Origami Around
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h
sheepfilms
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art blog(derogatory)
Not today Justin
Peter Solarz
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if i look back, i am lost
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
Xuebing Du
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
Love Begins
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dirt enthusiast
#extradirty
will byers stan first human second
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
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@ghoul-aunty
you can click on this button once daily to help palestine and support other causes in the middle east for free. it takes literally 5 seconds and could help save lives so please take the time to click and share this link.
#oh it raises money thru ad revenue and ur click confirms the value to advertisers. neat
self pity is self obsession + u need to forgive urself
the telltale signs of fiction
[ID: "My mother... apologized?!" in comic font. End ID]
It's Autumn, which means if I make a Big Pot of Soup it will Fix Everything. No one fact check me on this. We need to let the soup speak for itself.
in school they used to call me semipermeable membrane for my habit of allowing some things to pass through me
but not all things.
SON MISTAKE: In teaching my cat son boy the command "out"- intended to mean, "emerge from the enclosed space"- I have unwittingly trained him to understand that if I open a box, cupboard, cabinet, or fridge in his presence, he need only rush inside and stay there, firmly planted with his wide wet baby eyes, and he will surely be granted the opportunity to earn a delightful little treat
PROS: My darling son WILL emerge from the microwave as soon as I ask!
CONS: My son will be in the microwave. Until I ask
SON MISTAKE: In teaching my cat son boy the command "out"- intended to mean, "emerge from the enclosed space"- I have unwittingly trained him to understand that if I open a box, cupboard, cabinet, or fridge in his presence, he need only rush inside and stay there, firmly planted with his wide wet baby eyes, and he will surely be granted the opportunity to earn a delightful little treat
PROS: My darling son WILL emerge from the microwave as soon as I ask!
CONS: My son will be in the microwave. Until I ask
it’s ween
me when I "mysteriously" feel better after I "have something to eat"
you have to stay alive. you're going to be such a beautiful middle aged freak. young freaks will see you in the street and know that things can be okay.
imagine having a discourse blog
imagine having a blog
imagine having… for i have naught a penny to me name
the autistic view of the world has insight and beauty in it, and we’re taught that there’s something wrong with it.
What’s fascinating is that the parents who didn’t know it was the work of an autistic kid praised it as well.
Technically, we don't know that it's an autistic kid's work, either. 5e infographic doesn't say Cadence is autistic.
"appropriate play skills" is such a horrid phrase, goddamn
Someone over on Discord asked, "I'm morbidly curious: How BAD is A Song of Ice and Fire in terms of the authenticity George claims it to be?"
My reply was straightforward:
The long and the short of it is that ASOIAF is basically a vehicle for GRRM to present both his rape fetish and his Hobbesian view on human nature and has less historical accuracy than Frozen or most other Disney movies.
That's actually a good way to think of it, now that I've said it--he's Family Unfriendly, they're Family Friendly, but both have the same relationship with History: just Pure Aesthetic with no consideration for how the worldbuilding would work.
@azureliongoddess, ha! I can see the confusion, and just in case anyone else is wondering, I'm referring specifically to Thomas Hobbes, English Philosopher who believed that the innate tendency of humanity is that of warlike brutality, with no compassion, kindness, or virtues beyond that of naked force and a desire for power and basically said that, without a strong state to enforce laws, well...
"In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short."
The man lived through the English Civil War, which miiiiight have something to do with his extremely pessimistic views on how humans behave--and it is that same pessimistic outlook that I think infects GRRM. That, given half a chance at power, we'll destroy ourselves in an orgy of violence and brutality in squabbling over it. It's a constant theme of Martin's work--not just in ASOIAF, but in Tuf Voyaging and Wild Cards and more.
The whole idea of "seasons last many years so winter can be a long ways off but when it hits, an entire generation grows up in darkness and cold".... uh.
Let's ignore what it takes to make a planet do that, okay? Wave the Plot Wand and declare you've got the right rotation, distance from star, axial tilt, interference from ancient deities, etc. to make that happen. Fine.
