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thejdizzler 4mo ago · Edited 4mo ago

In Defense of A Song of Ice and Fire and George R. R. Martin

If you think the series is nihilistic, you haven't been paying attention

There are certain takes on literature and culture that make me want to scream and tear my hair out. Harry Potter being decried as a book that encourages satanic witchcraft, when the books are explicitly (and somewhat heavy-handedly by the end) Christian, is one of them. Another is the insistence that post-modernism, fiction like Cloud Atlas or Infinite Jest have nothing to offer us because they don’t follow some Christian or rationalist world view. I’m pretty sure the early Church Fathers read pagan authors and some (like St. Basil) suggested that Christians should actually be well versed in pagan texts like the Odyssey and Aeneid before tackling the Bible. Most rage-inducing of all however is the idea that George R. R. Martin and his magnum opus, A Song of Ice and Fire, is some kind of nihilistic, grimdark, pornographic deconstruction of all that is right and good in the world.

Now I think that many of those who make this critique haven’t even taken the time to read the books, much less the wealth of secondary analysis sources like [Race for the Iron Throne] (https://racefortheironthrone.wordpress.com) (RIT Steven Attewell), Mereenese Blot, Not a Podcast, or Wars and Politics of Ice that really clarify what the books are trying to say. The show, for all its success in adaptation during the first 2-3 seasons, unfortunately twists the message of the series towards nihilism and sex and violence for mere shock value. However, this is the fault of the show runners, and the requirements of television as a medium (once again Marshall McLuhan’s words ring true) rather than anything Martin wrote).

Rather I think Martin serves as convenient punching bag for people with a particular view about post-modernism (that it has been bad for human culture). He’s an easy target: he’s old, he hasn’t finished his series, and he doesn’t live a particularly healthy lifestyle. Many people have made these critiques, but the most uncharitable (and negligently so) on Substack comes from this post by The Brothers Krynn.

I found this essay repugnant in a number of ways, from its ad hominem attacks on Martin to the obvious fact that the guy clearly hadn’t read the books he was critiquing. However, I’ll do my best to give Krynn the critique that he fails to give Martin.

Krynn has three main points to make in this essay, which mainly revolve around critiquing a tweet that Martin made about hobbit sex, but he expands to the whole of the guy’s corpus.

"The sole thing that inspires and motivates Game of Thrones is sex. Martin admits that it is what he views a most transcendent.”
“His series is mediocre at best. It is not true Fantasy. It does not uphold the traditional values one should aspire to, it is not blessed with the Spirit of Truth that Fantasy embodies”
“with regards to the ‘religious structure’ as all religious characters are insane, and the Church is mocked and shown to be little more than a political organization, and one that we don’t know the rituals, ceremonies, and the ideals of.”

I would respond to these arguments as such:

1.Martin is a Romantic and places a primal role on Romantic love (which involves sex) as a human motivation. This does not just mean sex but also protecting your family and community of love (which all too abstract in Tolkien’s Gondor, although not as much in the shire). Martin is also careful to point out how various sexual and romantic fixations can ruin people, families, and entire nations.

There is plenty of truth in A Song of Ice and Fire. However, it is a (post-modern) novel that is by its nature deconstructive of traditional values. This deconstruction allows honest reflection on many traditional systems of values and myths that empirically don’t work (despite the lamentations of the trad caths and their ilk), and the reconstruction of a more truthful set of personal values.
Every single major religion in A Song of Ice and Fire is shown to have some kind of actual supernatural power. While many religious characters are rather likable (Davos Seaworthy, Catalyn Stark), you also have your fair share of insane theocrats (Damphair), and people who cynically use the church as a political tool (Cersei). It’s not true that we don’t see religious ceremonies at all: the drowned God, the Seven, the old Gods, and the Faith of the Seven all have various weddings, funerals, baptisms, and worship services on camera. These churches are shown to be political institutions (if you don’t think the Catholic church was or has always been an extremely political institution you need to crack open both a newspaper or history book), but not mere tools of power (their functioning is heavily swayed by true believers and the supernatural).

