which kingdom can be cut without affecting the main story?

[the trees have eyes]

14 hours ago, lujo said:

Err, not really. The North takes up a lot of the VOLUME of the story, but most of it goes nowhere and is ultimately irrelevant and circular. You don't actually even need the North for it, either.

You could put the Wall at the neck and elminate "the North" from the story altogether. It's a plot tumor, for the most part.

- Ned's story doesn't go anywhere, he goes south, gets killed, gets nothing done.
- Bran does nothing. Like, literally, the story could've been written with Bran just being dead from the fall.
- Arya and Sansa spend most of their screen time in the South, the Starks could've been geographically at where the Twins are, there'd be no difference
- Robb gets an army together. This army all dies and it all goes nowhere. 

- Catelyn's story also goes nowhere, she captures the imp, then loses him a bit later, lets Jaime go, and everyone around her including her just gets slaughtered.

 

The actual story is:

- Littlefinger and Cat's crazy sister poison Jon Arryn
- This causes the political alliance that took the throne from Targaryens to collapse  
- There's a bunch of rather pointless fighting where everybody who challenges the Lannisters pretty much just drops dead (Renly dropped dead, Robb dropped dead, Balon dropped dead, Stannis didn't but he was defeated and then effectively dissapeared)
- Some people wonder around the Riverlands and we get to see that war is hell, and this is in part because of the Dornish sneakily getting veangence on the Lannisters (depending on if you believe this is happening)
- Lanisters mess themselves up
- Targaryens come back (hopefully eventually)

For that you need the Arryns, you need the Lannisters (who could just be Southeastern Riverlands), you need someone where the Twins are to be "the starks" to do the few things Starks maybe did that's relevant, and you need someone to be in the middle riverlands to be the battlefield. And you need Dorne to be secretly pulling strings, if you believe that theory.

Otherwise, the North is about as relevant as Renly ultimately was and most tings about it could've easily happened offscreen.

That's that. There's not all that much point to the North, it's just that people get attached to it because of how Martin wrote it. If you ask me as a writer, the only reason it exists is so that there's an ice and fire visual contrast and to provide sales driving young adult and young woman appeal with wolf imagery. Martin orignally didn't intend to have dragons but was persuaded by the publisher, and a bunch of stuff related to the North looks exactly like the kind of stuff publishers insist on in genre novels (or would have at that point in time).

Oh, and there was the Red Wedding, which is obviously something Martin wanted to write as a cool scene. But that's just the thing, that thing is just a powerful scene and half (all?) of it's power is in the reader going "OH NO, I'VE BEEN READING ALL THIS FOR NOTHING!", and yes, that's exactly what happened. That's the big terrifying reveal - the North was a red herring, their doom was spelled offscreen when this guy boffed this girl, and all it was there was for some gory rehashing of the first time the North turned out to be irrelevant when he did the same with Ned. XD But the North had been irrelevant all along.

That's how the whole damned thing was written. About 85% of it is pointless and only there to let the relevant bits hide in it or to distract the reader while relevant bits happen off-stage. If I wanted to condense it and cut some stuff, the North would be a huge source of dead weight.
 

Really?  If you want to transplant Houses, people, locations, battles, magical connections and emotional scenes from one region to another then you can axe anything and everything and have it happen somewhere else.  That's kind of an empty argument though because once you accept that line of reasoning then nowhere is necessary and you can have the whole story happen in some other imaginary setting.  The geography, culture, history and families of each region are carefully constructed and in most cases have a huge relevance and impact on the story.

I don't see how you can dismiss the relevance of the North either given the Red Wedding was not the final act by any means just a step on the journey.  We have not read all that for nothing and as of ADWD we have events gearing up for the battle of Winterfell, the Grand Northern Conspiracy (however much of that you buy into), the fall of the Wall and the Others' invasion.  The Starks are at the heart of the story and the focus will move away from KL and more to the North in the next two books.

ASOIAF has also always had three overlapping story lines - the Game of Thrones / War of the 5K, the NW's battle against the Wildlings / Others and Dany's journey to restore the Targaryen dynasty. I'm pretty amazed you managed to distill "the plot" of the Series down to just the first element of what GRRM has been writing so its probably just as well you aren't able to cut the "dead weight" and the "dragons and boobs"!  This story has always been more that a fantasy setting for a rerun of the Wars of The Roses after all.

[Rhodan]

15 hours ago, lujo said:

Err, not really. The North takes up a lot of the VOLUME of the story, but most of it goes nowhere and is ultimately irrelevant and circular. You don't actually even need the North for it, either.

You could put the Wall at the neck and elminate "the North" from the story altogether. It's a plot tumor, for the most part.

- Ned's story doesn't go anywhere, he goes south, gets killed, gets nothing done.
- Bran does nothing. Like, literally, the story could've been written with Bran just being dead from the fall.
- Arya and Sansa spend most of their screen time in the South, the Starks could've been geographically at where the Twins are, there'd be no difference
- Robb gets an army together. This army all dies and it all goes nowhere. 

- Catelyn's story also goes nowhere, she captures the imp, then loses him a bit later, lets Jaime go, and everyone around her including her just gets slaughtered.

