In case anyone thought the Game of Thrones spinoffs were going to be anything but woke garbage
(media.kotakuinaction2.win)
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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'!