfare or combat, and a lot of the stuff that he thinks is historically realistic seem to come from wildly inaccurate Victorian Era Historians where a lot of shit was made up.
Martin could probably be described as writing fantasy based on fantasy. With a sprinkle of narrative great man history. The basis for his assumptions are already built on anachronism. He’s not writing a credible medieval setting he’s writing a darker version of Ivanhoe.
My understanding of it is its meant to be unsustainable which is why every Khalasar ultimately eats itself or splinters when the Khal dies. The Free Cities and Westeros treat them as an annoyance or barbaric savages to be paid off whenever a Khalasar rolls by but that may be me giving GRRM too much credit that he was trying to deconstruct the noble savage trope by showing how brutal and backwards such societies can be.
Yeah... No. GRRM simply has no idea about horsebased nomad societies. He has based the Dothraki on films like "Stage Coach" and "Genghis Khan". Which is ok, if he hadn't claimed that they are based on Sioux and Mongols.
A historians view: https://acoup.blog/2020/12/04/collections-that-dothraki-horde-part-i-barbarian-couture/
At some point after a Few years one Khal would learn how usefull bows are and then change dothraki society overnight.
Taking quickly to better was of killing people is one of the great unifying common instincts.
People always compare them to the Mongols, but the Mongols would eat the Dothraki for breakfast. The Dothraki feel more like the Scythians or some other Bronze Age steppe people as opposed to medieval
If I recall correctly, 2 out of 4 cultures mentioned as inspirations are Alans and Huns. The comparision with Mongols is something fans did, not GRRM himself.
While I do mostly agree, what’s interesting about the Dothraki is that they are a relatively “new” culture in terms of planetos. They were only really able to thrive due to the massive power vacuum left by the collapse of Valyria and the following the century of blood. After the century of blood ended, I think the reason no smarter culture, like the post-Valyrian free cities decided to roll over them was because, well they were smarter. You could argue the smart thing is to pay them tribute like they do, and they (mostly) leave you alone. The other option is waging a massive scale war to exterminate an extremely numerous and highly mobile population, which would be devastating to the whole continent.
To me the problem is them existing as a threat at all.
They can't realistically sack a city. They have no siege weapons or the means/skill to make them.
They don't were armor so they cant realistically fight an army that does. They are at best light cavalry, more suited for skirmishing, harassing enemies, and luring them into traps.
Their entire culture exists exclusively off raiding, which cannot be done (see points #1&2).
They constantly have internecine warfare so their population would never be large enough to pose a real threat, the Mongols for example were not a real threat to their neighbors until Genghis Kahn united/subjugated the clans.
Great points. I definitely see how it's pretty unrealistic for this type of culture to thrive the way they are, but to me George works it into the narrative pretty well. He does a pretty good job of providing in universe explanations about the Dothraki's prestige in warfare. I'm admittedly naive on military history, but I felt pretty convinced during my reads. Keep in mind this is coming from Jorah Mormont, who's been established as having years of warfare experience and good military instincts.
>Ser Jorah's face grew thoughtful as their horses trod together down the godsway. "When I first went into exile, I looked at the Dothraki and saw half-naked barbarians, as wild as their horses. If you had asked me then, Princess, I should have told you that a thousand good knights would have no trouble putting to flight a hundred times as many Dothraki."
>"But if I asked you now?"
>"Now," the knight said, "I am less certain. They are better riders than any knight, utterly fearless, and their bows outrange ours. In the Seven Kingdoms, most archers fight on foot, from behind a shieldwall or a barricade of sharpened stakes. The Dothraki fire from horseback, charging or retreating, it makes no matter, they are full as deadly … and there are so many of them, my lady. Your lord husband alone counts forty thousand mounted warriors in his khalasar."
AGOT Dany IV
Yeah and there are a lot of problems militarily with this. GRRM gods bless him doesn't seem to know much about Medieval warfare or weapons systems, and shows some serious inconsistencies from time to time. A lot of the problem comes down to armor, it really matters. The fight between Jorah and Quotho shows this, Jorah is no slouch, but Quotho as one Drogo's blood riders is supposed to be one of the best of the best, and Jorah's armor saves him. Other times it seems armor's practicality is forgotten, this isn't just a GRRM problem but a common fantasy trope that really bugs me, armor works that's why people used it.
Lets start with the bows, The Westerosi use a longbow, based on the English longbow and the Dothraki use a recurve composite bow based on the Mongol bow. In reality they are pretty much of equal strength, but used for different purposes, as Jorah says longbows are used on foot, and recurve bows are designed for use on horseback. Like Horseback archery longbow archery was not just something that anybody could do. The Mary Rose shipwreck contained hundreds of longbows from the 16th century which have up to almost 200 lb draw weights. The skeletons recovered have evidence of spinal distortion and compression, and they have a thickening of their arm joints, suggesting enough training to actually change the development of the bones. The usefulness of Arrows against plate armor has been greatly exaggerated both in history and in pop culture. if you are interested in this topic I highly suggest Tod Culter's medieval myth busting videos on Youtube.
[https://www.youtube.com/@tods\_workshop/playlists](https://www.youtube.com/@tods_workshop/playlists)
Knights are heavy cavalry, and they would have trained since childhood in riding and combat, both on horseback and on foot. The best Mercenary company in Essos is The Golden Company, made up of largely of Westerosi and designed in the Westerosi military style. I'm not saying that the Dothraki wouldn't be excellent horsemen, and skilled warriors, but they just don't add up. Experienced soldiers in Westeros would be used to fighting against cavalry, the horse archer angle might require a change in tactics, but that's what experienced and skilled commanders do.
Numbers are always a problem for GRRM. If Robb, or Tywin can field 40,000 soldiers how is the 40,000 Dothraki a particular threat? as others have mentioned elsewhere in the thread there is an overabundance of peasant levys, and not enough professional soldiers, and mercenaries for a culture as militaristic as Westeros where there is at least 1 huge war per generation.
Sorry for the rant, I didn't mean to go on this long...but once I get going on this subject its hard for me to stop.
Robert talks about this (in the show, don't remember the books) that how long will the people support him if he dosent try to fight and disband/destroy the dothraki should they come to westeros. If the dothraki roam the countryside and avoid the fortifications and a direct fight against a prepared westerosi army the its not much the Westerosi armies can do. Because of the mobility of the dothraki. And I guess the same goes for the free cities.
2 problems here.
1) The Dothraki wouldn't be that mobile. 40,000 soldiers means how many non combatants (women, children, slaves) that they would be bringing with them, let alone the hundreds of thousands of horses they would need. They cannot hide and swiftly move around the countryside with logistical issues like that
2) The Dothraki are in hostile foreign territory, they don't know what to eat or where to forage, also as the locals you set where you fight them. You also have a huge numerical advantage. lure them into advantageous terrain (any advantage the Dothraki might have is totally lost in any of the many non plain environments in Westeros), surround them and they cannot run away.
2 is HUGE. How are they going to feed themselves? How are they going to find ANYTHING in such a strange and exotic land?
I think it's stretching reality already to have the Ironborn conduct all of these surgical strikes throughout the North in ACOK when most of them should be hopelessly lost. *Eventually*, they might places like Deepwood Motte, but they might have already been run down from reports about their invasion long before this, and none of them are experienced cavalrymen.
And then it comes to the Dothraki, which turns stretching reality into breaking it. They have likely no maps, or none that are any good. And any people leading them like Viserys or GC don't have good first-hand knowledge either. They have all kinds of terrain with which they are not familiar, no ability to have reinforcements, no ability to coordinate with each other in Westeros if they separate into different bands, no ability to engage in siege warfare, etc. They would be good for "smash and grab" raiding of small settlements only.
>as others have mentioned elsewhere in the thread there is an overabundance of peasant levys, a
Isn't this it? Knights are skilled, but it was always my impression that they were relatively uncommon. I always assumed Westerosi armies consisted of 10% knights and 90% conscripted peasants.
The thing is the 90% peasants arent just barely armed levies, if you see the descriptions of the men when Catelyn looks at Rob's army she sees armoured pikemen longbowmen and several units of organised troops which make up most of the northern army.
They are also disciplined most of the time, a pike square in the battle where Roose leads the northern troops holds for a long time against wildmen and the Mountain, and hails of arrows.
Yeah and knights would be fairly rare, but what I'm talking about are Men-at-Arms. People like Bronn and The Hound, plus unknighted household guards. The best example from the story I can think of are the Mountain's Men, he has 7 professional soldiers an several squires serving him. Most Knights would have a group like this around them. So for most Knights there are 5-10 professionals, plus there would be unsworn fighting men looking to make a name or a living of of the conflict. So if 10% are knights well over half the soldiery should be professionals, and not untrained peasants.
Edit: Also another example when Beric goes to hunt down The Mountain, Ned sends Beric, Thoros, Gladden Wylde, and Lord Lothar Mallery, each is reasonable to bring 20 men at arms, plus he sends 20 of his own guard.
Edited for clarity
I don't think it's the idea of them existing as a threat, I think it's them being a complete nuisance to the cities in Essos. Almost all of the cities in Essos depend upon trade to keep alive and keep wealthy, meaning that they keep their ports open, they keep their gates open and they keep the roads leading to their gates open and easy to travel.
What happens when a highly mobile and highly aggressive group of skilled fighters approach the city? They either close the city gates and prepare for a siege, marshal troops and fight in the field, or present them with gifts and carry on with business as usual.
The first two options are arguably more costly and detrimental to the cities; they either close themselves off to trade for an extended period of time, or they get drawn into a long and slow war with the Dothraki, not due to the Dothraki's fighting prowess or martial tactics, but due to the sheer number and manouverability of the Dothraki, not to mention that the Dothraki's entire way of life revolves around fighting and killing; the cities can't just beat an army and force them to surrender, they would have to eradicate the Dothraki as a whole to stop them from reappearing and waging war again.
In the end, with all of the cost involved in launching a campaign against the Dothraki, or the economic losses incurred by closing the city and engaging in a siege, it seems to be the cheapest and easiest solution to just present the Dothraki with slaves and riches to keep them pacified, especially considering the obscene amounts of wealth the Slaver Cities and perhaps some of the Free Cities posses.
Again, these are just my thoughts, and my way to justify why such a primitive and aggressive group like the Dothraki even survive and thrive in Essos.
Realistically there would have been one Khal in the century of blood that figured out how cool bows are and then Dothraki society as it exists in the books would be gone.
Even the show realized they needed to give the Dothraki horse archers.
It’s kinda funny because the world of ice and fire book tries to fix this a little bit by saying they spend a lot of time herding sheep and goats, something that just never shows up in the main books lol
I've posted this before but the Dothraki don't make sense even outside of their crude representation as nomads. Vaes Dothrak shouldn't exist. I can maybe buy that it's a holy site for all Dothraki, that's fine, but what I can't believe is that it has a thriving market where people from all over come to visit. Why would any merchant from anywhere travel through the heart of the Dothraki Sea with valuable wares to sell in a city with little to no infrastructure?
As great of a character writer as he is, George is not a very good worldbuilder… admittedly, he has said he writes for the stories, not the lore, so it isn’t his focus.
He's great at character work, and his medieval houses do good enough of a job to give the *illusion* of history. (Which is as good as you can get as an author, unless you sit down and actually write a history like Silmarillion.)
Which makes all the times he's praised for worldbuilding weird. We're talking about the guy who thought years long winters were a cool idea but did not bother thinking about how it would actually reshape a society.
If anyone wants the very detailed answer to this there is a great essay about this on ACOUP.
[That Dothraki Horde, Part I: Barbarian Couture](https://acoup.blog/2020/12/04/collections-that-dothraki-horde-part-i-barbarian-couture/)
I think the point is he was never asked or given the benefit of the doubt like everyone else. Ned Stark decided what happened and no matter what Jaime said, it was pushing against a tide.
Tyrion similarly, comes out of his bedridden state and tons of people have taken credit for his achievements etc. He decided it’s pointless to argue about who did what since he would look silly. Can’t remember the word GRRM uses.
But I also agree that the fact it isn’t told to *anyone* comes off as a retcon now that I think more, there’s no reason for him not to tell his family for example. Though some evidence I would use against retcon is that the caches of Wildfire are found in Clash of Kings once or twice by the alchemists
I always figured it was less a benefit of the doubt issue and more Jaime being way too proud and stiff-necked for his own good. And also feeling on some level that he was guilty because he did kill the king, even if it was for good reason. Now put all that on a dramatic teenager, and it's totally plausible to me that you get "Fiiiine. You want to call me Kingslayer, I'll be the biggest dick of a kingslayer you've ever seen." And then after a few years no one would have believed him if he'd changed his story anyway.
Exactly this, sometimes it's easier to be the bad guy rather than be a good guy perceived as bad by everyone around them. I mean, that is literally Tyrion's story in a nutshell, and we see that now he doesn't care about what people believe about him, as he's tired of trying to prove himself as 'good' to everyone around him. I think that as a fandom we sometimes spend too much time overanalysing characters' decisions, and especially from a very pragmatic, emotionless lens. People do so much stupid stuff in real life that it isn't a stretch to believe that characters within this story could make the same mistakes.
> I think the point is he was never asked or given the benefit of the doubt like everyone else.
Right but the idea that *nobody* once asked him about what is objectively one of the most important events in the war is just silly.
No Maesters? Barristan never came up to him afterwards and said, "How could you have done this?" Robert never asked him the tale of how Aerys died? Nobody who hated the Mad King ever wanted to find out exactly how he died? Not even a semi-rhetorical "How can you live with yourself" or whatever?
It's just an absurdity. Either nobody asked him, which is just the laziest writing ever, or they did ask him and he lied to them for no reason. It's just abysmal.
Yeah reasonable enough. As I said it is weird that he expects us to believe he and Tyrion or Tywin discussed it.
The whole topic is interesting though because everyone hated Aerys so why did Jaime even need an explanation
Honestly from what I can tell Jaime was just called a mean-spirited nickname by his political enemies occasionally. It's just beyond pathetic that we're supposed to think he's gone through some kind of dismal persecution.
Like I think it just fails completely as a story. I don't think *any* of it works. The Wildfire is not only a massive plothole but it also makes the scenario *less* interesting. "Jaime killed Aerys and Ned disagrees with this because both men have complex systems of morality and worldviews that are mutually exclusive" is far more interesting to me than "Jaime killed Aerys in a scenario where literally nobody would ever disagree with his actions but he decides not to tell anyone about this for no reason so there can be conflict".
Because the point was never to present an interesting or nuanced account of the situation. It was to go, "You thought Jaime was bad? HE'S GOOD WHAAAA??? I JUST SUBVERTED YOUR EXPECTATIONS!"
I think the Jaime excuse really just comes down to spite. It's easy to be spiteful over a minor thing but Jaime is as spiteful as he is arrogant so explaining himself is just unheard of. He doesn't need their understanding. That's what I got out of it. That's why I love his character development where he begins to want people to see him as honorable
I think its more that he expected to be seen as shinning knight,or at least not scorned by it,but then people started talking kingslayer and he got pissed because his fantasy was broken,and developed a you are all wrong mentality.
But still he could still talk about wildfire without talking about why he killed Aerys.