 

The actual story is:

- Littlefinger and Cat's crazy sister poison Jon Arryn
- This causes the political alliance that took the throne from Targaryens to collapse  
- There's a bunch of rather pointless fighting where everybody who challenges the Lannisters pretty much just drops dead (Renly dropped dead, Robb dropped dead, Balon dropped dead, Stannis didn't but he was defeated and then effectively dissapeared)
- Some people wonder around the Riverlands and we get to see that war is hell, and this is in part because of the Dornish sneakily getting veangence on the Lannisters (depending on if you believe this is happening)
- Lanisters mess themselves up
- Targaryens come back (hopefully eventually)

For that you need the Arryns, you need the Lannisters (who could just be Southeastern Riverlands), you need someone where the Twins are to be "the starks" to do the few things Starks maybe did that's relevant, and you need someone to be in the middle riverlands to be the battlefield. And you need Dorne to be secretly pulling strings, if you believe that theory.

Otherwise, the North is about as relevant as Renly ultimately was and most tings about it could've easily happened offscreen.

That's that. There's not all that much point to the North, it's just that people get attached to it because of how Martin wrote it. If you ask me as a writer, the only reason it exists is so that there's an ice and fire visual contrast and to provide sales driving young adult and young woman appeal with wolf imagery. Martin orignally didn't intend to have dragons but was persuaded by the publisher, and a bunch of stuff related to the North looks exactly like the kind of stuff publishers insist on in genre novels (or would have at that point in time).

Oh, and there was the Red Wedding, which is obviously something Martin wanted to write as a cool scene. But that's just the thing, that thing is just a powerful scene and half (all?) of it's power is in the reader going "OH NO, I'VE BEEN READING ALL THIS FOR NOTHING!", and yes, that's exactly what happened. That's the big terrifying reveal - the North was a red herring, their doom was spelled offscreen when this guy boffed this girl, and all it was there was for some gory rehashing of the first time the North turned out to be irrelevant when he did the same with Ned. XD But the North had been irrelevant all along.

That's how the whole damned thing was written. About 85% of it is pointless and only there to let the relevant bits hide in it or to distract the reader while relevant bits happen off-stage. If I wanted to condense it and cut some stuff, the North would be a huge source of dead weight.
 

You seem to be quite a crusader, lujo. First claiming that GRRM has stolen Tyrion from Bujold, then that majority of kingdoms are meaningless. What´s next? That he copied almost everything from Tad Williams?

[lujo]

1 hour ago, the trees have eyes said:

Really?  If you want to transplant Houses, people, locations, battles, magical connections and emotional scenes from one region to another then you can axe anything and everything and have it happen somewhere else.  That's kind of an empty argument though because once you accept that line of reasoning then nowhere is necessary and you can have the whole story happen in some other imaginary setting.  The geography, culture, history and families of each region are carefully constructed and in most cases have a huge relevance and impact on the story.

The qestion was what you can cut an not impact the main story.

The geography, culture, history and families of each region have most certainly NOT been carefully constructed and that's part of why this series "works" better than most others. People don't really want their characters to be different or from truly different backgrounds, they seem to enjoy having an unified england stretched out to fill a continent. They all speak the same language, effectively worship the same gods, subscribe to the same brand of feudalism, share the same naming conventions (for the most part), have maesters, legends and creeds in common. Someone who saw it for what it is could go - "hold on, anyone could do better than this", but they would get bogged down in non-character driven stuff, and broad audiences only ever seem to relate to that in fiction. 

Furthermore, the characters would take actual characterisation to account for actually having a different background. In Westeros they all belong to pretty much the same culture, and most of them also belong to the same social class too. The whole Point of View narration rellies on this, too, as this lets all the stories be connected and lets Martin drop hints or observations about other people while in a remote PoV, and why observations made by one guy at the wall can have meaning in relation to something happening in Dorne. If Westeros was actually complex and diverse, the whole thing would fall apart. Most ruthlessness comes from individuals pushing their aristocratic privilege to the logical breaking point, and most twists come out of the narrative very suddenly and sneakily insisting that there ARE differences, which only really works because most of the narrative revolves around the fact that there aren't.

The idea of Westeros being diverse can only be met with one of those "You're adorable" memes by anyone from... idk... the Balkans, for example, or Italy, or even Germany or, say the area around the Baltic sea. That's why you can cut just about whatever and rearange it, because most of Westeros is just cut-rate ren-fair UK with some first season of Blackadder and artificial color coding / coat of arms system to mislead the reader into thinking how diverse and complex it all is. You get a primary school 8th grader from a school with a passable history curriculum and basic coding classess to code a program to proceduraly generate "a Westeros" every time you press a button. It's very unified, generic and convenient.

You could write a tale of a gang war situated all within one larger block of streets in a medium sized city with more diversity and complexity than Westeros has.

 

1 hour ago, the trees have eyes said:

I don't see how you can dismiss the relevance of the North either given the Red Wedding was not the final act by any means just a step on the journey.  We have not read all that for nothing

And this is what makes the average reader incapable of aproaching ASOIAF level-headedly. It's the sunk cost and the idea that a writer would actually do this to you. Yes, yes we have, we have read all that for nothing and it served no purpose compared to the ammount of text it took. The Red Wedding means that the best the North can hope for is to spend an indefinite amount of time getting to where it was at the point of the Red Wedding again. Catelyn and Robb were just as ultimatelly irrelevant in the grand scheme of things as Renly and Balon Greyjoy, and the North falling apart and reconstructing again is also pretty pointless because we've allready been there. Then this writer guy just went "oh, crap, if these guys keep wining they'll win the war and the story is over" and just nixed most of the plot up to that point. That act meant that every second everyone ever spent reading about those characters was pretty much pointless - there may be clues to some mytery in there, but apart from that the reaction of a sane person should be: "Right, why next time you decide to have stuff as pointless as this just do it offscreen like you did with other poinltess people, and don't waste my time."

