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Volume One.
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Mar 18, 2022 10:29
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Kuiperdolin posted:Even GRRM acknowledged he should not have made the kids that young, it's an artifact from when the books were to span a much longer time (and they did, just not in universe) It's him responding to the backlash of "hey GRRM why are you writing awful child rape scenes what the gently caress is wrong with you?" The books happening over a longer period of time wouldn't explain why he has those scenes in the early books, let alone why he kept writing them in later books like ADWD. mind the walrus posted:It is kind-of true. It's like how eventually you take some weeb out of the anime and they have to realize "like so wait you're telling me that most people don't chase media starring teenagers who look like small children well into adulthood?" Normalization lensing is a hell of a thing. GRRM just did the more archaic Boomer highbrow version of " Anyone who unironically calls themselves a lolicon should be thrown in prison.
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Mar 18, 2022 15:19
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it's more realistic
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Also GRRMs entire understanding of Medieval Europe is from pulp historical fiction books so he legitimately thinks daughters were married off at 12 and immediately had the marriages consummated. Also that absolutely everyone rapes each other all the time. It also turns him on.
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Mar 18, 2022 15:33
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The ages were fine, and the character's actions made more sense due to their youth. Sansa betraying her family to maintain her princess illusion seems age appropriate for an 11/12 year old. Jon being willing to give up everything and join the black makes more sense as an honor crazy 14 than at 16 or older. Robbs stupid decisions make more sense as a 16 year old teenager, as well as him loving everything up and falling in love/knocking up whatever her name was. Dany being sex-traffic'd out to a barbarian king at 13 is young, obviously, but that seemed like the point. Yes, the Drogo sex scenes are off putting on a bunch of different levels. However some 13/14 year olds are sexually active, and I found Dany's behavior made sense in terms of the kids I knew at 13/14 who were sexually active. At the private highschool I went to, I knew a 14 year old who was secretly sleeping with her mom's boyfriend, and had an 18 year old coke dealer boyfriend. I knew several girls freshman year who were loving guys, and some girls were sexually active in grade school as well. As an adult I've met numerous people who were molested or abused before they were 13 who dealt with that by being very promiscuous at a young age. So while Dany's stupid Rape Is Love Now scenes are easy to view from "This is not how real sex works" point of view, or "Horrible Romance Novel" I always saw it as Dany acting like a child in an adult situation - convincing herself that this was the romance, or whatever, she wanted. I'm pretty sure GRRM wrote it from the "Romance Novel" point of view, because GRRM. But I was young enough when I read the books that I could remember being those ages, and the actions made sense to me. e: Honestly the sexual thing that seemed the furthest from reality was Cercei licking Robert's cum off her fingers because she hated him so much. I'm pretty sure there isn't a single alternate reality where that has ever happened. TERFherder fucked around with this message at 02:07 on Mar 20, 2022 |
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Mar 20, 2022 02:05
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TERFherder posted:e: Honestly the sexual thing that seemed the furthest from reality was Cercei licking Robert's cum off her fingers because she hated him so much. I'm pretty sure there isn't a single alternate reality where that has ever happened. I always read that "I swallowed your heirs" line as her refusing to let him anywhere near her vagina and she managed to hold him off by giving him a blowie every once in a while when he was drunk and demanding his "marital rights".