Sex and Love

I’ll start off with a little bit about the personal philosophy of George R. R. Martin, which should help clarify his position on the sex vs. love question. Martin was born in 1948 in Bayonne, New Jersey in a working class family. Martin was raised Catholic, grew up reading comic books and adventure stories before beginning his writing career at Northwestern. Here he also was a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War. It’s also obvious from Martin’s early stories in Dreamsongs, that the guy is a Romantic (with a capital R), and extremely interested in beauty, gnostic individualism, and subjectivity. So we have an anti-war, Romantic, who still believes in many of the traditional virtues of Catholicism without believing in the faith himself. Given these things, the message of A Song of Ice and Fire starts to become a lot more clear.

So sex and love. Tolkien obviously thought love was important too, but he doesn’t take a Romantic view of it. Love for Tolkien is very abstract: for ideals (the shire), for peoples (the Men of the West), or for the idea of a person (which is what Arwen basically is). For Martin, whose is a Romantic, love is very specific:

Needle was Robb and Bran and Rickon, her mother and her father, even Sansa. Needle was Winterfell’s grey walls, and the laughter of its people. Needle was the summer snows, Old Nan’s stories, the heart tree with its red leaves and scary face, the warm earthy smell of the glass gardens, the sound of the north wind rattling the shutters of her room. Needle was Jon Snow’s smile. He used to mess my hair and call me “little sister,” she remembered, and suddenly there were tears in her eyes.- Arya, AFFC

Love for Martin is built on personal relationships, and to describe the personal you have to describe specific intimate moments, some of which are sexual in nature.

Now, as many trad people like to point out, sex is powerful, and when that power is not used in the proper context, it can have terrible consequences. Martin knows and understands this, and contrasts sexual dynamics in two different families: the Starks (healthy), and the Lannister’s (fucked up). Ned has a healthy sexual relationship with his wife, and the resulting children love each other, and their father. This dynamic is also reflected in the political realities of the North, in which vassals are willing to die to save “Ned’s little girl”. Contrast this to the Lannister’s, who all have various sexual traumas inherited from their patriarch Tywin, and fail to meet the personal and political challenges presented to them as a result.

Of course the Brothers Krynn Disagrees:

"Because of this Ned Stark is very much a buffoon, and the likes of the incompetent sex-addled, drunkard Lannisters must triumph."

Ned makes mistakes throughout the narrative, but very much dies because he needs to for narrative reasons, not because of any fundamental trait the he has. Ned is honestly a very conflicted guy: a lot of his inner monologue is PTSD from the last war, and his inner concerns have little to do with sex, instead dealing with the conflict between trying to protect his family, or doing what he thinks is morally right and honorable. The Lannisters' are no less complicated, and the idea that they do triumph is laughable: very quickly after their "victory", House Lannister is in shambles. In fact you can argue that sex is central to their downfall. The incest between Cersei and Jaime is one of the direct causes of the war that is central to the first three novels. Tywin and Tyrion clearly also have their own sexually-linked problems, and Tywin's sexual treatment of Tyrion's first wife DIRECTLY LEADS to his death and the downfall of his house/legacy. George clearly does not think "sexy Lannister's good", and if you think so, you can't read. When Tywin dies, the regime he built quickly falls apart, as it's constructed on a level of fear, violence, and cunning that his children can't maintain. He also, as many people in the novel point out, dies stinking of his own shit.

Ned's legacy on the other hand is such that his vassals will march to battle in the middle of a snowstorm to save his daughter from a marriage with a monster. All his children remember him fondly and try to live up to the ideals he taught them, as fate slowly brings the whole family back together. Who really is the buffoon there?