The resulting flora & fauna would not look like earth plants and animals. You would not have "harvest season is 2 months out of every 12" if summer lasts for multiple years; there'd be no push for plants to get their seeds grown and ready to be in the ground in a couple of months. Plants could grow much more slowly - but they'd need a hibernation ability to survive winter, not just "they kinda go dormant for 12-ish weeks."
Animals would be even more affected. Years-long winter means you can't just scrounge for scraps, lose a bit of weight, and wait for spring. More omnivores, fewer herbivores, and a lot more long-term hibernators. Potentially, lots of "herbivore in summer; carnivore in winter" animals.
Potentially, a number of plants and animals that only thrive in winter and manage to go into deep hibernation or seed/egg stages during summer. Hey, they have less competition.
I don't even want to think how bugs would work. The mind boggles.
The resulting human cultures would not look like European middle-ages-ish cultures.
GRRM's cultures are European-esque factions thrown into a fantasy/scifi setting that is impossible to allow those political factions to form. There's endless weird handwaving past things like: why would people call it a "year" when it's been summer for seven of them? What do they use to mark "years" as we understand them?
Why would you even have four recognized seasons? If this were a colony world like Pern, then maybe there's an ancestral recognition of year-cycles with seasons, but if summer has always been 7-10 years long, why would you call that "summer?"
All of human culture - entertainment, travel, political machinations, city infrastructures, language, food, etc etc etc - is affected by Earth's cycles and seasons.
Martin makes a few changes here & there to deal with his extra-long seasons and pastes those into a fantasy-ish European backdrop with no attempt to make things consistent.
(And that is FINE. It's a fantasy story. You're supposed to be able to handwave past a lot of the implausible things - not worry about how widespread writing skills are and who the scribes are if there's no equivalent of a Catholic church with monk archivists; not worry about how they have certain metal tools but no printing press or guns; definitely don't think about the sword technology plz. Readers are allowed to say "hey I'm enjoying the story; it doesn't have to be realistic.") (Look, a whole generation lost their minds for teenagers who could waves sticks around and levitate tables.)
But. The fact that it doesn't need to be realistic to be good writing (...another debate we're shelving for now) does not mean it's "realistic" because the outfits resemble those in historical dramas.
Frozen has more realistic politics for its setting. More authentic technology. A more plausible culture.
Cosigning all of this. I think my favorite pithy takedown of it is, "ASOIAF is an ISO 9000 Standard Medieval Fantasy Setting in a world with cyclical ice ages." Which, well... doesn't work, for the reasons you just outlined.
[image: reply by azureliongoddess: "So I did look it up, but I'd never heard the word 'Hobbesian' before and for half a minute thought you were comparing his worldview to that of Hobbits."]
There is no reconciling the dynastic histories of the setting with the observed behavior of the nobility and those around them.
Like, lets imagine for a second it was even possible for a dynasty to outlast the IRL record holders, the Pandya and Chola dynasties, by a factor of three. Lets pretend that the nominally-monogamous structure of the Catholic-ish Standard Medieval Fantasy Setting would be capable of managing and exceeding the sorts of legitimate-issue birthrates that the explicitly polygamous cultures of the Pandya and Chola did.
The Freys are looked down on for being up-jumped merchants, because they have only been a noble house for... four centuries. Longer than the Romanovs. Its not just the Starks, Lannisters, Arryns, Greyjoys, and Durrandons, the former Royal Houses of Pre-Targaryen Westeros, whom are supposed to be fuck-off ancient. Its every damn family. The Tarbecks, the Boltons, the Harlaws, all of them.
In order for this to be conceivable, there’s got to be a deep cultural taboo about exactly what family has to rule where. In order for me to believe for an instant that the Starks didn’t just eradicate the Boltons two thousand years ago and hand their castle over to some second son’s cadet-dynasty, you need to convince me that doing so was unthinkable. Get-immediately-overthrown-for-angering-the-gods unthinkable. Not actually possible to do.
When they were down to the last Bolton for one reason or another? House Stark was either required to get involved in their enemy’s love-life, or else the Boltons should be extinct.