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Mar 20, 2022 04:27
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St0rmD posted:I always read that "I swallowed your heirs" line as her refusing to let him anywhere near her vagina and she managed to hold him off by giving him a blowie every once in a while when he was drunk and demanding his "marital rights". quote:Whilst you snored, I would lick your sons off my face and fingers one by one, all those pale sticky princes. You claimed your rights, my lord, but in the darkness I would eat your heirs. :sadface:
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Mar 20, 2022 05:04
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TERFherder posted:Dany being sex-traffic'd out to a barbarian king at 13 is young, obviously, but that seemed like the point. Yes, the Drogo sex scenes are off putting on a bunch of different levels. However some 13/14 year olds are sexually active, and I found Dany's behavior made sense in terms of the kids I knew at 13/14 who were sexually active. At the private highschool I went to, I knew a 14 year old who was secretly sleeping with her mom's boyfriend, and had an 18 year old coke dealer boyfriend. I knew several girls freshman year who were loving guys, and some girls were sexually active in grade school as well. As an adult I've met numerous people who were molested or abused before they were 13 who dealt with that by being very promiscuous at a young age. So while Dany's stupid Rape Is Love Now scenes are easy to view from "This is not how real sex works" point of view, or "Horrible Romance Novel" I always saw it as Dany acting like a child in an adult situation - convincing herself that this was the romance, or whatever, she wanted. I'm pretty sure GRRM wrote it from the "Romance Novel" point of view, because GRRM. But I was young enough when I read the books that I could remember being those ages, and the actions made sense to me. You're not wrong about any of this, including this paragraph specifically, but it's one of those things where the omniscient narration definitely works against the story and we're left to wonder how much GRRM is actually into these ideas. Given how he marries Sansa to Tyrion and has him come within a hair's breadth of raping her, but stops because he's ~ ~ Tyrion ~ ~ the "complicated" one, it's really more of a broad package deal where any one bit doesn't seem too offensive but laid out end to end it's like "that's way more than is normal or seemingly healthy." Respect though, because I've known a lot of sexually active kids who were groomed/molested at those ages and it is rather taboo to say but with some of those kids there is a distinct pattern stemming from prematurely sexual behavior and Dany's behavior does make a twisted sense through that lens. Given how GRRM grew up in Bayonne and would have seen a lot of skeevy urban poo poo in NJ/NYC even as a shut-in nerd, it does square... you just shouldn't have to walk that far to square it. No one questions Nabokov's intentions with Lolita unless they're straight dumb, for an extreme example. In conclusion GRRM's disgusting habits are a land of contrasts. mind the walrus fucked around with this message at 05:27 on Mar 20, 2022 |
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Mar 20, 2022 05:18
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TERFherder posted::sadface: 
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Mar 20, 2022 07:56
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It's symbolic, see, 'cuz she's a man eater.
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Mar 20, 2022 13:43
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Yeah, Sansa's whole idea early on is that she's a child who's been outright groomed and brainwashed by society to be unquestionably faithful to the monarchy and patriarchy. People who talk about her being stupid and a "villain" of the story (I've looked up discussions, those people genuinely exist) don't throw the same blame against all of the boys who blindly run into battle to get themselves or others mauled or killed for no reason. Catelyn is a similar story, but she has a decent understanding of how the world works. In the books, she encourages her family to seek better political prospects and often gives good advice that goes completely ignored (Bran stop climbing, Robb don't break your marriage vows). The show took away some of her better decisions and even gave one or two to male characters (they did this obsessively with Dany in the show, too) to the point where they made her look like a hysterical foil to her family. Her idea of trading Jaime for Sansa/Arya makes sense in that she believes that the system will do what it says on the tin and obey the rules of trading nobility around. Aging up Jon for the show was probably one of the worst early decisions, because his character and attitudes make way more sense if he's barely high school age. They also took out a lot of Jon's sassiness and as a result sort of just turned him into a block of unseasoned tofu. Aging up Dany is such a rough decision and I don't blame anyone for doing it and I don't envy anyone who had to make the decision. I think overall, aging her up doesn't inherently hurt the narrative, but the writers playing her love for Drogo straight as opposed to her being groomed by the nature of sexual abuse enabled by this awful system was a huge miss. It also sucked that they outright gave good character moments from the book where she showed leadership or good sense, and outright either removed them or gave them to male characters for no good reason. mind the walrus posted:Respect though, because I've known a lot of sexually active kids who were groomed/molested at those ages and it is rather taboo to say but with some of those kids there is a distinct pattern stemming from prematurely sexual behavior and Dany's behavior does make a twisted sense through that lens. Given how GRRM grew up in Bayonne and would have seen a lot of skeevy urban poo poo in NJ/NYC even as a shut-in nerd, it does square... you just shouldn't have to walk that far to square it. No one questions Nabokov's intentions with Lolita unless they're straight dumb, for an extreme example. I grew up in Pennsyltuckey and our school system had a serious problem of teachers of every age marrying students. At any given time, there were at least three teachers in any of the schools who married students with varying age gaps. One of the women, an old friend of mine who'd married a teacher not long after she graduated had a mental breakdown when she was just short of 30 years old when she saw a group of high schoolers and saw them as children and realized what had been done to her. She's doing better and we've been jamming on our guitars after getting back in touch in recent years. The school also changed up its leadership and such teachers have been getting run out and in one case, prosecuted. I think one thing George has going for him is that it feels like he has lived or experienced hosed-up societal things and tries to examine the institutions at the root of cruelty. I find more to think about when he talks about such motivating factors at the institutional level as opposed to narratives these days that claim to "tackle mental health" and come out with the conclusion that you just need to not be angry at anything ever. As for GRRM and some of the weird hosed-up content he puts in the books, he reminds me of something that happens when I'm drawing. Sometimes when I'm drawing a character or a landscape, I'll push my face a little too close to the paper so that I can look at the fine details. Then, I'll pull my face back and there's just a mess of bad proportions and perspective staring back at me. I think he doesn't pan out from weird character thoughts or decisions to wonder how much sense they make. Then again, nearly everyone in the book is groomed by a horrific world order and have different varying degrees of priorities and self-delusion. Like, imagine what the average real-world person's biography would look like if it documented all of their weirdest private moments and invasive thoughts.