I want to live forever in a land where summer lasts a thousand years. I want a castle in the clouds where I can look down over the world. I want to be six-and-twenty again. When I was six-and-twenty I could fight all day and fuck all night. What men want does not matter. Winter is almost upon us, boy. And winter is death. I would sooner my men die fighting for the Ned's little girl than alone and hungry in the snow, weeping tears that freeze upon their cheeks. No one sings songs of men who die like that. As for me, I am old. This will be my last winter. Let me bathe in Bolton blood before I die. I want to feel it spatter across my face when my axe bites deep into a Bolton skull. I want to lick it off my lips and die with the taste of it on my tongue.-The King’s Prize, ADWD

Fantasy and Truth

The next banger from the Brothers Krynn:

The reason for this is that Martin is incapable of writing tales of honor, of chivalry, of faith, of goodness because let us be honest… he has precious little of it in him. He has no belief in it. He has only scorn for it, as is evident in all his tales.

This is just completely untrue as to be approaching the level of libel. The three prequel novellas, combined in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, are pretty much only about what chivalry looks like, and there are plenty of characters, ranging from Jaime Lannister to Brienne of Tarth who are supremely concerned with their own code of conduct. I mean how can you not read the following passage and not come away thinking that Martin has some idea about what faith, goodness, and courage actually are?

Willow stepped out into the rain, a crossbow in her hands. The girl was shouting at the riders, but a clap of thunder rolled across the yard, drowning out her words. As it faded, Brienne heard the man in the Hound's helm say, "Loose a quarrel at me and I'll shove that crossbow up your cunt and fuck you with it. Then I'll pop your fucking eyes out and make you eat them." The fury in the man's voice drove Willow back a step, trembling. Seven, Brienne thought again, despairing. She had no chance against seven, she knew. No chance, and no choice. She stepped out into the rain, Oathkeeper in hand. "Leave her be. If you want to rape someone, try me." - AFFC

George R. R. Martin is a Romantic who does believe in the ideals that you claim he scorns. But the world is complicated, and being a good person is not as simple as merely upholding those values because in the real world, those things are often in conflict with each other, and the institutions that claim to stand for those values are easily corrupted. We see this in the novels through the lens of the institution of knighthood, which confers honors onto to criminals like Gregor Clegane because of their noble status and physical stature, but fails to grant the same honor to people who actually follow the code due to their gender (Brienne) or social status (Dunk). It’s not that Martin wants us to believe that these ideals are a lie, but rather to critically recognize that institutions and symbols that represent said ideals are not 1:1 substitutes for them.

Tolkien recognized this too to some extent, especially in the Akallabêth in the Silmarillion: the kingship of Numenor as an office did not protect the kings from corruption by Sauron, and it did not protect their descendants in Gondor and Arnor from decadence. Yet because of the mythic quality of Tolkein’s story we do tend to get an exaggerated sense of trust of people and institutions as a collective rather than the personalities of the individuals that make up these groups. The Elves are all wise. The Rohirrim are all brave. The men of Gondor are all good. Of course there are some subversions of these expectations, most notably in the introduction of Aragorn (all that is gold does not glitter), but the pattern holds.

The other point that Martin wants to make is that it’s not always that simple to do the right thing. In Lord of the Rings, doing good may be hard, but it is always simple. There is never a question of whether the ring should be destroyed or Sauron resisted: the main questions revolved around the “how” of these things and the development of moral character to not breakdown when the going gets tough.

In A Song of Ice and Fire, doing good is not so simple. I think one of the best examples of this is Jon's story in the latest entry in the series. Jon is the Lord Commander of the Night's Watch, whose job it is to protect the world from supernatural evil. And he does this job very well in very difficult circumstances. However, in a nearby theatre of the plot (the North), there is a civil war going on between the forces of King Stannis Baratheon, and the Boltons, the later of whom killed all of Jon’s biological family (the Starks). It is very natural, and also certainly noble, for Jon to try and undermine the Boltons. They are evil characters who have done much harm in the story and deserve to be destroyed. But by acting on this noble impulse, Jon critically undermines his other duty of protecting the realm from literal ice zombies that want to kill all humans. And thus the folly of trying to follow all his noble impulses: which eventually gets him killed in a mutiny. For more info on this check out the essays on Jon over at the Mereenese Blot.