The primordial-dynasties are unrealistic to begin with, but you can either have it be conceivable to come up with a plausible and canon-compliant headcanon to resolve that or you can have your edgy, super-cool ultra-badasses going all Reality-Ensues on their enemies and wiping entire families without being immediately cut down by their own men. These things cannot coexist.
Normally, I’d probably be willing to drop it as an acceptable break from reality. But this is the setting that’s constantly jerking itself off about how realistic it is.
Literally no one in this thread has actually read the books or even watched the show and have only had details espoused to them third or fourth hand. Pretty much every detail here isn't just wrong, it's presented in the most innacurate bade faith interpretation possible.
No, I read the books, sorry. What details did we get wrong? The amount of historically inaccurate sexual violence? Or something else? If you're calling us all wrong, back it up!
Also read the books and this is all completely accurate, someone is just mad at it being called out.
I feel obligated to make @swindle94 even madder by pointing out that in a world with weather like ASOIAF, humans as we know them wouldn't exist.
Because humans evolved into humans due to the environmental factors on earth. Things like an entire decade of dark, freezing cold? That would literally drive humans-as-we-know-them bugshit before killing them. Being able to keep warm and fed isn't even the issue here--the issue is psychological. Many far-north cultures are observed to be more susceptible to things like depression and skin diseases caused by lack of vitamin D, and that's with only 3-5 months of darkness. Imagine 3-5 years (or more).
Likewise, the entire human reproductive tract just...wouldn't work in that setting. It's estimated that 50% of pregnancies end before the pregnant person even knows they're pregnant--basically the body goes "hm, bad timing" and reabsorbs the zygote or embryo. Things that can cause this include extreme stress both mental and physical, and poor diet. So you take bodies that are struggling and burning a ton of energy to stay warm and mobile and alive during this years-long winter; minds that are trying not to snap under the strain of darkness; and the diet of "whatever we could grow to survive during our summer," and do you know how many pregnancies are going to survive? Not fucking many. Quite a lot of otherwise-fertile people wouldn't even be able to conceive at all.
Let’s not forget that every description of the ongoing House wars repeatedly mentions how the land is being laid waste to, crops destroyed, peasants slaughtered for being in the way, etc.
No society that has to contend with decade-long winters would do that.
Anyway the whole thing is about as ‘realistic’ as Harry Potter once you strip away the gritty surface details. The whole thing with the Houses is just as overly simplistic and set in stone as the fucking Hogwarts Houses. Realistic? Buddy, Tolkein designed realistic societies and he was writing an unabashed high fantasy setting with elves and shit. GRRM needs to get over himself.
Just to throw in my two cents as a sci-fi/fantasy writer:
The problem is not the realism here. The problem is that the speculative elements aren't effectively serving the narrative.
Everyone keeps bringing up Tolkien and that's fine, GRRM was obviously inspired by Tolkien, but Tolkien wasn't exactly a paragon of realism, and, with good fantasy, realism isn't necessarily the goal. Sure, Middle Earth has a LOT of detail to it, but Tolkien was mostly just way more intentional with his speculative elements.
I could go on all day about Tolkien's magic and symbolism, but like. The primary ability of the Ring of Power is turning the wearer invisible. It fucking frees you from accountability. It's so simple, it's so elegant, of course it can do that. Isn't that the whole point of being all-powerful? So you don't have to answer to anyone else?
The Ring can do much more than that of course, Lord of the Rings has SO much to say about the nature of power, but that's the first thing the Ring promises you. Freedom from accountability. Everything else Tolkien has to say about power starts from there.
By contrast, the generations-long winters of Game of Thrones just...don't tie into what the rest of the story wants to be about. It's not that they CAN'T tie in, it's that the story seems largely disinterested in actually exploring the implications of having generations-long winters in a feudalist society or even thinking about how to use that particular plot element in an interesting way. I mean, when you get right down to it, the generations-long winter are just this looming inevitable apocalypse scenario that everyone can see coming, and no one's preparing for it because they're too busy squabbling amongst each other. Which, hey, that kinda sounds like the news sometimes. Maybe there's something worth talking about in there somewhere?
