ASoIaF is kind of Gen X

[giant snake]

I'd like to talk about the series from the perspective of its character development and inspiration.  Personally I never found any of the speculation about cryptic plot points very interesting because the cliffhangers at chapters end were more of a method of advancing the story than anything else.  More important, I think, is the way the story is told, which is through character perspectives.  It's a character driven story more than a plot driven story for that reason, or at least that's the way I see it - the plot details are second stage to the personalities on display.

 

About those personalities - looking for the inspiration in the character types, I see a lot of analogies to historical figures as I lurk around here.  I'm not convinced by most of them.  The characters generally fall into three types in the story:  

1.  The naive.  All of the younger characters, at least at the start of the story, and most of the traditionally 'good' characters fall into this.

2.  The disturbed.  This would cover most of the villainous or morally ambiguous characters in the story, but not all of them.  I hesitate to put Beric Dondarrion or Thyros into this camp because they initially fit into the first category and Thyros becomes his own type of disillusioned later in the story, by which point he's a nonentity.  This is also where I put Tywin because his cold rationality actually doesn't explain him entirely.  Specifically I'm talking about his ambition and his indifference to parental duty.

3.  The smartest person in the room.  This, for me, is normally the one that is hardest to believe and the most weakly written.  I don't mean as in the humorous dialogue, because that IS funny, but the total unambiguousness about this type in any situation.  There is no doubt that the clever character really is smarter than everyone else and their reasoning is so easily convincing that you actually have a hard time believing that they aren't the only person in the know.  Of course that isn't always true but it is a recurring theme, and not one that most fantasy isn't guilty of.

That's not to say that I don't like the books or anything, just something that is more and more noticeable on the third read-through.  To give credit where it is due, the story actually seems to fall back on these character types as it goes on, meaning that for the first three books it wasn't nearly as obvious or irritating.  I think the part where it falls through is when we get the (pointless) Barristan POV and he's really nothing more than a senile old man with nothing to do.  That was the tipping point for me anyway, where the cynicism really just started making me roll my eyes.

 

Putting this in the context of the dark fantasy world it would seem to make sense, but then again it really doesn't if it's supposed to be taken as historical analogy.  Dark fantasy books take place in a malevolent world because the circumstances of the world are so alien and hostile to us that it makes sense for the characters to range from amoral to loathsome.  That is the case in the Conan universe, where all aspects of civilization are exaggerated to a phantasmagoric extreme.  While Robert E Howard wasn't exactly a wordsmith, he did a great job at painting these believable but incredibly hostile and low trust society.  In praise of ASoIaF, it does a good job at creating a similar world in Essos, which is why that story can stand on its own until Dance of Dragons.  The longer the series goes on, the more it seems like Westeros and Essos are basically becoming the same thing with different trappings.  Okay maybe that's fine for most people, but it really starts to stretch this idea of being historically inspired to an incredulous extreme.  That's my point here - the world of Westeros is looking at Medieval Europe through an overly cynical lens.  

 

Lets look at some of the character types and how they are perceived (based off of some reflections on the characters here)

First off there are the dynastic house inspirations.  Honestly I don't see anything wrong here.  The Targaryan/Baratheon dispute makes sense compared to the Wars of the Roses, the Targaryans make sense as the Tarquinians, and their foreign overlord status lines up well with the Normans.  No problems here - the world is actually set up very well.  What I don't agree with are the characterizations.

I see Tywin compared to Machiavelli, or at least Machiavelli's supposed interpretation of a successful ruler.  First of all, Machiavelli was not a ruler in his own right and it is speculated that he was basing his concept of rule off of the example of the Borgia family, Cesare Borgia in particular.  While being the best soldier in all of Italy, he also was a man who was universally hated but too powerful to oppose.  Maybe that sounds like Tywin, but that's not the image I get - Tywin has loyal men and a long family pedigree, the extreme opposite of Borgia.  A better analogy to Tywin would be Henry II of England.  Both have a vindictive streak and end up in conflict with their sons, although Tywin's is less excusable as he actually hates one of his sons and seems overly focused on placing his progeny on the throne rather than handing over power successfully.  Most of the other characters that fall into 'the disturbed' type have less influence on the world and Tywin is the most important to the story.  I also think he's the most believable of all the lords.