Nothing that happens in the North can build up to more than where the North was before Robb boffed Jane Westerling offscreen. And to get there there didn't even need to BE a North, Staks could've just been north-riverlanders and the riverlands didn't have to be an empty battleground. There's no use arguing about this, either you understand this or you approach literature in a way so fundamentaly different than someone who makes it that I'd be stuck trying to explain how the world works to someone who really doesn't want the world to work the way it does.

 

1 hour ago, the trees have eyes said:

ASOIAF has also always had three overlapping story lines - the Game of Thrones / War of the 5K, the NW's battle against the Wildlings / Others and Dany's journey to restore the Targaryen dynasty. I'm pretty amazed you managed to distill "the plot" of the Series down to just the first element of what GRRM has been writing so its probably just as well you aren't able to cut the "dead weight" and the "dragons and boobs"!  This story has always been more that a fantasy setting for a rerun of the Wars of The Roses after all.

 Um, overlapping? The main point of frustration with the series is a distinct lack of tangible overlap (or rather acessible overlap) between those stories. And you missed Brans journey, too, which is also someting alost completely disconected from everything else (in practice). If you want to distill the story, and the question was which kingdoms you can cut, in order to have

- The Wall Story
- The Danny Story
- The Bran Story
- The Rest of Westeros Story

You need the Vale, Dorne, Kings Landing and something like the Riverlands where you just move the miserable ammount of relevant content everythign else provided. So far, that is.

- You put the wall at where the neck is and Stark lands where the Twins are, and that whole thing plays out the same.
- Danny's story is so completely disconnected (on a surface level) that you could cut IT or you could do whatever to Westeros and it wouldn't affect it one bit.
- Bran's Story is just a bunch of exposition and possibly setup for some deus ex machins stuff, also entirely divorced from all the other narratives on a practical level
- Rest of westeros I've said, you want to distill it, you can tell it with pretty much just the riverlands having signature cities at the end of various rivers. It's, in fact what the old Hoare kindgom looked like, to a degree. There's not enough content or diversity or even plot in it for more than that.

[lujo]

5 hours ago, Rhodan said:

You seem to be quite a crusader, lujo. First claiming that GRRM has stolen Tyrion from Bujold, then that majority of kingdoms are meaningless. What´s next? That he copied almost everything from Tad Williams?

I'm not a crusader, I'm just an old-school fantasy-sf fan who isn't emotionally invested in Martins work being significant, relevant, orginal or even good. I calls them like I sees them, more or less. Tyrion was stolen from Bujold and that you can go see for yourself, it's just that it's not emotionaly acceptable or worthwhile for the average idealistic GRRM fan to entertain the notion that their beloved writer could actually be a honest-to-god plagiarist (like, going beyond homages and stuff). If you can allow for it as a possiblitiy, and go check - it's true. And the saddest and most sordid part of it is that Tyrion was what sold the first and second books, the series would never have got off the ground without him.

I know because I was there when it came out and all the general nerddom in my parts was split between two camps. One camp felt that plagiarizig bujold was appalingly  distasteful and knowing what's going to happen with Tyrion (due to having read Bujold) made the first (and only, at that point) book actually terrible - that was the only plot that was going anywhere and was entertaining. If you couldn't take it seriously due to obvious plagiarism the first book couldn't possibly hook you. The other camp didn't mind the plagiarism because they loved Miles Vorkosigan and thought the "watered down Miles Fanfiction" (there wasn't a term "fanfction" around yet AFAIK) was well worth suffering throught the rest of the crap. People who didn't read Bujold just thought Tyrion was the best thing ever and the rest was boring and tasteless crap and indistinguishable from standard genre shlock, just less imaginative due to only having humans around.

The series only got some traction outside of that once the ammount of books piled up so there was something to pick up after GoT left you wondering why the hell did you even bother reading it at all. Kids nowdays can't really appreciate how utterly awful the first book was back in the day. Although Clash of Kings was "marketed" by word of mouth as "It got better there's way more Miles fanfiction in this one". And he recycled "In the house of the worm" for the Jaime plot and appeased folks who were by this point really fed up with how pointless the Jon Snow storyline was by letting them think something's actually happening up there (this was 3 books in) and that's when it kinda-sorta started being talked about in less than "oh god, that crap" terms. People did still groan, though, that he used the Inigo Montoya scene almost word for word as a hugely iconic scene with Oberyn - George, it's not a "homage" if it's the most remembered, or thereabouts, scene in the book, and you didn't subvert it just because you killed off the guy you brought in seemmingly just to perform it. How about, you know, actually coming up with characters and scenes that sell your books more often? (That wasn't as bad as Tyrion though, but it still got it's fair share of eye rolling).

Also, I haven't read anything by Tad Williams, as it happens. It wouldn't surprise me, though.

[Eden-Mackenzie]

17 hours ago, lujo said:

Err, not really. The North takes up a lot of the VOLUME of the story, but most of it goes nowhere and is ultimately irrelevant and circular. You don't actually even need the North for it, either.

You could put the Wall at the neck and elminate "the North" from the story altogether. It's a plot tumor, for the most part.

Moving the Wall south does not eliminate the North, it just moves it south as well. 

17 hours ago, lujo said:

Err, not really. The North takes up a lot of the VOLUME of the story, but most of it goes nowhere and is ultimately irrelevant and circular. You don't actually even need the North for it, either.

You could put the Wall at the neck and elminate "the North" from the story altogether. It's a plot tumor, for the most part.

- Ned's story doesn't go anywhere, he goes south, gets killed, gets nothing done.
- Bran does nothing. Like, literally, the story could've been written with Bran just being dead from the fall.
- Arya and Sansa spend most of their screen time in the South, the Starks could've been geographically at where the Twins are, there'd be no difference
- Robb gets an army together. This army all dies and it all goes nowhere. 