There are countless similar conundrums throughout all the storylines of all the novels. Martin is ultimately interested in exploring the ways our noble impulses come into contradiction with each other, and how simplistic morality stories can often get in the way of making good decisions. Life is not a song, sweetling.

Religion

This one is hard one to discuss because I think unfortunately many in the same space as the Brothers Krynn (and in my own parish) are in deep denial about the political nature that the church has now, and since the days of Saint Paul, has always had. Popes led armies into battle, helped to redraw the political maps of Europe, and had orgies in Saint Peter’s Basilica. Protestantism was just as much of a political movement as it was a genuine reaction to the spiritual excesses of the medieval church hierarchy. The Taiping Rebellion, still the bloodiest per capita war in Chinese history was spearheaded by a man who claimed to be the brother of Jesus Christ. And we don’t even need to start talking about the tight link between the political and the spiritual in Islam. Frankly, it is insane to not regard all organized religion as fundamentally political as well as spiritual.

Tolkien doesn’t even address this questions at all: most of the characters in the book are vaguely gnostic, despite the fact that we know the Eru Llúvatar (God) is real and acts in the world. I understand why he did this: he was writing a mythology for his own people. There was no need to complicate things with having the people in the myth have their own faiths.

Martin crafts a much more complex tapestry of faiths and belief systems in his world. There are at least four different faiths in the main continent of Westeros: the Faith of the Seven, the Drowned God, the Old Gods, and the Lord of Light, all of which have their own religious structures and various degrees of supernatural intervention. You have very religious characters, who clearly believe in their faith: Davos, Sansa, and Brienne are constantly making references to different members of the Seven, cynical atheists like Tyrion, and opportunists like Cersei or Stannis that use the faith as a political, or in the case of Stannis, supernatural tool.

We also get a fairly rich sense of what these faiths value. The followers of the Lord of Light are supremely concerned with coming Eschaton: a showdown between themselves and the great evil that lurks beyond the Wall. The Faith of the Seven is concerned with knightly values, while the old Gods are more concerned with traditional values that revolve around nature, the land, and the personal embodiment of justice.

And religious actions do have consequences. Cersei defiles the Great Sept of Baelor when her son orders Ned’s execution on its steps. This wins her no points with the Faith and leads directly to her downfall in the fourth book. Similarly, Stannis’ embrace of the foreign faith of the Lord of Light also makes it difficult to win over northern lords when his priests demand that their heart trees be burned. Beliefs do matter in this world, but so do politics.

Conclusion

Martin's fundamental critique of Tolkien is that the world isn't as simple as a struggle between good and evil. Yes there are elements of that, but often times it is our noble desires IN CONFLICT with each other that causes the real problems. From a Romantic (and gnostic) perspective each individual has to examine the contents of their own soul to make their own (subjective) decision. Of course there are general patterns to what is true and good and beautiful, Martin (and I) certainly think so, but the devil is in the details. And that is for each one of us to figure out: no one is coming to save you.

And that is why it is important to read these books, and everything else much more carefully than the Brothers Krynn. Even if you disagree fundamentally with what is being said, it does you no favors to claim that your enemies “have a black soul. have a wicked heart, and [don’t] believe in goodness. "[That they don’t] believe in righteousness," when that is so clearly not true. All that does is make you new enemies (me), and brings us further away from understanding the good, the true, and the beautiful.

Context

crushedoranges thejdizzler 4mo ago · Edited 4mo ago

This is a good essay, albeit, one that I disagree with vehemently, so I will attempt to rebut concisely and with the most gentle of rebukes.

If the sum of his contribution to the fantasy genre is that 'it's more complicated then that' and shades of grey, I'd reply: 'no shit'. He muddles... in a very liberal kind of way. In a way that does not add clarity, but obfuscates. In the way Samwell Tarly (his favorite character and probable authorial stand-in) is. Feast for Crows is him saying 'war is bad'. No shit! Don Quixote tilting at windmills. You mean to tell me that this author who desires to add nuance to the fantasy genre, comes up with the moral... war is bad'. Is his target audience literally children? Are they morons? Are they liberals?