Littlefinger isn't the cause of the Realm's financial woes (at least not the only one anyway).
Littlefinger only became Master of Coin less than 5 years before the start of the main books. And the whole reason he was apointed was because the crown was already having financial trouble, and he had a talent for money. A minor lord like him would never have even been considered for the small council if they weren't desperate.
Littlefinger may have been embezzling the crowns funds, but he was hardly the only one doing it. Corruption was rampant in King's Landing during Robert's reign.
The crown's debts were a result of Robert's enormous wasteful spending and enabling of corruption. Littlefinger was just a symptom of the problem, not the root cause.
It is a little bit that we don’t know. Martin isn’t exactly sketching out a working revenue system.
But it’s possible that they really are that low on the state development scale and being king doesn’t really make you rich and powerful. It’s being rich and powerful that makes you king. It’s owning a butt load of land. Sort of personal wealth. Rather than taxes, which old style monarchs tended to keep as low as possible because people hate when you demand their money. Autocrats tend to not have the option of higher taxes, it’s democracies that can fund their state by greater taxation because of having the buy-in from representation. Not being the richest lord Robert was never going to be an effectively rich king.
This couples well with Robert seeming to not understand or not care about the basis of his real power. He’s a warlord in a society ruled by warlords. And yet he has no dudes, no men at arms, no spear carriers. He’s surrounded himself with another warlord’s men in red cloaks. Or just allows sell swords to hang around. You wouldn’t catch a Targ dead without a load of faceless spear carriers around to impress everyone. Or most Westerosi lords. But Robert seems to think all he needs are a couple of white knights and a crown.
I've always seen the first one as part of littlefingers plan. He was able to bankrupt the realm because Robert basically demanded him to, and nobody could say no to Robert. If he wanted to intentionally bankrupt the realm all he had to do was hide big purchases in bigger purchases made in Roberts name, and people would just put the blame on Robert over petyr
Littefinger didn't impoverish the crown secretly.
Robert did by being a spendthrift who tolerated corruption, and he and the rest of his council knew fully well that he was running up dept throughout his reign.
Jaime not telling anyone you could still say its his arrogance,pride, whats baffling is that Kings Landing was shortly taken by two huge armies and none of them found some stacks of wildfire,and then the story progress 15+ years and suddenly they find wildfire in ACOK.
I was gonna make a post about how Doran Martell sends his son off on a ridiculous mission into enemy territory with vague goals and when he doesn't return Doran's next move is to... send off his daughter on a ridiculous diplomatic mission into enemy territory with vague goals.
Doran is either a complete moron or he REALLY wants Trystane to be his heir.
A lot of the worst stuff comes from Fire and Blood but the one that gets me is 'the Dragon's Wroth'.
Dorne resisting Aegon was always an interesting aspect of the lore but it stops making any sense once the actual logistics of it are explored more.
GRRM has officially lost any right ever to complain about other fantasy being unrealistic. "The entire country's population hid in some caves for a few months" is actually insulting to the intelligence of the reader.
I always saw the Dorne-Targ conflict as an allegory of the US (Targs) attacking Iraq / Afgh (Dorne) with superior air power (dragons) so I never really had any problems with Dorne holding out
Even if that’s true, the scenarios are not very much alike. It doesn’t make sense for the outcome to be the same when the situation is completely different.
You can't just take a modern industrialized conflict and transpose it directly onto a medevial one. What did the Dornish people *eat* when all their crops and fields weren't being maintained?
real medival peasents even during good harvest often had barely enough food to survive. Even if the dornish has manage to evacuate most of there population in caves and mountains there would have immediately been famine. Like huge famine like bengal or irish potato famine.
Especially in modern conflicts where a lot of these "primitive" actors have support from much larger ones as their proxies. Who was secretly shipping supplies to the Dornish in their caves?
When I think about it, technically the North resisting would have made more sense. The much vaster and sparsely populated lands mean that even after capturing castles/cities, it would be much harder to exert control over the surrounding lands, and would lend well to guerilla-style resistance. And the swamps of the Neck are just a perfect natural chokepoint to hold off any armies.
Reading Fire and Blood I understand why GRRM considers himself to be a "gardener" rather than an "architect" in regards to his approach to writing.
Its clear there are quite a few places in Fire and Blood where GRRM needed something to happen a certain way because he'd already said it did in the main books, only to find he couldn't figure out how to make that happen convincingly. And Aegon's war with Dorne is probably the worst example of this.
It's not necessarily a matter of bad writing. And said completely with the benefit of hindsight.
But I do think that the initial plot regarding Cersei's children could have done with a little more build than just that they don't look like Robert. Because Stannis and Jon Arryn apparently didn't see a problem with that for like 14 years until the plot kicks off.
Like, maybe there should have been something else that made them distrust and investigate Cersei. And that's where they stumble upon the idea of the kids possibly being illegitimate.
But as I said, that's not so much a matter of what was actually put on paper being badly written. Just that the plot itself looks a bit weak in hindsight.
Perhaps this is fanon, but I thought the initial investigation by Stannis and Jon Arryn was caused by how obviously unfit Joffrey was to be king and that were looking for some reason to remove him from the line of succession
The father didn't see a problem with it. The father gives the ultimate legitimacy, e.g. Blackfyre Rebellion. It didn't matter at the time because Bobby was alive and the Lanisters weren't dangerous from the start. But, as years passed, sucession was a reality and so the scheming habit of the Lannisters, then questions of all sorts started being asked.
Stannis, as a Baratheon, might have found it weird and unconvincing from the start, but how was he gonna prove anything to his brother anyway?
I’ve already complained a lot about F&B in general, but I’ll focus on a specific aspect that bothers me:
So, among other things, the way that so many young women/girls are sexualized in F&B (including Coryanne Wylde, Princess Alyssa, Saera and her companions, Viserra, Daenaera Velaryon, arguably Baela, etc.) has the effect of undercutting a key point of Cersei’s storyline in Feast.
>”The cousins?" Even Taena sounded doubtful. "All three are younger than the little queen, and more innocent."
>”My cousins?" Margaery paled. "Alla and Megga are hardly more than children. Your Grace, this . . . this is obscene. Will you take us out of here?"
It is a critical detail that Cersei’s allegations against Margaery and her cousins are only believable to *someone who thinks like Cersei*. Only someone like Cersei, with her particular combination of internalized misogyny, lack of empathy, distorted outlook on human relationships and behavior in general—plus, a desire to defeat Margaery by sexually humiliating her (the one true way in which Cersei is her father’s heir)—could actually try to accuse a bunch of tweens of having bizarre debauchery parties on a daily basis.
But F&B is so insistent on sexualizing every female character, especially the younger female characters, with Gyldayn’s anecdotes of their “sexual exploits” that it undermines the point being made about Cersei in AFFC. If Gyldayn’s prurient fixations are to be believed, then apparently Cersei’s allegations are par for the course regarding preteens in Westeros. But isn’t the whole point that they are obscene and eminently untrue?
I don't think you're supposed to conclude that Gyldayn *is* to be believed. I think George is showing how what begins as an outrageous and absurd rumor can become a historical factoid due to the tides of politics and history. It's similar to the outrageous magical rumors surrounding Sansa after her escape from the Red Keep; they're a clue to cast a skeptical eye to similarly fanciful claims elsewhere in the story's history.
Please after how he sexualizes Dany in the mainline books? Or the comments he has done out of universe in regards to Dany's relationship with Drogo. Or the vast amount of sex children have in F&B most outrageously Aemma for basically no reason. There's a pattern here and I won't just say it's an unreliable narrator.
I agree that he's a pervert, I just don't think he's a 1-dimensional pervert. He codes Cersei's allegations as outrageous within his own writing. And while he has some deeply disturbing ideas around Dany's romance with Drogo, I don't think he actually portrays Dany herself in a seductress role, nor do I think his depiction of Dany lends credence to Glydayn's allegations.
I think, among other things, George is a bit more generous than most of us would be when he looks at people living in a different cultural context. When he describes Drogo and Dany's story as a love story, I do think we are meant to take into account the fact that 'love' in both of their cultures is something far more violent and cynical than it is in ours. To be clear, I still think his interpretation of that scene oversteps considerably, but so too does collapsing all analysis of sexuality in the books under the banner of "GRRM is a sicko and loves all of this unironically."
So IMO the thing with Cersei's accusations is that she isn't merely claiming Margaery is sleeping around, but that she has committed treason by cheating on Tommen, and that her cousins (and anyone else that was involved) are her accomplices in that treason. Also the religious zealotry of the Sparrows, coupled with their anti-nobility stance makes them super quick to believe any accusation against a lord or lady. In F&B on the other hand the Faith really has very little real power in regards to the nobility after Maegor.
This is definitely a good point. I think the issue for me though is that Cersei goes so overboard, not just Margaery having an affair but like the Tyrell girls are organizing some secret sex cult in the Maidenvault, and it’s supposed to be outrageous, to the extent that they are released from the Faith’s custody because it’s so transparent. But F&B is full of rather extreme sexual anecdotes about underage characters that aren’t even related to charges of treason—they’re just there for the sake of being there. That’s why I feel that, in addition to being pretty uncomfortable to read, it unintentionally diminishes the point being made about Cersei with her own charges against Margaery.
I had to put down Fire and Blood after the "cattle show" or whatever he called the young Targ king picking a queen.
There is no way in any universe that a 13 year old boy is gonna pick an 8 year old over a big tiddy 20 year old.
Oh god that's even worse
I eventually picked it back up and then when it got to the line about that Targ guy sucking on his 12 year old sister's "teats" "to make them larger and more sensitive" I was like hell no, into the fire pit with you. Like I get that writers can write bad things without supporting those things but when it's as a consistent a pattern as it is with Martin I get suspicious.
It did get me into writing and I'm doing my best to create an authentically medieval world but one where if a man so much as suggested marrying a child he would be castrated on the spot.
>undercutting a key point of Cersei’s storyline in Feast
To a degree this point is undercut by Sansa and Dany. Sansa is like 11 and has grown men actively lusting after her.
Fire and Blood does take this to ridiculous levels with Daenaera Velaryon.
Also a very good point! We’re supposed to see characters like Jorah and LF as sleazy, and be disgusted for example by Raff’s lecherous behavior towards Arya in the preview chapter, but the impact is dulled by the fact that very underage female characters are constantly sexualized in-universe to a ridiculous degree. I suppose if the intent was to make Westeros a deeply predatory society, GRRM certainly succeeded, but I mostly think it’s out of an attempt to be “shocking!” And “historically accurate!” to his idea of sexual violence in the Middle Ages.
I apparently pissed some people off the last time I said this, but it’s also directly related to worldbuilding/coherency issues (in addition to being gross). I will say it again: **By GRRM’s own words, “maiden” is an explicitly sexualized term in Westeros, so the fact that Gyldayn’s description of Daenaera describes her as a “maiden” automatically means that there is a sexual aspect to his description of her. Despite the fact that she is six.** No it’s not just purple prose or GRRM secretly trying to suggest that Aegon is asexual or any other bizarre defenses I’ve seen. It’s just gross and it achieves nothing else than suggesting that Westeros is a truly depraved place.
Interesting comment, thank you. I haven't read F&B myself, but given that it's about Targs, I guess it takes place some hundred years before ASOIAF.
Is it possible that attitudes on young teenagers having sex changed?
Though I'm not sure how "realistic" it would actually be for Westeros to undergo societal/cultural changes, because GRRM's world has always seemed fairly... static to me. i.e. great houses ruling over their land for hundreds, thousands of years
There's an interesting (but flawed) theory that people in Westeros are *really* bad at counting - or rather, prone to exaggeration. That "a thousand years" might only be six hundred, and the "seven hundred foot wall" that GRRM admitted was probably too big.
It's fun to entertain, but really it's just trying to justify the problem with most fantasy worlds - why *are* they so static? For most it's easy to write off as "it's a fantasy world" - no one is really asking why guns haven't been invented in Middle Earth when the films show us explosive powder and fireworks - but Westeros tends to invite more realistic scrutiny.
Although I think the real answer is that GRRM is really bad at counting.
To be fair, the gunpowder and fireworks were created by Wizards, and in the case of fireworks were at least partially magical. I'm fine with Gandalf and Saruman knowing how to make gunpowder while everyone else doesn't.
>It's fun to entertain, but really it's just trying to justify the problem with most fantasy worlds - why *are* they so static?
Also, there's a [trope in most fantasy worlds](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SciFiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale) where the worlds themselves are just way smaller than Earth so a conflict can actually have world-ending consequences despite pseudo-medieval levels of technology with transportation, food generation/preservation, etc. And as a result, when there are these kinds of conflicts with some kind of "Dark Lord" equivalent, the author doesn't have to write about the hundreds or *thousands* of possible polities that would be involved, or sending off armies to go fight somewhere that would take them months to reach by ship ("King Richard, I have gotten word that an evil Lich is rising in the Phillipines! Shall we send forces to stop him?").
So, you have a scenario where there's a justified break from reality to tell this kind of story, where we have more or less the same level of technology and governments for *thousands* of years and yet most of the known world can be reached within a thousand miles or two because it's been scaled down to make the story possible.
But then George comes along and amplifies the first trope by pretending at reality and having family dynasties which last thousands of years despite insufficient childbirth and cadet branches, and tries to avoid the second trope by using "realistic" continent size and breaking reality a different way to have these kinds of political structures and conflicts that should be made very difficult by having such huge distances to travel.
Worldbuilding in general. While Martin is a master ať character development, his world is just a bunch of clichés about the Middle Ages. Wide as a sea but shallow like lake Balaton.
The problem is, Martin is this nerdy guy who would read about some interesting thing, And then use it in his book, without a second though.
Others have already talked about Dothraki, another great example is Braavos: real life Venice was a superpower because it sits in one of the most fertille valleys in the world. They would import food and timber from Po valley. Braavos sits in the middle of nowhere, with no forests in hunderts of miles wide radius around the city. A city which completely relies on shipbuilding as their main defence but must import wood... is going to fall pretty quickly in the times of war. One blockade, and Braavos is doomed.
Martin just looked at Venice and told to himself: "I want this in my book", without thinking about why Venice was so successful.
And I could continue. Westerosi society is a joke and have nothing in common with medieval society besides names like "lord" and "kingdom".
The armies are made from recruited peasants like in 19th century, while real medieval armies were either made from professional warriors or mercenaries. This gave the nobles power. If your army is made of peasants, what's stopping them from rebelling against you? You can say, you could supress any rebellion with your loyal soldiers, right? Oh, you don't have any...
There are no laws. Little to no trade. Just 5 cities. No economic activity going on in Westeros, aside from farming. No artisians class. Some nobles are cartoonishly evil.
The whole society is cartoonishly evil, you really want me to believe that someone would willingly live under Boltons or Cleganes, George? For millenia? Why would anyone raise children here l, knowing they will get raped or flayed alive for the fun of the nobles? That's not how humans works.
I love the books for the characters, but the worldbuilding made me to roll my eyes many times. The more you think about it, the less sense it makes.
I also think about the overall lack of religiosity compared to IRL medieval Europe. And I think that ironically while we know a lot about the Faith as an institution, we have very little about the actual religion itself or why anyone would follow it. There’s no theology (so far), and very little sense of what it even is as a religion, beyond characters making the occasional prayer or two.