 

The Starks, on the other hand, are so naive that it almost becomes comical after a while.  My guess has always been that they are tougher than the impression they give, simply because their simplicity and deliberate nature makes them perfectly suited to ruling over the unruly North, where more sophisticated lords would fail.  The part that disappoints me is how this hasn't borne any fruit since the first book, where we get a better picture of them as a unique and separate entity from the rest of the lords.  The Boltons are the big exception to this, but I'm really starting to wonder if this is to indicate that Northmen are simply more direct and brutal or if they are only acting that way to advance the plot.  Right now, all I'm seeing is that with their being evil, they are better at plotting and are therefore more capable than the stupidly honest Starks.  

 

Aside from Jaime, there aren't any complex protagonists which seem both realistic and capable like an actual leader would have been.  It's kind of a shame that in such a diverse and richly explained world, he is exceptional.  It's interesting that the dead Targaryans come across as so much more believable, even though they are the most fantastical of all the houses.  They are the ones who more closely align with the history that the books are supposedly inspired by, both in the recounting of their lives by others and through direct interactions with them in the Hedge Knight books.  It isn't that the Targaryans are so wonderful, it's that they are the easiest to sympathize with because they are really the only rulers who are humanized in the story.  GRRM can write a good character, it just seems like he doesn't want to because he has a predisposition to making most of the characters in ASoIaF two dimensional or outright buffoons.

[The Commentator]

 

1 hour ago, giant snake said:

I'd like to talk about the series from the perspective of its character development and inspiration.  Personally I never found any of the speculation about cryptic plot points very interesting because the cliffhangers at chapters end were more of a method of advancing the story than anything else.  More important, I think, is the way the story is told, which is through character perspectives.  It's a character driven story more than a plot driven story for that reason, or at least that's the way I see it - the plot details are second stage to the personalities on display.

 

About those personalities - looking for the inspiration in the character types, I see a lot of analogies to historical figures as I lurk around here.  I'm not convinced by most of them.  The characters generally fall into three types in the story:  

1.  The naive.  All of the younger characters, at least at the start of the story, and most of the traditionally 'good' characters fall into this.

2.  The disturbed.  This would cover most of the villainous or morally ambiguous characters in the story, but not all of them.  I hesitate to put Beric Dondarrion or Thyros into this camp because they initially fit into the first category and Thyros becomes his own type of disillusioned later in the story, by which point he's a nonentity.  This is also where I put Tywin because his cold rationality actually doesn't explain him entirely.  Specifically I'm talking about his ambition and his indifference to parental duty.

3.  The smartest person in the room.  This, for me, is normally the one that is hardest to believe and the most weakly written.  I don't mean as in the humorous dialogue, because that IS funny, but the total unambiguousness about this type in any situation.  There is no doubt that the clever character really is smarter than everyone else and their reasoning is so easily convincing that you actually have a hard time believing that they aren't the only person in the know.  Of course that isn't always true but it is a recurring theme, and not one that most fantasy isn't guilty of.

That's not to say that I don't like the books or anything, just something that is more and more noticeable on the third read-through.  To give credit where it is due, the story actually seems to fall back on these character types as it goes on, meaning that for the first three books it wasn't nearly as obvious or irritating.  I think the part where it falls through is when we get the (pointless) Barristan POV and he's really nothing more than a senile old man with nothing to do.  That was the tipping point for me anyway, where the cynicism really just started making me roll my eyes.

 

Putting this in the context of the dark fantasy world it would seem to make sense, but then again it really doesn't if it's supposed to be taken as historical analogy.  Dark fantasy books take place in a malevolent world because the circumstances of the world are so alien and hostile to us that it makes sense for the characters to range from amoral to loathsome.  That is the case in the Conan universe, where all aspects of civilization are exaggerated to a phantasmagoric extreme.  While Robert E Howard wasn't exactly a wordsmith, he did a great job at painting these believable but incredibly hostile and low trust society.  In praise of ASoIaF, it does a good job at creating a similar world in Essos, which is why that story can stand on its own until Dance of Dragons.  The longer the series goes on, the more it seems like Westeros and Essos are basically becoming the same thing with different trappings.  Okay maybe that's fine for most people, but it really starts to stretch this idea of being historically inspired to an incredulous extreme.  That's my point here - the world of Westeros is looking at Medieval Europe through an overly cynical lens.  

