#mudcore

[honeyrosepetals]

[s0larize]

[mytimemyaccord]

Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart for Entertainment Weekly (2008) Shot by Jeff Riedel

[leatherbound-breakdown]

A Short Cut.

[vexwerewolf]

I don't resent A Song of Ice and Fire for itself, per se. I resent it by proxy for all of the "GrItTtY dArK fAnTaSy" we had to slog through for a decade after Game of Thrones became popular, and that is still impacting the way people write fantasy in the modern day (a particular sore spot for me is that Baldur's Gate III is being made by the same people who made the Divinity series and I can already tell that's going to be fucking miserable).

ASOIaF (and early Game of Thrones) was dark, yes, but at its heart it was surprisingly optimistic and idealistic. It was a world in which doing what was good and right was always hard, often unrewarding and would sometimes get you killed, but you should still do it anyway because goddamnit it's the right thing to do. Bad things happened to good people because they wouldn't compromise their own morality, but the books (and the early seasons of the show) never portrayed these peoples' choices as meaningless or worthless.

Writers of lesser talent and vision looked at GRRM's work and saw good people dying for refusing to compromise their morality, and their takeaway from it was "morality is meaningless" and we've been mired in this miserable genre of fantasy that @sahonithereadwolf named "mudcore" for more than a decade now - and worse, even Game of Thrones eventually fell prey to it.

It's not really GRRM's fault people didn't have the correct takeaway from A Song of Ice and Fire but I still can't quite shake the resentment of how it's shaped fantasy fiction over most of my adulthood.

[aesthetic-otd]

Today's aesthetic is mudcore

[tearsandtheteeth]

[pizzaisland03]

cr. to @pizzaisland03