Yup, that's another thing where Martin read about the Catholic church and just put it into his books, without thinking about it.
Most of the main characters may be followers of faith, but they are actually atheists, And use religion as a tool to get more power. For medieval monarchs, even the progressive ones, the existence of God was a given, even for the progressive ones. That doesn't mean they were stupid - it was just natural for them, just like the existence of gravitation or black holes is natural to us.
I've also written an answer in some other thread, that the Church had incredible soft power. They could (and would) excommunicate people from the church, even the monarchs, making them social pariahs. They could place interdict over whole cities, so no baptisms, weddings nor furneals could take place in such city.
Think about it. Without baptisms, your children become pariahs for the rest of their lifes, never finding a spouse. Without wedding, if one of the parents die, the children and spouse do not inherit anything, and become homeless. These two things basically ruin the society upon which the interdict was declared.
And without furneals, the dead bodies remain rotting in the streets, poisoning the water and leading to the spread of diseases. After a few months of interdict, any city would surrender.
Edit: i mean interdict, not anathema.
The funny thing is that GRRM is a lapsed Catholic, which I think shows up all over the place in his writing—except for the Faith, which is sort of hilarious. Like, I think a lot of the character work can be viewed through that lens to an extent, I’m thinking particularly of the way that Dany’s story references prophet/Messiah narratives, or a lot of the general themes about self-sacrifice and morality even if it’s not specifically in a religious context.
Which might also be part of why GRRM writes the Faith the way he does—not going to try to play armchair psychologist here, but I’d imagine that someone identifying as a lapsed Catholic most likely has some ambivalent feelings. But it’s another one of those things where GRRM’s supposed “historical accuracy” is almost the complete opposite.
Like, the reason I really critique it is because it’s sort of like the defense of overusing sexual violence, death in childbirth and child brides as being “accurate.”
Kind of referring to your earlier comment, I always think that Westeros is an awful place because it’s the story GRRM is trying to tell, but the issue is when we’re supposed to believe that it’s historically accurate.
Most of the military writing focuses about the knighs. There's also mercenaries like the "Brave Companions" and King's Landing has a professional military force. Overall very little attention is given to the poor fucking infantry, which is actually very fitting for medieval writing
Medieval *chevauchees* were often that nasty
>Medieval *chevauchees* were often that nasty
Medieval warfare in general was quite nasty. The thing that set apart chevauchees from regular raiding was deph in which they pentrated enemy territory and the scale. For example Black Prince's 1355 chevauchee saw destruction of over 18 000 square miles of enemy territory, compared to not much more than 1200 square miles devastated by Edward III. But even the Black Prince wouldn't have dreamt of doing anything to the scale of what's described happening in the Riverlands.
>real medieval armies were either made from professional warriors or mercenaries
Aren't professional standing armies a relatively "new" (late renaissance and afterwards) idea? I'm pretty sure for most of medieval history, armies were in fact composed largely of peasants, or middle-class citizens.
Yeah that's an element that smartass deboonkers often overcorrect. The numerically bigger element in medieval armies were most of the time militias, althought they were relatively accomodated men Who could afford decent equipment, just like in Greece and Rome. Mercenaries became aboundant only in the late middle ages. For instance in Castille the *fonsado* obligated every free men to go to offensive war when the King marched on campaign.
While I don't think it's completely implausible, the fact that no one in-story questions the whole Rhaegar kidnapping Lyanna narrative. He was apparently loved by the smallfolk and (at least) respected by nobles (even Tywin simped for him) and since half-ish of the realm fought on his side, you'd think someone would've at least raised some doubts on his supposed actions in kidnapping and raping the daughter of the Warden of the North. Even after Barristan recalls his memories of Rhaegar to Dany, and Dany brings up Rhaegar's reputation in comparison with his supposed actions with Lyanna, Barristan is just like "I know. Crazy, huh?"
Same goes for Ned being Jon's supposed father. It's easier to see why people buy the story. But people are always saying how out of character Ned fathering a bastard would be. No matter what people believe happened, Rhaegar and Lyanna were together and 9 months later Ned comes back to Winterfell with a bastard. You'd think someone would've done the math and had suspicions.
I get it serves the story. But IMO it clashes with pretty much every other narrative where no secret is ever safe and there isn't a universal opinion on any one character (even Ned Stark isn't universally loved by non-Lannister characters). For example, in book we're only given context clues that Loras and Renly are lovers, yet the whole realm seems to be in on that "secret". It's just a stretch that possibly the most consequential secret in the entire series which pretty much anyone could piece together is universally accepted at face value.
While I think some people do know that Lyanna ran away but never spoke about it in the open, since it appears to be an open secret. For example Barristan said that Rhaegar had "his lady lyanna" implying that Lyanna was Rhaegar's lover and lady. No one questioned if they had kids because Ned sort of lucked out with people suspecting that he and Ashara Dayne may have been lovers plus Ned's truthfulness played into his reputation plus very few people would have cared about Jon in the first place. It seems to be one of the only places where Ned truly played the game of thrones effectively by concealing Jon.
Meereen and slavers bay plot. Nothing made me want to close my book more than when I see a Daenerys chapter pop up.
Which is a damn shame because I love Dany as a character, but where she is and everything she’s involved in means absolutely nothing to me.
The most book-accurate part of the adaptation was the audience shouting "go to Westeros, go to Westeros, GO TO WESTEROS" only for Dany to say "you know what imma chill here a while longer"
I very quickly became disinterested in Daenerys as a character as well. While I understand that it’s natural and human, her teenage crush on Daario was nothing I cared for. When the POV switched over to Barristan I gave a huge mental fist pump. I sincerely hope that when Daenerys comes back, it’s as the Queen and not the little girl.
The big narrative pay-off to Danaerys’ character WAS returning to Westeros. After 3 books it was time to advance that story.
If I was GRRM I would’ve replaced the Qarth plot in ACOK with the Astapor/Yunkai/Mereeen plot from ASOS. In ASOS proper i would have the plot from ADWD but abridged so that Dany is sailing back to Westeros by the end, or the beginning of the next book.
Theon taking bloody winterfell with only 30 men. Absolutely absurdly stupid.
The Dothraki, the Meereen and slavers bay plot.
Honestly, not having a Robb POV.
GRRM’s absolute hard on for “Medieval = Rapey”. Not a fan.
-The introduction of fAegon. I think it will ultimately benefit the story and I'm a fan of the arc, but this whole "somehow...the son of Rhaegar survived" being dropped in book 5/7 is some hot retcon bullshit.
-The unreal lucky streak that blessed the Lannisters before/during war of the 5 kings. Cat kidnaps Tyrion on a whim, he survives trial by combat; Jamie is captured (not killed) and Cat just decides to let him walk; Renly decides he wants to be King "just because", starts war with brother; Renly then killed by shadowbaby (a strategy never again used); Tywin arrives just in time to save KL; Ironborn invade the North for some reason (not for resources or land). I could also include Robb marrying Jeyne but it was likely planned or approved by Tywiin, but still, that plan went off without a hitch.
-Despite being a major piece of Westeros politics and having a massive presence, actual faith in the Seven seems to be reserved for the simple-minded smallfolk or blow-hard nobles. Otherwise they only get lip service from the main characters. I think it'd be more realistic if people more-strictly adhered to the rules of the faith and used it to guide their morals (i.e. not just in deciding not to do a little kin-slaying).
Cat running into Tyrion was definitely unlikely. I don’t think it’s particularly surprising that Jaime was captured. If they killed him, there would be no hope for getting any of the Starks back from Kings landing. Renly wanting to be king makes sense because he had the support of the people, and a big theme of the story is that ultimately the “rules of inheritance” don’t matter. Renly had more than an order of magnitude more supporters than Stannis, and it’s not surprising that he thought he’d be a better king, nor that he’d want to be more powerful, nor that people would support the person they like more.
The shadow baby is just setup for when the white walkers are revealed to be shadow babies but with ice magic instead of fire magic.
In general essos isn’t nearly as interesting or complex as Westeros.
It’s not a huge deal but Martin isn’t very knowledgeable about war or military history and it shows with the battle stuff. Makes fans discussions harder because imo you just have to go along with what the smart characters say even if it doesn’t make sense to you.
Feast dance aren’t good despite the revisionists. He definitely tried to write in a more literary fiction style, and some of the themes are interesting or good. But the story really goes nowhere and no one needs 5 dornish povs and 4 Ironborns.
I guess that depends on what defines bad writing.
Is it an act that seems contrived? Is a plot point that appears to go nowhere? Is it bad dialogs or descriptions?
Yeah, these responses are all over the place, but in a good way - I’ve enjoyed reading others’ interpretations. I guess it can mean a variety of things.
For me, in the series, the times I really noted poor writing was in the storytelling, which is usually excellent. The most egregious instance is the mutiny at Craster’s Keep. It’s from Sam’s perspective, and starts with someone being stabbed and then…”When it was over, the Lord Commander laid with his head on Sam’s lap” (something like that). The fuck? It just happened off page and he skipped to the aftermath? That’s LAZY writing.
Also, the thrilling climactic action of the Battle of Blackwater is delivered…second hand from Dontos recounting it to Sansa. Riveting. Martin has multiple POVs to work with, but violates one of the most rudimentary rules of writing: Show, don’t tell.
The entire catspaw reveal makes absolutely no fucking sense.
So let’s go over some facts. Because we literally saw this scene play out in Book One.
The Catspaw was paid in advance. They were given a dagger that, explicitly, would not escape notice. They were unusually dedicated to pulling this off. They focused on it being a mercy for Bran when speaking to Cat. For some reason whoever hired them wanted them to use a very distinctive dagger instead of say, just smothering the sleeping 7 year old boy.
Everything in book one points to it being some kind of diversion. The dagger is planted to try and attract notice. There is 0 reason the assassin couldn’t just smother Bran. Emphasis is put on it being a mercy.
Tyrion overhears Joffrey complaining about Summer. He doesn’t care about Bran. He’s annoyed at the wolf. Sandor offers to silence the beast, and Joffrey finds amusement in the idea of a dog killing a dog. When Tyrion talks to Joffrey about Bran, Joff seems unable to even comprehend the idea of empathizing with his suffering or showing mercy.
Flash forward to Storm. Tyrion, drunkenly, starts to think that Joffrey planned the whole thing. Because Joffrey acts weird about the idea of a dagger. That’s it. He starts to think Joff planned this whole thing because of that. He misremembers the line about Joffrey being annoyed at Summer, shifting it to being annoyed at Bran. He then stops thinking about it bc it doesn’t really make much sense and he’s drunk and soon has more pressing problems.
Jaime later talks with Cersei about it. Cersei claims that Robert drunkenly talked about how Bran should be killed as a mercy in front of their 7-12 year old children. Ok we know Robert wasn’t Dad of the Year so…maybe. Cersei is pretty unreliable. She even later tells Jaime that she’s lied to him a thousand times so like who knows if she’s being honest here, or even remembering correctly. Jaime from this thinks that Joff did it to try and please Robert. Despite the fact that the last time he tried doing something he thought his dad would want he got beaten for it. Despite the fact that this was his own betrothed’s brother, not that he cares about Sansa, but he’s at least keeping up a pretense at this point. Despite the fact that he doesn’t care at all about mercy. Despite the fact that he was much more concerned with the wolf being loud then Bran. OK.
It makes literally no sense. Honestly the catspaw’s actions don’t really make sense anyway. Him being a wildling would probably make the most sense and explain his dedication at least partially, since they also are pretty hardcore and seem to kill children as a mercy when they have such ailments (Val literally says word for word about Shireen, the same words the catspaw says about Bran.) I mean honestly at this point the 3EC skinchanging the catspaw because this falls into his plans makes more sense then Joffrey. I have no idea what Martin was smoking but it’s this kinda thing that makes you see how Storm was written extremely quickly, for everything fantastic about it, some things lack logic or just feel off.
I’m not sure if this necessarily counts as bad writing, but the sheer number of women who die in childbirth.
In the real life Middle Ages, about 5% of women died due to childbirth. In ASOIAF, is closed to about 20%. (There was a thread from a few years ago that broke down the statistics but I couldn’t find it).
I’m pretty sure I remember GRRM mentioning how medicine in Westeros is further advanced than medicine in the Middle Ages due to the maesters, but we don’t actually see how the advanced medicine/knowledge helps lessen mortality rates.
So maybe that’s more of a world-building issue
(But, to be fair, a lot of the deaths caused by childbirths are from Targaryens, and one could argue it has to do with their inbreeding, but considering we don’t see physical deformities in the Targaryens I find it slightly hard to believe that’s the cause)
Edit to add:
Also the sheer number of young girls who are married and that marriage is consummated immediately isn’t realistic regarding a medieval setting. Most girls who were married as young girls in the Middle Ages would wait until they were around 15-16ish for the marriage to be consummated because they knew at least somewhat that young girls were more likely to die in childbirth because of their size. (Obviously there are exceptions like Margaret Beaufort the mother of Henry VII, father of Henry VIII, who gave birth around 12-14 if im remembering correctly)
I agree, my theory is that long winters may give women severe vitamin d deficiencies leading to more deaths lol. But yeah child mortality and woman dying in child birth was high but not as high as grrm says.
No you’re right. And what sucks is especially when it’s transparently used by GRRM as a quick convenient way to remove a female character from the narrative. And also the amount of women who died in childbirth in ASOIAF who have essentially no other details or characterization (or names).
Aemma Arryn will never make sense to me!!! Her mother literally died after being pushed into marriage/childbirth at a young age with fragile health, and then apparently everyone “kinda forgot” about that so that Aemma could be married off at 11?? (And she was already experiencing miscarriages before Rhaenyra, meaning that the marriage was already being consummated…)
Still boggles my mind that the Princess of Dorne who was Doran,Ellia and Oberyn mother is still nameless meanwhile other less important Lords from a time more removed from the main story are named....
That’s one of my biggest grievances about the general world building. I mean, the Princess of Dorme that you mentioned would have been a negotiator for Elia’s marriage to Rhaegar, the heir to the throne, and considering how important their marriage is to the plot (considering the Rhaegar/Lyanna situation and the general existence of Faegon), it just doesn’t make sense to me why she isn’t named.
Like it's just boring and repetitive. GRRM could have used a *ton* of things to kill of all these characters. Fell down the stairs! Banged head on doorframe! Greyscale! Killed breaking up a fight! Hunting accident!
Like we know very little about Luthor Tyrell but the method of his death tells us a lot about who he was as a person. Childbirth tells us nothing.
It reminded me of a "Behind the Scenes" voiceover part of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In a late Season 7 episode where she gets into a relationship-ending conversation with Giles, the writer doing the voiceover testified that the writers were going to have Giles bring up the fact that he was willing to "walk the walk" because two years prior he murdered a potentially dangerous person that Buffy had specifically spared, a reveal of something the audience knew from two years earlier but she didn't.
And then they said they scrapped that part because they realized that none of the audience would have cared at that point and it would have been a very stale "revelation".
