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who is the fattest targaryen
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Oct 26, 2021 00:10
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Jazerus posted:who is the fattest targaryen https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Aegon_IV_Targaryen Shimrra Jamaane posted:Honest to god, if he did that I think he would actually have a chance to finish the series. Yeah. There's no way that the self-indulgence that he showed with those two books can carry over into Winds and Spring without each of those books being about 2k pages. The best chance of either book being delivered is if he and his publisher put out a notice saying "we're cutting this poo poo down."
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Oct 26, 2021 04:00
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Your bitch? Not.
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Oct 26, 2021 04:02
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Hasselblad posted:Your bitch? It's now between over ten times as long between the publication of A Dance With Dragons and now as it has been between the publication of the "George RR Martin Is Not Your Bitch" letter and the release of A Dance With Dragons.
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Oct 26, 2021 10:00
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HonorableTB posted:It's funny because those are legitimately some impressive page numbers ONCE HE ACTUALLY SAT DOWN AND STARTED WRITING. All that wasted time loving around and then in two years he wrote like 1100 pages, what was the magic trick that got that done?? The magic trick was that those 1100 pages were A Dance With Dragons and they were
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Oct 26, 2021 13:14
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I think I mentioned in this thread that I think George has put a ton of work into Winds and possibly has a large amount of work finished, but that the book itself is nowhere near completed. I've been participating in proofreads and group feedback reads for fantasy drafts for a long time now, and the features of the genre that attract people to it can be a trap for certain writers. As someone who grew up on minimalist writers like Vonnegut, I in no way can abide by series like LOTR and Wheel of Time's insistence on cutting away from dialogue to deliver an omnisciently-told page on the history of pipeweed or stopping in the middle of a fight so a character can have a flashback about the history of his dueling partner's sword or something. A lot of fantasy readers and writers love that, though, which can be a problem. One of my classmates in college started writing a pretty promising fantasy novel that was prompted by one of our professor's assignments. The professor even let him use it for some extra credit further on in the class. I lost contact with that friend when I had to drop out of college, and only talked to him again like six years later when I looked him up on Facebook. I asked him about that writing project he had in college, and he said he was still working on it and was now actively trying to finish it. He sent me a working draft and it was at 1,300 pages in an editing format. The sections that I remembered reading in college were still there, but there had been a lot of fluff added to it over the years. He asked me what I thought and I said the plot, characters, and dialogue were all cool, but why was he constantly pausing advancement to tell me about the magic system, especially when the magic system was being explained from the POV of characters who would not know how that magic system works (among other problems)? He asked me to jump into his reading group, and I did, and from the second I opened my mouth, I felt like I was not welcome there. Every time he expounded on his world, his readers wanted to know more. There was a duel scene with three paragraphs of action and something like eleven pages of internalization. A person would swing a sword, and then think about their sword, then talk about how they got their sword, how their sword was made, who made the sword, etc. They would then swing the sword again and tear someone's shirt, then we would have to go into world-building about the shirt. His readers were encouraging him to take these types of sections even further. There was so much useless bloat that he was being congratulated for, because he was listening to fantasy readers, not writers. This included even himself, as he loved those types of books that built their worlds at laborious paces, but now he was staring down the barrel of being thirty years old with this doorstop of a .doc that was likely going to reach 2,000 pages within another decade. So, I gave him that feedback. We'd both made our start working as line cooks, so we could dish and take helpful criticism. We're also both Simpsons nuts, so I explained my criticisms to him using the Itchy and Scratchy focus group scene. I explained the difference between having readers (viewers) critique his work and having writers critique his work. When you ask a reader to read your work, they'll tell you what they want, and usually they want everything. This even applies to when the writer of the piece in question is viewing his piece as a reader. When you ask a writer to read your work, they'll tell you how you should compose your work. His readers were all fantasy and lore nuts, so they were only going to tell him that they wanted more, instead of explaining to him the virtues of leaving them with less. I ended up putting it as "So you want a interesting plot full of crazy magic and tons of lore building with no mystery whatsoever, but you want the series finished in a reasonable amount of time?" followed by all of the readers in the focus group nodding and cheering. His group of readers were not happy. I got dogpiled by them in the Discord, especially after making some critiques about