 

Lets look at some of the character types and how they are perceived (based off of some reflections on the characters here)

First off there are the dynastic house inspirations.  Honestly I don't see anything wrong here.  The Targaryan/Baratheon dispute makes sense compared to the Wars of the Roses, the Targaryans make sense as the Tarquinians, and their foreign overlord status lines up well with the Normans.  No problems here - the world is actually set up very well.  What I don't agree with are the characterizations.

I see Tywin compared to Machiavelli, or at least Machiavelli's supposed interpretation of a successful ruler.  First of all, Machiavelli was not a ruler in his own right and it is speculated that he was basing his concept of rule off of the example of the Borgia family, Cesare Borgia in particular.  While being the best soldier in all of Italy, he also was a man who was universally hated but too powerful to oppose.  Maybe that sounds like Tywin, but that's not the image I get - Tywin has loyal men and a long family pedigree, the extreme opposite of Borgia.  A better analogy to Tywin would be Henry II of England.  Both have a vindictive streak and end up in conflict with their sons, although Tywin's is less excusable as he actually hates one of his sons and seems overly focused on placing his progeny on the throne rather than handing over power successfully.  Most of the other characters that fall into 'the disturbed' type have less influence on the world and Tywin is the most important to the story.  I also think he's the most believable of all the lords.

 

The Starks, on the other hand, are so naive that it almost becomes comical after a while.  My guess has always been that they are tougher than the impression they give, simply because their simplicity and deliberate nature makes them perfectly suited to ruling over the unruly North, where more sophisticated lords would fail.  The part that disappoints me is how this hasn't borne any fruit since the first book, where we get a better picture of them as a unique and separate entity from the rest of the lords.  The Boltons are the big exception to this, but I'm really starting to wonder if this is to indicate that Northmen are simply more direct and brutal or if they are only acting that way to advance the plot.  Right now, all I'm seeing is that with their being evil, they are better at plotting and are therefore more capable than the stupidly honest Starks.  

 

Aside from Jaime, there aren't any complex protagonists which seem both realistic and capable like an actual leader would have been.  It's kind of a shame that in such a diverse and richly explained world, he is exceptional.  It's interesting that the dead Targaryans come across as so much more believable, even though they are the most fantastical of all the houses.  They are the ones who more closely align with the history that the books are supposedly inspired by, both in the recounting of their lives by others and through direct interactions with them in the Hedge Knight books.  It isn't that the Targaryans are so wonderful, it's that they are the easiest to sympathize with because they are really the only rulers who are humanized in the story.  GRRM can write a good character, it just seems like he doesn't want to because he has a predisposition to making most of the characters in ASoIaF two dimensional or outright buffoons.

Would you say the rogue prince was believable?  Did Princess Rhaenyra really birth a baby with dragon wings?  Much of history is embellished to make it more exciting.  Historians and maesters may not reap the financial rewards but they want their work to be interesting to their target audience, do they not?  

[giant snake]

What I'm talking about specifically here is actually what makes the story less interesting.  I like the Tyrion chapters of the first couple of books as much as anyone, but when I get later into the series, it really is simplistic how almost everyone doesn't understand what he is saying.  I get that he is clever but at some point it starts to become more of a parody than anything.

 

The somewhat nihilistic way the characters' actions unfold in the main series is what I'm talking about being a bad thing.  It's not that embellishments always make the truth seem completely mundane by comparison.  A good author knows how to make something out of either, and that you don't have to explain everything as an accident of fate if  you can just make a scene convincing.  It's one of the reasons that I think Jaime is by far the best character.  It isn't just his catharsis after losing his hand.  He is a convincing and threatening character long before, even though the plot of the first book could have very easily made him into a buffoon.  Honestly he is a little bit of a buffoon in the first book, but then you see his internal monologue and you immediately get the impression that he is actually quite tough and takes his knightly status quite seriously, even with his personal quirks.  As the series goes on, it seems more and more like he's one of the few characters that doesn't start becoming a shadow of his former self.

