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Heresy 227 and the Great Turtle


Black Crow

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7 hours ago, Black Crow said:

As a general rule yes, but I do recall [though not the author]* a dimension-shifting story in which the hero found himself in a world with a military technology which paralleled the 30 years war, ie; pikes and matchlock muskets. Similarly Poul Anderson's Midsummer Tempest is set in an alternative English Civil War.

 

*Tuttle ?

I think they refer to those books as "alternative history" as opposed to fantasy.  Whatever that distinction means.  

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9 hours ago, Black Crow said:

a lot of articles have been cropping up very recently in which GRRM has been very forcefully repudiating the Mummers version and no longer pretending that he's working towards the same ending.

Well, in a way.  What he said was:

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The series has been... not completely faithful. Otherwise, it would have to run another five seasons.

It would be reasonable to interpret this to mean GOT only shortened his future story too much to be faithful.

All the same, I'm quite sure they deviated from his future story in major, basic ways.  To me it's only a question of whether he told them most of his future revelations, and they chose to do different ones... or he simply did not tell them at all.   I lean toward the second.

9 hours ago, Black Crow said:

as the Mummers version was fan-fiction made flesh, it does suggest that we miserable heretics are groping in roughly the right direction

If by "right direction" you mean "we're assuming the show got it wrong and exploring more probable alternatives," I agree with that.

The last season, and in particular the series finale, was so inept it qualified as accidental comedy. 

To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, one would have to have a heart of stone to wave goodbye to the show without laughing.

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1 hour ago, JNR said:

Well, in a way.  What he said was:

It would be reasonable to interpret this to mean GOT only shortened his future story too much to be faithful.

All the same, I'm quite sure they deviated from his future story in major, basic ways.  To me it's only a question of whether he told them most of his future revelations, and they chose to do different ones... or he simply did not tell them at all.   I lean toward the second.

If by "right direction" you mean "we're assuming the show got it wrong and exploring more probable alternatives," I agree with that.

The last season, and in particular the series finale, was so inept it qualified as accidental comedy. 

To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, one would have to have a heart of stone to wave goodbye to the show without laughing.

He also weighed in on how certain show characters were elevated in importance because they got higher Q ratings [whatever that means] and as a result the story line was distorted. 

As to the "right direction" I won't be so bold as to claim that we have it figured correctly because after all we each have our own ideas, but we do have a history of kicking against fan fiction and certain theories

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On 10/11/2019 at 12:50 PM, Black Crow said:

He also weighed in on how certain show characters were elevated in importance because they got higher Q ratings [whatever that means] and as a result the story line was distorted. 

That was a general comment on working with Hollywood:

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On his experiences in Hollywood, he continued: "You get totally extraneous things like the studio or the network weighing in, and they have some particular thing that has nothing to do with story, but relates to 'Well this character has a very high Q Rating so let's give him a lot more stuff to do'."

However, I think we can be pretty sure it does apply to GOT, because it does to all shows.   A Q rating is basically just audience appeal; Hollywood management always likes to dial in more of popular characters when it can.

On 10/11/2019 at 12:50 PM, Black Crow said:

we do have a history of kicking against fan fiction and certain theories

And beyond that -- which is certainly true -- it's irrefutable that the show and books must be fundamentally different in key ways, because many important things that happened on the show just couldn't possibly happen in the books.

GRRM's favorite example to make that point is character deaths, but that's barely just a start.  I'll just point to the radical alterations to the storylines of Sansa and Brienne and try not to die laughing.

We might define Heresy as a meta-theory that says "The show got it fucking wrong, and so did almost all the fans."   That meta-theory will be proven correct, for the most part.

15 hours ago, alienarea said:

maybe he should write his story instead of being an attention whore

It is a little hard to feel sorry for him re fan expectations, because previously he was heard moaning about how the whole world had left Westeros behind... what with the show ending... and thus was leaving him all alone.

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10 hours ago, JNR said:

We might define Heresy as a meta-theory that says "The show got it fucking wrong, and so did almost all the fans."   That meta-theory will be proven correct, for the most part.

It is a little hard to feel sorry for him re fan expectations, because previously he was heard moaning about how the whole world had left Westeros behind... what with the show ending... and thus was leaving him all alone.

... but left to get on with HIS story

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8 hours ago, Black Crow said:

... but left to get on with HIS story

Yes, you'd think he'd focus on that -- that HBO's turn is over, so now he gets to do a proper job with the story he personally conceived and created.  As for fan pressure, HBO lowered the bar so much he could hardly do worse... unless he fails to finish the series at all.