Tolkien and Jordan when they inevitably got brought up, but after that, my friend was convinced to open up a second group of mostly aspiring writers/lit agents/editors, and they came with clippers in hand. We convinced him to cut out a tertiary C-plot as well as a truckload of flashbacks and lore building. All in all, the book went from something like 1,100 pages in final format to something like 500-600 after editing. He's talking with an experienced lit agent to get it sold to a publisher at the moment. I've also experienced this type of problem with other fantasy drafts I've read, all of which have gone absolutely nowhere. This brings me back to George. I don't know whether he's writing for himself, or for his readers, or both, but over time he has become obsessed with coloring in every corner of his big world. In the time between Dance and Winds, he's released around 1,000 pages worth of lore books. His prose is getting more and more verbose, and it feels like his characters exert one sentence of introspection for every literal step they take. I have a feeling since he's typing in emulated Wordstar, that he's not keeping in regular contact with an editor, and since he's probably worried about spoilers, he's likely not shopping it with other writers. He is likely writing entirely for himself, and he is a detail-obsessed man who is not receiving pushback for his bad habits. So I'm imagining that there are at least 500 pages of Winds written, but that the plot has gone nowhere as he keeps creating gaps that he then obsessively tries to fill. vvv Yeah, that's a good point. I remember him doing an interview about writing the timelines for a World of Ice and Fire, and he talked about how he had just wrote that the reign of Jaeherys' I "was a peaceful one." Then he sat there and realized that something had to be said for a forty year reign, so he started filling it in with events. Flash forward, and the Jaeherys section of Fire and Blood is freaking massive and ties a bunch of events into the main series. Coquito Ergo Sum fucked around with this message at 20:59 on Oct 26, 2021 |
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Oct 26, 2021 17:44
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I think also GRRM wrote himself into a corner. One of the main things that makes Song of Ice and Fire stand out (other than subverting tropes) is mundane political consequences. King's Landing is on the opposite side of a war than the Reach. This leads to starvation in the capital. Rob breaks a marriage contract and a large part of his army defects. So he built up that someone's actions has not just personal ripples but political ones too. This is why when he subverts a trope it feels satisfying because the politics ripples are telling you the trope can't happen. Which means at the end of Storm of Swords, he couldn't do his 5 year jump because there are serious political ripples going on. If he jumped over them, then it wouldn't be taken as badly as the Cersei blowing up the Sept with no consequences, but things would still have not felt right. Dorne is just gonna take the death of Oberon and lie low for 5 years? The Ironborn's new leader is gonna just raid shows and continue to not make progress for 5 years? So after he left the books at a place where the (main) characters are in pretty static spaces but the politics are a mess. So he needs a bunch more povs to handle those effects, because all the main cast are in what basically should be a training montage. He wrote himself into a damned if he does, damned if he doesn't position. KellHound fucked around with this message at 18:57 on Oct 26, 2021 |
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Oct 26, 2021 18:47
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Coquito Ergo Sum posted:
KellHound posted:I think also GRRM wrote himself into a corner. One of the main things that makes Song of Ice and Fire stand out (other than subverting tropes) is mundane political consequences. i think these are related problems, in that a lot of the mundane political consequences are depicted through the reactions/motivations of minor characters/factions, and the plethora of minor characters/factions exist largely to provide a medium for mundane political consequences to happen in (chicken egg etc). You see this in a lot of the show's streamlining attempts, which start out seeming sensible enough and end up snowballing into problems. authors like robert jordan make huge worlds with thousands of characters, but are comfortable treating tertiary characters as adjunct to the heroic journeys of the protagonists and having them act sorta as needed to facilitate whatever is happening with main characters. This allows them to just keep chugging along and putting out more books despite the huge weight of lore. In contrast, I think GRRM spends a lot of time trying to figure out how Lord Whoever of Nowheretown would react to X thing, then gets bored/frustrated and heads off to watch tv and cram down a few more lil debbies rather than writing anything with forward momentum. tl;dr i don't think the Meereeneese knot is a fake problem gurm made up, i think he actually has spent huge amounts of time trying to work out what the various subfactions around Meereen would do, or figuring out who all would reasonably defect to Aegon and Connington, or figuring out how many Vale houses Littlefinger can subvert and how he can do it. Many fantasy authors would quite reasonably not bother with any of this (since who cares) and would just more or less go "Littlefinger is very convincing and tricked a bunch of guys into being his army, now let's get back to the giant battle that [Main Character] is about to be in" PupsOfWar fucked around with this message at 04:02 on Oct 27, 2021 |
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Oct 27, 2021 03:58
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also being a fan of both NYC football teams is a coward move pick 1!