Unfortunately, Jaime's are some of the only chapters that don't seem to drop in quality and inspiration as the story goes on.  Everyone else has to have some sort of long explanation for why they aren't incompetent at everything in life, as if that was the norm.  The over-reliance on the empty headed flatterers of court is also irritating.  I get that in Joffrey's court you want to be very careful, but everywhere you go it seems like the nobility is comprised of airheads.  Who wants their court to be surrounded by boring ditzes?  At the very least King Robert has a court which makes more sense - it's full of people who are witty, capable, or at least able to get along with him.  Like I'm saying, GRRM is better than what he is giving us in the last two books.

That is what is frustrating - you don't have to overemphasize anything if you write well enough, and there is evidence of that else where in GRRM's writing.

[Jon Ice-Eyes]

This is all good critique. I may chime in on specifics later, but first I have a general question. 

Are those three character types -- the naive, the disturbed, the smartest person in the room -- a particularly gen-x thing?

I am not arguing! I actually love the thread title and just want to know where the gen-x part fits in precisely. 

[giant snake]

No tbh the thread title might be a little misleading.  I don't think this has everything to do with generations.  GRRM himself would be pushing it to be called early Gen X and is more in the Boomer timeframe.  Basically though I get more of a vibe that the story is regressing into the Gen X days when cynicism was all the rage.  I get kind of that feel from the way Westeros is becoming in the later books, and not because it's at war and all of that.  Obviously war and privation are going to be a part of the story, although I think the scale is wrong both in scope and in time - given the geography and troop numbers we would be looking at, it seems unrealistic.  I say the same about the scale of the story in many ways though - thousands of years of persistent noble houses, but the technological level is NOT arrested in a typical fantasy sense?  That part I just have to ignore and write it off as fantasy.  I could go all historical aspi about it but these aren't the big things that bother me.  My complaint is more about how the events lead to poor decision making or a total lack of decision making for a lot of the characters.

 

The types I laid out are just common trends I notice more on the third read through, but they get more pronounced in the later books only because it is used more and because formerly mysterious characters end up having more of the same motivations and thoughts.

[HoodedCrow]

I think you have a point in that this society is vaguely based on the Wars of the Roses, so the times are cynical and violent. But I think the characters, many of them being adapted and changed from historical or literary sources are not as simple as you are suggesting. It's possible to be reductive, and those are some basic trends that you have picked out. Most of the characters go through phases of development or devolution. Main characters have motives and traits that are shown, suggested or explained.

Tyrion is clever but makes impulsive mistakes. He gets darker with each betrayal and tragic decision. LF is clever, but in very dispassionate way. Tywin is clever in the use of power and position but fails with his family. I wouldn't call them very similar! 

Many of the choices made in the Wars of the Roses are almost comically bad, except that in the end there is a "solution" made from chance dice flipping events and exhaustion. Evil people profit. Nobler ones are at a loss. Poorer people suffer. Historical figures are so ambiguous, that there are arguments to this day. Perhaps you are on to something with the gen x cynicism, and making your own luck!

 

[giant snake]

I think you could look at the Wars of the Roses in particular as being a tragic succession of errors, especially with the ruthlessness shown AFTER the battle was over.  Really it was kind of a dark age all across Europe, at least as far as the idea of chivalry was concerned.  Louis XI was probably one of the worst of France's kings, at least when it came to his idea of dispensing judgement.  The Ottomans were conquering Eastern Europe, Italian Wars escalated across the city states even more, and the Mediterranean was overflowing with captives going east as slaves.  Taking it in that perspective, I can see a more negative time to frame an analogical fantasy in.  