- Catelyn's story also goes nowhere, she captures the imp, then loses him a bit later, lets Jaime go, and everyone around her including her just gets slaughtered.

Ned going south resulted in at least the discovery of Cersei's children's true parentage, which led to Robert's death, which led to Barristan's dismissal from the Kingsguard, which led to his subsequent alliance with Dany, which led to Jorah's second exile, which led to Tyrion leaving Team Aegon for Team Daenerys. 

Bran's journey to and training under the Three Eyed Crow, the separate paths of Arya and Sansa, Robb gathering an army (which is not remotely close to being all dead), and Catelyn's kidnapping of Tyrion and release of Jaime have significant ramifications as well.  

You are completely ignoring Jon Snow, the Night's Watch, the Wildings, and the Others.

Quote

The actual story is:

- Littlefinger and Cat's crazy sister poison Jon Arryn
- This causes the political alliance that took the throne from Targaryens to collapse  
- There's a bunch of rather pointless fighting where everybody who challenges the Lannisters pretty much just drops dead (Renly dropped dead, Robb dropped dead, Balon dropped dead, Stannis didn't but he was defeated and then effectively dissapeared)
- Some people wonder around the Riverlands and we get to see that war is hell, and this is in part because of the Dornish sneakily getting veangence on the Lannisters (depending on if you believe this is happening)
- Lanisters mess themselves up
- Targaryens come back (hopefully eventually)

"The political alliance that took the throne" included the Starks and the reason the alliance was formed in the first place is largely because of inhabitants of the North. The implosion of the Lannisters was spurred on in no small part by the actions of those you have deemed irrelevant. 

Quote

For that you need the Arryns, you need the Lannisters (who could just be Southeastern Riverlands), you need someone where the Twins are to be "the starks" to do the few things Starks maybe did that's relevant, and you need someone to be in the middle riverlands to be the battlefield. And you need Dorne to be secretly pulling strings, if you believe that theory.

The Lannisters could not "just be Southeastern Riverlands". Tywin was a Lord Paramount and Warden of the West. If he was a vassal of Riverrun, he would not have had the power and influence he did.

Quote

Otherwise, the North is about as relevant as Renly ultimately was and most tings about it could've easily happened offscreen.

Renly is the reason the Tyrells joined forces with the Lannisters. The Tyrell involvement/presence in King's Landing has resulted in or affected at least the following major plot points: the Battle of the Blackwater, Sansa's wedding to Tyrion, the Purple Wedding (which itself led at least to Oberyn's death, Tywin's death, and Tyrion's exile to Essos), and Cersei's imprisonment and upcoming trial. 

Quote

That's that. There's not all that much point to the North, it's just that people get attached to it because of how Martin wrote it. If you ask me as a writer, the only reason it exists is so that there's an ice and fire visual contrast and to provide sales driving young adult and young woman appeal with wolf imagery. Martin orignally didn't intend to have dragons but was persuaded by the publisher, and a bunch of stuff related to the North looks exactly like the kind of stuff publishers insist on in genre novels (or would have at that point in time).

Oh, and there was the Red Wedding, which is obviously something Martin wanted to write as a cool scene. But that's just the thing, that thing is just a powerful scene and half (all?) of it's power is in the reader going "OH NO, I'VE BEEN READING ALL THIS FOR NOTHING!", and yes, that's exactly what happened. That's the big terrifying reveal - the North was a red herring, their doom was spelled offscreen when this guy boffed this girl, and all it was there was for some gory rehashing of the first time the North turned out to be irrelevant when he did the same with Ned. XD But the North had been irrelevant all along.

That's how the whole damned thing was written. About 85% of it is pointless and only there to let the relevant bits hide in it or to distract the reader while relevant bits happen off-stage. If I wanted to condense it and cut some stuff, the North would be a huge source of dead weight.

The level of condescension for other readers and disregard for the author's writing is truly mind boggling. 

[Rhodan]

4 minutes ago, lujo said:

I'm not a crusader, I'm just an old-school fantasy-sf fan who isn't emotionally invested in Martins work being significant, relevant, orginal or even good. I calls them like I sees them, more or less. Tyrion was stolen from Bujold and that you can go see for yourself, it's just that it's not emotionaly acceptable or worthwhile for the average idealistic GRRM fan to entertain the notion that their beloved writer could actually be a honest-to-god plagiarist. If you can allow for it as a possiblitiy, and go check - it's true. And the saddest and most sordid part of it is that Tyrion was what sold the first and second books, the series would never have got off the ground.

I know because I was there when it came out and all the general nerddom in my parts was split between two camps. One camp felt that plagiarizig bujold was appalingly  distasteful and knowing what's going to happen with Tyrion (due to having read Bujold) made the first (and only at that point) book actually terrible - that was the only plot what was going anywhere and was entertaining, if you couldn't take it seriously due to obvious plagiarism the first book can't possibly hook you. The other camp didn't mind the plagiarism because they loved Miles Vorkosigan and thought the "watered down Miles Fanfiction" was worth suffering throught the rest of the crap. People who didn't read Bujold just thought Tyrion was the best thing ever.

Also, I haven't read anything by Tad Williams, as it happens. It wouldn't surprise me, though.

As a matter of fact, you´ve kinda almost convinced me to read Vorkosigan saga, but whan it comes to reading investment itself, I don´t know if it´s worth to follow series of 16 books or risk to get bored in the middle. Also, in the previous thread I was interested how much in your opinion was Sapkowski´s Witcher plagiat plot-wise.