I recently read ASOS for the first time and I had kind of forgotten about that plot point by then, tbh I think it would have been better if it was just not resolved, kinda like how we still don't know why Mandon Moore tried to kill Tyrion
Personally, I think George's writing is great. It's his pacing and endless character names he throws about that lower my experience. We keep hearing the name of endless side characters, guards, etc, often with the same names as many other ones. Technicality wise; descriptions, style, symbolism. I won't complain. He's leaps and bounds ahead of many other writers, and even if I prefer a little more action, I could only be lucky and honoured to have half his skill.
And that's coming from someone who has heavily criticised the series. But I keep going back for all its positives.
Tyrion doing absolutely nothing about Littlefinger.
Tyrion is told by Catelyn Stark that Littlefinger framed him for the dagger. Why she tells him this? I honestly dont know as its not necessary for anything. It doesnt come up in his trial and Tyrion doesnt act on it.
She has very little reason to lie to him and he believes her.
He then goes to Kings Landing in ACOK. In ACOK Tyrion is essentially running Kings Landing. He has his own forces loyal only to him, the city is about to go into lockdown and hes taken out a lot of Cersei's support. Tyrion also has express permission from his father to kill any councillor he doesnt need or like.
Littlefinger then confirms what Catelyn said was true by *flaunting* the dagger in his Tyrion's face. And Tyrion does nothing.
It makes absolutely no sense. Littlefinger set Tyrion up to die in an act that would at a minimum inflame tensions between 2 houses, and what it ended up doing was starting a war.
Frankly, Tyrion had the power and reason to just execute Littlefinger on the spot. But he didnt.
Syrax's death is also incredibly dumb.
This. It absolutely baffles me why Tyrion never, ever bother confronting Baelish about that damned dagger. I mean we know how LF was too useful of a Master of Coin to simply just kill off, but knowing Tyrion he could’ve cooked up a scheme to at least find out why LF would ever go through the effort of setting him up for murder of the son of the King’s hand.
Writing over 2,000 pages in two books, while barely moving the plot forward is a prime example. There were some great pieces and I enjoy reading his writing, but that’s a textbook example of failure in writing. And it led directly to where we are today, with a series that will never be finished.
While most stories will rely upon *some* contrivances to reach desired plot points, George went way overboard with all of the different ways Robb's campaign went to hell. He had half a dozen different things happen when he should have relied upon one or two.
GRRM as a general rule puts his thumb on the scale heavily in favor of the antagonists (see Littlefingers titanium plot armor) and against the protagonists (Catelyns entire arc)
"Break my fast" - I absolutely **hate** reading that line and GRRM uses it over and over and over again.
Food/wine/beer running down character's chins - Does everybody in Westeros eat like a toddler?
*Jaime* Lannister - The name just knocks me right out of my groove and doesn't fit the Lannister naming conventions at all, he should have been named Cyrdan Lannister or something similar rhyming with Cersei. I'm convinced that GRRM chose that name specifically because he felt it would appeal to female readers.
Also, characters who are members of the nobility using contractions such as "I'm" and "you're", etc. This should have been limited to peasant characters.
And while I'm at it, GRRM not employing proper noble titles, such as baron, count, duke, etc. to give readers a sense of noble character's social/political position in Westeros.
> I'm convinced that GRRM chose that name specifically because he felt it would appeal to female readers.
I think he chose it to appeal to himself. He seems to love the name Jaime, so many characters in his stories are named Jaime, he even named a planet Jaime (or something similar) in *"1000 Worlds."*
> he even named a planet Jaime (or something similar) in *"1000 Worlds."
It was Jamison's World in the [Jambles](https://images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/f/67aa1abc-ad15-4765-81c4-41524817a8ea/db0jad4-8ebda08f-b351-44b5-8165-350ed6347d2e.jpg/v1/fill/w_1024,h_576,q_75,strp/thousand_worlds_map__version_1__by_caffeine2_db0jad4-fullview.jpg?token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ1cm46YXBwOjdlMGQxODg5ODIyNjQzNzNhNWYwZDQxNWVhMGQyNmUwIiwiaXNzIjoidXJuOmFwcDo3ZTBkMTg4OTgyMjY0MzczYTVmMGQ0MTVlYTBkMjZlMCIsIm9iaiI6W1t7ImhlaWdodCI6Ijw9NTc2IiwicGF0aCI6IlwvZlwvNjdhYTFhYmMtYWQxNS00NzY1LTgxYzQtNDE1MjQ4MTdhOGVhXC9kYjBqYWQ0LThlYmRhMDhmLWIzNTEtNDRiNS04MTY1LTM1MGVkNjM0N2QyZS5qcGciLCJ3aWR0aCI6Ijw9MTAyNCJ9XV0sImF1ZCI6WyJ1cm46c2VydmljZTppbWFnZS5vcGVyYXRpb25zIl19.Wo5sjvYQUo85tuT9ntzdt-fKT1s5d1lD-tRSTLDSoJg)
>Food/wine/beer running down character's chins - Does everybody in Westeros eat like a toddler?
this isn't very related to the point you're making but it really reminds me of russian/slavic folk tales, many of which ended with some variation of "and I was there, I drank mead and beer, it poured down my beard and missed my mouth" (it rhymes in Russian.) I doubt GRRM was inspired by this phrase but it really reminds me of a fairytale when I read it.
GRRM for some reason barely makes any distinction between the way nobles and peasants talk. For example, there's no mention of Arya faking a lowborn accent when she is disguised as Arry, or any smallfolk characters noticing that she speaks like a highborn girl.
I feel like the most egregious example is the glut of POVs introduced in AFFC and ADWD and the screeching halt the existing plot threads reach. If the intention is for those books to form the middle of the series then you shouldn’t be inserting a bunch of new plot threads and basically pausing the other character’s journeys to do so.
Generally by the middle of the series the existing threads you’ve introduced should be beginning to tie together as everything is setting up for the conclusion. This doesn’t happen and instead we get multiple Dorne and Ironborn POVs, along with ones like Brienne that go nowhere.
That’s not to say they shouldn’t exist, but not everything *must* happen on screen. Good writing is knowing when to keep certain things behind the scenes because including them bogs down the story and brings everything to a screeching halt. Bad writing is getting lost in the details and being unable to properly tie things together.
Theon taking a castle bigger than most castles in England with 20 men. If castles were so easily taken there would be no point in building them. The same with Tywin's Blitzkrieg in the Riverlands. It makes even less sense that the Riverlands would be easy to take. Rivers are like mountains, natural borders. Protect the crossing point and no army can outflank you.
The Dornish commoners fighting for their freedom against the flying atomic bombs of Aegon because their ruler does not want to accept their rule. In real life, the commoners would give the Princess of Dorne the middle finger and probably also the nobles. Neither nobles nor commoners were prepared to die like mad lemmings. Medivals times was not like the Vietnam war were you had guerilla troops. Apart from that, it makes no sense that Dorne would be impregnable. Burn the fields with dragon fire, make a naval blockade, close up the mountain passes, and they would starve to death with or without a fucking dragon. The entire Dornish stuff makes no sense unless you realize that George was probably inspired by Braveheart, a movie that makes even less sense.
Tysha being raped by a dozen of men and surviving it at age 13. All the gangrape survivors. Like does George know how dangerous rape can be for the body?
The fact that at the Wall no one ever attempts to sexually assault Jon Snow, though this place is full of criminals, rapists and men who spent the last years suffering in the cold. Ask any guy who ever was in a gulag or a prison why sending teenagers to be together with grown up people would be a bad idea. Its what I answer every time some idiots tell me that minor perpetrators of crimes should be imprisoned with the grown up guys to teach them a lesson. No, you don't want that ever. Its a bad idea.
The fact that Targaryen women cannot be queens because they are woman but are riding fucking dragons. In medival times women were not considered a good idea as queen because they couldnt lead men into battle, but a woman on a dragon would have no disadvantage compared to a man. George basically took the Planteganet dynasty and gave them dragons. Fire and Blood is just utterly lazy how it just is a tale of abused woman who never do or achieve anything other than get raped, die in child birth or get murdered. Half of them do not even get a personality.
Everything we know about Alyssa the mom of Daemon is that she like the cow girl position and that she died in childbirth. Would it have hurt the story to keep her alive a bit longer and have her die in battle or something? Like is childbirth the only way a woman can die?
Honestly , Tyrions whole “where do whores go ? “ recurring phrase really got us nowhere at all and became just super annoying and off putting .
Sort of the same with Jaime and “She was fucking Lancel and Osmund Kettleblack and moon boy for all I know ! “
“Pink mast”
Also pretty much every time food’s in a scene, you’ll bet George wastes a paragraph describing it.
Also I accurately predicted two tragedies in ADWD and AFFC because a woman was present in that chapter. Like from the second I read “she,” I thought something bad was gonna happen, and was correct both times.
I remember for Joffery’s wedding, there was almost 2 entire pages just describing the food. Like sure, maybe it’s meant to be a commentary on how extravagant and wasteful the ceremony is, but I didn’t need to hear about every single course in great detail.
Cerseis luck is so ludicrous it gets annoying to read. We know that nothing will actually come of her trial with the Faith and she’ll end up back in power through some ridiculous contrivance despite her relentless fuckups. If she was a protagonist she would have been deposed and killed immediately after her Looney Tunes plot to kill Robert by *checks notes* making him get too drunk on a hunting trip, but instead everything always breaks in her favor no matter how implausible.
George R.R. Martin is beyond my favorite writer. As far as I'm concerned, he gets to do whatever. That said, his semicolons and other punctuation are used in a signature rather than a classic way and could be called bad, though not by me.
I also read AGOT as voiced to mislead readers into underestimating the text. Some of what might get called "bad writing" by someone focused on implementing a classical education registers to me as setting up for trope subversions.
There is also the question of the many dick jokes. When I started getting really irritated at how the show was piling those on, I had to admit it was a worse version of something definitely happening all over the books. Especially among minor character names, there are a lot of dick jokes. Leave George alone.
This sentence from the first book didn't really work for me:
"Ser Alliser Thorne walked from the room so stiffly it looked as though he had a dagger up his butt."
He overuses the word “that” a lot, as in ‘he thought that the time was right’ (not an actual sentence since I don’t have the books with me right now, but you get the idea). Whenever you can strike “that” in a sentence, strike it. A good editor should be catching those, though.
This isn’t bad writing so much as its a first-bookism/change of path but Stannis just sitting around on Dragonstone doing nothing for a year, and also waiting so long to declare his kingship.
I just finished re-reading the first book, and you're absolutely right. What was he waiting for? He already knows everything, and he already has the evidence.
This is one of things I’ve been sitting on forever trying to come up with an answer to this
Honestly it seems a bit contrived in order to explain/justify the North declaring independence instead of siding with Stannis, who Ned was trying to put on the throne. Unaware of the incest or why exactly Ned was imprisoned and executed, Robb feels he can’t side with Stannis because Joffrey and Tommen are ahead of him in the line of succession, which then leads to his vassals declaring him KITN.
I mean what was he going to do before Robert died. He says himself had he brought the incest claims to him, it would have been seen as a self-serving attempt to put himself first in the line of succession. The waiting after he died can probably be explained as him gathering his strength for the inevitable civil war before making himself a target.
He took longer than Robb to gather his forces? Remember Robb had time to gather an army march from winterfell to the Riverlands fight two big battles before stannis even declared himself king. Also he did exactly zero work to actually have any evidence to prove his claims. He just spent a year sulking in dragonstone not even getting a hold over any of Robert's bastards
If Stannis called his banners how many men would he realistically be able to muster? He doesn’t inspire loyalty to begin with and the houses he does eventually get to his side are very small. Remember Renly is the Lord Paramount of the Stormlands, not Stannis. Stannis has the loyalty of the lords along the Narrow Sea, which are few and far between.
Remember that Stannis actually really sucks at inspiring people to his cause
Unless you're out of universe. In which case he's great at it!
Forever the One True King.
1. Hiring sellswords & pirates takes longer than just calling your banners. Stannis had to actively go around the narrow sea and painstakingly pay off & promise things to various mercenaries to supplant his meager bannermen. 2. Robb was explicitly trying to get to King’s Landing as fast as humanly possible to rescue Ned. 3. Edric Storm is Renly’s ward, what justification was he going to use to take him?
Stannis has a brain and a disciplined mind, not just rushing into the fray. He is a man of strategy and tactics. While Rob was a boy with many banners and a father in prison. Call the banners, we move to war.
The one thing I’ve thought of is inviting Ned to Dragonstone under the guise of wanting to inform the Hand about naval matters and then share the findings. From there a plan could be made to keep Robert alive and expose Cersei, maybe even get Renly in since he’s got the Stormlords and could convince Mace to marry Margaery to Robert (or himself if Robert refuses to marry again)
Maybe it could have been debacles with Milsandre?
didnt ned also write him? if stannis had ask ned to visit him at dragonstone everything would have turned out different. Or if cat would have stopped at Dragonstone
AGOT Eddard VIII >It struck him suddenly that he might return to Winterfell by sea. Ned was no sailor, and ordinarily would have preferred the kingsroad, but if he took ship he could stop at Dragonstone and speak with Stannis Baratheon. Pycelle had sent a raven off across the water, with a polite letter from Ned requesting Lord Stannis to return to his seat on the small council. As yet, there had been no reply, but the silence only deepened his suspicions. Lord Stannis shared the secret Jon Arryn had died for, he was certain of it. The truth he sought might very well be waiting for him on the ancient island fortress of House Targaryen.
could be that Pycelle modified the letter or had it 'misplaced'. maester conspiracies and loyalties etc.
Yes wasn’t Pycelle a Lannister toady? It was Tyrion who figured out he was leaking to Cersei.
He didn’t have the ships or swords. He spent the time hiring Salladhor Saan and sellswords from Essos. Had he declared immediately before gathering forces it would have gone less well than it did. Also there isn’t really evidence against Cersei, or at least not definitive like a DNA test. Jon Arryn died right after Stannis brought him in and he did not know or trust Eddard. Bringing it forward himself was useless especially after Robert died.
My headcanon explanation for this is simply Stannis being resentful of Ned over his relationship with Robert. He didn’t know if he could trust ned, and the incest allegations would look self-serving. Stannis’ whole character is defined by slights he has received,whether they are real or perceived. Sometimes people don’t make the most savvy political moves, but instead act out of personal emotions and ignorance. To be honest I just think it was an oversight by Martin.
Stannis didn't do anything because he couldn't. He had no men and most houses in the Stormlands refused to support his claim. I'd imagine his time during Book 1 is spent trying to fortify Dragonstone, establishing alliances with pirates like Salladhor Saan, and trying to wrest control of the Stormlands from Renly.
Stannis has been shown to be indecisive at times. He takes a while to make his next move after defeating the free folk and after the Battle of the Blackwater. He probably just wasn’t sure what to do.
Personality wise him stewing on an island fits but it makes no sense strategically or considering his sense of justice
I mean is he not sitting there knowing Ned has been taken into custody or beheaded, he lacked support and troops. He a careful commender and supposed be a real procatinator like in the last book at the village.
The Dothraki. Real life steppe peoples were masters of war and logistics. The dothraki mostly use one handed sabers and charge spear walls head on. Any culture that intept would have promptly been rolled over by one that was smarter.