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Mar 20, 2022 18:22
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Memeing aside GRRM definitely falls into the using rape to show this is a bad guy trope. Now incest that man 1000% has an incest kink it shows up in his non ASOIAF stuff too.
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Mar 20, 2022 20:46
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The books are graphic to be sure, but I do appreciate that GRRM is willing to show the ugly side of war even on the good guys side. There are plenty of passages illustrating the fact that it doesn't matter who actually wins or who was correct in the first place, all sides of the war are raping, pillaging, and murdering innocent people in vast numbers. Rape in GRRM's books is not just for the bad guys. I've read a lot of fantasy books where the Good Guy Army marches around and they just magically happen to have food and everyone is motivated by Good Thoughts because they're the Good Guys and suffering never follows in their wake. Armies march on their stomachs, and that generally means completely devastating the areas they march through, regardless of whether those areas are supporters or enemies or somewhere in between. I think it gives better context to a Glorious Assault when we see that even the best and noblest of lords are pretty much incapable of stopping their men from turning into bloodthirsty animals the moment they breach the gates. Some of them try to stop it, while others encourage it, but none of them are innocent of it. Though it is of course a scene of threatening a child with rape, I think Queen Cersei's scene with Sansa in which she tells her to prepare for the worst during Stannis' siege is a good one. She's trying to open her eyes that a just cause or innocence is no protection from horror, and that even men fighting for the noblest of causes can be violent animals when it suits them. Mr. Grapes! fucked around with this message at 08:48 on Mar 23, 2022 |
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Mar 23, 2022 08:46
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Part of the problem with these appeals to realism is the fixation on rape to the exclusion of most other messy bits of war. Even after killing dudes most people are far more willing to be a thief than a rapist. The books do not have the same fascination of depicting say foot soldiers ripping off all the valuable pieces of armor and clothing on a fallen knight compared or abandoning a fight to pilfer enemy saddle bags, at least in comparison to how much it loves to talk about rape. Does the book have even one instance of an army being beaten because it starts looting prematurely?
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Mar 23, 2022 10:00
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Terrible Opinions posted:Part of the problem with these appeals to realism is the fixation on rape to the exclusion of most other messy bits of war. Even after killing dudes most people are far more willing to be a thief than a rapist. The books do not have the same fascination of depicting say foot soldiers ripping off all the valuable pieces of armor and clothing on a fallen knight compared or abandoning a fight to pilfer enemy saddle bags, at least in comparison to how much it loves to talk about rape. Does the book have even one instance of an army being beaten because it starts looting prematurely? You could argue that the Greyjoy northern offensive is defeated because they are essentially just going on a big looting spree and pissing people off rather than engaging and destroying armed enemy forces. They have no real objective in the war beyond 'proving themselves' and grabbing poo poo, they don't really seem to care one way or another who is actually king, unlike all the other major houses involved. I feel like in general the books haven't really described too many field battles at all? Like there is the siege of King's Landing where all the good loot is assumed to be inside the walls which they never truly breach, and then the field battle in which Tyrion gets injured and wakes up to the aftermath, which involves looting. I don't think there is as much rape depicted 'onscreen' as we like to imagine, though admittedly it has been quite an age since I've actually read them. As for Looting: I think it is repeatedly emphasized that the reason the Unsullied are considered good soldiers is their extreme discipline, and while they will happily murder and loot for you, they won't do it on their own initiative. - The Greyjoys go on and on about 'the iron price' which is looting. It's basically their whole thing. They seem like they don't really produce much themselves and rely on stealing everything. - The Dothraki are pretty famous for looting stuff rather than producing their own. - The King's Landing riots have a lot of people looting stuff. Rich folk are dragged down and people rip them apart while stealing