[lujo]

3 hours ago, Rhodan said:

As a matter of fact, you´ve kinda almost convinced me to read Vorkosigan saga, but whan it comes to reading investment itself, I don´t know if it´s worth to follow series of 16 books or risk to get bored in the middle. Also, in the previous thread I was interested how much in your opinion was Sapkowski´s Witcher plagiat plot-wise.

Just read the Warriors apprentice, and for Catelyn stuff Barrayar (if I remember correctly but also shards of honor because they kinda go hand in hand - Catelyn isn't such a straight up pilfering, but more like vandalism). No real need to go beyond that, although miles books from Vor Game to Memory are where the good stuff is for that saga.

For Sapkowski I really don't feel like getting into it. If this looks like a copout, I appoligize, one day I might.

[Rhodan]

2 minutes ago, lujo said:

Just read the Warriors apprentice, and for Catelyn stuff Barrayar (if I remember correctly but also shards of honor because they kinda go hand in hand). No real need to go beyond that.

For Sapkowski I really don't feel like getting into it. If this looks like a copout, I appoligize, one day I might.

OK, thanks. In my personal view, Bujold is talented, if somewhat inconsistent writer. I might give her a bigger try in general.  

[Jon's Queen Consort]

I would say the Vale. It's the only region that we don't have a PoV, Sansa doesn't count, it's the only region that isn't involved in a bigger conspiracy, it's boring and they don't have characters who are heros, again Sansa doesn't count.

[lujo]

1 hour ago, Rhodan said:

OK, thanks. In my personal view, Bujold is talented, if somewhat inconsistent writer. I might give her a bigger try in general.  

I'm not all that hot on her, tbh, I can see her flaws fine enough and I kept appologizing to my wife when I suggested Bujold as a reading because when you get down to it the Vorkosigan saga has plenty of flaws. Just so you don't think I'm trying to push her as a better writer than Martin, I just give stuff the Stannis Baratheon treatment. You get careful attention and praise for what you deserve praise for, and get your head chopped off for what you deserve your head chopped off for.

And with the was ASOIAF works, being pink-glasses idealistic about what it is doesn't really help with reading into it and noticing the finer points of it. If you wanna know how something works you gotta be honest about what it is and not let your self get in the way, that's the thing...

Sorry if it annoys people. 
 

Spoiler

EDIT: Oh, the Miles books get quite a bit better in their own right from say Vor Game to, say, Memory, if someone's curious what made that series as popular as it was, as Shards, Barrayar and Warrior's apprentice aren't all that amazing in retrospect. Borders of Infinity and Mirrordance, though, are quite nice (as far as I recall), and Memory I seem to recall liking, too.

 

[a bit for joffrey]

the vast majority of them, frankly

 

since we all 'know' who will be around at the end.  most of the rest are just filler for books that this aspy should/could have ended years ago.

does anyone really think the dornish princess or the sandsnakes will have any impact on the story's end?  or the ironborn (maybe euron gets killed by dany's ragons, but not a big deal imho)..the wildlings? hah. faceless men/bravos? nope.

[Nevets]

The most superfluous region would appear to be the Reach (so far).  The only major character from there is Sam, and he could really come from anywhere.  The Tyrells have some importance, but less than most of the other Great Houses, and nobody else from there has had any real effect.  Almost nothing in the story has taken place there, and if you take out Oldtown, I have doubts much will.   It certainly gives the appearance of being less important than any of the other regions.

[The Wolves]

1 hour ago, a bit for joffrey said:

the vast majority of them, frankly

 

since we all 'know' who will be around at the end.  most of the rest are just filler for books that this aspy should/could have ended years ago.

does anyone really think the dornish princess or the sandsnakes will have any impact on the story's end?  or the ironborn (maybe euron gets killed by dany's ragons, but not a big deal imho)..the wildlings? hah. faceless men/bravos? nope.

I think the Wildlings will make up some of the army against the Others. They also have knowledge about them. 

[the trees have eyes]

19 hours ago, lujo said:

1) The qestion was what you can cut an not impact the main story.

2) The geography, culture, history and families of each region have most certainly NOT been carefully constructed and that's part of why this series "works" better than most others. People don't really want their characters to be different or from truly different backgrounds, they seem to enjoy having an unified england stretched out to fill a continent. They all speak the same language, effectively worship the same gods, subscribe to the same brand of feudalism, share the same naming conventions (for the most part), have maesters, legends and creeds in common. Someone who saw it for what it is could go - "hold on, anyone could do better than this", but they would get bogged down in non-character driven stuff, and broad audiences only ever seem to relate to that in fiction. 

3) Furthermore, the characters would take actual characterisation to account for actually having a different background. In Westeros they all belong to pretty much the same culture, and most of them also belong to the same social class too. The whole Point of View narration rellies on this, too, as this lets all the stories be connected and lets Martin drop hints or observations about other people while in a remote PoV, and why observations made by one guy at the wall can have meaning in relation to something happening in Dorne. If Westeros was actually complex and diverse, the whole thing would fall apart. Most ruthlessness comes from individuals pushing their aristocratic privilege to the logical breaking point, and most twists come out of the narrative very suddenly and sneakily insisting that there ARE differences, which only really works because most of the narrative revolves around the fact that there aren't.

4) The idea of Westeros being diverse can only be met with one of those "You're adorable" memes by anyone from... idk... the Balkans, for example, or Italy, or even Germany or, say the area around the Baltic sea. That's why you can cut just about whatever and rearange it, because most of Westeros is just cut-rate ren-fair UK with some first season of Blackadder and artificial color coding / coat of arms system to mislead the reader into thinking how diverse and complex it all is. You get a primary school 8th grader from a school with a passable history curriculum and basic coding classess to code a program to proceduraly generate "a Westeros" every time you press a button. It's very unified, generic and convenient.