The best quote on this subject comes from GRRM himself:

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While Martin has remained a key show collaborator, advising Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss as they carved out new territory beyond the books in the show’s final three seasons, he said he feels no obligation to make his upcoming books align with the TV series. Rather, he views the show and the novels as existing side-by-side in “two alternate realities.”

“I have very fixed ideas in my head as I’m writing The Winds of Winter and beyond that in terms of where things are going. It’s like two alternate realities existing side by side. I have to double down and do my version of it which is what I’ve been doing"

 

He can still get it right, at least in the minds of the fanbase he cares about most.

That would be us -- the book readers, the people who know Varys can't teleport.   Maybe some of us won't be happy with this revelation or that revelation, but they will all have been set up, they will all make sense, and continuity will be preserved, as opposed to the bullshit buffet that HBO served us.

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On 9/16/2019 at 1:53 PM, Black Crow said:

In looking at the influences acting on GRRM, I still hold that the single most important factor is that he is a child of the Cold War; of a seemingly endless struggle between light and darkness, of mutual assured destruction and above all the Wall.

 

Daaaaaaaamn that's good. I really need to keep up with these threads more but I always feel a little overwhlemed by the volume. I need to chew on that for a hot minute, particularly in light  of his fixation, imho, on dualities and the ultimate unreliability and artificiality of them, but a brief question: have you delved much in here the theme of alloys/hybrids/blending of opposites/dualities?

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51 minutes ago, JNR said:

Yes, you'd think he'd focus on that -- that HBO's turn is over, so now he gets to do a proper job with the story he personally conceived and created.  As for fan pressure, HBO lowered the bar so much he could hardly do worse... unless he fails to finish the series at all.

The best quote on this subject comes from GRRM himself:

He can still get it right, at least in the minds of the fanbase he cares about most.

That would be us -- the book readers, the people who know Varys can't teleport.   Maybe some of us won't be happy with this revelation or that revelation, but they will all have been set up, they will all make sense, and continuity will be preserved, as opposed to the bullshit buffet that HBO served us.

Quite, which is why I raised this in the first place. We don't know where this is headed, although we do have some ideas, but as I said earlier if the Mummers version is fan-fiction made flesh then what we do know is that GRRM has repudiated that fan-fiction.

And fundamentally what we can also say is that the fan-fiction in that alternative reality revolves around the Game of Thrones while we are looking at the Song of Ice and Fire, and that while there are cross-overs the two are different in that while the song provides a background to the Game in the Mummers' version of reality that game is no more than a dangerous distraction from the Song in GRRM's version.

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50 minutes ago, hiemal said:

Daaaaaaaamn that's good. I really need to keep up with these threads more but I always feel a little overwhlemed by the volume. I need to chew on that for a hot minute, particularly in light  of his fixation, imho, on dualities and the ultimate unreliability and artificiality of them, but a brief question: have you delved much in here the theme of alloys/hybrids/blending of opposites/dualities?

I don't think we've delved much as such, largely because we've long accepted that its fundamental to the story and that the scenario peddled first by Mel that this is all about Azor Ahai returning to lead the Royal Targaryen Airforce to victory over the snowmen. This is about duality. 

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2 hours ago, Black Crow said:

I don't think we've delved much as such, largely because we've long accepted that its fundamental to the story and that the scenario peddled first by Mel that this is all about Azor Ahai returning to lead the Royal Targaryen Airforce to victory over the snowmen. This is about duality. 

Dualities within dualites within dualities. Fire and Blood, Ice and Fire, East and West...

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10 hours ago, Black Crow said:

if the Mummers version is fan-fiction made flesh then what we do know is that GRRM has repudiated that fan-fiction

Well, that's just it.  He hasn't really repudiated it, or called it fan-fiction; he's just said HBO's version is different from the story he's writing.

So what does that mean?  It's up to us to decide.

To put a sharper edge on the distinction, here are some basic concepts I confidently predict D&D and the book fanbase, including this site, got completely wrong:

1. Bran never becomes King of Westeros in the books

2. Jon is not the son of Rhaegar and Lyanna in the books

3. The origin of the Others, as provided on the show, is fundamentally different in the books

Additionally, I also point out this recent remark from GRRM:

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The world of Ice & Fire is a WORLD, boys and girls. Huge continents, ten thousand years of history, cities, deserts, oceans, mysteries, triumphs and tragedies.

