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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1427 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 5, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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World War Z was released on the upswing of Peak Zombie, and now we're well into the downslop. I loved zombie apocalypse content around high school in 2010 or so, but by the time The Walking Dead was big and the World War Z movie came out, it was just so beaten to death and cliche that I was sick of it all.

As an aside, I believe that is what is preventing GRRM from ever finishing The Winds of Winter, he probably had ideas for how to really play with and subvert tropes around zombies in fantasy/horror...and then a hundred other major zombie properties came out between when he started the series and when he got to TWOW, and a thousand more have come out while he's working on TWOW. My personal theory: Jon Snow is meant to assume the role of the Night King to lead the Others and the Zombies away from the human lands to the South, this has been theorycrafted well in advance. The problem for GRRM is that this is also the ending to the Arthas raid in World of Warcraft Wrath of the Lich King, so it's no longer cool and creative and subverting tropes in the genre, it's merely regurgitating another story. The irony being that both the Scourge's first appearance in Warcraft III and the ending of WotLK were probably inspired by GRRM and ASOIAF. GRRM's subversiveness has been torpedoed by his own success before he could finish his work.

Pretty good theory, makes sense on why GRRM has writer's block. He will probably pass of natural causes before he finishes ASOIAF unfortunately, being obese and physically inactive.

It's a literary debate grenade I throw out every few months when someone brings up Game of Thrones, how GRRM set out consciously with the goal of critiquing or debating or surpassing Tolkien, and ultimately failed because he was unable to write an ending.

My theory was always that he was going in the opposite direction, and going to do a "White Walkers win" ending to shit on Tolkien's optimism and faith. "AKSHUALLY, people don't just come together after a hatefully bitter civil war. They just die."

And that's a thing you can do when you're writing a "Top 100 most popular current fantasy series", where the grim ending is what makes a splash, but now that Game of Thrones broke containment and is world-renowned to normies, he doesn't have the balls to eat the backlash.

Anyone out there is going to have one tell of a time in attempting to surpass Tolkien. The mythology of Middle Earth went well beyond what most people found in LOTR alone, and it wasn’t simply the range but the depth of fantasy he went into.

I don't think it's really possible.

My wife is reading LOTR for the first time right now, and asked me how much of modern fantasy Tolkien invented. And I said that it's not so much that he invented a lot of things, almost everything in LOTR had some precedent either in prior sword and sandals fantasy universes or in myths both ancient and modern. ((Among other things, I think Tolkien scholars make a concerted effort to connect Numenor primarily to Plato's Atlantis and skip over the various Aryanist fantasies around Atlantis and Lemuria you see more clearly in R.E. Howard's stories.))

But Tolkien is fantasy's Most Recent Common Ancestor on essentially all questions. He settled a lot of different versions of what Elves, Orcs, Goblins, Dwarves were. Before Tolkien they could be a lot of things, after Tolkien they're mainly just the one thing, or if you change it you are in conscious conversation with Tolkien's tradition in changing it.

You just can't get that kind of juice today. The only thing comparable in influence is D&D, which will never get the same credibility.

Oh, yes it makes sense he would attempt to equal or surprass Tolkien, GRRM wrote about how he thought he could never equal Tolkien in the preface to his short story collection as a young writer.

I like some of his short stories, A Song for Lya is one of my favorites. It has an interesting ending! I bet he wants to land an ending to ASOIAF which is just as good.

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