 

The sticking point for me is that the setup isn't quite the same.  At the beginning of the story, we're coming off of a time of peace and plenty, not on the trail end of bloody conflict and defeat.  I don't picture everything going to shit quite so quick because of two factors:  These people aren't living in the Shire - they understand what a war is and that it's part of the cycle of history, so the shock shouldn't be quite as sudden and overwhelming.  Conversely, they (mostly) aren't living on the frontier either.  Most of the privations in wars of this time were due to the longstanding destruction of farmland - okay that isn't an easy task for one.  It's a lot easier than rounding up thousands of people, torturing them, raping literally everything with tits on it, and so on.  Chevauchee was a strike at a lord's prestige, not a 20th century style annihilation zone.  Or looking at older events like the Rape of Magdeburg - for one, that was confined to a city and inescapable.  Two: the men are off at war, not sitting idly by letting themselves be killed (this is almost immersion breaking for me, how the men and boys are actually just letting all of this happen).  Three: again that is a good example because it is after literally decades of constant war and constantly present mercenary armies.  For the Riverlands (a big place geographically, we are to believe) to turn to absolute shit in one year...I understand why it is important to the story, and I'm really not trying to sperg about it here...I just think that it takes an exaggeratedly negative view of both medieval societies and a bit of a more emotional (and less logical) view of human conflict.

 

Not everything has to be squeaky clean of course - there are plenty of tie ins we can make with the actual time where ASoIaF is supposed to take place, at least technologically.  You look at Towton - probably the bloodiest battle on British soil (no way to be completely sure, I think) - and you have two commanders in their early twenties.  That aligns with a lot of ASoIaF pretty well.  Makes sense I would say...but the more shrewd and ambitious characters from history, like Warwick, weren't necessarily better at everything because they were unscrupulous.  I look at England's best soldier king as being Edward III - he could be ruthless as a matter of course.  Even still he was measured.  He wasn't a fanatical madman who boiled people like a savage (like Henry V) and neither was he the type to always lead from the rear.  In fact a lot of the Kings during the Hundred Years War had more complexity than you would first think.  That's kind of what I would expect from a king.  

As much as I like the first book, even from the beginning it kind of bothered me how Robert really just gave up on life and on his responsibility.  I never really understood whether he was supposed to be depressed or a fool or what, because he obviously was no fool in his youth.  To me he is actually one of the least appreciated characters in how he could have had more depth.

[StarkofWinterfell]

11 hours ago, giant snake said:

I'd like to talk about the series from the perspective of its character development and inspiration.  Personally I never found any of the speculation about cryptic plot points very interesting because the cliffhangers at chapters end were more of a method of advancing the story than anything else.  More important, I think, is the way the story is told, which is through character perspectives.  It's a character driven story more than a plot driven story for that reason, or at least that's the way I see it - the plot details are second stage to the personalities on display.

 

About those personalities - looking for the inspiration in the character types, I see a lot of analogies to historical figures as I lurk around here.  I'm not convinced by most of them.  The characters generally fall into three types in the story:  

1.  The naive.  All of the younger characters, at least at the start of the story, and most of the traditionally 'good' characters fall into this.

2.  The disturbed.  This would cover most of the villainous or morally ambiguous characters in the story, but not all of them.  I hesitate to put Beric Dondarrion or Thyros into this camp because they initially fit into the first category and Thyros becomes his own type of disillusioned later in the story, by which point he's a nonentity.  This is also where I put Tywin because his cold rationality actually doesn't explain him entirely.  Specifically I'm talking about his ambition and his indifference to parental duty.

3.  The smartest person in the room.  This, for me, is normally the one that is hardest to believe and the most weakly written.  I don't mean as in the humorous dialogue, because that IS funny, but the total unambiguousness about this type in any situation.  There is no doubt that the clever character really is smarter than everyone else and their reasoning is so easily convincing that you actually have a hard time believing that they aren't the only person in the know.  Of course that isn't always true but it is a recurring theme, and not one that most fantasy isn't guilty of.

That's not to say that I don't like the books or anything, just something that is more and more noticeable on the third read-through.  To give credit where it is due, the story actually seems to fall back on these character types as it goes on, meaning that for the first three books it wasn't nearly as obvious or irritating.  I think the part where it falls through is when we get the (pointless) Barristan POV and he's really nothing more than a senile old man with nothing to do.  That was the tipping point for me anyway, where the cynicism really just started making me roll my eyes.