You could write a tale of a gang war situated all within one larger block of streets in a medium sized city with more diversity and complexity than Westeros has.

 

5) And this is what makes the average reader incapable of aproaching ASOIAF level-headedly. It's the sunk cost and the idea that a writer would actually do this to you. Yes, yes we have, we have read all that for nothing and it served no purpose compared to the ammount of text it took. The Red Wedding means that the best the North can hope for is to spend an indefinite amount of time getting to where it was at the point of the Red Wedding again. Catelyn and Robb were just as ultimatelly irrelevant in the grand scheme of things as Renly and Balon Greyjoy, and the North falling apart and reconstructing again is also pretty pointless because we've allready been there. Then this writer guy just went "oh, crap, if these guys keep wining they'll win the war and the story is over" and just nixed most of the plot up to that point. That act meant that every second everyone ever spent reading about those characters was pretty much pointless - there may be clues to some mytery in there, but apart from that the reaction of a sane person should be: "Right, why next time you decide to have stuff as pointless as this just do it offscreen like you did with other poinltess people, and don't waste my time."

6) Nothing that happens in the North can build up to more than where the North was before Robb boffed Jane Westerling offscreen. And to get there there didn't even need to BE a North, Staks could've just been north-riverlanders and the riverlands didn't have to be an empty battleground. There's no use arguing about this, either you understand this or you approach literature in a way so fundamentaly different than someone who makes it that I'd be stuck trying to explain how the world works to someone who really doesn't want the world to work the way it does.

 

7) Um, overlapping? The main point of frustration with the series is a distinct lack of tangible overlap (or rather acessible overlap) between those stories. And you missed Brans journey, too, which is also someting alost completely disconected from everything else (in practice). If you want to distill the story, and the question was which kingdoms you can cut, in order to have

- The Wall Story
- The Danny Story
- The Bran Story
- The Rest of Westeros Story

You need the Vale, Dorne, Kings Landing and something like the Riverlands where you just move the miserable ammount of relevant content everythign else provided. So far, that is.

8) - You put the wall at where the neck is and Stark lands where the Twins are, and that whole thing plays out the same.
- Danny's story is so completely disconnected (on a surface level) that you could cut IT or you could do whatever to Westeros and it wouldn't affect it one bit.
- Bran's Story is just a bunch of exposition and possibly setup for some deus ex machins stuff, also entirely divorced from all the other narratives on a practical level
- Rest of westeros I've said, you want to distill it, you can tell it with pretty much just the riverlands having signature cities at the end of various rivers. It's, in fact what the old Hoare kindgom looked like, to a degree. There's not enough content or diversity or even plot in it for more than that.

1) And that really boils down to what the "main story" is.  If you think it's just A Game of Thrones you are missing out on so much and I'd say wilfully so based on a lot of comments you go on to make.

2) I strongly disagree with you here.  The only point you have that has any merit is that the language is in common (Old Tongue aside).  The religion being effectively the same ignores the very obvious fact that the religious history of Westeros is very diverse, that both the Ironborn and the Northmen practice their own religions and it's almost like you haven't considered how uniform Christianity became in medieval and early modern Europe.  Ditto the point about chivalry, feudalism and heraldic culture: these were uniform in most of Europe so you may find it thin or unrealistic or downright lazy for Westeros but actually it's not and again the Ironborn and the Northmen are on the periphery of this culture.  And the geography and history of the different kingdoms are beautiful; whether the Wolfswood and White Harbour and the statues of the Kings of Winter in the crypts of Winterfell and the stories of all the different Starks; or the Bloody Gate and the ascent to the eyrie in the Vale of Arran and the stories of the winged knight, the Giant's Lance and Alyssa's tears.  It's the same for every region and GRRM does as much as he wants or needs to here and the fault is with you for sky high expectations and pedantic criticism of world building.

As for the comment "Someone who saw it for what it is could go - "hold on, anyone could do better than this", I have to say this appears both mistaken and arrogant and have to wonder if you have written any 7 volume bestselling epics to show the world how to combine brilliant story-telling with what you consider to be world-building of suitable depth and richness.  No?  I would like to read it when you have.

3) Just no.  When Victarion or Aeron sacrifice people to the drowned god it's because they follow different value systems and their characterisation is poles apart from good old honest Ned and Jon, neither of whom are bound by the chivalric vows of knighthood, but who have a n entirely different moral compass.  I also think you completely miss the brilliance of how GRRM writes in character equally well for children (Bran 7, Arya 9 and Sansa 11 in AGOT) as he does for adults, whether Ned the Lord Paramount or Davos the smuggler.

4) I don't really know whether you read this before you posted it or considered how you come across but it's not in a positive way.....  GRRM draws distinctions between the regions but he also draws unifying themes, the faith of the 7, feudalism and chivalry and Andal culture gradually coming to dominate Westeros with the exception of the North, Iron Islands, and to some extent the salty / sandy / stony Dornish and pockets like the Blackwoods and some houses in the Vale.  If you really paid any attention in 8th grade or studied European history at all you would get that largely uniform religious belief and aristocratic feudal culture (right down to similar coats of arms and a continent-wide convention for that) is pretty much on the money.  GRRM wants Westeros to be broadly similar to Europe (western Europe) in this regard and Essos and beyond to be where the really large cultural and linguistic differences lie.  You are being silly to mock this so much.