He doesn't have to tell us that the world is full of piss and shit and cum and tax returns, we know that. There is a genre of Japanese novel, of which is called pillow books, which can be best summed up as... things happen. Things happen, in his underedited, over-bloated work, but nothing much of consequence actually occurs. (This is mostly talking about 4 and 5, rather than 1-3.) Contrast it to his own work - the Dunk and Egg novels, which are superior, which reiterate the core themes of ASOIAF - because they are short stories, and they are not allowed to meander into irrelevancy where things just Happen. They have plots.

To sum it all up (and to not be hypocritical about brevity being the soul of wit) if you're going to write a fantasy epic that is very long, write the transcendental and heroic. If you're going to be an indulgent ride where bad people do horrible things to worse individuals (Black Company is very fun) admit it. There's nothing wrong with that kind of writing. It's unpretentious. Don't be a fat fraud, a stammering pussy, and write about sex and gore and baby-smashing and then waggle your finger at the reader with liberal platitudes.

If Martin was honest about his anti-war and feminist beliefs, he would have written Vinland Saga, but he didn't. He chose to write this. And yes - we can judge him for it. He certainly doesn't hold back with his political opinions. He should extend his audience the same courtesy. But he doesn't. I think that sums it up very nicely.

Hoffmeister25 American Bukelismo Enthusiast crushedoranges 4mo ago

This is a great example of what I was complaining about. This demand that the author take a strong and explicit stand and clearly spell out the moral of the story. Certainly the “message” of Martin’s novels, to the extent there is one, is far more nuanced and interesting than your juvenile “war is bad” interpretation. Even if it wasn’t, though… so what? Why is that an invalid message for a series of fantasy novels?

He doesn't have to tell us that the world is full of piss and shit and cum and tax returns, we know that. There is a genre of Japanese novel, of which is called pillow books, which can be best summed up as... things happen. Things happen, in his underedited, over-bloated work, but nothing much of consequence actually occurs.

I think that actually a lot of people do need the reminder that even the most lofty ideals and heroic rhetoric is ultimately describing a series of mundane, gross, and often brutish Things Happening. Part of Martin’s whole project is to showcase the dramatic irony between, on the one hand, the lofty chivalric self-image and self-importance of the power players involved, and, on the other hand, the grubby and venal motives underlying it, and the hideous reality of the real-world outcomes of all of that rhetoric. He’s forcing the reader to stare straight into the abyss of that discrepancy, rather than escaping into the fantastical good-and-evil stories which still dominate so much of the fantasy novel oeuvre.

if you're going to write a fantasy epic that is very long, write the transcendental and heroic.

Why?

If you're going to be an indulgent ride where bad people do horrible things to worse individuals (Black Company is very fun) admit it.

Why can’t it be something in between? Why can’t he write a series in which many good people earnestly attempt to do good things, and sometimes succeed but often fail? Why can’t he write about people who are situationally bad — pursuing motives and methods which are legitimate in some circumstances, but catastrophic under others? Why can’t there be both moments of heroism, and moments of Bad People Doing Horrible Things? I don’t understand the insistence of forcing the author to “choose a lane” like this.

If Martin was honest about his anti-war and feminist beliefs, he would have written Vinland Saga, but he didn't

I think he is very honest about these views, but I don’t think he beats the audience over the head with them in his works, nor does he appear to want to. I think he does have genuine affection for certain parts of the historical era about which he’s writing, and I don’t think he set out to construct a narrative in which war is depicted as 100% bad, or modern feminism 100% good, or anything quite so morally clean as that. I understand that his behavior on social media is suggestive of a simplistic morality, but I think his writing illustrates that he’s capable of far greater insight than his Twitter or his blog comments let on.

