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OperaMouse posted:Jets and Giants win. Going to be some chapters written this week. bold assumption that a chapter has even been written this year
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Oct 4, 2021 02:01
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Phenotype posted:Did Robert Jordan ever post "Current Mood: Horny" with a little devil smile emoji? that's what the five paragraphs about snug bodices every chapter are all about
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Oct 10, 2021 02:46
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pseudanonymous posted:Yes, if you can't handle books for babies, somehow that means it's problematic if you like a series intended for adults. the funny thing is that LotR is often makes much more sense than asoiaf on a lot of the "adult" things like troop movements and the dynamics of society even though nobody says "gently caress" i've enjoyed grrm's books but westeros is deeply silly on a nuts and bolts level
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Oct 21, 2021 02:15
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who is the fattest targaryen
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Oct 26, 2021 00:10
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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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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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pseudanonymous posted:Like the toponomy itself isn't so bad, but the very fact they have a name for a continent is in and of itself pretty ahistorical. it isn't at all. the historical europeans named europe, asia, and africa long before they knew the full extent of any of those continents. given that people live in every corner of westeros as part of a unified society it would be very strange if they didn't have a name for their continent
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Oct 31, 2021 21:08
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pseudanonymous posted:But they didn't refer to the entire continent, they basically had to do with sailors and the Mediterranean sea. People didn't think of Scandinavia as part of Europe at that time, so while the name existed, the usage of it was not really linked to continents in the same sense. okay look, this "at that time" stuff doesn't make sense. "the past" is a very long period of time. you have legs to stand on during antiquity, the romans especially used "asia" to mean "anatolia/iraq" and "africa" to mean "libya/tunisia" - but even then, the modern borders between europe, asia, and africa had more or less been decided already by the greeks, and were of such ancientness to herodotus that he basically says "hey nobody really knows why we divide the land up this way, we just do". also europe is referred to as europe by herodotus and it's equally clear that the greeks had been referring to europe as, well, europe for a long time already. it's true that northern europe and the exact boundaries of eastern europe along the steppe were a later addition since the greek conception of the world was rather small, but since europe isn't actually a continent in the way that westeros is, i don't see the relevance furthermore, asoiaf doesn't take place during antiquity (that's the valyrian era of course), it's set in an analogue of the mid-1400s at the earliest - by which time europeans were intimately familiar with every corner of europe, had a reasonable handle on the extent of asia, and were only a few decades away from sailing down africa's coast. it would be absolutely blatantly silly for the westerosi to not have a name for their own continent - the first men probably had a name for it before the andals even invaded! genericnick posted:Wasn't Europe invented by some jerk in Charlemagne's court? no e: actually yes in the sense that the charlemagne courtier is where the idea of europe takes hold as a commonplace idea that everyone knows about, but he was definitely drawing on previous ideas from the romans and greeks, not just making it up out of nowhere Jazerus fucked around with this message at 23:02 on Oct 31, 2021 |
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Oct 31, 2021 22:37
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Kylaer posted:Well poo poo, now we have to question whether Europe has ever actually existed. funnily enough that particular section of herodotus also includes a description of the phoenicians sailing around africa from gibraltar to the red sea, which includes a description of the sun moving the opposite direction across the sky for part of the voyage; a characteristic marker of being in the southern hemisphere. herodotus says he thinks they made the voyage but that they're full of poo poo about the whole "opposite sun" thing, when of course their tale about that phenomenon is actually very strong evidence that the story is true
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Nov 1, 2021 02:23
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Evil Fluffy posted:I thought China just meant "middle kingdom" as in "we're the center of the world because we're the best" and not that it tied any specific ruling family. china goes back to the qin as hieronymous said. china refers to itself as zhongguo, which means "central states" really - middle kingdom is maybe a bit more grandiose than the term is meant to imply. it was originally a term for the core chinese provinces in antiquity and has nothing to do with superiority or anything like that - it was created as a term long before china became a large power.
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Nov 1, 2021 20:28
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Klungar posted:From the MCU TV Thread: that poor bastard lol imagining him sitting there thinking "hell yeah...hell yeah!!!" throughout all of season 1, and then "oh....gently caress" as everything starts to decline immediately afterward
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Nov 6, 2021 18:10
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euron at least has the advantage of like, making sense on paper as a roided out weirdo that can get other people to follow him and do war crimes. that's sort of the whole ironborn thing. ramsay's completely over the top awfulness is completely in line with gurm's take on the character in spirit and it doesn't make any sense in the books, either. the whole theon/ramsay winterfell plotline is probably the most meanspirited, petty, and unrealistic part of the books. it's just torture porn and some weird fucker pretending to be the lord of winterfell and somehow succeeding.
