In case anyone thought the Game of Thrones spinoffs were going to be anything but woke garbage
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HAHAHA they made Corlys Velaryon black! The Velaryons, for those who haven't read the books or looked into the worldbuilding material GRRM has released to date, are a Valyrian family like their inbred overlords the Targaryens; noted for having the same pale skin, silver hair and purple or bluish-purple eyes of that race. It is precisely because of their shared Valyrian ancestry that the Targaryen royals typically married a Velaryon (by now their cousins many times over) when they aren't bedding their own sisters, because as the incest demonstrates, they were a bunch extremely concerned with the purity of their bloodlines - it's also why they only rarely married their heirs to the subject Great Houses of the setting. This particular Velaryon and his family have been consistently depicted with those Valyrian looks in all art and fanart up to this point.
The Velaryon looks are quite seriously a major story element in the Dance of the Dragons (the civil war which this series revolves around), because the crown princess Rhaenyra's first three kids look nothing like her Velaryon husband (who is gay) and a whole lot like her non-Valyrian lover. Their disputed paternity is what opens the way for her half-brother (already legally the heir, but bypassed by a sanction from their father) to challenge her claim to the throne. But I guess storytelling integrity is no match for the power of Current Year diversity, eh?
Fuck you GRRM, not only are you never going to finish your main series, but now you're selling out what little artistic integrity you still have to the woke crowd even though D&D have already crashed the TV side of your franchise with no survivors and so, if anything, only the most hardcore fans of those books you're never gonna complete are going to care to watch this series. Can't believe this guy ever entertained the title of 'American Tolkien'.
Oh god. Don't tell me he actually called himself that. That's an insult to Tolkien more than anything
If only. Time Magazine called him that originally, but it seems the success got to his head real fast and he's been thinking he can surpass Tolkien for the last few decades. Even setting aside his infamous 'what's Aragorn's tax policy' and 'the way Gandalf came back from the dead was dumb' criticisms, his Wiki article has noted that:
Emphasis mine.
Incidentally, if you were to actually study medieval history in-depth you'd find that ASOIAF isn't particularly realistic - grimdark, or frankly grimderp, is a much better descriptor for it. Having an honorable king who could trust and be trusted by his vassals was actually important in medieval society, for starters, since the functioning of feudal politics depended pretty much entirely on your personal likability & trustworthiness in an age before modern large-scale professional bureaucracies; someone like Walder Frey or Tywin Lannister would've been outlawed by their king and/or had their lands raided to shit by and all their serfs defect to their neighbors for their crimes. And that's before we get into the obscenely unrealistic and inconsistent army sizes & composition, how scholarship is the preserve of the secular Maester order and not the Faith of the Seven, etc.
Tl;dr ASOIAF isn't so much a 'realistic' depiction of medieval politics and society transposed to a fantasy Europeanesque setting as it is basically a modern liberal's pop-cultural understanding of the Middle Ages, and Martin should really stop flattering himself.
That said The Red Wedding is heavily inspired by events that happened in Scotland. Namely the Black Dinner of 1440 and the Massacre of Glencoe in 1692.
Yes, I'm aware. The Black Dinner was a very small-scale affair that didn't involve an entire army being slaughtered, just two young dukes who the king (being a 10 year old boy at the time) couldn't save - and that dishonor was paid back when many years later, the same now-all-grown-up king personally murdered the son of the greatest magnate who planned it, throwing Scotland into several more decades of unrest.
The Massacre of Glencoe took place centuries after the end of the Middle Ages, when honor had lost its role in politics entirely. The guys who carried it out did so at the command of a Parliament which had just blatantly committed treason by overthrowing their king for another, and then rewrote history to make themselves the unambiguous good guys.