The real world doesn’t have “a plot”. It’s not a series of carefully-woven interlocking events all building toward some satisfying conclusion. To the extent that Martin is going to fail to land the plane of the series, it’s because a novel must to some extent differ from the real world in that sense, and Martin couldn’t thread the needle between the parts of the form which are necessary, and the parts which can be effectively deconstructed. To that extent, I agree that a novel can’t simply be a bunch of Things Happening. But I don’t fault Martin for making the experimental effort to see just how far the deconstruction could be taken before it fell apart.

crushedoranges Hoffmeister25 4mo ago

Before I address the essential thrust of your argument, I would like to state that although many people say that Martin's work is morally complex, I believe that it is not true. To say that 'war is bad' is a rhetorical tool is comic over-exaggeration. In truth, I believe that his work is not even strong enough to state such a thing definitively. That is the nihilism of which people speak. There is no message. Things happen. There is no meaning in the cruelty and goodness of these characters: it might as well not have been written. Their deeds don't effect the world. At times, they hardly effect themselves.

It is an exhausting and alienating element of which detracts from the work as a whole.

And that is the fly in the ointment. You can get away with things happen (that's what slice of life is all about, after all.) If the characters are compelling and interesting enough, you can get away with it. But he has slaughtered his best characters and introduced new ones which also meander around, and in an even less interesting fashion. The Dornish characters, Quentyn and Arriane, exemplify the issue the best. Brienne of Tarth wanders around in a futile quest looking for a girl who we know isn't there... Sansa cools her heels observing intrigues that strain the memory to remember.

Perhaps this is more realistic. But he has gone too far. He has deconstructed not just his predecessors, but his own story, and he is unable to put together his magnum opus. If the true quality of stories is the human heart in conflict with itself. then why does his later books make me feel nothing? Why do I feel bored? Why should I give a damn about his silly characters if they do things that change nothing?

Martin's characters are hypoagentic: the plot (read: his notional outline that grows increasingly distorted as characters spin their wheels, waiting for their cue) drives them where they need to go. They have no volition of their own, they are constantly driven by circumstances beyond their control. Neither heroes or villains, just people... perhaps a poignant philosophical point, but terrible for a coherent narrative. He looks into the abyss and sees in it reflected his own helplessness and lack of meaning.

There is nothing romantic about that.

thejdizzler crushedoranges 4mo ago

This is a really frustrating comment because I don't feel like it engages with what I wrote nor, nor with the comment above, nor even in good faith with the author's work. You are doing the exact same thing that I come down on the Brother's Krynn for: engaging in bombastic, exagerrated critiques of the book that have much more basis in your reactions and emotions to the book rather than what is actually in the text. Now unfortunately I have quite the large rhetorical advantage here because I've read these books many times and love them, and so have many more resources to draw upon to contradict your rather juvenile interpretations of A Feast for Crows in Particular.

Let's start with the first point.

To say that 'war is bad' is a rhetorical tool is comic over-exaggeration. In truth, I believe that his work is not even strong enough to state such a thing definitively. That is the nihilism of which people speak. There is no message. Things happen. There is no meaning in the cruelty and goodness of these characters: it might as well not have been written. Their deeds don't effect the world. At times, they hardly effect themselves.

I'm not sure how you can say this given millions of people have gotten so much out of these books, but I disgress. A Feast for Crows is certainly the easiest of the books to pick a fight with in this regard, but again I think it's pretty easy to prove you wrong. Let's go through the major plot points of AFFC and see if anything "happens"