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Oct 27, 2021 04:01
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PupsOfWar posted:also being a fan of both NYC football teams is a coward move This car only stops for Mets, Nets, or Jets.
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Oct 27, 2021 04:06
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PupsOfWar posted:i think these are related problems, Oh they definitely are related problems. The mundane political problems is part of what makes the series stand out (when it first came out). So not pulling at these threads risk alienating his audience. The thing that made the series stand out encourages his worst tendencies and because he is a "gardener" rather than a "planner"/"plotter" he didn't realize he was backing into a corner until it was too late.
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Oct 27, 2021 06:03
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Coquito Ergo Sum posted:I think I mentioned in this thread that I think George has put a ton of work into Winds and possibly has a large amount of work finished, but that the book itself is nowhere near completed. I've been participating in proofreads and group feedback reads for fantasy drafts for a long time now, and the features of the genre that attract people to it can be a trap for certain writers. As someone who grew up on minimalist writers like Vonnegut, I in no way can abide by series like LOTR and Wheel of Time's insistence on cutting away from dialogue to deliver an omnisciently-told page on the history of pipeweed or stopping in the middle of a fight so a character can have a flashback about the history of his dueling partner's sword or something. A lot of fantasy readers and writers love that, though, which can be a problem. You've written more words than he has.
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Oct 27, 2021 10:47
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Coquito Ergo Sum posted:I think I mentioned in this thread that I think George has put a ton of work into Winds and possibly has a large amount of work finished, but that the book itself is nowhere near completed. I've been participating in proofreads and group feedback reads for fantasy drafts for a long time now, and the features of the genre that attract people to it can be a trap for certain writers. As someone who grew up on minimalist writers like Vonnegut, I in no way can abide by series like LOTR and Wheel of Time's insistence on cutting away from dialogue to deliver an omnisciently-told page on the history of pipeweed or stopping in the middle of a fight so a character can have a flashback about the history of his dueling partner's sword or something. A lot of fantasy readers and writers love that, though, which can be a problem. This is a fascinating inside into another writer's mind. It's also an interesting contrast to my own approach at writing. The longest text I got together so far is 400+ pages, and that project was finished. The idea you could just keep on writing until you have 2k+ pages of unending text is such an alien thing to me. I mean, my own approach is to go idea->plot/characters->execution. This makes it impossible to actually overshoot that much, as eventually your plot is finished and the story ends. Presumably a lot earlier than 1300 pages in.
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Oct 27, 2021 11:02
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KellHound posted:I think also GRRM wrote himself into a corner. One of the main things that makes Song of Ice and Fire stand out (other than subverting tropes) is mundane political consequences. King's Landing is on the opposite side of a war than the Reach. This leads to starvation in the capital. Rob breaks a marriage contract and a large part of his army defects. So he built up that someone's actions has not just personal ripples but political ones too. This is why when he subverts a trope it feels satisfying because the politics ripples are telling you the trope can't happen. Which means at the end of Storm of Swords, he couldn't do his 5 year jump because there are serious political ripples going on. If he jumped over them, then it wouldn't be taken as badly as the Cersei blowing up the Sept with no consequences, but things would still have not felt right. Dorne is just gonna take the death of Oberon and lie low for 5 years? The Ironborn's new leader is gonna just raid shows and continue to not make progress for 5 years? I mean people like fake history. He was able to publish a handful of fake history books in the time since the last book. I feel like the simplest solution for GRRM in this case would have been to do the five year time skip, and have the gap filled in by opening the next book with a big exposition dump in the form of an excerpt from some maester's chronicle or by sprinkling excerpts from various chronicles at the start of chapters or something. Or hell, just publish a shorter fake history book filling in those five years. It's not ideal, but I mean an imperfect solution is better than no solution.