their poo poo. - The 'inn at the crossroads' gets taken over by soldiers - The Brotherhood Without Banners are pretty famously gold hungry - The Bloody Mummers also are big into pillagers. Same with Clegane's men who are constantly torturing people and asking about their gold. - Tyrion's barbarian soldiers are specifically enticed into his service with the promise of being able to loot stuff at will. For barbaric-savages types they don't really have any descriptions of them raping but quite a bit of them enjoying stealing cool weapons and armor. - The Wildlings routinely cross the Wall just to steal poo poo on huge looting raids We see plenty of gruesome torture and mutilation involved with soldiers as well. Pretty much anything involving the Boltons or Clegane's men, as well as human sacrifice, genocide, disembowelment, crucifying people, burning them alive, and so on. I think GRRM certainly covers it all but from a modern perspective we consider all of that rather secondary in horror to rape. I think it is easier to have the rape events stand out because we see it as more horrific, while yoinking valuables is considered rather innocuous even though in a starving-peasant-economy it is pretty much a death sentence to steal someone's livestock. In any case, a 'realistic' medieval war is going to be mostly depicting small bands of soldiers terrorizing civilian populations. Field battles were incredibly rare, and most of the time the way to actually get a field battle going was to go around burning, raping, and stealing everything you could to provoke the local lord to challenge you instead of hide away in his castle. Large scale medieval warfare was mostly inconclusive sieges, rare field battles, with a whole pile of horror inflicted on the populace over and over and over. See the Hundred Years War or Albigensian Crusades for some good examples. All that being said: Realism is a crutch, GRRM can rely on history or ignore it in every sentence as he can and does. But, I think when he was writing them it was pretty common for most fantasy books to be of the Tor-style Friends With Swords On An Adventure and him throwing some ugly stuff into the mix was not so overplayed back then. Kind of like how most WW2 movies were pretty 'fun' and bloodless before Saving Private Ryan came along and thrust the horror into people's faces. I think he does a pretty good job of showing how the average peasant really doesn't give a poo poo whose pampered rear end sits on a fancy chair as long as they can bring in their crops and survive. Rape was (and is) a weapon of terror by an invader, and it was pretty common historically for it to be widely understood that a populace that surrendered immediately would be treated rather well, but resisting until they literally have to bash down your castle gate means everyone inside is going to suffer a horrible fate. Mr. Grapes! fucked around with this message at 11:04 on Mar 23, 2022 |
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Mar 23, 2022 10:34
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Mr. Grapes! posted:
quote:I think it is easier to have the rape events stand out because we see it as more horrific, while yoinking valuables is considered rather innocuous even though in a starving-peasant-economy it is pretty much a death sentence to steal someone's livestock. quote:All that being said: Realism is a crutch, GRRM can rely on history or ignore it in every sentence as he can and does. But, I think when he was writing them it was pretty common for most fantasy books to be of the Tor-style Friends With Swords On An Adventure and him throwing some ugly stuff into the mix was not so overplayed back then. Kind of like how most WW2 movies were pretty 'fun' and bloodless before Saving Private Ryan came along and thrust the horror into people's faces. quote:I think he does a pretty good job of showing how the average peasant really doesn't give a poo poo whose pampered rear end sits on a fancy chair as long as they can bring in their crops and survive. Rape was (and is) a weapon of terror by an invader, and it was pretty common historically for it to be widely understood that a populace that surrendered immediately would be treated rather well, but resisting until they literally have to bash down your castle gate means everyone inside is going to suffer a horrible fate. Overall he does that well, yes. I think that's why it gets so tiresome that whenever we zoom back into the "court" or "personal cast" level, it seems to circle immediately back to sexual assault in one form or another. It's nice that he plays it pretty even-handed across all factions and I suppose it's "realistic" but it quickly just becomes a trope toolkit the same way it did in comics after Alan Moore and Frank Miller started the trend, and once it crosses the line into "trope" it takes on a ton of other baggage-- look at Identity Crisis for an excellent apotheosis of just how bad the "rape as trope" kit can really loving get.