Cersei in King's Landing: Without Tywin/Jaime/Tyrion to keep her in line, Cersei descends further and futher into an egoistic spiral where she becomes increasingly paranoid, easily manipulable (and fatter), and begins to take on all the characteristics of her dead husband who she hated. This culminates in her misplaying her hand and being arrested by the faith militant Themes/messages: corrupting nature of power (even for someone already clearly corrupt), complicated relationship between love and hatred (Cersei sure spends a lot of time thinking about Robert), fear of declining sexual attractiviting when one's power is derived from appearances.
Sansa in the Eeyrie: Sansa sinks deeper into her identity as Peter Baelish's stepdaughter. There's some minor politicing in the Vale of Arryn, but I found most of Sansa's sections to be focused on her struggles with her own identity and her own ideals. So much of Sansa's story is about her obsession with some knight or hero coming to save her from the trials and tribulations she's been put through, and this part of her arc is about her slow realization that hero has to be her herself. She has to be the one who plays the game and embody the ideals of her father. How is this not a powerful message.
Dorne. Arianne and Ser Arys plan to crown Myrcella Baratheon queen and rebel against the Iron Throne after the death of her uncle. This goes horribly wrong when her father finds out, and Myrcella is maimed, Arys dies and one of her co-conspirators escapes. Her father confesses his own long-planned moves against the Lannsiter regime. Themes/messages: the innocent are always those who suffer most in war, vendetta's never solve anything, thinking carefully about a plan doesn't necessarily make it so it's going to work out. Adam Feldman has some great essays on this plotline at the Mereenese Blot
Iron Islands. Balon Greyjoy is dead so there's an election for a new King. Balon's brother Euron wins the election through the promise of even greater booty through the continuation of raiding/reaving, this time in the south. Asha is unable to articulate her reasons for peace, and Victarion is unable to effectively form a coalition with her because of his views on gender/general dimwittedness. There's some more reaving in the Shield Islands off the coast of the Reach where it becomes increasingly clear that Euron merely views the ironborne as a tool for his lovecraftian plans. Themes/messages: The seductive appeal of war, manipulabiliity of democratic institutions, problems with holding to tradition when tradition clearly no longer works.
Arya. Arya trainsto become an assasin in Bravos. At the end of the book she has to give up Needle, which is her last real memory of home. Like Sansa this section is very much about identity. Arya has worn so many faces throughout the series and been forced to do some pretty horrible things (remember she's an 8 year old when the series starts). These sections made me think about how we shape and form our own identities: is there some deep core of who we are, or is it more dependent on our environment.
Brienne. Brienne wanders the Riverlands looking for Sansa, which we know is a futile quest. That is not to say nothing happens: each chapter is a little adventure in of itself, and serves as a vehicle to explore the questions of knighthood and chivalry. Does Brienne still embody Knightly ideals even though she doesn't have the actual blessing of the institution of knighthood? Even though her quest is pointless? Yes, yes she does. She kills outlaws, she protects the innocent from violence (which I quote from the text above), and she trains a squire in this image. Martin is trying to tell us her that you don't need a grand quest or instititutional approval to be heroic and to live up to your ideals.
Jaime. Jaime has a lot of parallels to Brienne's story. He spends all of this book mopping up the last bits of Stark resistance in the Riverlands. Knighthood is also central to this arc. Jaime spends most of his life scoffing at the institution because of its apparent contradictions. Yet in this book Jaime realizes that those contradictions mainly involve other's perceptions of you: you always have a choice to do what you personally believe is right and thread the narrow needle of all your conflicting vows.
Sam. Sam only has three chapters in this book, so his arc is rather short. Sam and Maester Aemon are sailing to Oldtown but get stuck in Braavos. Maester Aemon ends up dying, and Sam comes into conflict with the other brother of the night's watch who is shirking his vows. Sam finally ends up standing up for himself and his beliefs and ends up finding passage on a ship because of it. In contrast to your point, this is an arc about gaining agency by standing up for one's beliefs, even in the most desperate of times.

I just gave you eight character arcs with various levels of plot and character development. It's okay to not have enjoyed these arcs, to think the book as a whole is too slow, or to think that some of these arcs were poorly done. What is not okay is to claim that it all means nothing, that there's no message here, that the character's lack agency in their own stories. That is just so clearly false. Just because the stakes aren't world shaking, doesn't mean that the character's lives and actions don't have meaning. Brienne might not find Sansa, but she saves Willow and her siblings from being murdered and raped. Jaime might not be able to turn back the clock on the whole of the war of the Five Kings, but he does use diplomacy to prevent a bloody battle over Riverrun.

You and all the other people in this thread need to be better readers. Not only does Martin's work clearly not support a nihilistic world view, but my own essay very clearly argues against that. All you all have to offer in return are word salads about your emotions reading the book, rather than actual textual evidence.

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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024