Anyway, my point wasn't that real medieval history was spotless - of course treachery and murder happened - but that it was, relatively speaking, less insanely bloody & backstabby than Westeros' history is made out to be. Even the Byzantines, whose court intrigues have preserved their name as a byword for 'complex and treacherous', would normally balk at pulling a Red Wedding-level affair because it'd destroy their good name; when they actually did (abandoning Emperor Romanos IV at Manzikert, 1071 and the 1182 Massacre of the Latins) it screwed them over massively and greatly hastened the collapse of their empire. Honor was a serious concept in medieval Europe, not the polite suggestion and/or cynical joke of a fairytale that it's treated as in ASOIAF, and regicides were notable precisely because they were actually quite rare; extremely, pointlessly brutal goons like Gregor Clegane, slimeballs like the Freys and the higher lords who enabled them like Tywin typically had short lifespans because of all the enemies they'd make.
I will grant Martin this, though: he does at least try to present some consequences for the Freys & Lannisters post-Red Wedding, even if they were far lighter than what would realistically happen IRL, unlike the show which just wholeheartedly embraces nihilism and doesn't punish anyone for committing atrocities until & unless the plot demands it, ex. Ramsay. By the end there what little message D&D still had basically boiled down to 'believe in nothing and nobody but yourself, betray and murder everyone around you to get ahead, break promises as soon as you make them, always prioritize your own petty squabbles & focus on short-term gratification over long-term thinking - and everything will work out for you'. Which is all well & good if you're a current-year corporate shark but a horrible way to manage a remotely 'realistic' medieval kingdom, to tie this tangent back to what I was saying about how those functioned IRL earlier.
Quite a few passages from LOTR stand out to me, but one that holds a special place in my heart is this one from ROTK, when a completely exhausted Sam lies down amid the lifeless rocks and ash of Mordor. He's totally beat, pretty much on the verge of collapse, and then...
I can't think of anything Martin or Pullman have written that struck me like those sentences did. Truly it's no wonder crass, cynical materialists and second-rate authors like GRRM and Pullman resent this dude so much and hope to take his place in readers' hearts; they can't make anything quite like what he made, because even this single passage impresses upon us the existence of immaterial things worth fighting for - indeed of greater worth than anything in our fleeting material world - while such things are antithetical to their worldview, and does so with greater grace than both of them combined could hope to have.
Oh, but I can go a level deeper than even that. Who is the lord of Mordor? Sauron. What are Sauron and his boss Morgoth best known for? Besides being archetypical fantasy dark lords, they originally created orcs by mangling and twisting captive elves, tearing every bit of goodness from them until all that's left is ugly cruelty, seething hatred and a total lack of belief in any higher power but the master who rules them. Sauron did this and wages war on the Free Peoples of Middle-earth in the name of imposing rationality and order, Morgoth did it because he's just a destructive spiteful asshat.
And now we have Martin, who thinks he can beat out Tolkien by writing medieval fantasy based on LOTR but 'darker and edgier', meaning hollow, cynical and full of pretenses of being 'realistic' when it's actually uglier than our real Middle Ages; and Pullman, who seeks to attack C. S. Lewis' books about kids having adventures against a fantastic backdrop full of religious allegories by making a fantasy work of his own where God is both evil & impotent, rationality and freedom (as defined by a modern antitheist progressive) are the things to aspire to past the controlling oppression of the church, and the at-best barely pubescent male & female leads are implied to have sex at the end.
Yeah, can't imagine why those two might get assblasted at any comparisons to Sauron, or more generally when their works are compared to the ones they totally didn't rip off & try to 'deconstruct'!
It's also a minor plot point in the Witcher regarding Yen and Fringilla Vigo, the latter of which is distantly related by blood to both [a cousin][(https://witcher.fandom.com/wiki/Anna_Henrietta) of the Nilfgaard Emporer and Emperor himself.
The plot point being Fringilla is meant to look so much like Yen she's sent after Geralt by the Lodge of Sorceresses to distract him "any way she can" to stop his search for Ciri. Those links have a tab to see the Netflix castings and not only were both "diversified" neither look alike. That said the castings in general were shit for the show and Cavill really deserves fucking better at this point having now had a passion project like the Witcher fucked over by the execs and his role as Superman fucked by Whedon and execs too.