Real life steppe nomads: *colorful, interesting and unique clothes in many colors, often detailed embroidery, jewelry and accessories* Dothraki: *painted leather*
You know how people joke that the British colonised half the world for spices just to never use it in their food? The Dothraki raped and pillaged through half of Essos for its riches but refuse to wear anything but horse leather.
> refuse to wear anything but horse leather. And silver bells
It also doesn’t help that the only things they seem to do are fight, rape, and enslave. There’s really no reason to look on them as anything other than monsters. GRRM might as well have taken Tolkien’s Orcs and given them horses and long hair. Hell, the Orcs had more instances of individuality than we’ve gotten from the Dothraki.
They also have a city that merchants can travel to and from in peace.
Their nomadic lifestyle of constant war seems really unsustainable, especially for how many there seem to be. Real world analogues like the Mongols actually had pretty sophisticated systems of government.
So does the constant eating of their horses, lmao. How the fuck are they breeding them fast enough to offset all the ones they eat?
Another thing to consider is that the Mongols still had a society, not every mongol was a warrior riding in the horde, like previously stated they had extensive logistics. Mongol horses were also smaller so they could be sustained on grass. But something George fails to take into account is that riders required spare remounts, each warrior had 3-4 horses minimum. The entire world is unsustainable though, and it lacks a lot of the historically-realistic nuance and details that exists in other series like the Witcher and WoT, ASoIaF is more anachronistic and the rule of cool prevails on work much more than George would like to admit. George doesn't really seem to have a strong understanding of medieval warfare or combat, and a lot of the stuff that he thinks is historically realistic seem to come from wildly inaccurate Victorian Era Historians where a lot of shit was made up.
Martin could probably be described as writing fantasy based on fantasy. With a sprinkle of narrative great man history. The basis for his assumptions are already built on anachronism. He’s not writing a credible medieval setting he’s writing a darker version of Ivanhoe.
My understanding of it is its meant to be unsustainable which is why every Khalasar ultimately eats itself or splinters when the Khal dies. The Free Cities and Westeros treat them as an annoyance or barbaric savages to be paid off whenever a Khalasar rolls by but that may be me giving GRRM too much credit that he was trying to deconstruct the noble savage trope by showing how brutal and backwards such societies can be.
He probably wanted to deconstruct it. But I don't think that he thought that far ahead.
Yeah... No. GRRM simply has no idea about horsebased nomad societies. He has based the Dothraki on films like "Stage Coach" and "Genghis Khan". Which is ok, if he hadn't claimed that they are based on Sioux and Mongols. A historians view: https://acoup.blog/2020/12/04/collections-that-dothraki-horde-part-i-barbarian-couture/
At some point after a Few years one Khal would learn how usefull bows are and then change dothraki society overnight. Taking quickly to better was of killing people is one of the great unifying common instincts.
Orcs: 🤢🤢🤮 Orcs with cute hair: 😍🥰🥰
People always compare them to the Mongols, but the Mongols would eat the Dothraki for breakfast. The Dothraki feel more like the Scythians or some other Bronze Age steppe people as opposed to medieval
I'd say the closest comparison would be Atilla the Hun and his forces, or at least the gold obsessed barbarians that the Romans portrayed them as.
If I recall correctly, 2 out of 4 cultures mentioned as inspirations are Alans and Huns. The comparision with Mongols is something fans did, not GRRM himself.
While I do mostly agree, what’s interesting about the Dothraki is that they are a relatively “new” culture in terms of planetos. They were only really able to thrive due to the massive power vacuum left by the collapse of Valyria and the following the century of blood. After the century of blood ended, I think the reason no smarter culture, like the post-Valyrian free cities decided to roll over them was because, well they were smarter. You could argue the smart thing is to pay them tribute like they do, and they (mostly) leave you alone. The other option is waging a massive scale war to exterminate an extremely numerous and highly mobile population, which would be devastating to the whole continent.
To me the problem is them existing as a threat at all. They can't realistically sack a city. They have no siege weapons or the means/skill to make them. They don't were armor so they cant realistically fight an army that does. They are at best light cavalry, more suited for skirmishing, harassing enemies, and luring them into traps. Their entire culture exists exclusively off raiding, which cannot be done (see points #1&2). They constantly have internecine warfare so their population would never be large enough to pose a real threat, the Mongols for example were not a real threat to their neighbors until Genghis Kahn united/subjugated the clans.
Great points. I definitely see how it's pretty unrealistic for this type of culture to thrive the way they are, but to me George works it into the narrative pretty well. He does a pretty good job of providing in universe explanations about the Dothraki's prestige in warfare. I'm admittedly naive on military history, but I felt pretty convinced during my reads. Keep in mind this is coming from Jorah Mormont, who's been established as having years of warfare experience and good military instincts. >Ser Jorah's face grew thoughtful as their horses trod together down the godsway. "When I first went into exile, I looked at the Dothraki and saw half-naked barbarians, as wild as their horses. If you had asked me then, Princess, I should have told you that a thousand good knights would have no trouble putting to flight a hundred times as many Dothraki." >"But if I asked you now?" >"Now," the knight said, "I am less certain. They are better riders than any knight, utterly fearless, and their bows outrange ours. In the Seven Kingdoms, most archers fight on foot, from behind a shieldwall or a barricade of sharpened stakes. The Dothraki fire from horseback, charging or retreating, it makes no matter, they are full as deadly … and there are so many of them, my lady. Your lord husband alone counts forty thousand mounted warriors in his khalasar." AGOT Dany IV
Yeah and there are a lot of problems militarily with this. GRRM gods bless him doesn't seem to know much about Medieval warfare or weapons systems, and shows some serious inconsistencies from time to time. A lot of the problem comes down to armor, it really matters. The fight between Jorah and Quotho shows this, Jorah is no slouch, but Quotho as one Drogo's blood riders is supposed to be one of the best of the best, and Jorah's armor saves him. Other times it seems armor's practicality is forgotten, this isn't just a GRRM problem but a common fantasy trope that really bugs me, armor works that's why people used it. Lets start with the bows, The Westerosi use a longbow, based on the English longbow and the Dothraki use a recurve composite bow based on the Mongol bow. In reality they are pretty much of equal strength, but used for different purposes, as Jorah says longbows are used on foot, and recurve bows are designed for use on horseback. Like Horseback archery longbow archery was not just something that anybody could do. The Mary Rose shipwreck contained hundreds of longbows from the 16th century which have up to almost 200 lb draw weights. The skeletons recovered have evidence of spinal distortion and compression, and they have a thickening of their arm joints, suggesting enough training to actually change the development of the bones. The usefulness of Arrows against plate armor has been greatly exaggerated both in history and in pop culture. if you are interested in this topic I highly suggest Tod Culter's medieval myth busting videos on Youtube. [https://www.youtube.com/@tods\_workshop/playlists](https://www.youtube.com/@tods_workshop/playlists) Knights are heavy cavalry, and they would have trained since childhood in riding and combat, both on horseback and on foot. The best Mercenary company in Essos is The Golden Company, made up of largely of Westerosi and designed in the Westerosi military style. I'm not saying that the Dothraki wouldn't be excellent horsemen, and skilled warriors, but they just don't add up. Experienced soldiers in Westeros would be used to fighting against cavalry, the horse archer angle might require a change in tactics, but that's what experienced and skilled commanders do. Numbers are always a problem for GRRM. If Robb, or Tywin can field 40,000 soldiers how is the 40,000 Dothraki a particular threat? as others have mentioned elsewhere in the thread there is an overabundance of peasant levys, and not enough professional soldiers, and mercenaries for a culture as militaristic as Westeros where there is at least 1 huge war per generation. Sorry for the rant, I didn't mean to go on this long...but once I get going on this subject its hard for me to stop.
Robert talks about this (in the show, don't remember the books) that how long will the people support him if he dosent try to fight and disband/destroy the dothraki should they come to westeros. If the dothraki roam the countryside and avoid the fortifications and a direct fight against a prepared westerosi army the its not much the Westerosi armies can do. Because of the mobility of the dothraki. And I guess the same goes for the free cities.
2 problems here. 1) The Dothraki wouldn't be that mobile. 40,000 soldiers means how many non combatants (women, children, slaves) that they would be bringing with them, let alone the hundreds of thousands of horses they would need. They cannot hide and swiftly move around the countryside with logistical issues like that 2) The Dothraki are in hostile foreign territory, they don't know what to eat or where to forage, also as the locals you set where you fight them. You also have a huge numerical advantage. lure them into advantageous terrain (any advantage the Dothraki might have is totally lost in any of the many non plain environments in Westeros), surround them and they cannot run away.
2 is HUGE. How are they going to feed themselves? How are they going to find ANYTHING in such a strange and exotic land? I think it's stretching reality already to have the Ironborn conduct all of these surgical strikes throughout the North in ACOK when most of them should be hopelessly lost. *Eventually*, they might places like Deepwood Motte, but they might have already been run down from reports about their invasion long before this, and none of them are experienced cavalrymen. And then it comes to the Dothraki, which turns stretching reality into breaking it. They have likely no maps, or none that are any good. And any people leading them like Viserys or GC don't have good first-hand knowledge either. They have all kinds of terrain with which they are not familiar, no ability to have reinforcements, no ability to coordinate with each other in Westeros if they separate into different bands, no ability to engage in siege warfare, etc. They would be good for "smash and grab" raiding of small settlements only.
>as others have mentioned elsewhere in the thread there is an overabundance of peasant levys, a Isn't this it? Knights are skilled, but it was always my impression that they were relatively uncommon. I always assumed Westerosi armies consisted of 10% knights and 90% conscripted peasants.
The thing is the 90% peasants arent just barely armed levies, if you see the descriptions of the men when Catelyn looks at Rob's army she sees armoured pikemen longbowmen and several units of organised troops which make up most of the northern army. They are also disciplined most of the time, a pike square in the battle where Roose leads the northern troops holds for a long time against wildmen and the Mountain, and hails of arrows.
Yeah and knights would be fairly rare, but what I'm talking about are Men-at-Arms. People like Bronn and The Hound, plus unknighted household guards. The best example from the story I can think of are the Mountain's Men, he has 7 professional soldiers an several squires serving him. Most Knights would have a group like this around them. So for most Knights there are 5-10 professionals, plus there would be unsworn fighting men looking to make a name or a living of of the conflict. So if 10% are knights well over half the soldiery should be professionals, and not untrained peasants. Edit: Also another example when Beric goes to hunt down The Mountain, Ned sends Beric, Thoros, Gladden Wylde, and Lord Lothar Mallery, each is reasonable to bring 20 men at arms, plus he sends 20 of his own guard. Edited for clarity
I don't think it's the idea of them existing as a threat, I think it's them being a complete nuisance to the cities in Essos. Almost all of the cities in Essos depend upon trade to keep alive and keep wealthy, meaning that they keep their ports open, they keep their gates open and they keep the roads leading to their gates open and easy to travel. What happens when a highly mobile and highly aggressive group of skilled fighters approach the city? They either close the city gates and prepare for a siege, marshal troops and fight in the field, or present them with gifts and carry on with business as usual. The first two options are arguably more costly and detrimental to the cities; they either close themselves off to trade for an extended period of time, or they get drawn into a long and slow war with the Dothraki, not due to the Dothraki's fighting prowess or martial tactics, but due to the sheer number and manouverability of the Dothraki, not to mention that the Dothraki's entire way of life revolves around fighting and killing; the cities can't just beat an army and force them to surrender, they would have to eradicate the Dothraki as a whole to stop them from reappearing and waging war again. In the end, with all of the cost involved in launching a campaign against the Dothraki, or the economic losses incurred by closing the city and engaging in a siege, it seems to be the cheapest and easiest solution to just present the Dothraki with slaves and riches to keep them pacified, especially considering the obscene amounts of wealth the Slaver Cities and perhaps some of the Free Cities posses. Again, these are just my thoughts, and my way to justify why such a primitive and aggressive group like the Dothraki even survive and thrive in Essos.
Realistically there would have been one Khal in the century of blood that figured out how cool bows are and then Dothraki society as it exists in the books would be gone. Even the show realized they needed to give the Dothraki horse archers.
It’s kinda funny because the world of ice and fire book tries to fix this a little bit by saying they spend a lot of time herding sheep and goats, something that just never shows up in the main books lol
In the main books they explicitly hate sheep and kill both the sheeps and the shepherds when they come across them.
I've posted this before but the Dothraki don't make sense even outside of their crude representation as nomads. Vaes Dothrak shouldn't exist. I can maybe buy that it's a holy site for all Dothraki, that's fine, but what I can't believe is that it has a thriving market where people from all over come to visit. Why would any merchant from anywhere travel through the heart of the Dothraki Sea with valuable wares to sell in a city with little to no infrastructure?
*inept
As great of a character writer as he is, George is not a very good worldbuilder… admittedly, he has said he writes for the stories, not the lore, so it isn’t his focus.
He's great at character work, and his medieval houses do good enough of a job to give the *illusion* of history. (Which is as good as you can get as an author, unless you sit down and actually write a history like Silmarillion.) Which makes all the times he's praised for worldbuilding weird. We're talking about the guy who thought years long winters were a cool idea but did not bother thinking about how it would actually reshape a society.
> so it isn’t his focus You wouldn't know from the books he published in the past 10 years.
If anyone wants the very detailed answer to this there is a great essay about this on ACOUP. [That Dothraki Horde, Part I: Barbarian Couture](https://acoup.blog/2020/12/04/collections-that-dothraki-horde-part-i-barbarian-couture/)
Littlefinger impoverishing the crown without suspicion makes no sense at all Jaime excuse for not telling anyone about the wildfire plot is lame.
The Jaime thing is an obvious retcon hence the lack of good reasons.
I think the point is he was never asked or given the benefit of the doubt like everyone else. Ned Stark decided what happened and no matter what Jaime said, it was pushing against a tide. Tyrion similarly, comes out of his bedridden state and tons of people have taken credit for his achievements etc. He decided it’s pointless to argue about who did what since he would look silly. Can’t remember the word GRRM uses. But I also agree that the fact it isn’t told to *anyone* comes off as a retcon now that I think more, there’s no reason for him not to tell his family for example. Though some evidence I would use against retcon is that the caches of Wildfire are found in Clash of Kings once or twice by the alchemists
I always figured it was less a benefit of the doubt issue and more Jaime being way too proud and stiff-necked for his own good. And also feeling on some level that he was guilty because he did kill the king, even if it was for good reason. Now put all that on a dramatic teenager, and it's totally plausible to me that you get "Fiiiine. You want to call me Kingslayer, I'll be the biggest dick of a kingslayer you've ever seen." And then after a few years no one would have believed him if he'd changed his story anyway.
Exactly this, sometimes it's easier to be the bad guy rather than be a good guy perceived as bad by everyone around them. I mean, that is literally Tyrion's story in a nutshell, and we see that now he doesn't care about what people believe about him, as he's tired of trying to prove himself as 'good' to everyone around him. I think that as a fandom we sometimes spend too much time overanalysing characters' decisions, and especially from a very pragmatic, emotionless lens. People do so much stupid stuff in real life that it isn't a stretch to believe that characters within this story could make the same mistakes.