But hey, honestly, if you wanted to, you could totally have your generations-long winters and vaguely 15th-century feudalist political drama, too. It's not THAT hard, you just have to come up with a way for people to make food fast enough, some reasons why they still know how to do that after generations of winter, and, like, maybe a way for the main characters to un-fuck the situation so the story doesn't end with all the idiots slowly freezing and starving to death maybe. I mean, I guess you could just go with everyone freezing and starving to death too. That might be someone's idea of a satisfying ending, I don't know your life.
Instead, the generations-long winters are just kinda hovering in the background of a Tolkien-ish generic fantasy setting that also wants to be Gritty and Realistic and Historical and will accomplish this by being vaguely based off of the War of the Roses, and also by having a lot of sexual assault and violence. I guess. Also there are ice zombies. Which serve the same purpose as the generations long winter, in that they are a looming apocalypse scenario no one's addressing in favor of squabbling amongst each other, so really the ice zombies are redundant.
These ideas are cool, they CAN be interesting, but it's mostly a coat of paint. If you integrate them further into the world and take the time to really consider what it means for the people living there and the natural world around them, you can totally turn it into something cool. I just don't think GRRM is all that committed to doing that for you.
Also no one ever tries to claim that Tolkien’s work is “historically accurate”
@scyllas-revenge these tags have passed peer review!
you are SO right for saying this
I'm sorry, but GRRM claims to be better than Tolkien? Tolkein?? The Tolkein?! I.. I cannot even fathom the audacity...
Yeah, it really comes across as him having a serious inferiority complex; he's frequently complained that "Nobody asked Tolkein about Aragorn's tax policies" or other such things.
GRRM had this quote about how people don't consider that just because Aragorn is a good Man doesn't mean he'll make for a good King. Which, sure, in a vacuum is a valid point and an interesting artistic element to explore... but Aragorn is perhaps the worst possible character to use as an example of this???
Like, there's this whole thing where the Gondorians don't give a shit about Aragorn's claim to the throne until after he starts showing leadership and care for the common man, and "The Hands of a King are the hands of a Healer." And just generally Tolkien spends a great deal of care demonstrating Aragorn's bona fides as a Good Leader.
There's a quote from Gimli in The Return of the King (side thing, Gimli is done dirty by the movie adaptation. In the books he's practically an idealized Samurai; a cultured warrior poet. Gimli keeps a meticulous journal of events, and that's the only reason Frodo (who canonically wrote the book) is able to get a sensible timeline for things that happened when he wasn't there.) where they are riding across central Gondor with the Army of the Dead, who strike uncontrollable terror into the hearts of mortals (although even Legolas is unsure if the Dead are actually able to harm the living, physically), and Gimli, warrior poet, comments that he "was held to the road only by the will of Aragorn."
Aragorn is demonstrably a Good Leader, who cares about his men and the people in his charge, and knows how to put their needs ahead of his own. This is made painstakingly clear in the text. Which is all the more noteworthy because, unlike in Martin's writing, for Tolkien these mighty Knights and Kings and Rightful Kings are not the main characters. Frodo, Sam, and by-this-point Gollum/Smeagol are the main characters. The entire plot of the trilogy hinges on Sauron, with his cruel, conqueror's view of reality, getting distracted by these Wizards and Princes and Elves and Generals and Kings moving around that he overlooks the smallest of them all.
No shit Tolkien doesn't go into Aragorn's tax policy, Aragorn is a capital-D Distraction.
A distraction which evidently hoodwinked not only Sauron, but also George R R Martin.
Now, considering that this is the level of incompetence with which Martin approaches basic textual analysis, consider what this means for his own writing.
Strawberry sharks 🍓🦈
fun fact! did you know that you can gain extra ‘forbidden time’ by staying up late in the night? but Watch Out
Shit this is great! You can get so much done if you don't sleep!
THE CONSEQUENCES
