It’s Amazing! Granted I’m only like 110 pages into Fellowship but Tolkien is an amazing story teller. I read the Hobbit a while back and since I work from home (the one benefit of my company having Covid hysteria) I get to read a lot more.
I remember Peter Jackson saying he wanted to tell Tolkien’s story. It’s too bad modern day adaptations don’t have that respect for source material. Wheel of Time comes to mind. That showrunner is more concerned with lgbt representation than actually adapting the story. And I have no hope for the new show based on the Simarillion (which I’ll read after I finish the trilogy).
Pretty disgusting if true
Granted, I enjoyed reading Martin's series, but that is an evil reason to want to write a story. To tear down and destroy something that shows humanity at its best.. I just can't imagine being in a mental state to where I wanted to crush something like that. Well..no, I can, it comes from a place of resentment and envy, and that's the sort of frame leftists like Martin are operating from. Inb4 all leftists
To be fair there's nothing wrong with deconstructing popular and established works, genres, and authors, nor does it mean that you dislike them. Alan Moore was and always has been a fan of Silver Age superhero comics, but that didn't stop him from looking at them under a more serious and analytical light with Watchmen (and he hated the age of dark and gritty comics that it ushered in).
I think the bigger problem with Martin is that instead of just focusing on writing the best possible story he can imagine with A Song of Ice and Fire, he has instead made it his God-given mission to deconstruct every fantasy trope and convention that Tolkien made popular. Which has not only slowed the story down to a crawl because he's so damn focused on the unimportant minutia, but ultimately limited the tools he has at his disposal because that's ultimately what deconstruction does. When you deconstruct tropes, you can no longer play them straight or else you ruin the reason behind the deconstruction of them in the first place.
Good point and I think a lot of modern writers are obsessed with it or subverting expectations. Nothing wrong with that but there is a reason that the heroes journey exists. I remember critics gushing over the last Jedi.
Watchmen was amazing but like you said when you do something different like that you get lots of copycats