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Oct 27, 2021 11:32
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RoboChrist 9000 posted:I mean people like fake history. He was able to publish a handful of fake history books in the time since the last book. I feel like the simplest solution for GRRM in this case would have been to do the five year time skip, and have the gap filled in by opening the next book with a big exposition dump in the form of an excerpt from some maester's chronicle or by sprinkling excerpts from various chronicles at the start of chapters or something. Or hell, just publish a shorter fake history book filling in those five years. Yeah, it seems he doesn't want to compromise. No change of style, no dropped plots, no ghostwriters. Or maybe he has been hiring various ghostwriters for the last 10 years and was never happy enough with the result. So here we are with the books never coming out. Which is a shame, because the mid story plot resolutions like red wedding, lysa arryn, oberyn and so on are generally very well done, so he could probably come up with a satisfying ending in principle.
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Oct 27, 2021 11:51
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The benefit to the fake history approach I just mentioned, I also realize, is that it also leaves wriggle room for not only the fine details, but even the broad strokes and 'facts'. If information on the five-year gap is provided primarily through in-universe chronicles written by maesters, with all the biases and access to information that implies, then yeah. The more I think about it, the more I think that the five year gap and filling it in with excerpts from chronicles and naturally through dialogue-based exposition seems like the best approach he could have taken.
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Oct 27, 2021 11:58
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Libluini posted:This is a fascinating inside into another writer's mind. It's also an interesting contrast to my own approach at writing. The longest text I got together so far is 400+ pages, and that project was finished. The idea you could just keep on writing until you have 2k+ pages of unending text is such an alien thing to me. I think the trick is having a drat good idea what you want to do, and how you want to do it. It's a reason I have no interest in writing fantasy. Realism with some fantastical element that is representative of a theme/emotion/mental hurdle? Yeah. Grand world building just sounds like a chore to me, when you can build a world in a mind.
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Oct 27, 2021 12:28
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RoboChrist 9000 posted:The benefit to the fake history approach I just mentioned, I also realize, is that it also leaves wriggle room for not only the fine details, but even the broad strokes and 'facts'. If information on the five-year gap is provided primarily through in-universe chronicles written by maesters, with all the biases and access to information that implies, then yeah. I've heard people call this an idea that he wouldn't do, but he released Fire & Blood, a doorstop that goes through something like 700 pages of fake history, so I agree that it would have absolutely been doable. I guess that George's fondness for character development wouldn't allow that, though. I think he'd be worried that we'd come back to these characters after five years and wonder why they're acting differently. But like all of the slack that anyone tries to give GRRM, it's immediately lost when you just remind yourself that it's all at the expense of the series not finishing. Collateral posted:I think the trick is having a drat good idea what you want to do, and how you want to do it. It's a reason I have no interest in writing fantasy. Realism with some fantastical element that is representative of a theme/emotion/mental hurdle? Yeah. You really don't see a lot of short fantasy one-offs, huh? I'm currently working on a second draft of a fantasy novel inspired by The Thing and The Descent for NaNoWriMo. My first draft was proofread by a few writers and a retired editor, as well as a few enthusiastic readers. When the readers said that they wanted to know more lore or information, I'd try to gauge whether they wanted to know more because the lack of information was hurting the reading experience, or because they liked what they were reading and wanted more of it. For the former, I'd try to fix up sections so that they would convey information that I felt was necessary to the book's events, and for the latter I would leave the passage alone or tease the reader even harder. My favorite fantasy worlds are FromSoft's because what little information their games feed the player is interesting and tantalizing and in the end, I don't even know if the information I got is even correct. When I'm bored, I try to piece together what I know of those worlds to try to solve mystery or answer questions, while I rarely think about some other fantasy world's convoluted or over-explained features. I'd rather have an appetite left by the time dessert arrives rather than be full after the first course, but I swear the majority of fantasy readers are the complete opposite and as a result it's as unwelcoming to certain authors as you say.