It could have been retconned as of Clash of Kings by which time George appears to have dropped the King Jaime idea.
> I think the point is he was never asked or given the benefit of the doubt like everyone else. Right but the idea that *nobody* once asked him about what is objectively one of the most important events in the war is just silly. No Maesters? Barristan never came up to him afterwards and said, "How could you have done this?" Robert never asked him the tale of how Aerys died? Nobody who hated the Mad King ever wanted to find out exactly how he died? Not even a semi-rhetorical "How can you live with yourself" or whatever? It's just an absurdity. Either nobody asked him, which is just the laziest writing ever, or they did ask him and he lied to them for no reason. It's just abysmal.
Yeah reasonable enough. As I said it is weird that he expects us to believe he and Tyrion or Tywin discussed it. The whole topic is interesting though because everyone hated Aerys so why did Jaime even need an explanation
Honestly from what I can tell Jaime was just called a mean-spirited nickname by his political enemies occasionally. It's just beyond pathetic that we're supposed to think he's gone through some kind of dismal persecution. Like I think it just fails completely as a story. I don't think *any* of it works. The Wildfire is not only a massive plothole but it also makes the scenario *less* interesting. "Jaime killed Aerys and Ned disagrees with this because both men have complex systems of morality and worldviews that are mutually exclusive" is far more interesting to me than "Jaime killed Aerys in a scenario where literally nobody would ever disagree with his actions but he decides not to tell anyone about this for no reason so there can be conflict". Because the point was never to present an interesting or nuanced account of the situation. It was to go, "You thought Jaime was bad? HE'S GOOD WHAAAA??? I JUST SUBVERTED YOUR EXPECTATIONS!"
I think the Jaime excuse really just comes down to spite. It's easy to be spiteful over a minor thing but Jaime is as spiteful as he is arrogant so explaining himself is just unheard of. He doesn't need their understanding. That's what I got out of it. That's why I love his character development where he begins to want people to see him as honorable
I think its more that he expected to be seen as shinning knight,or at least not scorned by it,but then people started talking kingslayer and he got pissed because his fantasy was broken,and developed a you are all wrong mentality. But still he could still talk about wildfire without talking about why he killed Aerys.
Littlefinger isn't the cause of the Realm's financial woes (at least not the only one anyway). Littlefinger only became Master of Coin less than 5 years before the start of the main books. And the whole reason he was apointed was because the crown was already having financial trouble, and he had a talent for money. A minor lord like him would never have even been considered for the small council if they weren't desperate. Littlefinger may have been embezzling the crowns funds, but he was hardly the only one doing it. Corruption was rampant in King's Landing during Robert's reign. The crown's debts were a result of Robert's enormous wasteful spending and enabling of corruption. Littlefinger was just a symptom of the problem, not the root cause.
It is a little bit that we don’t know. Martin isn’t exactly sketching out a working revenue system. But it’s possible that they really are that low on the state development scale and being king doesn’t really make you rich and powerful. It’s being rich and powerful that makes you king. It’s owning a butt load of land. Sort of personal wealth. Rather than taxes, which old style monarchs tended to keep as low as possible because people hate when you demand their money. Autocrats tend to not have the option of higher taxes, it’s democracies that can fund their state by greater taxation because of having the buy-in from representation. Not being the richest lord Robert was never going to be an effectively rich king. This couples well with Robert seeming to not understand or not care about the basis of his real power. He’s a warlord in a society ruled by warlords. And yet he has no dudes, no men at arms, no spear carriers. He’s surrounded himself with another warlord’s men in red cloaks. Or just allows sell swords to hang around. You wouldn’t catch a Targ dead without a load of faceless spear carriers around to impress everyone. Or most Westerosi lords. But Robert seems to think all he needs are a couple of white knights and a crown.
"Why? I have seen Littlefinger's accounts. Crown incomes are ten times higher than they were under Aerys." A Storm of Swords - Tyrion IV
I've always seen the first one as part of littlefingers plan. He was able to bankrupt the realm because Robert basically demanded him to, and nobody could say no to Robert. If he wanted to intentionally bankrupt the realm all he had to do was hide big purchases in bigger purchases made in Roberts name, and people would just put the blame on Robert over petyr
Littefinger didn't impoverish the crown secretly. Robert did by being a spendthrift who tolerated corruption, and he and the rest of his council knew fully well that he was running up dept throughout his reign.
Jaime not telling anyone you could still say its his arrogance,pride, whats baffling is that Kings Landing was shortly taken by two huge armies and none of them found some stacks of wildfire,and then the story progress 15+ years and suddenly they find wildfire in ACOK.
I was gonna make a post about how Doran Martell sends his son off on a ridiculous mission into enemy territory with vague goals and when he doesn't return Doran's next move is to... send off his daughter on a ridiculous diplomatic mission into enemy territory with vague goals. Doran is either a complete moron or he REALLY wants Trystane to be his heir.
Why is OP sitting at 0 upvotes when this is one of the few threads I clicked on out of actual interest, this is criminal.
Reddit voting logic As in there is no logic Only the hive mind, so upvote and others will follow
It's timing based, Europe was at work, US wasn't awake yet
A lot of the worst stuff comes from Fire and Blood but the one that gets me is 'the Dragon's Wroth'. Dorne resisting Aegon was always an interesting aspect of the lore but it stops making any sense once the actual logistics of it are explored more.
GRRM has officially lost any right ever to complain about other fantasy being unrealistic. "The entire country's population hid in some caves for a few months" is actually insulting to the intelligence of the reader.
Yeah, the ability of dorne to not get steamrolled in that war was frankly ridiculous.
I always saw the Dorne-Targ conflict as an allegory of the US (Targs) attacking Iraq / Afgh (Dorne) with superior air power (dragons) so I never really had any problems with Dorne holding out
Even if that’s true, the scenarios are not very much alike. It doesn’t make sense for the outcome to be the same when the situation is completely different.
Also in less that 100 years dorne is back to fighting shape somehow after what pretty much amounts to the total destruction of their kingdom
You can't just take a modern industrialized conflict and transpose it directly onto a medevial one. What did the Dornish people *eat* when all their crops and fields weren't being maintained?
Cave crops, *obviously*
real medival peasents even during good harvest often had barely enough food to survive. Even if the dornish has manage to evacuate most of there population in caves and mountains there would have immediately been famine. Like huge famine like bengal or irish potato famine.
Yeah, a naval blockade alone could cripple Dorne.
Especially in modern conflicts where a lot of these "primitive" actors have support from much larger ones as their proxies. Who was secretly shipping supplies to the Dornish in their caves?
It's like he watched *Platoon* and from that thought he could extrapolate literally everything he would ever need to know about the conflict.
That’s what George wants but it isn’t very realistic.
When I think about it, technically the North resisting would have made more sense. The much vaster and sparsely populated lands mean that even after capturing castles/cities, it would be much harder to exert control over the surrounding lands, and would lend well to guerilla-style resistance. And the swamps of the Neck are just a perfect natural chokepoint to hold off any armies.
Reading Fire and Blood I understand why GRRM considers himself to be a "gardener" rather than an "architect" in regards to his approach to writing. Its clear there are quite a few places in Fire and Blood where GRRM needed something to happen a certain way because he'd already said it did in the main books, only to find he couldn't figure out how to make that happen convincingly. And Aegon's war with Dorne is probably the worst example of this.
All the Targaryen plagues, civil wars, stillbirths, and other random kerfuffles that repeatedly reduce their numbers also come to mind.
It's not necessarily a matter of bad writing. And said completely with the benefit of hindsight. But I do think that the initial plot regarding Cersei's children could have done with a little more build than just that they don't look like Robert. Because Stannis and Jon Arryn apparently didn't see a problem with that for like 14 years until the plot kicks off. Like, maybe there should have been something else that made them distrust and investigate Cersei. And that's where they stumble upon the idea of the kids possibly being illegitimate. But as I said, that's not so much a matter of what was actually put on paper being badly written. Just that the plot itself looks a bit weak in hindsight.
Perhaps this is fanon, but I thought the initial investigation by Stannis and Jon Arryn was caused by how obviously unfit Joffrey was to be king and that were looking for some reason to remove him from the line of succession
The father didn't see a problem with it. The father gives the ultimate legitimacy, e.g. Blackfyre Rebellion. It didn't matter at the time because Bobby was alive and the Lanisters weren't dangerous from the start. But, as years passed, sucession was a reality and so the scheming habit of the Lannisters, then questions of all sorts started being asked. Stannis, as a Baratheon, might have found it weird and unconvincing from the start, but how was he gonna prove anything to his brother anyway?
Essos worldbuilding in general.
ok, the century of blood happened but why is everything around the free cities not habited? why theres 0 effort to rebuild all the ruins?
How?
I’ve already complained a lot about F&B in general, but I’ll focus on a specific aspect that bothers me: So, among other things, the way that so many young women/girls are sexualized in F&B (including Coryanne Wylde, Princess Alyssa, Saera and her companions, Viserra, Daenaera Velaryon, arguably Baela, etc.) has the effect of undercutting a key point of Cersei’s storyline in Feast. >”The cousins?" Even Taena sounded doubtful. "All three are younger than the little queen, and more innocent." >”My cousins?" Margaery paled. "Alla and Megga are hardly more than children. Your Grace, this . . . this is obscene. Will you take us out of here?" It is a critical detail that Cersei’s allegations against Margaery and her cousins are only believable to *someone who thinks like Cersei*. Only someone like Cersei, with her particular combination of internalized misogyny, lack of empathy, distorted outlook on human relationships and behavior in general—plus, a desire to defeat Margaery by sexually humiliating her (the one true way in which Cersei is her father’s heir)—could actually try to accuse a bunch of tweens of having bizarre debauchery parties on a daily basis. But F&B is so insistent on sexualizing every female character, especially the younger female characters, with Gyldayn’s anecdotes of their “sexual exploits” that it undermines the point being made about Cersei in AFFC. If Gyldayn’s prurient fixations are to be believed, then apparently Cersei’s allegations are par for the course regarding preteens in Westeros. But isn’t the whole point that they are obscene and eminently untrue?
I don't think you're supposed to conclude that Gyldayn *is* to be believed. I think George is showing how what begins as an outrageous and absurd rumor can become a historical factoid due to the tides of politics and history. It's similar to the outrageous magical rumors surrounding Sansa after her escape from the Red Keep; they're a clue to cast a skeptical eye to similarly fanciful claims elsewhere in the story's history.
Please after how he sexualizes Dany in the mainline books? Or the comments he has done out of universe in regards to Dany's relationship with Drogo. Or the vast amount of sex children have in F&B most outrageously Aemma for basically no reason. There's a pattern here and I won't just say it's an unreliable narrator.
I agree that he's a pervert, I just don't think he's a 1-dimensional pervert. He codes Cersei's allegations as outrageous within his own writing. And while he has some deeply disturbing ideas around Dany's romance with Drogo, I don't think he actually portrays Dany herself in a seductress role, nor do I think his depiction of Dany lends credence to Glydayn's allegations. I think, among other things, George is a bit more generous than most of us would be when he looks at people living in a different cultural context. When he describes Drogo and Dany's story as a love story, I do think we are meant to take into account the fact that 'love' in both of their cultures is something far more violent and cynical than it is in ours. To be clear, I still think his interpretation of that scene oversteps considerably, but so too does collapsing all analysis of sexuality in the books under the banner of "GRRM is a sicko and loves all of this unironically."
So IMO the thing with Cersei's accusations is that she isn't merely claiming Margaery is sleeping around, but that she has committed treason by cheating on Tommen, and that her cousins (and anyone else that was involved) are her accomplices in that treason. Also the religious zealotry of the Sparrows, coupled with their anti-nobility stance makes them super quick to believe any accusation against a lord or lady. In F&B on the other hand the Faith really has very little real power in regards to the nobility after Maegor.
This is definitely a good point. I think the issue for me though is that Cersei goes so overboard, not just Margaery having an affair but like the Tyrell girls are organizing some secret sex cult in the Maidenvault, and it’s supposed to be outrageous, to the extent that they are released from the Faith’s custody because it’s so transparent. But F&B is full of rather extreme sexual anecdotes about underage characters that aren’t even related to charges of treason—they’re just there for the sake of being there. That’s why I feel that, in addition to being pretty uncomfortable to read, it unintentionally diminishes the point being made about Cersei with her own charges against Margaery.
I had to put down Fire and Blood after the "cattle show" or whatever he called the young Targ king picking a queen. There is no way in any universe that a 13 year old boy is gonna pick an 8 year old over a big tiddy 20 year old.
Not even 8, she was 6!
Oh god that's even worse I eventually picked it back up and then when it got to the line about that Targ guy sucking on his 12 year old sister's "teats" "to make them larger and more sensitive" I was like hell no, into the fire pit with you. Like I get that writers can write bad things without supporting those things but when it's as a consistent a pattern as it is with Martin I get suspicious. It did get me into writing and I'm doing my best to create an authentically medieval world but one where if a man so much as suggested marrying a child he would be castrated on the spot.
That ain´t very authentically medieval tbf.
>undercutting a key point of Cersei’s storyline in Feast To a degree this point is undercut by Sansa and Dany. Sansa is like 11 and has grown men actively lusting after her. Fire and Blood does take this to ridiculous levels with Daenaera Velaryon.
Also a very good point! We’re supposed to see characters like Jorah and LF as sleazy, and be disgusted for example by Raff’s lecherous behavior towards Arya in the preview chapter, but the impact is dulled by the fact that very underage female characters are constantly sexualized in-universe to a ridiculous degree. I suppose if the intent was to make Westeros a deeply predatory society, GRRM certainly succeeded, but I mostly think it’s out of an attempt to be “shocking!” And “historically accurate!” to his idea of sexual violence in the Middle Ages. I apparently pissed some people off the last time I said this, but it’s also directly related to worldbuilding/coherency issues (in addition to being gross). I will say it again: **By GRRM’s own words, “maiden” is an explicitly sexualized term in Westeros, so the fact that Gyldayn’s description of Daenaera describes her as a “maiden” automatically means that there is a sexual aspect to his description of her. Despite the fact that she is six.** No it’s not just purple prose or GRRM secretly trying to suggest that Aegon is asexual or any other bizarre defenses I’ve seen. It’s just gross and it achieves nothing else than suggesting that Westeros is a truly depraved place.
Interesting comment, thank you. I haven't read F&B myself, but given that it's about Targs, I guess it takes place some hundred years before ASOIAF. Is it possible that attitudes on young teenagers having sex changed? Though I'm not sure how "realistic" it would actually be for Westeros to undergo societal/cultural changes, because GRRM's world has always seemed fairly... static to me. i.e. great houses ruling over their land for hundreds, thousands of years
There's an interesting (but flawed) theory that people in Westeros are *really* bad at counting - or rather, prone to exaggeration. That "a thousand years" might only be six hundred, and the "seven hundred foot wall" that GRRM admitted was probably too big. It's fun to entertain, but really it's just trying to justify the problem with most fantasy worlds - why *are* they so static? For most it's easy to write off as "it's a fantasy world" - no one is really asking why guns haven't been invented in Middle Earth when the films show us explosive powder and fireworks - but Westeros tends to invite more realistic scrutiny. Although I think the real answer is that GRRM is really bad at counting.