Martin is an executive producer on this show and the other GoT spinoffs, so he absolutely could have put his foot down over the wokecasting and didn't. He's clearly gone senile if he thinks that'll make House of the Dragon attractive to the woke crowd anyway (and he's gonna need them to compensate after further antagonizing the actual fans of his books), they still hate him after last year's Hugo awards to the point that some dangerhair cunt who wrote a piece on him literally titled 'George R.R. Martin Can Fuck Off Into the Sun' is already a Hugo finalist this year.
Ah well, if he hasn't learned anything from such ingratitude after he took a nice big diarrheic shit over the Sad Puppies, he's clearly not going to learn a thing now. He already has his 'fuck you' pile of money, after all. And will still be able to cry into it every day after HOTD inevitably flames out and the aforementioned dangerhair disses him some more in her Hugo acceptance speech.
The former, thanks for catching that.
I tjhink GoT's last season has already badly, if not fatally, injured that boom of fantasy TV shows I thought was imminent close to the end of the last decade. Everything new I hear about Amazon's LOTR further decreases my interest in that show. HOTD itself I'm 90% sure is dead on arrival, D&D managed to kill the franchise so hard that it went from being one of the biggest pop-cultural phenomena of the 2010s to deader-than-wights practicallt overnight and virtually nobody rewatched, memed about or just discussed it all last year just after it ended.
I think GRRM's issue is he went from being a working writer. A guy that had a lot of stuff published but never really sold much and was only really known in the writing community as a competent writer and editor. Then he got propelled into worldwide success and fame very late in life and he is terrified of losing that.
Your mistake is thinking he ever had artistic integrity. He's a lazy man who turned the War of the Roses into a well written start to a fantasy series during a time when there wasn't a ton of competition. Since then, his laziness has won out and he's taking the easy money since it ensures quite a bit of personal wealth.
GRRM may be an obese manchild, a chronic procrastinator, a sell-out, a lifelong libtard, etc. but he's a great writer and world-builder. It's exhausting to read people shit on him while fawning over Tolkien, who certainly wasn't perfect himself.
Well! As you might guess, I must respectfully disagree with your that assessment. I think Martin is actually not a bad character-writer, but his worldbuilding is actually quite shoddy if you look beneath the surface. If I were to explain in detail why (and why it certainly pales before Tolkien's) I'd be here all night. So instead I will try to summarize the most egregious flaws in bullet-point form:
Martin can't seem to make up his mind on what his armies look like and how they operate. You have Septon Meribald's story about how he & so many other soldiers were dirt-poor draftee/volunteer schlubs fighting with kitchen knives & farming implements, but the armies we actually see duking it out are capable of standing their ground in the face of massed cavalry charges and executing complex maneuvers (ex. the Battle of the Green Fork near the end of AGOT). Historically drafting peasants was an absolute last resort and most battles were fought between armies of knights, men-at-arms & mercenaries, because nobody in their right mind wants soldiers who can't fight and who you need to work your fields anyway. GoT armies act like the larger and more professional armies of the 16th century onward, up to & including tearing apart the countryside and terrorizing peasants in their way to 'forage' for supplies.
Martin's armies are in general far too big for such a 'realistic' medieval setting, even a late medieval one. Take the aforementioned Battle of the Whispering Wood: the Lannisters have got 20,000 men (including 7,500 cavalry!) while the Starks are fielding 17,000. The Tyrells and Renly field a host of 100,000. In reality medieval European armies were quite a bit smaller, being comprised (as said before) largely or entirely of knights and their men-at-arms who were typically only obligated to serve for 40 days; after that their lord would have to start paying them, which almost nobody could do because outside of the Byzantine Empire, most feudal realms collected taxes in kind rather than in gold & silver. Also, medieval logistics could not support such large armies for long. Tolkien comparison: the good guys have almost 15,000 men between them (8,000 Gondorians & 6,000 Rohirrim) at the Pelennor Fields, the climactic battle of ROTK.