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Oct 27, 2021 16:16
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The reason fantasy fans love world building is because modern fantasy is supported mostly by fandoms, and those love to place themselves in the fantasy scenario and come up with fan fiction and the like. And for that you need rules, so you can tell what is "realistic" for the world and what isn't. A one-off novel can introduce cool concepts, but where do you go from there? You can't play out your own stories in that world because there's no playing field to place them on. You also can't stick with your favorite characters, because a single novel usually doesn't bother explaining every character's comings and goings in detail. And from an author's perspective, I guess it's more economical not to need a whole new world for every story you write. That said, I think fantasy short story collections are also quite popular, just the mid-length normal novel space is a bit empty.
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Oct 27, 2021 16:37
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Those Dragonlance books had timeskips and the Dragonlance Chronicle books are widely regarded as classics of literature. Grrum just doesn't have the literary chops of Weis and Hickman.
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Oct 27, 2021 20:51
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Everybody wants to be Tolkien, no one wants to spend their lifetime as a philologist and folklorist, do any real conlangs, and then maybe write an epic fantasy on the side.
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Oct 29, 2021 16:54
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For thousands of years before Aegon's conquest, Oldtown was the largest, richest, and most influential city in Westeros. Even now it's barely surpassed by that open sewer calling itself King's Landing in population. This is quite weird considering Oldtown's location. A simple glance at a map of Westeros shows that the largest port city in Westeros should logically be located on the Narrow Sea, not the Sunset Sea. There are no known lands west of Westeros so all of the continents foreign trade is conducted with Essosi and Summer Islanders, all of whom have to sail the narrow sea before reaching any Westerosi port. Proximity is the most important factor in trade. The US trade value with Canada is $718 billion, almost 70% of the value of trade it does with all of the EU ($1.1 trillion). That's despite the EU having nearly 12 times Canada's population. China has 36 times Canada's population and still conducts only a comparatively paltry $558 billion worth of trade with the US. What is Canada's secret? Proximity. It's a lot easier to trade with those near you, especially in a time of long travel distances and slow communication. Nearly all trade was local. Cities on the Narrow Sea are closer to Essos making them far more accessible to ships. Sailing to Oldtown from Essos entails a far more treacherous journey first across the pirate-infested waters of the Stepstones and then along the barren coastline of Dorne. That's 400 leagues (1400 miles/2200km) on a wooden ship powered by sails or oars along the Dornish coastline with its sandbanks and other navigational traps. There's precious little water or fresh fruit to be found and getting shipwrecked practically guarantees death by sun or scorpion even if you manage to swim ashore. This long and dangerous can still be justified if the goods on the other end are worth it. So, what's traded in Oldtown that's so valuable people would brave Dornish sandbars for it? Nothing. At least not on the surface. There isn't really a unique product traded out of Oldtown that couldn't be found elsewhere after a shorter and less dangerous journey. The Reach is an agricultural powerhouse but why would you brave a trip like that for wheat when you could just buy it in Gulltown or Duskendale? At least Lannisport has gold and silver. What about the wine? Wine is the Reach's most valuable trade commodity but the producer with the most desirable vintages is the Arbor, an island just off the coast across the Redwyne Straits from Oldtown. Cheaper vintages are produced in the Reach outside the Arbor but the margins might not justify the cost of the trip. Merchants are better off buying Dornish wine. The shorter trip costs them less money, exposes them to fewer dangers, and ensures bigger profits. Traders would certainly sail to the Arbor for its famed wine but that trip doesn't need to take them anywhere near Oldtown. Yet there is no city of any appreciable size on The Arbor. If anything, the island is largely rural. Could Oldtown be a refueling stop? No. Ships needing fresh water and food after rounding the Dornish coast can get everything they want on the Arbor. They don't need to sail up to Oldtown. Lannisport should be larger than Oldtown Gold and silver are the currency of TWOIAF so Lanniport should by right be the largest city on the Sunset Sea. People would trade anything for enough gold so visitors shouldn't be a problem. Lannisport being the largest city would make sense. Oldtown doesn't. A good portion of the Reach's foreign trade should also be conducted through ports on the Arbor rather than Oldtown just like Sicily served as a hub for Mediterranean trade with the Italian peninsula. GRRM's reason GRRM's reason for Oldtown's growth and prestige is trade