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Mar 23, 2022 11:32
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looting
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mind the walrus posted:Well-cited and good point. You're right - Vietnam movies were always kind of horrific, but Americans mostly had negative feelings about that war already. I think the big difference with Saving Private Ryan is that it took the Good Glorious War and showed how dirty and nasty it could be. It 'Vietnamified' WW2 in a sense. Previous to that, most big budget American WW2 movies were of the John Wayne type. Even if they showed the horrors of war, our heroes got to die clean deaths where they told their wives they loved them. It had Americans laughing while committing murderous warcrimes as soldiers beg and plead that they aren't even German and don't want to be there. It had descriptions of tragic command incompetence. And most of all it just had unrelentingly brutal violence that hadn't really been seen in any mainstream war movies at the time. It showed what war injuries could look like with shredded limbs, brains spilling out, caved in faces, troops drowning under the weight of their equipment, etc. It really showed WW2 as ugly when popular images of it rarely did so. Obviously other countries had done this before, like Das Boot or Come and See, but for average American viewer it really brought things into perspective. I can see why people are tired of the trope really. But it's also worth keeping in mind that the last time GRRM did any substantial work on the series was almost 20 years ago when the edgy stuff hadn't been so tired, at least in the genre. I know comics were going for Dark N Adult N Serious on a bit different timeline than fantasy novels.
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Mar 24, 2022 02:19
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Yeah in 1997 grim dark realistic fantasy wasnt a mainstream thing. So that quick trilogy of books GRRM put out were really a shot in the arm to the genre. Of course GRRM was now the dog who had caught the car and had no idea what to do next with a story that still had 2 full acts remaining for him to finish.
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Mar 24, 2022 05:07
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Makes you wonder how he'd have been if the books were modest successes-- just enough to keep him going with publishing deals but no HBO courting, no adulation, just a small cult of preachy-rear end neckbeards. Would it have kept him hungry?
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Mar 24, 2022 05:13
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HBO didnt help matters but it was immediately after he had completed that first neat arc with the initial 3 books when his writing process screeched to a halt. So basically 2001. Anyone know when he started trying to shop the stupid thing around because that process might have been the genesis of no longer giving a gently caress and would predate HBO getting involved which was around 2008.
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Mar 24, 2022 06:25
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I'm pretty sure HBO was calling earlier, but it wasn't "serious" until around 2008. I definitely remember hearing rumblings on these very forums way way back in the day around the time of AFFC's release, but like gently caress if I'm doing the archaeology to prove it. He was definitely shopping it around by the third book thanks to sales and adoration coupled with Lord of the Rings, The Sopranos, etc. That's where it's very, very clear that his juices ran dry anyway. He had to do the time jump and started getting avoidant because that involves heavy structuring and starting to pay off on storylines-- the exact opposite of his writing process (which is apparently "just ramble" and hope something workable shows up). Perfect storm of excuses to... not give up as we did get the fourth and fifth books, but definitely where the rails really started to come off.
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Mar 24, 2022 06:52
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:HBO didnt help matters but it was immediately after he had completed that first neat arc with the initial 3 books when his writing process screeched to a halt. So basically 2001. Anyone know when he started trying to shop the stupid thing around because that process might have been the genesis of no longer giving a gently caress and would predate HBO getting involved which was around 2008. The Red Wedding was the point of no return for both the books and the show. Across it, GRRM no longer has the desire to write anything, and D&D no longer have the desire to even try to pretend to make a quality TV show.
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Mar 24, 2022 08:04
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Even in America there was Iron Cross, The Dirty Dozen, The Caine Mutiny... Hell even Kelly's heroes. Boss Baby vibes vibes...
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Mar 24, 2022 08:09
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Kuiperdolin posted:Even in America there was Iron Cross, The Dirty Dozen, The Caine Mutiny... Hell even Kelly's heroes. I love all those movies but you can see how they didn't really change the public's perception of how WW2 was fought or what it must have been like to be there. Cross of Iron was about the Germans, and every movie about the Germans has to be unrelentingly bleak because imagine if they made one where it wasn't? Not exactly a mainstream movie, either. Saving Private Ryan was the war movie that people who didn't like war movies were all watching. Kelly's Heroes and the Dirty Dozen are a bit closer to the War Is Fun genre since they were packed full of wisecracking character actors. No one watched Kelly's Heroes and left it thinking "drat, WW2 was surely hell!". It looked like a blast hanging out with your buddies. Dirty Dozen was a bit nastier but it still got away with it because they were all condemned criminals anyway so no one cares if they die and they were also clearly having a lot of fun making the movie. I'll