The Ironborn make no sense as a culture. They're reavers who have terrorized the mainland for millennia...despite hailing from a bunch of islands consistently described as barren rocks with little in the way of vegetation or arable land. Unlike the RL Vikings they're ostensibly based on, they actually HATE trading and aggressively look down on any of their kind who pay the 'gold price' (trading abroad) instead of the 'iron price' (raiding for shit). So where do they keep finding wood to rebuild their navy, which has been not only defeated but completely crushed on several occasions in history? For that matter, why haven't the continental powers who dwarf them completely crushed them for being nuisances and settled the Iron Isles themselves, despite said isles being conquered by mainlanders from time to time? How did they manage to conquer and hold the Riverlands, a much bigger and more heavily populated kingdom than their own, for centuries despite a long history of hostility & stark differences in culture & religion between the two? Tolkien comparison: the Corsairs of Umbar are a pretty advanced civilization descended from the Black Numenoreans and didn't spend all their time being annoying pirates.
The Dothraki make even less sense. They're clearly based on the Eurasian nomad hordes, but don't wear armor, don't have bows for their iconic weapon, have no fixed settlements at all besides Vaes Dothrak, and disdain settled civilization utterly. Their usual tactic is to just frontally charge at their enemies over and over until one side breaks, most hilariously attempting this against an Unsullied pike phalanx 18 times in the historical battle which made the latter famous. They should not realistically pose any threat to any non-Stone Age opponent, unlike the real Eurasian hordes which were often comparable to or even more advanced than the settled civilizations they battled and whose political practices could even make their rule more attractive than the kings they displaced (ex. the Huns and Mongols). Tolkien comparison: the Easterlings, and particularly the Wainriders, were noted to be extremely dangerous opponents to Gondor thanks not just to their barbaric ferocity but also to their excellent arms & armor and innovative tactics (involving horse archers & chariots).
The Faith of the Seven, the main church of Westeros, has comically little power for a 'realistic' medieval church. The Westerosi have religion but they don't actually believe in it, much like post-modern people these days tend to. Meanwhile actual Medieval kings were highly faithful and served a role in worship. They built edifices to the church and things like a King being unfaithful to his wife were huge problems that could topple a kingdom. If you were excommunicated, the people believed that working with you meant they would be going to hell with you later, and they believed it; just look at Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV, whose excommunication left him kneeling in the snow & begging the Pope for forgiveness for three days because literally none of his lords and servants would lift a finger for him. Tolkien comparison: the Free Peoples don't have organized religion but they do have a fairly pervasive sense of spirituality, and good reason for it (the last time they had a temple & organized clergy, both were puppets of Sauron) unlike ASOIAF, where the Faith inexplicably never tried to regain its power in the nearly 200 years after the Targaryens lost their dragons until the High Sparrow arises in AFFC.
Lack of cultural variation among the Andal Westerosi kingdoms. There's no way 5 out of the 7 kingdoms, which comprise the majority of the continent's kingdoms and population, should be basically interchangeable and all speak the exact same language, even despite their shared Andal ancestry and worship of the Seven. The Roman Empire had more regional variety than that, to say nothing of just medieval Western Europe or the HRE alone - without touching the Balkans or Eastern Europe. Tolkien comparison: the Gondorians had regional and cultural differences between themselves, with a Sindarin-speaking Numenorean elite lording it over the Middle Man majority (which only grew as the blood of Numenor waned) and Westron developing later as a mutually intelligible universal lingua franca from the former's original Adunaic language, but even that wasn't without its well-developed regional dialects such as Hobbitish.
I could go on but I'm already halfway to the .win character limit. To sum it up, Tolkien's worldbuilding isn't flawless - I don't think anyone's is, and there's always room for improvement - but it is insanely ahead of and certainly far more consistent than Martin's, which (as I have basically said before) isn't so much the realistic medieval world it's been advertised as, as it is a post-modern progressive undergrad's understanding of medieval Europe through pop-culture-tinted lens. ASOIAF isn't without its good points, but I would definitely not count the worldbuilding among those points, and instead argue it's one of the weaker parts of the work instead.
This comment gives me life.
Ironically, I think the inaccuracy of having the characters lack faith is one of the things that people think makes the series realistic. They don't believe in a god and people that do are beyond the scope of their imagination.