 

Putting this in the context of the dark fantasy world it would seem to make sense, but then again it really doesn't if it's supposed to be taken as historical analogy.  Dark fantasy books take place in a malevolent world because the circumstances of the world are so alien and hostile to us that it makes sense for the characters to range from amoral to loathsome.  That is the case in the Conan universe, where all aspects of civilization are exaggerated to a phantasmagoric extreme.  While Robert E Howard wasn't exactly a wordsmith, he did a great job at painting these believable but incredibly hostile and low trust society.  In praise of ASoIaF, it does a good job at creating a similar world in Essos, which is why that story can stand on its own until Dance of Dragons.  The longer the series goes on, the more it seems like Westeros and Essos are basically becoming the same thing with different trappings.  Okay maybe that's fine for most people, but it really starts to stretch this idea of being historically inspired to an incredulous extreme.  That's my point here - the world of Westeros is looking at Medieval Europe through an overly cynical lens.  

 

Lets look at some of the character types and how they are perceived (based off of some reflections on the characters here)

First off there are the dynastic house inspirations.  Honestly I don't see anything wrong here.  The Targaryan/Baratheon dispute makes sense compared to the Wars of the Roses, the Targaryans make sense as the Tarquinians, and their foreign overlord status lines up well with the Normans.  No problems here - the world is actually set up very well.  What I don't agree with are the characterizations.

I see Tywin compared to Machiavelli, or at least Machiavelli's supposed interpretation of a successful ruler.  First of all, Machiavelli was not a ruler in his own right and it is speculated that he was basing his concept of rule off of the example of the Borgia family, Cesare Borgia in particular.  While being the best soldier in all of Italy, he also was a man who was universally hated but too powerful to oppose.  Maybe that sounds like Tywin, but that's not the image I get - Tywin has loyal men and a long family pedigree, the extreme opposite of Borgia.  A better analogy to Tywin would be Henry II of England.  Both have a vindictive streak and end up in conflict with their sons, although Tywin's is less excusable as he actually hates one of his sons and seems overly focused on placing his progeny on the throne rather than handing over power successfully.  Most of the other characters that fall into 'the disturbed' type have less influence on the world and Tywin is the most important to the story.  I also think he's the most believable of all the lords.

 

The Starks, on the other hand, are so naive that it almost becomes comical after a while.  My guess has always been that they are tougher than the impression they give, simply because their simplicity and deliberate nature makes them perfectly suited to ruling over the unruly North, where more sophisticated lords would fail.  The part that disappoints me is how this hasn't borne any fruit since the first book, where we get a better picture of them as a unique and separate entity from the rest of the lords.  The Boltons are the big exception to this, but I'm really starting to wonder if this is to indicate that Northmen are simply more direct and brutal or if they are only acting that way to advance the plot.  Right now, all I'm seeing is that with their being evil, they are better at plotting and are therefore more capable than the stupidly honest Starks.  

 

Aside from Jaime, there aren't any complex protagonists which seem both realistic and capable like an actual leader would have been.  It's kind of a shame that in such a diverse and richly explained world, he is exceptional.  It's interesting that the dead Targaryans come across as so much more believable, even though they are the most fantastical of all the houses.  They are the ones who more closely align with the history that the books are supposedly inspired by, both in the recounting of their lives by others and through direct interactions with them in the Hedge Knight books.  It isn't that the Targaryans are so wonderful, it's that they are the easiest to sympathize with because they are really the only rulers who are humanized in the story.  GRRM can write a good character, it just seems like he doesn't want to because he has a predisposition to making most of the characters in ASoIaF two dimensional or outright buffoons.

I've read the books half a dozen times and I don't know who Thyros is. Can you point me to a specific book and/or section?

[Universal Sword Donor]

"ASOIAG is kind of Gen X"

You don't even explain why or how.

[giant snake]

1 hour ago, StarkofWinterfell said:

I've read the books half a dozen times and I don't know who Thyros is. Can you point me to a specific book and/or section?

Thoros of Myr

 

or his fat cousin Thyros of Mor

 

going on too long leads to the typos