quit with the derail, I was just trying to show that Martin did to fantasy what Spielberg did to WW2 movies. Obviously neither one were the first to make things gritty violent and nasty, but they were the first to really get massive audience eyeballs on their projects while doing so. Like, FPS existed before DOOM, but it was DOOM that made the FPS exist to the mainstream audiences who previously never cared about it. Fantasy as a genre was widely considered pretty chaste and sexless to a mainstream audience at least until GRRM added all those tits to the dragons. Like before GRRM fantasy was basically considered Tolkien/Potter powerhouses and then kiddie stuff like Dragonheart and various projects that had ambitions beyond their budget. Conan was cool and awesome of course but it never really took off beyond being a cult movie. For what it's worth I appreciate what he did but I also think he's an awful shitberg who can't write his way out of his hole (which would be fine) but fails to admit it (which is not). Mr. Grapes! fucked around with this message at 09:12 on Mar 24, 2022 |
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Mar 24, 2022 09:07
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I doubt HBO going we like this but we need to see more, to get an idea of the endgame would have improved the writing speed. We probably would have gotten less side stuff though
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Mar 24, 2022 16:53
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Mr. Grapes! posted:I'll quit with the derail, I was just trying to show that Martin did to fantasy what Spielberg did to WW2 movies. Obviously neither one were the first to make things gritty violent and nasty, but they were the first to really get massive audience eyeballs on their projects while doing so. Like, FPS existed before DOOM, but it was DOOM that made the FPS exist to the mainstream audiences who previously never cared about it. Fantasy as a genre was widely considered pretty chaste and sexless to a mainstream audience at least until GRRM added all those tits to the dragons. This is some weird mythmaking poo poo that the details don't fully support, is all we're saying. In the broadest strokes it's true, but it's a bit like saying "Before Iron Man, people didn't think superhero movies could be light and open and breezy and take place somewhere other than a grimy urban New York/Chicago area." In the broadest strokes there's truth to that but it ignores a lot of other projects that did have mild to moderate success and plenty of people knew the idea had merit, but the gestalt just wasn't there because someone "Big" didn't throw the money behind the concept to make it ultra-profitable. Like you're not wrong, there's just an element of "Well of course once the rich kids decided to commit to the concept it miraculously worked like everyone was telling them it out" and then said rich kids retroactively act like they were the first loving people to ever have the idea in the first place. We're all too old and seasoned (and been betrayed enough) to buy into that poo poo in 2022. It's a cute narrative, but save it for Nerdwriter and 12 year-old "film buffs" who aren't gonna do the homework to check. quote:Like before GRRM fantasy was basically considered Tolkien/Potter powerhouses and then kiddie stuff like Dragonheart and various projects that had ambitions beyond their budget. Conan was cool and awesome of course but it never really took off beyond being a cult movie. Again see above-- it's not that we can't give credit where it's due but at the same time "don't pee on our legs and tell us it's rain." GRRM was in many ways a very safe bet to test genre waters and got lucky to be riding trends that started well before he wrote ASoIaF (the whole "darker, more realistic genre" gimmick had been going on in publishing since the loving 80s), have preexisting entertainment industry connections, and happen to find HBO right at the moment when they really didn't have anything else to fill the massive vacuum left by The Sopranos/The Wire finishing out just when AMC was hitting its stride and Streaming was really taking root. Not to knock the parts that work or the effort that went into it, especially for a lot of the folks below the line who saw the trends and pushed their bosses in the right direction, but like everything it was a success of timing as much as it was "GRRM made fantasy ok for regular people to like  " byline tripe.
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Mar 24, 2022 19:04
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mind the walrus posted:got lucky to be riding trends that started well before he wrote ASoIaF (the whole "darker, more realistic genre" gimmick had been going on in publishing since the loving 80s) He was a part of those trends if you look at... wait for it... Wildcards. The core story is about superpowers and a more "realistic" take on what it would mean, especially if you had people getting lovely superpowers as well. Jetboy, the intro story, is like a direct riff on the Greatest Generation. An ace WWII pilot Chuck Yeager stand in, that struggled to integrate back into society after the war, and died trying ( but critically failing ) to save the day. I think it is a bit unfair to call it a "gimmick" because it was an important re-imagining of superheroes and our fantasies. I'm old enough to remember how blown away I was with Watchman / Dark Knight ( and others ), and surprised at just how long it took for that darker vision to enter the big screen. 20+ years to get from the comic to Nolan's Dark Knight, and the movie still doesn't tap into many of the darker themes or the moral relativism. Although... part of me wishes it hadn't happened with comics to the point that I have to watch DC/MARVEL resurrect every loving dead IP in the world and shove it down my throat. Things I have been really wrong about in my life: 1) It's not addictive if you just smoke it 2) Txt messaging is a fad and will be replaced with email 3) People will grow out of superhero movies, because they suck the same way video game movies suck I also said ADWD would never be published, but I think I'm at least half-right on that one.