5)  You are being arrogant again.  The average reader is someone who reads a book and enjoys it.  Or doesn't enjoy it.  If you didn't enjoy the book you are no different to anyone else but you seem to think you are.  You are welcome to your opinion but don't think it is anything special or any more valid than anyone else's opinion.  The Battle for Winterfell is about to take place, the Starks will come again in the North and I'm pretty sure you have noticed that Catelyn Stark is still with us and surely for a reason.  So don't say we read all that for nothing and that it was pointless and tell the author not to waste your time (good grief!) because you don't know how this story will play out yet.  As to the idea that characters dying makes them pointless and irrelevant I have to wonder if you really understand storytelling as much as you think you do.  To ignore the possibility or reality of death is very childish and the emotional and geo-political impact of character's deaths on the story and on other characters is of course huge and a key part of GRRM's writing.  Again it's a shame you can't appreciate that.

6) You completely missed the point and are being incredibly patronising again.  Any and all events in the books could have taken place somewhere else.  This is a given.  It's all fictional and can take place wherever the author chooses.  You don't need the Iron Islands, you don't need the North, you don't need the Riverlands or King's Landing because it can all take place somewhere else.  Point is if it does you are reading a different story.  You can take out the North or even the Starks and rewrite it and you would still have a story.  Sure you would but a different story.  If you think you can take out the North and still have essentially the same story then I disagree.  If you are utterly convinced of this then write one for me and I'll let you know how you did at "trying to explain how the world works to someone who really doesn't want the world to work the way it does".  Pfffft....

7) No.  The three central themes of the story overlap.  The author deliberately has them take place in different locations at the start of the story but either interlink occasionally or gravitate together over time.  So Jon joins the NW at the start of AGOT but Tyrion pays a visit to establish a friendship with Jon and connect the power struggle at court with the fate of the NW, something that is increasingly more overt with Tywin and Cersei's manipulation of who should be elected LC and reaches it's peak with the arrival of Stannis and the NW being dragged into the Bolton/Frey/Lannister - Stannis/Stark/Wildling war.  Equally Bran has his fall at the very start of AGOT but it is only in ASOS that he reaches the Wall, encountering Sam at the Black Gate (for some reason I am sure) and ADWD that he reaches the 3EC.  Maybe it doesn't progress as quickly as you would like but the overlap is there all along and the stories are uniting.

This is equally true of Dany who, though she was last seen facing Dothraki all alone, has managed to draw Victarion, Tyrion, Barristan and Quentyn into her orbit, the last unveiling the intended Dornish-Targaryen marriage alliance to regain the Iron Throne.  If you don't see how these arcs arte tied together and coming closer together in the last two books but just see the main story as battles and political intrigue in Westeros you are missing out on a lot of what the author is putting in front of you.

And Bran's story is not some standalone 4th element but a key part of the NW/Others storyline

8) You could write it like this I suppose but then you could write it any way you liked.  But would anyone read it and if they did would they think it was better?

18 hours ago, lujo said:

I'm not a crusader, I'm just an old-school fantasy-sf fan who isn't emotionally invested in Martins work being significant, relevant, orginal or even good. I calls them like I sees them, more or less. Tyrion was stolen from Bujold and that you can go see for yourself, it's just that it's not emotionaly acceptable or worthwhile for the average idealistic GRRM fan to entertain the notion that their beloved writer could actually be a honest-to-god plagiarist (like, going beyond homages and stuff). If you can allow for it as a possiblitiy, and go check - it's true. And the saddest and most sordid part of it is that Tyrion was what sold the first and second books, the series would never have got off the ground without him.

I know because I was there when it came out and all the general nerddom in my parts was split between two camps. One camp felt that plagiarizig bujold was appalingly  distasteful and knowing what's going to happen with Tyrion (due to having read Bujold) made the first (and only, at that point) book actually terrible - that was the only plot that was going anywhere and was entertaining. If you couldn't take it seriously due to obvious plagiarism the first book couldn't possibly hook you. The other camp didn't mind the plagiarism because they loved Miles Vorkosigan and thought the "watered down Miles Fanfiction" (there wasn't a term "fanfction" around yet AFAIK) was well worth suffering throught the rest of the crap. People who didn't read Bujold just thought Tyrion was the best thing ever and the rest was boring and tasteless crap and indistinguishable from standard genre shlock, just less imaginative due to only having humans around.

The series only got some traction outside of that once the ammount of books piled up so there was something to pick up after GoT left you wondering why the hell did you even bother reading it at all. Kids nowdays can't really appreciate how utterly awful the first book was back in the day. Although Clash of Kings was "marketed" by word of mouth as "It got better there's way more Miles fanfiction in this one". And he recycled "In the house of the worm" for the Jaime plot and appeased folks who were by this point really fed up with how pointless the Jon Snow storyline was by letting them think something's actually happening up there (this was 3 books in) and that's when it kinda-sorta started being talked about in less than "oh god, that crap" terms. People did still groan, though, that he used the Inigo Montoya scene almost word for word as a hugely iconic scene with Oberyn - George, it's not a "homage" if it's the most remembered, or thereabouts, scene in the book, and you didn't subvert it just because you killed off the guy you brought in seemmingly just to perform it. How about, you know, actually coming up with characters and scenes that sell your books more often? (That wasn't as bad as Tyrion though, but it still got it's fair share of eye rolling).

Also, I haven't read anything by Tad Williams, as it happens. It wouldn't surprise me, though.

You seem to have an axe to grind here.  The only people emotionally invested in GRRM's writing are those close to him.  The rest of us pick up a book and stay with it if we enjoy it.  And if there are more books we buy them and make an opinion on them too.  So what is giving you such a problem here?