To be fair, the gunpowder and fireworks were created by Wizards, and in the case of fireworks were at least partially magical. I'm fine with Gandalf and Saruman knowing how to make gunpowder while everyone else doesn't.
>It's fun to entertain, but really it's just trying to justify the problem with most fantasy worlds - why *are* they so static? Also, there's a [trope in most fantasy worlds](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SciFiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale) where the worlds themselves are just way smaller than Earth so a conflict can actually have world-ending consequences despite pseudo-medieval levels of technology with transportation, food generation/preservation, etc. And as a result, when there are these kinds of conflicts with some kind of "Dark Lord" equivalent, the author doesn't have to write about the hundreds or *thousands* of possible polities that would be involved, or sending off armies to go fight somewhere that would take them months to reach by ship ("King Richard, I have gotten word that an evil Lich is rising in the Phillipines! Shall we send forces to stop him?"). So, you have a scenario where there's a justified break from reality to tell this kind of story, where we have more or less the same level of technology and governments for *thousands* of years and yet most of the known world can be reached within a thousand miles or two because it's been scaled down to make the story possible. But then George comes along and amplifies the first trope by pretending at reality and having family dynasties which last thousands of years despite insufficient childbirth and cadet branches, and tries to avoid the second trope by using "realistic" continent size and breaking reality a different way to have these kinds of political structures and conflicts that should be made very difficult by having such huge distances to travel.
Worldbuilding in general. While Martin is a master ať character development, his world is just a bunch of clichés about the Middle Ages. Wide as a sea but shallow like lake Balaton. The problem is, Martin is this nerdy guy who would read about some interesting thing, And then use it in his book, without a second though. Others have already talked about Dothraki, another great example is Braavos: real life Venice was a superpower because it sits in one of the most fertille valleys in the world. They would import food and timber from Po valley. Braavos sits in the middle of nowhere, with no forests in hunderts of miles wide radius around the city. A city which completely relies on shipbuilding as their main defence but must import wood... is going to fall pretty quickly in the times of war. One blockade, and Braavos is doomed. Martin just looked at Venice and told to himself: "I want this in my book", without thinking about why Venice was so successful.
And I could continue. Westerosi society is a joke and have nothing in common with medieval society besides names like "lord" and "kingdom". The armies are made from recruited peasants like in 19th century, while real medieval armies were either made from professional warriors or mercenaries. This gave the nobles power. If your army is made of peasants, what's stopping them from rebelling against you? You can say, you could supress any rebellion with your loyal soldiers, right? Oh, you don't have any... There are no laws. Little to no trade. Just 5 cities. No economic activity going on in Westeros, aside from farming. No artisians class. Some nobles are cartoonishly evil. The whole society is cartoonishly evil, you really want me to believe that someone would willingly live under Boltons or Cleganes, George? For millenia? Why would anyone raise children here l, knowing they will get raped or flayed alive for the fun of the nobles? That's not how humans works. I love the books for the characters, but the worldbuilding made me to roll my eyes many times. The more you think about it, the less sense it makes.
I also think about the overall lack of religiosity compared to IRL medieval Europe. And I think that ironically while we know a lot about the Faith as an institution, we have very little about the actual religion itself or why anyone would follow it. There’s no theology (so far), and very little sense of what it even is as a religion, beyond characters making the occasional prayer or two.
Yup, that's another thing where Martin read about the Catholic church and just put it into his books, without thinking about it. Most of the main characters may be followers of faith, but they are actually atheists, And use religion as a tool to get more power. For medieval monarchs, even the progressive ones, the existence of God was a given, even for the progressive ones. That doesn't mean they were stupid - it was just natural for them, just like the existence of gravitation or black holes is natural to us. I've also written an answer in some other thread, that the Church had incredible soft power. They could (and would) excommunicate people from the church, even the monarchs, making them social pariahs. They could place interdict over whole cities, so no baptisms, weddings nor furneals could take place in such city. Think about it. Without baptisms, your children become pariahs for the rest of their lifes, never finding a spouse. Without wedding, if one of the parents die, the children and spouse do not inherit anything, and become homeless. These two things basically ruin the society upon which the interdict was declared. And without furneals, the dead bodies remain rotting in the streets, poisoning the water and leading to the spread of diseases. After a few months of interdict, any city would surrender. Edit: i mean interdict, not anathema.
The funny thing is that GRRM is a lapsed Catholic, which I think shows up all over the place in his writing—except for the Faith, which is sort of hilarious. Like, I think a lot of the character work can be viewed through that lens to an extent, I’m thinking particularly of the way that Dany’s story references prophet/Messiah narratives, or a lot of the general themes about self-sacrifice and morality even if it’s not specifically in a religious context. Which might also be part of why GRRM writes the Faith the way he does—not going to try to play armchair psychologist here, but I’d imagine that someone identifying as a lapsed Catholic most likely has some ambivalent feelings. But it’s another one of those things where GRRM’s supposed “historical accuracy” is almost the complete opposite. Like, the reason I really critique it is because it’s sort of like the defense of overusing sexual violence, death in childbirth and child brides as being “accurate.” Kind of referring to your earlier comment, I always think that Westeros is an awful place because it’s the story GRRM is trying to tell, but the issue is when we’re supposed to believe that it’s historically accurate.
Most of the military writing focuses about the knighs. There's also mercenaries like the "Brave Companions" and King's Landing has a professional military force. Overall very little attention is given to the poor fucking infantry, which is actually very fitting for medieval writing Medieval *chevauchees* were often that nasty
>Medieval *chevauchees* were often that nasty Medieval warfare in general was quite nasty. The thing that set apart chevauchees from regular raiding was deph in which they pentrated enemy territory and the scale. For example Black Prince's 1355 chevauchee saw destruction of over 18 000 square miles of enemy territory, compared to not much more than 1200 square miles devastated by Edward III. But even the Black Prince wouldn't have dreamt of doing anything to the scale of what's described happening in the Riverlands.
The Pee Eff Eye!
>real medieval armies were either made from professional warriors or mercenaries Aren't professional standing armies a relatively "new" (late renaissance and afterwards) idea? I'm pretty sure for most of medieval history, armies were in fact composed largely of peasants, or middle-class citizens.
Yeah that's an element that smartass deboonkers often overcorrect. The numerically bigger element in medieval armies were most of the time militias, althought they were relatively accomodated men Who could afford decent equipment, just like in Greece and Rome. Mercenaries became aboundant only in the late middle ages. For instance in Castille the *fonsado* obligated every free men to go to offensive war when the King marched on campaign.
Balaton: why you say fuck me for?
While I don't think it's completely implausible, the fact that no one in-story questions the whole Rhaegar kidnapping Lyanna narrative. He was apparently loved by the smallfolk and (at least) respected by nobles (even Tywin simped for him) and since half-ish of the realm fought on his side, you'd think someone would've at least raised some doubts on his supposed actions in kidnapping and raping the daughter of the Warden of the North. Even after Barristan recalls his memories of Rhaegar to Dany, and Dany brings up Rhaegar's reputation in comparison with his supposed actions with Lyanna, Barristan is just like "I know. Crazy, huh?" Same goes for Ned being Jon's supposed father. It's easier to see why people buy the story. But people are always saying how out of character Ned fathering a bastard would be. No matter what people believe happened, Rhaegar and Lyanna were together and 9 months later Ned comes back to Winterfell with a bastard. You'd think someone would've done the math and had suspicions. I get it serves the story. But IMO it clashes with pretty much every other narrative where no secret is ever safe and there isn't a universal opinion on any one character (even Ned Stark isn't universally loved by non-Lannister characters). For example, in book we're only given context clues that Loras and Renly are lovers, yet the whole realm seems to be in on that "secret". It's just a stretch that possibly the most consequential secret in the entire series which pretty much anyone could piece together is universally accepted at face value.
While I think some people do know that Lyanna ran away but never spoke about it in the open, since it appears to be an open secret. For example Barristan said that Rhaegar had "his lady lyanna" implying that Lyanna was Rhaegar's lover and lady. No one questioned if they had kids because Ned sort of lucked out with people suspecting that he and Ashara Dayne may have been lovers plus Ned's truthfulness played into his reputation plus very few people would have cared about Jon in the first place. It seems to be one of the only places where Ned truly played the game of thrones effectively by concealing Jon.
Meereen and slavers bay plot. Nothing made me want to close my book more than when I see a Daenerys chapter pop up. Which is a damn shame because I love Dany as a character, but where she is and everything she’s involved in means absolutely nothing to me.
The most book-accurate part of the adaptation was the audience shouting "go to Westeros, go to Westeros, GO TO WESTEROS" only for Dany to say "you know what imma chill here a while longer"
I very quickly became disinterested in Daenerys as a character as well. While I understand that it’s natural and human, her teenage crush on Daario was nothing I cared for. When the POV switched over to Barristan I gave a huge mental fist pump. I sincerely hope that when Daenerys comes back, it’s as the Queen and not the little girl.
The big narrative pay-off to Danaerys’ character WAS returning to Westeros. After 3 books it was time to advance that story. If I was GRRM I would’ve replaced the Qarth plot in ACOK with the Astapor/Yunkai/Mereeen plot from ASOS. In ASOS proper i would have the plot from ADWD but abridged so that Dany is sailing back to Westeros by the end, or the beginning of the next book.
I really wish she set up shop in Volantis not Meereen. Even George writes the people of slavers bay like he hates them, why shouldn’t we
When Varys tells Tyrion to take heart and Tyrion says “whose?” like damn Tyrion that is a shoe-horned C- pun for a chapter capper.
Tbf Tyrion is in a foul mood and completely exhausted (I think it’s the night of the KL riots?) and a shitty bleak “joke” is very in-character for him
“Each day was colder than the one before. Today was the coldest so far.” You don’t say! GoT prologue
The coldest so far *yet*!
*Dance with me, then*
Theon taking bloody winterfell with only 30 men. Absolutely absurdly stupid. The Dothraki, the Meereen and slavers bay plot. Honestly, not having a Robb POV. GRRM’s absolute hard on for “Medieval = Rapey”. Not a fan.
IIRC GRRM has actually said he regrets not having a Robb POV, which is why his role was a bit increased in seasons 2-3
-The introduction of fAegon. I think it will ultimately benefit the story and I'm a fan of the arc, but this whole "somehow...the son of Rhaegar survived" being dropped in book 5/7 is some hot retcon bullshit. -The unreal lucky streak that blessed the Lannisters before/during war of the 5 kings. Cat kidnaps Tyrion on a whim, he survives trial by combat; Jamie is captured (not killed) and Cat just decides to let him walk; Renly decides he wants to be King "just because", starts war with brother; Renly then killed by shadowbaby (a strategy never again used); Tywin arrives just in time to save KL; Ironborn invade the North for some reason (not for resources or land). I could also include Robb marrying Jeyne but it was likely planned or approved by Tywiin, but still, that plan went off without a hitch. -Despite being a major piece of Westeros politics and having a massive presence, actual faith in the Seven seems to be reserved for the simple-minded smallfolk or blow-hard nobles. Otherwise they only get lip service from the main characters. I think it'd be more realistic if people more-strictly adhered to the rules of the faith and used it to guide their morals (i.e. not just in deciding not to do a little kin-slaying).
Cat running into Tyrion was definitely unlikely. I don’t think it’s particularly surprising that Jaime was captured. If they killed him, there would be no hope for getting any of the Starks back from Kings landing. Renly wanting to be king makes sense because he had the support of the people, and a big theme of the story is that ultimately the “rules of inheritance” don’t matter. Renly had more than an order of magnitude more supporters than Stannis, and it’s not surprising that he thought he’d be a better king, nor that he’d want to be more powerful, nor that people would support the person they like more. The shadow baby is just setup for when the white walkers are revealed to be shadow babies but with ice magic instead of fire magic.
Everything about Dorne, including in the histories.
In general essos isn’t nearly as interesting or complex as Westeros. It’s not a huge deal but Martin isn’t very knowledgeable about war or military history and it shows with the battle stuff. Makes fans discussions harder because imo you just have to go along with what the smart characters say even if it doesn’t make sense to you. Feast dance aren’t good despite the revisionists. He definitely tried to write in a more literary fiction style, and some of the themes are interesting or good. But the story really goes nowhere and no one needs 5 dornish povs and 4 Ironborns.
Do you mean prose or story?
I guess that depends on what defines bad writing. Is it an act that seems contrived? Is a plot point that appears to go nowhere? Is it bad dialogs or descriptions?
Yeah, these responses are all over the place, but in a good way - I’ve enjoyed reading others’ interpretations. I guess it can mean a variety of things. For me, in the series, the times I really noted poor writing was in the storytelling, which is usually excellent. The most egregious instance is the mutiny at Craster’s Keep. It’s from Sam’s perspective, and starts with someone being stabbed and then…”When it was over, the Lord Commander laid with his head on Sam’s lap” (something like that). The fuck? It just happened off page and he skipped to the aftermath? That’s LAZY writing. Also, the thrilling climactic action of the Battle of Blackwater is delivered…second hand from Dontos recounting it to Sansa. Riveting. Martin has multiple POVs to work with, but violates one of the most rudimentary rules of writing: Show, don’t tell.
This is my question as well. Hopefully the OP will tell us more about the project so we can give helpful examples.
The entire catspaw reveal makes absolutely no fucking sense. So let’s go over some facts. Because we literally saw this scene play out in Book One. The Catspaw was paid in advance. They were given a dagger that, explicitly, would not escape notice. They were unusually dedicated to pulling this off. They focused on it being a mercy for Bran when speaking to Cat. For some reason whoever hired them wanted them to use a very distinctive dagger instead of say, just smothering the sleeping 7 year old boy. Everything in book one points to it being some kind of diversion. The dagger is planted to try and attract notice. There is 0 reason the assassin couldn’t just smother Bran. Emphasis is put on it being a mercy. Tyrion overhears Joffrey complaining about Summer. He doesn’t care about Bran. He’s annoyed at the wolf. Sandor offers to silence the beast, and Joffrey finds amusement in the idea of a dog killing a dog. When Tyrion talks to Joffrey about Bran, Joff seems unable to even comprehend the idea of empathizing with his suffering or showing mercy. Flash forward to Storm. Tyrion, drunkenly, starts to think that Joffrey planned the whole thing. Because Joffrey acts weird about the idea of a dagger. That’s it. He starts to think Joff planned this whole thing because of that. He misremembers the line about Joffrey being annoyed at Summer, shifting it to being annoyed at Bran. He then stops thinking about it bc it doesn’t really make much sense and he’s drunk and soon has more pressing problems. Jaime later talks with Cersei about it. Cersei claims that Robert drunkenly talked about how Bran should be killed as a mercy in front of their 7-12 year old children. Ok we know Robert wasn’t Dad of the Year so…maybe. Cersei is pretty unreliable. She even later tells Jaime that she’s lied to him a thousand times so like who knows if she’s being honest here, or even remembering correctly. Jaime from this thinks that Joff did it to try and please Robert. Despite the fact that the last time he tried doing something he thought his dad would want he got beaten for it. Despite the fact that this was his own betrothed’s brother, not that he cares about Sansa, but he’s at least keeping up a pretense at this point. Despite the fact that he doesn’t care at all about mercy. Despite the fact that he was much more concerned with the wolf being loud then Bran. OK. It makes literally no sense. Honestly the catspaw’s actions don’t really make sense anyway. Him being a wildling would probably make the most sense and explain his dedication at least partially, since they also are pretty hardcore and seem to kill children as a mercy when they have such ailments (Val literally says word for word about Shireen, the same words the catspaw says about Bran.) I mean honestly at this point the 3EC skinchanging the catspaw because this falls into his plans makes more sense then Joffrey. I have no idea what Martin was smoking but it’s this kinda thing that makes you see how Storm was written extremely quickly, for everything fantastic about it, some things lack logic or just feel off.