but he doesn't specify trade in what or with whom. The trade goods available in the Reach don't justify Oldtown's power or prominence on Planetos. The Arbor is a much better candidate for Reach foreign trade powerhouse than Oldtown simply because ships heading to Oldtown have to pass by it first anyway. Speculation 1: GEOTD I believe Oldtown's initial rise to prestige and power had little to do with its potential as a trade hub and more to do with the mysterious founding of House Hightower. Hightowers had dragons in the legends and probably came to Westeros across the Sunset Sea from The Great Empire of The Dawn. Maybe there was trade across the Sunset Sea with the GEOTD? Oldtown grew large and powerful, became home to important learning, religious institutions, and political institutions, and has lived off those achievements ever since. Once a city's population grows large enough, a certain flow of trade was guaranteed. That's how King's Landing became a trade hub. People came to be near the king and merchants came to serve their every need. On and on the cycle goes. The only thing the city has to do is maintain its population and the trade will keep flowing. Speculation 2: Magic and services of a magical nature Oldtown is home to the Citadel and was the faith HQ for almost the entirety of the religion's presence on Westeros. Even after the High Septon moved to King's Landing, many important institutions of the Faith remained in Oldtown. There's also the mystery of Battle Isle. My speculation is that there is a secret trade good or service that draws people to Oldtown: magic. The Hightowers are known practitioners of magic and it's not unthinkable that a thriving secretive trade in magical goods and services draws people from all over the world to Oldtown. Asshai survives entirely out of magic. Magicians go there to learn and practice their arts while traders brave the sea bring them sustenance. Asshai is only sinister because of the curse on the city and the fact that no magic is forbidden. Oldtown may be a tamer version of Asshai. Shadow binding and blood magic may not be openly practiced here but there's definitely something going on under the surface. Magicians can easily blend into the large population and offer their services to men who sail to Oldtown to procure them under the guise of buying and selling other trade goods. This may also explain the Grand Maester Conspiracy. We all know Hightowers own the maesters. So maybe the maesters don't want to destroy magic. They just want to control it. They want a monopoly on all knowledge, magical or otherwise. I'm more married to this speculation. For a House with its wealth and power and the second largest port in Westeros to boot, the Hightowers seem to have an oddly weak navy when the Ironborn attack. Lord Leyton's sons have to ask their sister Lynesse for ships because they have precious few of their own. The Arbor appears to be the sea power of the Reach. This makes a lot of sense if Hightower power comes from their control of magic rather than their control of a port. This secret source of their power may be what Euron is coming for. Or maybe it's just a mistake in the worldbuilding and I'm speculating too much. George, release Winds.
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Oct 30, 2021 04:54
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KellHound posted:I think also GRRM wrote himself into a corner. One of the main things that makes Song of Ice and Fire stand out (other than subverting tropes) is mundane political consequences. King's Landing is on the opposite side of a war than the Reach. This leads to starvation in the capital. Rob breaks a marriage contract and a large part of his army defects. So he built up that someone's actions has not just personal ripples but political ones too. This is why when he subverts a trope it feels satisfying because the politics ripples are telling you the trope can't happen. Which means at the end of Storm of Swords, he couldn't do his 5 year jump because there are serious political ripples going on. If he jumped over them, then it wouldn't be taken as badly as the Cersei blowing up the Sept with no consequences, but things would still have not felt right. Dorne is just gonna take the death of Oberon and lie low for 5 years? The Ironborn's new leader is gonna just raid shows and continue to not make progress for 5 years? Well yeah, and this would be a very sympathetic problem to note back in 2001, aka twenty years ago. Even without the benefit of hindsight it's obvious if we view this solely as an academic exercise (using royal "you" from hereon out)-- get your leather strap, bite down hard, and make the loving timejump anyway. People are going to whine either way, and the only reason to take on the long process is because you have absolute, unwavering confidence in the following 2 things: 1. Your work ethic at fleshing out this incredible kudzu of problems 2. Your ambition to create a true masterpiece to stand in the literary pantheon. And both of these are frankly amateur mistakes that you would only make if you were exceptionally arrogant and dishonest with yourself, about yourself. The timejump is gonna cause problems and be a pain. It's absolutely going to gently caress with the ripple effect precedent set up in the first few books. It also needs to happen for the next stage of the story to progress, and the same way only amateurs and exceptionally sociable Role Players actually act out the "how do we all join together as an adventuring party?" poo poo in Dungeons and Dragons, sometimes you just have to skip that as a conceit to get to the real meat of things. Unless of course GRRM didn't actually have an interesting back half to ASoIaF planned and really was just leading his fat gut around by the nose the entire time... and now we can put hindsight more overtly into the equation and say "Oh yeah loving wow he really didn't. Lmao look he made Bran king and Sam wrote a 'Song of Ice and Fire' book. That's got to be some poo poo he scribbled on a pizza box in 1996 because holy poo poo it feels less like 'the story coming full circle' and more like a colon stitched back into itself." mind the walrus fucked around with this message at 05:35 on Oct 30, 2021 |