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Nov 7, 2021 09:29
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the westerosi have already neutered their pope is the thing. the high septon ain't poo poo, literally everyone thinks the faith militant is a bad idea and the largest kingdom of the seven kingdoms doesn't even follow the faith of the seven. i think people don't really understand which era grrm was looking to portray very well. asoiaf doesn't take place in the local equivalent of like, the 800s, it's much closer to the early 1400s. everyone is running around in plate, faith-based norms are beginning to break down and war is getting bloodier and bloodier by the decade as the nobility becomes increasingly untouchable in their extremely good armor and as they start fielding larger and larger armies.
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Nov 9, 2021 04:14
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yeah crossbows aren't guns, and they aren't better at anything than a regular bow really - but they are easy to use, so you can drum up a squad of crossbowmen without training them from childhood. a knight in full plate doesn't want to get close to archers and crossbowmen because they will be able to aim at the armor's joints, but once the knight is too far away for that to be practical, they are effectively invincible to ranged fire. people in full plate are only afraid of two things: enough blunt force to crumple their plates, and getting knocked down by a group of dudes that can hold them down and stab through the joints
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Nov 9, 2021 18:03
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the weight of a soldier's kit is pretty consistent across time and space. humans can carry what humans can carry, that hasn't changed much at all. i guess mechanization has let modern infantry get away with a slightly heavier load in comparison but that's about it.
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Nov 11, 2021 19:23
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PittTheElder posted:This honestly was something I was surprised to learn. Half expected modern soldiers to be able to carry way more stuff, if only because modern logistics means it's much easier to supply them with many more regular calories. well in a lot of cases you aren't wrong. modern soldiers carry a kit of equivalent weight to pre-modern heavy infantry, but a lot of people who fought in wars were not heavy infantry. skirmishers and the like were loaded lighter. i should have written that the maximum weight is pretty consistent across time and space
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Nov 11, 2021 19:50
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we don't know a drat thing about bronn's past really. odds are he served in a company in essos, honestly; i wouldn't even be surprised if his involvement in the war of the five kings turns out to be an extremely long con from the golden company.
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Nov 13, 2021 03:22
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PupsOfWar posted:my favorite grrm anecdote is how he became extremely croggled during that interview with stephen king where king offhandedly mentioned he writes about 2,000 words per day i'm pretty sure gurm's head would fuckin explode if he had a conversation with the author of the wandering inn
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Nov 13, 2021 05:26
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mind the walrus posted:Just... never gonna not point out how loving tacky and obvious it was to have Samwell literally write "A Song of Ice and Fire." I feel like that doesn't get nearly enough poo poo. it's just a pale riff on tolkien which is really what benioff and weiss wanted all along tbh. maybe they should have adapted shannara instead but then again there aren't any tits in it
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Nov 14, 2021 05:24
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RCarr posted:Lol this scene is poo poo it's not bad. the gauls should also be in formations with only some hotheaded brawlers (possibly naked ones) charging forward, a guy does a hollywood jump at the formation like he's a zombie or something - it's also not good. but the cycling of the front line, the use of a sound signal (the whistle) instead of shouted orders, the emphasis on formation fighting and everyone treating pullo like he's a piece of poo poo for being a gloryhound that left a hole in the formation...that's all so far above most film and TV battles as to make it one of the best depictions of pre-modern war, and it is the best specifically roman scene by a mile afaik.
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Nov 14, 2021 07:48
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RCarr posted:Yea I mean that’s the problem with TV/Movies. No one wants to see a dead accurate portrayal of ancient war tactics. Seeing two armored Knights wrestling in the mud for 15 minutes trying to slide a blade through an armor joint isn’t compelling. You have to take liberties for the visual medium you are working with. i do understand why late middle ages stuff tends to focus on longsword duels and the other tourney fighting styles instead of the war techniques like grappling. obviously even people at the time thought that the reality of how two knights would fight each other in war was boring to watch as entertainment. there's a lot less justification for non-realism outside of that narrow 1300-1500 time period though imo.
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Nov 14, 2021 20:43
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Edmure's actions at Stone Mill were absolutely correct and it's dumb as hell that the show used it to paint Robb as a cool badass instead of a lovely boy king. yeah edmure did the thing he should have done in the absence of being told that he ought to feign defeat and allow a crossing. not exactly something you do without explicit orders lol
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Nov 16, 2021 04:12
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PupsOfWar posted:this is not to say that GRRM hasn't left a lot of military stuff unaccounted for the crownlanders are most likely sitting at home laughing and telling tywin that they'll send their levies to king's landing any day now, they swear, while having a big party any time they hear a good rumor about daenerys. the stormlanders are a genuine loose end tho.