I find GRRM's writing to be very good indeed.  I grew up reading fantasy and to a lesser extent sci-fi and fyi I'm 42 years old and consider ASOIAF to be the best I've read.  That's an opinion but one I'm perfectly happy sharing.  If you had told me in advance I would be equally drawn in reading a chapter from the POV of a 7 year old boy or a 9 year old girl as, say a 30 year old man I would not have believed it but it's true.  That's GRRM's great achievement for me: to tell a wonderful story from so many different points of view with equal skill and to make me care about characters who I would expect to find boring.

The accusation of plagiarism is a pretty heavy and a pretty ugly one but as I haven't read Bujold I can't comment.  I will say that a certain poster pops up on this forum every now and then with long colour-coded posts about Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time series in which he asserts that every single character and every plot aspect in ASOIAF is either directly based on or alludes to the TWOT.  Having read TWOT I think the guy is completely wrong and is probably smoking something he shouldn't be but his arguments are really, really, weak.  I only hope you have more to back up your bold assertion that a passing similarity or two.

Tyrion did not sell either book to me so speak for yourself.  Tyrion is a character I enjoy reading but what sold the first book to me (and this is still in my bookcase) was the snippet on the back cover from a review "Fantasy literature has never shied away from grandeur, but the sheer mind-boggling scope of this epic has sent other fantasy writers away shaking their heads...Its ambition: to construct the Twelve Caesars of fantasy fiction, with characters so venomous they could eat the Borgias".  As a fan of fantasy writing and a history graduate the reference to Imperial Rome and the medieval papacy were pretty compelling.  And neither AGOT nor the following books have disappointed.  The part where I knew I was hooked was Bran's fall: so unexpected, so dramatic and so indicative of how devious and merciless this story would be.

And I have to wonder why you are fixating on Tyrion so much as the only reason for ASOIAF's success and essentially attributing GRRM's success to Bujold.  Seems you have something riding on this to me.  Personally what had me wanting to follow up AGOT was 1) the Stark-Lannister conflict, broadly the response of the Starks to Ned's execution, the fate of Arya and Sansa and broadly the "Northern" destiny following the KITN scene, 2) the way things would pan out on the Wall after the appearance of the wights, Benjen's disappearance and the plan for the great ranging, coupled with how Bran's dream of the Land of Always winter would play into this and 3) the way Dany's storyline would develop after the seismic events of Drogo's funeral pyre, the birth of the dragons being such a huge moment and such a beautifully written scene (or "dragons and boobs" to your rather sour disposition).  Tyrion?  Well I enjoyed reading his chapters but he wasn't really central to anything in AGOT and certainly wasn't what the success of the book or the series was founded on for me.

"Kids now[a]days can't really appreciate how utterly awful the first book was back in the day".  Luckily for them they can pick up and read exactly the same book today and, as I would encourage anyone picking up a book to do, ignore anyone else's opinion and simply read and enjoy (or not).  I would also encourage them to make up their own minds and ignore the rather toxic sentiments people like you express and which seem to give some people a feeling of importance or status as opinion-formers on social media these days.  I don't want to be too rude but you do need to get over yourself.

18 hours ago, Eden-Mackenzie said:

The level of condescension for other readers and disregard for the author's writing is truly mind boggling. 

Word.

18 hours ago, lujo said:

Just read the Warriors apprentice, and for Catelyn stuff Barrayar (if I remember correctly but also shards of honor because they kinda go hand in hand - Catelyn isn't such a straight up pilfering, but more like vandalism). No real need to go beyond that, although miles books from Vor Game to Memory are where the good stuff is for that saga.

More accusations of plagiarism, hey?

17 hours ago, lujo said:

I'm not all that hot on her, tbh, I can see her flaws fine enough and I kept appologizing to my wife when I suggested Bujold as a reading because when you get down to it the Vorkosigan saga has plenty of flaws. Just so you don't think I'm trying to push her as a better writer than Martin, I just give stuff the Stannis Baratheon treatment. You get careful attention and praise for what you deserve praise for, and get your head chopped off for what you deserve your head chopped off for.

And with the was ASOIAF works, being pink-glasses idealistic about what it is doesn't really help with reading into it and noticing the finer points of it. If you wanna know how something works you gotta be honest about what it is and not let your self get in the way, that's the thing...

Sorry if it annoys people. 
 

  Reveal hidden contents

EDIT: Oh, the Miles books get quite a bit better in their own right from say Vor Game to, say, Memory, if someone's curious what made that series as popular as it was, as Shards, Barrayar and Warrior's apprentice aren't all that amazing in retrospect. Borders of Infinity and Mirrordance, though, are quite nice (as far as I recall), and Memory I seem to recall liking, too.

 

Annoys people?  It's pretty insufferable.  Given your criticism of extremely successful writers I have to ask: have you ever written anything?

[a bit for joffrey]

On 7/6/2016 at 7:36 PM, The Wolves said:

I think the Wildlings will make up some of the army against the Others. They also have knowledge about them. 

that knowledge didnt help they a great deal, if at all.  they had tens of thousand, hundreds maybe, and they couldnt do anything against the others with their 'knowledge'. i'd wager jon snow and sam have as much knowledge of the others as any wildling.

how many wildlings are even left at this point, after the slaughter of their 'army'?

if there is a real battle agianst the Others, it'll probably be dany and the magic dragons. i see it more likely that their is a standoff/peace accord brokered by Bran or something of that nature, some re-instating of some broken pact, rather than just an all out war.