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Mar 25, 2022 02:04
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TERFherder posted:He was a part of those trends if you look at... wait for it... Wildcards. The core story is about superpowers and a more "realistic" take on what it would mean, especially if you had people getting lovely superpowers as well. Jetboy, the intro story, is like a direct riff on the Greatest Generation. An ace WWII pilot Chuck Yeager stand in, that struggled to integrate back into society after the war, and died trying ( but critically failing ) to save the day. I think it is a bit unfair to call it a "gimmick" because it was an important re-imagining of superheroes and our fantasies. I'm old enough to remember how blown away I was with Watchman / Dark Knight ( and others ), and surprised at just how long it took for that darker vision to enter the big screen. 20+ years to get from the comic to Nolan's Dark Knight, and the movie still doesn't tap into many of the darker themes or the moral relativism. Yeah, you're right. It's more that even there... GRRM's earlier work is more along the lines of wannabe Frank Herbert/Stephen King riffs right? Then he sees Alan Moore and Frank Miller and all them do their thing and suddenly it's like "oh poo poo yeah I can do that." It's definitely coming from a place of salt, I'm not fronting. I've been posting in this toilet for years and if anyone wants to potshot me for being pathetic like... what tipped you off? But I also think that place of garbage affords me the honesty to say-- was GRRM really that innovative? I really do look at the timeline and while he really did have his virtues as a pulp creative, it's also pretty clear he's not an innovator. That's my only real point.
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Mar 25, 2022 03:08
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mind the walrus posted:Yeah, you're right. It's more that even there... GRRM's earlier work is more along the lines of wannabe Frank Herbert/Stephen King riffs right? Then he sees Alan Moore and Frank Miller and all them do their thing and suddenly it's like "oh poo poo yeah I can do that." he was an innovator not so much in the grimdark aspect, but in the "realism" aspect kinda hard to remember at this distance but 1997's conception of what the late middle ages/early early-modern period looked like was, frankly, extremely abstract. you've got kings and queens, knights and peasants, castles...it's medieval! with basically very little interest in looking at the details of anything, or how these pieces interlock, or why the king's knights are loyal to him, or... today i think the broad medieval pastiches of the 20th century often come across as unbelievably shallow, and gurm did play a part in making that happen. at the same time, asoiaf still suffers from being a work created within that environment - the "realism" only stretches so far because martin basically only did so much research and as soon as you hit a topic he didn't bother with (steppe nomads, etc.) the people just turn back into 90s fantasy archetypes
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Mar 25, 2022 03:47
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mind the walrus posted:You're not wrong about any of this, including this paragraph specifically, but it's one of those things where the omniscient narration definitely works against the story and we're left to wonder how much GRRM is actually into these ideas. Can you explain what you mean by omniscient narration? I'm not understanding this. mind the walrus posted:Given how he marries Sansa to Tyrion and has him come within a hair's breadth of raping her, but stops because he's ~ ~ Tyrion ~ ~ the "complicated" one, it's really more of a broad package deal where any one bit doesn't seem too offensive but laid out end to end it's like "that's way more than is normal or seemingly healthy." mind the walrus posted:Respect though, because I've known a lot of sexually active kids who were groomed/molested at those ages and it is rather taboo to say but with some of those kids there is a distinct pattern stemming from prematurely sexual behavior and Dany's behavior does make a twisted sense through that lens....it does square... you just shouldn't have to walk that far to square it. No one questions Nabokov's intentions with Lolita unless they're straight dumb, for an extreme example. I guess it just made sense to me and didn't break my immersion in the story at the time. But I was young and didn't really question the whole "yes, it's rape, but now I'm taking control and enjoying myself!" aspect. Re: Nabakov, just to be difficult, I thought many people question his intentions - I've seen compelling arguments on both side. Which is the obvious one? I don't do literary poo poo, so I'm not sure. An example of how I had changed over the decades was reading the Mercy chapter. I couldn't get past how disgusting it was to watch Arya playing this sexual "role". There was no way for me to look past it, or ignore that GRRM wrote that loving thing. mind the walrus posted:Yeah, you're right. It's more that even there... GRRM's earlier work is more along the lines of wannabe Frank Herbert/Stephen King riffs right? Then he sees Alan Moore and Frank Miller and all them do their thing and suddenly it's like "oh poo poo yeah I can do that." Timeline wise - Wildcards #1 was only 2 years behind Watchmen and less than a year after Dark Knight. I always compared Wildcards to Thieves' World, just because they were the only shared world anthologies I knew of, and TW was almost a decade earlier. To me, that was what he was ripping off. TW was also very amoral. I can't think of a single "good" character, and some pretty hosed up child rape / slavery/ vivisection and most taboo of all.. Homosexuality! It was hard to root for anyone, especially