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Nov 19, 2021 02:20
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the only thing that isn't racist about the dothraki is their ethnic diversity. historically steppe people had a very broad range of features and you could find practically any eurasian "look" among them - genghis khan had red hair for example. this didn't hold true for every steppe people in every location but the dothraki we see are supposed to be representative of the entire essos steppe they should be even more diverse to be accurate to reality tho
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Nov 19, 2021 19:10
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Mr. Grapes! posted:I think the show itself did a decent job of this in the early half but then as time went on things got mashed into Only The Main Characters Matter and we have absurd poo poo like the Tyrells dying and then everyone else claiming 'The Reach is empty' as if there wouldn't be hundreds of noblemen all trying to jump into the vacuum they leave behind. particularly absurd considering gurm explicitly outlines the reach as being unusually full of people who want to kill the tyrells and take their stuff because their claim to highgarden and being lords paramount is viewed as shaky and illegitimate by the houses that can trace their lineage back to the age of heroes even if you argue that most of the florents are with stannis, the hightowers are right there
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Nov 23, 2021 03:51
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the longest english language fantasy series ever written, The Wandering Inn, at 8.6 million words and still ongoing, has been written entirely within the period between the releases of A Dance with Dragons and Winds of Winter
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Nov 30, 2021 23:29
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i knew somebody was going to do this instead of just laughing at the slow words man it's a fair point of comparison when it's 8.6 million words (which i personally enjoy more than most of gurm's words but you're welcome to view it as trash if that's how you feel, although your "example" text is, well, probably the worst six lines you could pull out of the whole story, and from one of the earliest volumes, too) vs 400k. aside from that, i do not personally feel that latter-day asoiaf has any special literary quality at all. gurm isn't tolkien by a long shot Jazerus fucked around with this message at 03:18 on Dec 1, 2021 |
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Dec 1, 2021 03:12
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PupsOfWar posted:if the position you want to take is that the anonymous channer author of The Wandering Inn puts out better work than gurm, i dont think anyone can realistically stop you it would extremely surprise me if the author of TWI had any tolerance whatsoever for channers there are a lot of valid criticisms you can make of TWI but these aren't it, folks
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Dec 1, 2021 03:32
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Guy A. Person posted:I feel like if you don’t want a fantasy series you like to get made fun of, bringing it up in a thread that’s become entirely about making GBS threads on a guy’s fantasy novels in increasingly elaborate ways was maybe a little risky that's fair i don't much care about people's opinions of TWI, i responded because the criticism was very dumb unlike all of the criticism of grrm
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Dec 1, 2021 04:14
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the targs should be hapsburg-looking motherfuckers none of this ethereal beauty nonsense that dany and rhaegar had going on. bring on the banana chins
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Dec 30, 2021 03:08
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Mad Hamish posted:dragonfire can't burn wierwood beams
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Dec 31, 2021 03:04
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TERFherder posted:"Tyrion designs saddles for Rhaegal and Viserion." this is extremely lmao dude designed a saddle once and now he's the world's greatest saddler
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Jan 13, 2022 04:11
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euron i'm guessing learned a few shadowbinder tricks like melisandre did, but they won't end up mattering much except to assassinate a couple of characters everyone likes and 99% of his time on the page will be spent simply being a psycho with a ship theoretically, given that he'll never actually appear again in a published novel by george r. r. martin Jazerus fucked around with this message at 05:18 on Jan 15, 2022 |
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Jan 15, 2022 05:15
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nobody ever said that sandor clegane was very smart
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Feb 5, 2022 22:27
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why not 3 books? or 4? perhaps gurm has an infinite landscape of books within his mind
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Feb 19, 2022 19:22
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Evil Fluffy posted:The wild thing is just how well Iron Man did and how effectively RDJ played the role at a time when nobody really expected much of him and IIRC he was in a real bad place at the time. When that movie was being made there was plenty of "RDJ, that trainwreck of a person is the movie's hero?" It wasn't like when Patrick Stewart was announced as Professor X and the world went "yes of course he is why would you use anyone else?" yeah nobody gave a single gently caress about iron man or RDJ at the time, the movie was just a real next-gen spectacle. the only movie i've ever been to where people were actively saying "holy poo poo!!!" in the theater the way i imagine happened with star wars and some of the other late 70s blockbusters
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Feb 23, 2022 02:44
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the grrm cinematic universe
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Mar 9, 2022 20:44
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Nae posted:Who is going to watch all of these GoT shows after the end of GoT? piggies
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Mar 10, 2022 07:44
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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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Shimrra Jamaane posted:So some friend of GRRM broke out a pre-release manuscript of the first book that was written in 1994. gurm
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May 3, 2022 21:57
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