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Oct 30, 2021 05:31
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the reach is a big logistical plot hole that doesn't make any sense, oldtown's silliness is just a consequence of that. supposedly the reach exports grain to practically every other kingdom...every city on the continent would starve without it, or at least have a lot of trouble keeping the same population size. how does it do this? well, by kingdom: 1. dorne - sail it over, easy. 2. the west - same 3. riverlands - seem to be self-sufficient, no need to sell here, which is good, because... 4. the north - shares a problem with the riverlands: you have to sail right by the iron islands. i guess that might be okay if the dumb viking lads aren't feeling dangerous this week. also, the north has no proper ports on its western coast and absolutely no roads to speak of to carry grain into the interior. grain from the reach cannot make it to winterfell, and nobody lives on the west coast of the north. merchants might sell a bit of grain on the way to bear island for furs or something, that's it. 5. crownlands - absolutely hosed. king's landing should have starved away the second aegon built his dumb castle and insisted people live next to it, because the reach cannot feed it. the trip by boat is starting to be so intensely unprofitable nobody would ever do it, and while the rose road might seem like sufficient infrastructure to cart grain on, it isn't. 6. the vale - people here have never eaten grain from the reach, ever. not even once. everything about the reach as a breadbasket is stupid, and the worst part? gurm coulda fixed it with a few squiggly lines on the map. just reverse the course of the mander river and have it meet the blackwater near king's landing and suddenly it works and aegon is a genius for locating his city where he did. Jazerus fucked around with this message at 05:44 on Oct 30, 2021 |
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Oct 30, 2021 05:37
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Oh btw GRRM dropped a new blog post the other day Mfer puts his railroad on LinkedIn
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Oct 30, 2021 05:46
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Jazerus posted:the reach is a big logistical plot hole that doesn't make any sense, oldtown's silliness is just a consequence of that. supposedly the reach exports grain to practically every other kingdom...every city on the continent would starve without it, or at least have a lot of trouble keeping the same population size. how does it do this? well, by kingdom: GURM doesn’t even care enough to worry about the logistics of his fake world, why should you?
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Oct 30, 2021 05:51
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Jazerus posted:the reach is a big logistical plot hole that doesn't make any sense, oldtown's silliness is just a consequence of that. supposedly the reach exports grain to practically every other kingdom...every city on the continent would starve without it, or at least have a lot of trouble keeping the same population size. how does it do this? well, by kingdom: i assume the crownlands get their grain from the also-fertile riverlands, ditto the North through eastern coastal ports like Saltpans the vale is supposed to be pretty self-sufficient too (not a lot of it is fertile. but those parts are meant to be *super* fertile, and all of the population centers are in those valleys) imo it makes the most sense if all of the regions are self-sufficient on staples like grain/potatoes/neeps, and the Reach's exports are mostly processed foodstuffs and luxuries - wine, cheese, preserves, milled flour, honey, etc, plus the occasional batch of warm-climate fruit shipped at vast expense for aristos to enjoy. apples and berries can grow in colder climates (ex: upstate NY, Michigan, and Washington all being apple hotspots in the USA) so you dont gotta order from the Fossoways if you're a Northern or Vale lordling who wants an apple pie yes i recognize this is wildly overthinking GRRM's map squiggles PupsOfWar fucked around with this message at 06:19 on Oct 30, 2021 |
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Oct 30, 2021 06:10
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there's not even a single realistic fantasy map but some are cool or funny i like the got map because it's so lazy: 
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Oct 30, 2021 09:36
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That was also from Reddit but I guess it wasn’t crazy enough.