with the many factions that mirrored the Israeli / Palestinian conflict. Or maybe it was the various revolutionary groups in Latin America. Irregardless, everyone was a piece of poo poo, including the gods they worshiped. I don't know if GRRM is any sort of innovator. I think we all stand on the shoulders of giants, and that Talent Borrows and Genius Steals. [ And poo poo copies, to quote the Designer's Republic, who stole it from Wilde, who seems appropriate for this conversation ]. There are creative geniuses out there, and people who take leaps beyond what their contemporaries are doing, but mostly... not. So yeah, i can see why you would be salty listening to someone praise GRRM .. well for anything. Much of why he was so successful was timing, but that's true of most things. He did write a pretty cool trilogy, and I'm glad he did that. But gently caress him because he's an absolute fucker, and what he failed to do was write a gritty low-magic series that delivered on the promises he made. You can't hint at a giant magic event in the future, and then never show that event. You can't end your low-fi magic series with ice spiders and dragons and magic swords without spoiling much of what drew people to it in the first place. He never showed us how that was going to come together, and that was one of the central promises of the book. He didn't even need to innovate that, he could have stolen that poo poo. The grimmest reality was that good books turn into poo poo books, which turn into "no books". loving wall of text there.
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Mar 25, 2022 12:52
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mind the walrus posted:Makes you wonder how he'd have been if the books were modest successes-- just enough to keep him going with publishing deals but no HBO courting, no adulation, just a small cult of preachy-rear end neckbeards. Would it have kept him hungry? Maybe he'd have just kept churning out books (of decreasing quality) like Feist did with the Riftwar Cycle halfway through the Serpentwar books (and even the first book takes a lot of beats from The Dirty Dozen). Kuiperdolin posted:Even in America there was Iron Cross, The Dirty Dozen, The Caine Mutiny... Hell even Kelly's heroes. I loved Kelly's Heroes but that movie doesn't show the dark side of WW2 any more than Ocean's Eleven shows the dark size of the criminal underworld.
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Mar 25, 2022 21:32
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It's not graphic but it does show the GIs and the brass as venal, cynical, unconcerned with the supposed aims of the war or the consequrnces of their actions and ultimately willing to literally make a deal with Nazis. I admit it's a bit more of a stretch than the others.
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Mar 26, 2022 10:08
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https://twitter.com/widesauce/status/1506393548844789760
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Mar 27, 2022 23:32
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I am playing Elden Ring and I can't even imagine what he even did for it. I like it, but I don't like it because of its story or lore. I'm about 40 hours in and I still have no idea what's going on or why I should even care, but it is fun to stab dragons. Is this just like when Tarantino shoved his name onto every random grindhousey movie in the early 2000s?
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Mar 28, 2022 14:53
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Yes but even then I dont know what the name recognition was for since From games have been shooting into the stratosphere in popularity over the past decade.
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Mar 28, 2022 15:59
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Mr. Grapes! posted:I am playing Elden Ring and I can't even imagine what he even did for it. I like it, but I don't like it because of its story or lore. I'm about 40 hours in and I still have no idea what's going on or why I should even care, but it is fun to stab dragons. all the big bosses have names that start with g r or m. and grrm loves turtles and theres turtles all over the game.
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Mar 28, 2022 16:08
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jsoh posted:all the big bosses have names that start with g r or m. and grrm loves turtles and theres turtles all over the game. also you fight a sentient lemon cake
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Mar 28, 2022 19:15
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Nae posted:also you fight a sentient lemon cake Its a rapist too thats how you know its a bad lemon cake.
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Mar 28, 2022 19:27
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pseudanonymous posted:Its a rapist too thats how you know its a bad lemon cake. hey now, some of Martin's good characters are also rapists!
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Mar 28, 2022 19:36
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Mr. Grapes! posted:I am playing Elden Ring and I can't even imagine what he even did for it. I like it, but I don't like it because of its story or lore. I'm about 40 hours in and I still have no idea what's going on or why I should even care, but it is fun to stab dragons. Theres a corpse raper who eats turds thats a pretty important character.
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Mar 29, 2022 01:29
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:New GRRM blog and oh boy its a doozy Steve Conrad has better things to do than waste time in GRMMs fantastical fartscape
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Mar 29, 2022 04:02
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