I’m not sure if this necessarily counts as bad writing, but the sheer number of women who die in childbirth. In the real life Middle Ages, about 5% of women died due to childbirth. In ASOIAF, is closed to about 20%. (There was a thread from a few years ago that broke down the statistics but I couldn’t find it). I’m pretty sure I remember GRRM mentioning how medicine in Westeros is further advanced than medicine in the Middle Ages due to the maesters, but we don’t actually see how the advanced medicine/knowledge helps lessen mortality rates. So maybe that’s more of a world-building issue (But, to be fair, a lot of the deaths caused by childbirths are from Targaryens, and one could argue it has to do with their inbreeding, but considering we don’t see physical deformities in the Targaryens I find it slightly hard to believe that’s the cause) Edit to add: Also the sheer number of young girls who are married and that marriage is consummated immediately isn’t realistic regarding a medieval setting. Most girls who were married as young girls in the Middle Ages would wait until they were around 15-16ish for the marriage to be consummated because they knew at least somewhat that young girls were more likely to die in childbirth because of their size. (Obviously there are exceptions like Margaret Beaufort the mother of Henry VII, father of Henry VIII, who gave birth around 12-14 if im remembering correctly)
I agree, my theory is that long winters may give women severe vitamin d deficiencies leading to more deaths lol. But yeah child mortality and woman dying in child birth was high but not as high as grrm says.
No you’re right. And what sucks is especially when it’s transparently used by GRRM as a quick convenient way to remove a female character from the narrative. And also the amount of women who died in childbirth in ASOIAF who have essentially no other details or characterization (or names). Aemma Arryn will never make sense to me!!! Her mother literally died after being pushed into marriage/childbirth at a young age with fragile health, and then apparently everyone “kinda forgot” about that so that Aemma could be married off at 11?? (And she was already experiencing miscarriages before Rhaenyra, meaning that the marriage was already being consummated…)
Still boggles my mind that the Princess of Dorne who was Doran,Ellia and Oberyn mother is still nameless meanwhile other less important Lords from a time more removed from the main story are named....
That’s one of my biggest grievances about the general world building. I mean, the Princess of Dorme that you mentioned would have been a negotiator for Elia’s marriage to Rhaegar, the heir to the throne, and considering how important their marriage is to the plot (considering the Rhaegar/Lyanna situation and the general existence of Faegon), it just doesn’t make sense to me why she isn’t named.
Like it's just boring and repetitive. GRRM could have used a *ton* of things to kill of all these characters. Fell down the stairs! Banged head on doorframe! Greyscale! Killed breaking up a fight! Hunting accident! Like we know very little about Luthor Tyrell but the method of his death tells us a lot about who he was as a person. Childbirth tells us nothing.
The random conclusion of the ‘catspaw dagger’ mystery shoehorned into ASOS when it was no longer relevant.
It reminded me of a "Behind the Scenes" voiceover part of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In a late Season 7 episode where she gets into a relationship-ending conversation with Giles, the writer doing the voiceover testified that the writers were going to have Giles bring up the fact that he was willing to "walk the walk" because two years prior he murdered a potentially dangerous person that Buffy had specifically spared, a reveal of something the audience knew from two years earlier but she didn't. And then they said they scrapped that part because they realized that none of the audience would have cared at that point and it would have been a very stale "revelation".
I recently read ASOS for the first time and I had kind of forgotten about that plot point by then, tbh I think it would have been better if it was just not resolved, kinda like how we still don't know why Mandon Moore tried to kill Tyrion
Personally, I think George's writing is great. It's his pacing and endless character names he throws about that lower my experience. We keep hearing the name of endless side characters, guards, etc, often with the same names as many other ones. Technicality wise; descriptions, style, symbolism. I won't complain. He's leaps and bounds ahead of many other writers, and even if I prefer a little more action, I could only be lucky and honoured to have half his skill. And that's coming from someone who has heavily criticised the series. But I keep going back for all its positives.
“The sight of their arousal was arousing”
Tyrion doing absolutely nothing about Littlefinger. Tyrion is told by Catelyn Stark that Littlefinger framed him for the dagger. Why she tells him this? I honestly dont know as its not necessary for anything. It doesnt come up in his trial and Tyrion doesnt act on it. She has very little reason to lie to him and he believes her. He then goes to Kings Landing in ACOK. In ACOK Tyrion is essentially running Kings Landing. He has his own forces loyal only to him, the city is about to go into lockdown and hes taken out a lot of Cersei's support. Tyrion also has express permission from his father to kill any councillor he doesnt need or like. Littlefinger then confirms what Catelyn said was true by *flaunting* the dagger in his Tyrion's face. And Tyrion does nothing. It makes absolutely no sense. Littlefinger set Tyrion up to die in an act that would at a minimum inflame tensions between 2 houses, and what it ended up doing was starting a war. Frankly, Tyrion had the power and reason to just execute Littlefinger on the spot. But he didnt. Syrax's death is also incredibly dumb.
This. It absolutely baffles me why Tyrion never, ever bother confronting Baelish about that damned dagger. I mean we know how LF was too useful of a Master of Coin to simply just kill off, but knowing Tyrion he could’ve cooked up a scheme to at least find out why LF would ever go through the effort of setting him up for murder of the son of the King’s hand.
Sexual violence that doesnt serve the plot, just serves to shock.
Writing over 2,000 pages in two books, while barely moving the plot forward is a prime example. There were some great pieces and I enjoy reading his writing, but that’s a textbook example of failure in writing. And it led directly to where we are today, with a series that will never be finished.
Anytime he describes how a woman looks. It's just a cursory glance at their hair and then how firm or soft their tits are lol
While most stories will rely upon *some* contrivances to reach desired plot points, George went way overboard with all of the different ways Robb's campaign went to hell. He had half a dozen different things happen when he should have relied upon one or two.
GRRM as a general rule puts his thumb on the scale heavily in favor of the antagonists (see Littlefingers titanium plot armor) and against the protagonists (Catelyns entire arc)
First off, no one has mentioned Dunk & Egg, so W. But for my answer, how often GRRM describes a woman's hair as "Falling in lazy ringlets"
"Break my fast" - I absolutely **hate** reading that line and GRRM uses it over and over and over again. Food/wine/beer running down character's chins - Does everybody in Westeros eat like a toddler? *Jaime* Lannister - The name just knocks me right out of my groove and doesn't fit the Lannister naming conventions at all, he should have been named Cyrdan Lannister or something similar rhyming with Cersei. I'm convinced that GRRM chose that name specifically because he felt it would appeal to female readers. Also, characters who are members of the nobility using contractions such as "I'm" and "you're", etc. This should have been limited to peasant characters. And while I'm at it, GRRM not employing proper noble titles, such as baron, count, duke, etc. to give readers a sense of noble character's social/political position in Westeros.
> I'm convinced that GRRM chose that name specifically because he felt it would appeal to female readers. I think he chose it to appeal to himself. He seems to love the name Jaime, so many characters in his stories are named Jaime, he even named a planet Jaime (or something similar) in *"1000 Worlds."*
> he even named a planet Jaime (or something similar) in *"1000 Worlds." It was Jamison's World in the [Jambles](https://images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/f/67aa1abc-ad15-4765-81c4-41524817a8ea/db0jad4-8ebda08f-b351-44b5-8165-350ed6347d2e.jpg/v1/fill/w_1024,h_576,q_75,strp/thousand_worlds_map__version_1__by_caffeine2_db0jad4-fullview.jpg?token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ1cm46YXBwOjdlMGQxODg5ODIyNjQzNzNhNWYwZDQxNWVhMGQyNmUwIiwiaXNzIjoidXJuOmFwcDo3ZTBkMTg4OTgyMjY0MzczYTVmMGQ0MTVlYTBkMjZlMCIsIm9iaiI6W1t7ImhlaWdodCI6Ijw9NTc2IiwicGF0aCI6IlwvZlwvNjdhYTFhYmMtYWQxNS00NzY1LTgxYzQtNDE1MjQ4MTdhOGVhXC9kYjBqYWQ0LThlYmRhMDhmLWIzNTEtNDRiNS04MTY1LTM1MGVkNjM0N2QyZS5qcGciLCJ3aWR0aCI6Ijw9MTAyNCJ9XV0sImF1ZCI6WyJ1cm46c2VydmljZTppbWFnZS5vcGVyYXRpb25zIl19.Wo5sjvYQUo85tuT9ntzdt-fKT1s5d1lD-tRSTLDSoJg)
>Jaime *I like* it.
George, get back to work and finish the story.
>Food/wine/beer running down character's chins - Does everybody in Westeros eat like a toddler? this isn't very related to the point you're making but it really reminds me of russian/slavic folk tales, many of which ended with some variation of "and I was there, I drank mead and beer, it poured down my beard and missed my mouth" (it rhymes in Russian.) I doubt GRRM was inspired by this phrase but it really reminds me of a fairytale when I read it.
GRRM for some reason barely makes any distinction between the way nobles and peasants talk. For example, there's no mention of Arya faking a lowborn accent when she is disguised as Arry, or any smallfolk characters noticing that she speaks like a highborn girl.
The show actually tries to do this. As much as I dislike the Arya meeting Tywin plot, that bit was cool to see.
Yeahh but the my lord m'lord distinction actually happens later in George's writing between Roose and Theon/Reek.
No geographical distinctions either.
Accents are mentionned, like northern or dornish.
Jaime's name isnt that unusual when you see his uncle Jason. Jason Lannister. Dude sounds like an accountant.
Jason is actually a really old name, all things considered. Jason and the Argonauts. The Golden Fleece, etc
I feel like the most egregious example is the glut of POVs introduced in AFFC and ADWD and the screeching halt the existing plot threads reach. If the intention is for those books to form the middle of the series then you shouldn’t be inserting a bunch of new plot threads and basically pausing the other character’s journeys to do so. Generally by the middle of the series the existing threads you’ve introduced should be beginning to tie together as everything is setting up for the conclusion. This doesn’t happen and instead we get multiple Dorne and Ironborn POVs, along with ones like Brienne that go nowhere. That’s not to say they shouldn’t exist, but not everything *must* happen on screen. Good writing is knowing when to keep certain things behind the scenes because including them bogs down the story and brings everything to a screeching halt. Bad writing is getting lost in the details and being unable to properly tie things together.
Theon taking a castle bigger than most castles in England with 20 men. If castles were so easily taken there would be no point in building them. The same with Tywin's Blitzkrieg in the Riverlands. It makes even less sense that the Riverlands would be easy to take. Rivers are like mountains, natural borders. Protect the crossing point and no army can outflank you. The Dornish commoners fighting for their freedom against the flying atomic bombs of Aegon because their ruler does not want to accept their rule. In real life, the commoners would give the Princess of Dorne the middle finger and probably also the nobles. Neither nobles nor commoners were prepared to die like mad lemmings. Medivals times was not like the Vietnam war were you had guerilla troops. Apart from that, it makes no sense that Dorne would be impregnable. Burn the fields with dragon fire, make a naval blockade, close up the mountain passes, and they would starve to death with or without a fucking dragon. The entire Dornish stuff makes no sense unless you realize that George was probably inspired by Braveheart, a movie that makes even less sense. Tysha being raped by a dozen of men and surviving it at age 13. All the gangrape survivors. Like does George know how dangerous rape can be for the body? The fact that at the Wall no one ever attempts to sexually assault Jon Snow, though this place is full of criminals, rapists and men who spent the last years suffering in the cold. Ask any guy who ever was in a gulag or a prison why sending teenagers to be together with grown up people would be a bad idea. Its what I answer every time some idiots tell me that minor perpetrators of crimes should be imprisoned with the grown up guys to teach them a lesson. No, you don't want that ever. Its a bad idea. The fact that Targaryen women cannot be queens because they are woman but are riding fucking dragons. In medival times women were not considered a good idea as queen because they couldnt lead men into battle, but a woman on a dragon would have no disadvantage compared to a man. George basically took the Planteganet dynasty and gave them dragons. Fire and Blood is just utterly lazy how it just is a tale of abused woman who never do or achieve anything other than get raped, die in child birth or get murdered. Half of them do not even get a personality. Everything we know about Alyssa the mom of Daemon is that she like the cow girl position and that she died in childbirth. Would it have hurt the story to keep her alive a bit longer and have her die in battle or something? Like is childbirth the only way a woman can die?
Honestly , Tyrions whole “where do whores go ? “ recurring phrase really got us nowhere at all and became just super annoying and off putting . Sort of the same with Jaime and “She was fucking Lancel and Osmund Kettleblack and moon boy for all I know ! “
Jaime's one became funny to me after the first few times.
“Pink mast” Also pretty much every time food’s in a scene, you’ll bet George wastes a paragraph describing it. Also I accurately predicted two tragedies in ADWD and AFFC because a woman was present in that chapter. Like from the second I read “she,” I thought something bad was gonna happen, and was correct both times.
I remember for Joffery’s wedding, there was almost 2 entire pages just describing the food. Like sure, maybe it’s meant to be a commentary on how extravagant and wasteful the ceremony is, but I didn’t need to hear about every single course in great detail.
I don't know enough about writing to say what is bad or not, but it seems he likes the phrases "half a hundred" and "sickening crunch" a lot lol
Cerseis luck is so ludicrous it gets annoying to read. We know that nothing will actually come of her trial with the Faith and she’ll end up back in power through some ridiculous contrivance despite her relentless fuckups. If she was a protagonist she would have been deposed and killed immediately after her Looney Tunes plot to kill Robert by *checks notes* making him get too drunk on a hunting trip, but instead everything always breaks in her favor no matter how implausible.
George R.R. Martin is beyond my favorite writer. As far as I'm concerned, he gets to do whatever. That said, his semicolons and other punctuation are used in a signature rather than a classic way and could be called bad, though not by me. I also read AGOT as voiced to mislead readers into underestimating the text. Some of what might get called "bad writing" by someone focused on implementing a classical education registers to me as setting up for trope subversions. There is also the question of the many dick jokes. When I started getting really irritated at how the show was piling those on, I had to admit it was a worse version of something definitely happening all over the books. Especially among minor character names, there are a lot of dick jokes. Leave George alone.
This sentence from the first book didn't really work for me: "Ser Alliser Thorne walked from the room so stiffly it looked as though he had a dagger up his butt."
He overuses the word “that” a lot, as in ‘he thought that the time was right’ (not an actual sentence since I don’t have the books with me right now, but you get the idea). Whenever you can strike “that” in a sentence, strike it. A good editor should be catching those, though.