This IMO conclusively shows any Short Timeline theory is wrong.  As I've suggested various times, the timeline is long

So for instance when in AGOT we are told the Wall has been around eight thousand years, we would do better to accept that rough estimate than doubt it.

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3 hours ago, JNR said:

To put a sharper edge on the distinction, here are some basic concepts I confidently predict D&D and the book fanbase, including this site, got completely wrong:

1. Bran never becomes King of Westeros in the books

2. Jon is not the son of Rhaegar and Lyanna in the books

3. The origin of the Others, as provided on the show, is fundamentally different in the books

 

1, Actually, this is possible, though certainly not in the way depicted by the Mummers. Remember that book Bran is heavily based on Bran the Blessed/Bendigeidfran.

2. I think this may turn out to be as irrelevant as it so far has been in the book and that whoever his father Jon is a son of Winterfell not of Valyria. 

3. Agreed and they too are sons of Winterfell - and Craster

To this, I'll add a fourth:

4. The Dragons are as much of a threat as the Others

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10 hours ago, Black Crow said:

Actually, this is possible, though certainly not in the way depicted by the Mummers.

As inept and surreal as that was, it's about the only way I can imagine it happening at all.

All kings in the history of Westeros have ascended to the throne via a claim based on either military conquest or genetic inheritance. Bran seems a very doubtful bet for both.  What does that leave?

10 hours ago, Black Crow said:

I think this may turn out to be as irrelevant as it so far has been in the book and that whoever his father Jon is a son of Winterfell not of Valyria. 

I think it'll be relevant by making certain things easier for Jon, but that's just a guess.

It would be interesting to see a poll of Westeros/Reddit asking whether we'll see an overt Dark Lord in the last two books, since the show had one and most fans are convinced the show spoiled the books on all important points. 

I'm not sure what the poll results would be, but I am sure there won't be any such entity, and that by the last page of TWOW, it will be overwhemingly clear the show did not spoil the books on all important points.   Instead, it did exactly what GRRM explicitly told us it would do about eight years ago: it got increasingly different from the books with every season.

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13 minutes ago, JNR said:

 

I think it'll be relevant by making certain things easier for Jon, but that's just a guess.

 

That rather depends on where the story is really headed.

Reviewing the first book, written when the story-line was still fresh in GRRM's mind, I'd struck by the way it effectively began and ended with two threats; the blue-eyed lot at the beginning and the dragons at the end - Ice and Fire.

If we look at that, rather than the Game of Thrones in the middle we see it for what it really is, a dangerous distraction from the Song

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5 hours ago, Feather Crystal said:

Can anyone recall a different book series that was still awesome after the third installment? 

Dune series Frank Herbert. which is getting a movie remake.  Hooray.  Foundation Series Asimov,  Rama series Arthur Clarke.  Harry Potter...

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20 hours ago, Black Crow said:

That rather depends on where the story is really headed.

Almost everything does.  But GRRM does not set up complex puzzles of this sort for no reason.

Whatever else we want to conclude about Jon's parentage, it's objectively true that GRRM went to great lengths to do these two things:

1) Tell us nothing conclusive about where Lyanna went, what she did, and with whom during the entire Rebellion

2) Create the illusion that he had told us -- an illusion which completely fooled most fans, including Ran

Pulling off those double goals meant carefully arranging and phrasing literally thousands of details throughout almost two million words of five huge books.

This was so much work for GRRM, Jon's true parentage is not likely to be as meaningless as Jon's favorite pair of socks, and it's not solely about his mother.  In the end I think we'll see there's a purpose to it (just not the purpose of putting Jon on the throne or anything similar).

20 hours ago, Black Crow said:

Reviewing the first book, written when the story-line was still fresh in GRRM's mind

The problem there is that he never originally meant to end AGOT with Dany's eggs hatching.  He thought it would go much further into the story.

The egg-hatching was a hacked substitute, forced by GRRM's typical failure to contain his wordcount. Ask him to describe a Jersey pizza in 500 words, and he'll blow those 500 just on the parmesan he sprinkles on top.

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12 hours ago, LynnS said:

Dune series Frank Herbert. which is getting a movie remake.  Hooray.  Foundation Series Asimov,  Rama series Arthur Clarke.  Harry Potter...

Would you say these series are also a single story, or is each subsequent book a new story using the same characters? Could each book be read as a stand alone and have its own beginning and ending?

ASOIAF is technically one very long story broken into segments.

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