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Oct 30, 2021 16:24
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ChubbyChecker posted:there's not even a single realistic fantasy map dang you are stupid huh. its not that at all its literally just great britain backwards
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Oct 30, 2021 23:06
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I am not convinced that GRRM actually drew any of the Essos map himself. Maybe the coast on the narrow sea.
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Oct 31, 2021 01:28
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To be fair, drawing a map is a bitch and a half and sucks royally and coming up with plausible geography also is a pain. We're not all polymaths and I can't fault a guy for getting lazy with the basic broad strokes of the map like that. I think the real issue with Westeros' design is stuff like the Oldtown thing mentioned. I don't mind the map being clearly based on a real place, I mind the map making no sense in-universe.
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Oct 31, 2021 01:53
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oldtown is located near where london is on the flipped britain but its location has few of the virtues that london's does because there is nothing south or west of it that the westerosi are aware of.
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Oct 31, 2021 02:53
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:I am not convinced that GRRM actually drew any of the Essos map himself. Maybe the coast on the narrow sea. The Essos maps done for A Dance With Dragons always felt like they were done by someone else, and then expanded even further by yet another person or persons for the show. And then a third crack at it was taken by yet another person because the book version seen in The Lands of Ice And Fire is wildly out of step with the show's version of the known world.
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Oct 31, 2021 11:00
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nine-gear crow posted:The Essos maps done for A Dance With Dragons always felt like they were done by someone else, and then expanded even further by yet another person or persons for the show. And then a third crack at it was taken by yet another person because the book version seen in The Lands of Ice And Fire is wildly out of step with the show's version of the known world. If I remember right, while George won't let anyone else touch Westeros, he does get help from Elio & Linda and maybe other people for Essos.
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Oct 31, 2021 15:02
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Westeros, Essos, and loving Sotheros wouldn't fly as continent names in a book aimed at 12 year olds, and how they haven't been mocked relentlessly is a mystery. Although as far as I can recall, the name Sotheros doesn't actually appear in the books (although the fact that it's Jurassic Park down there and has velociraptors does, lol).
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Oct 31, 2021 15:27
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Kylaer posted:Westeros, Essos, and loving Sotheros wouldn't fly as continent names in a book aimed at 12 year olds, and how they haven't been mocked relentlessly is a mystery. Although as far as I can recall, the name Sotheros doesn't actually appear in the books (although the fact that it's Jurassic Park down there and has velociraptors does, lol). You can still find uses of orient, and occasionally occident in use today. Or even just the word/meaning Mediterranean. People have never been terribly clever when naming real world places, the names just sound better now because the old languages that originated them are dead.
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Oct 31, 2021 15:44
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Coquito Ergo Sum posted:If I remember right, while George won't let anyone else touch Westeros, he does get help from Elio & Linda and maybe other people for Essos. I think it’s the opposite. He doesn’t get help on Essos from the two Scandinavian white supremacists, he farms everything not involving the Valryians out to them because thats literally all he cares about regarding that continent. So in the lore book everything East of Slavers Bay like Yiti and the Shadow Lands and City of Skulls and Ashai and all that poo poo is just those two writing fanfic that he signs off on as he’s pouring over a new Wild Cards draft.
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Oct 31, 2021 17:37
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Kylaer posted:Westeros, Essos, and loving Sotheros wouldn't fly as continent names in a book aimed at 12 year olds, and how they haven't been mocked relentlessly is a mystery. Although as far as I can recall, the name Sotheros doesn't actually appear in the books (although the fact that it's Jurassic Park down there and has velociraptors does, lol). If you actually look at the etymology of a lot of place names it's pretty bad. Eng-land, ply-mouth, there's a hill in England that is hill-hill-hill-hill-hill-hill-hill in 7 languages, all the continents start with A (Europe isn't really a continent - though what exactly is a continent). So on the one hand, yes those names are laughable, on the other hand they are in some ways more realistic than the high falutin' fancy names given to places in most fantasy novels.
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Oct 31, 2021 18:04
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| # ? Jun 4, 2024 22:36 |
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Wessex, Sussex, Essex
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Oct 31, 2021 18:32
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