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Good post, and doubly good for inspiring the linking of the "Galbrush Paradox" below--which I had never encountered, but which I love both because it is absolutely correct and because Guybrush Threepwood is one of the greatest video game characters of all time. (Heh. Rubber tree.)
What your post mostly made me think, though, was--yeah, as it turns out, people don't usually identify and discuss problems because they are interested in obviously relevant solutions. They identify and discuss "problems" as a negotiating tactic for getting whatever it is they actually want--usually, greater leverage or control over whoever it is they're complaining to.
To give a very simple example, I was subjected to this once as part of a hiring committee. We were going over god-only-knows how many resumes from grossly underqualified applicants, and I would say "let's toss this one out because X." And someone would respond, "wait, though, X isn't necessarily the problem you're making it out to be." Then we'd come to another application with X, and that very same someone would say "let's toss this one out because X." Then I would say, "I thought you didn't think X was a problem though" and I would get kind of a nasty look, followed by vague irrelevant platitudes--not even hair splitting, just straight up gobbledygook. This is from fellow tenured faculty, by the way, PhDs the lot of them, but it became quickly clear that for at least two members of the committee, there were no real standards of evaluation in play--just "say negative things about the ones I don't like, and positive things about the ones I do." Pointing out their inconsistencies was met with dirty looks or accusations of being unnecessarily aggressive about the process.
Actually I once got a similar criticism from a law professor when I was involved in a mock appeal. I threw everything I had into giving the most thorough arguments I could, and my peers were clearly frustrated by the amount of work that created for them. The professor had to step in and give us all a "remember this is just an exercise, we're not actually deciding a case here, no need to put so much into it..." Decades later, I'm still kind of cross about it!
This is like maybe the original sin from the perspective of the contemporary Rationalist movement, which Scott Alexander has done a lot of good work articulating with his culture war writings on social signaling. Most people are not making arguments, because most people are not usually reasoning at all. They're playing a hierarchy game, and complaining is a way of subordinating others. Their arguments are trash qua arguments, but it's a category error to even evaluate them that way. It's like watching someone flip a chessboard and then patiently explaining to them that flipping the chessboard isn't a legitimate move.
I apologize that this is pretty meta but the disconnect I see in so many people between identifying a problem and considering actual solutions is something I think about a lot. There is of course a gender stereotype here ("men, stop trying to solve our problems, that's not why we share them"--"if you don't want me to solve your problem, there's not really any point in listening to you talk about it"--"I'm just talking to show that I care!"--"I'm solving to show that I care!"--"if you really cared then you would stop trying to fix things!"--"okay, I guess I can't fix this relationship then, we're done"--"not like that!"). But while men and women often approach it from different angles, I've had just as many problems with men doing this sort of thing, as women. Most recently, I had a colleague come down with a serious case of AI psychosis (we should definitely start calling it cyberpsychosis) and completely lost his ability to engage with me on substance. Every disagreement we have now turns into him burying me under reams of ChatGPT-generated bullshit; when I pick it apart on substance, he says "okay I'll get back to you" and then ghosts me long enough for the discussion to go stale.
(To avoid having it suggested that I'm doing exactly what I'm complaining about, here, I will respond more directly to the substance of your post with an observation: possibly I don't hang out with the "right" kind of men, or maybe I hang out with the "wrong" kind of women, but in real life I have heard many, many women talk about their own breasts using descriptors like "perky" (or "tight" or "saggy" or "flat")--and almost never heard men speak of women's breasts that way outside of movies. I feel like "real women don't examine, describe, sexualize, or even notice their own breasts, that's something only thirsty lecherous male authors make badly-written female characters do" is the kind of egocentric misconception a teenage boy might have about the virginal purity of women. Women are of course not a monolith, probably not all women do this, but most of the women I've known in my life have been pretty casual/unconcerned/vaguely raunchy when discussing their "boobs" (the word I hear deployed most often, though maybe that is a generational thing). Sure, it's not always handled well in literature, but in reality the only people I know who are more obsessed with female breasts than young men, is young women.)
I feel really lucky to have been disabused of female purity early on.
I had a younger sister on the highschool varsity volleyball team. I was a senior, I was classmates with many of the very attractive and tall senior players. My sister was one of two sophmores on the varsity team. They won states that year, it was not a shitty team. But boy did they love to talk about shit. Any juvenile male thought of 'huh i wonder what the hot girls are talking about, maybe its how they really want some good dick or something' got so disabused that year. No, they weren't talking about dicks, they were talking about their shits. The big ones, the liquid ones, the frequent ones, the smelly ones, etc. I had to beg my sister to stop talking about her team gossip. One of the best parts of going to her games was looking at all the beautiful buts in spandex. But it was completely ruined. All I could think about was them talking about their latest dumps on the ivory throne.
No, it wasn't some psyops to get me not interested in her teammates. Sister would have set it up if it was viable. She told me when her classmates her age had crushes on me. A real caring sibling. I still get along great with her.
Nowadays I have three daughters. They stink, they shit, they pee, I've changed so many diapers, and wiped poop out of a vagina so many times. Sorry if that is graphic for people without female daughters. It just becomes this weird fact of life. Once they get past one the shits get real gnarly and you want them getting potty trained asap. Of course my daughters fought it until 4.
Sorry why am I talking about shit so much? Its a default human experience. And its also like the first thing any self conscious female will want covered up in their characters. I think we should have a shit test for female characters. Can they talk about taking a shit for a few sentences, even just as an internal monologue. If yes, they are a real person. If no, they are fake barbie dolls.
There are plenty of works in which the male characters could not plausibly talk about taking a shit. Can you imagine LotR with an aside about the logistics of Gandalf having to go Number 2 while fighting the Balrog?
Ultimately, fiction more often than not wants to show humans as they would like to be, not as they are. If humanity could reinvent itself according to its ideals, it would probably not poop.
(It's often downright jarring when fiction that otherwise has no pretense to cynical realism does involve defecation. I remember being jarred when Soukou Akki Muramasa's protagonist made sure to take a dump before getting in his robot armour.)
Apparently GRRM made up for all the lack of Tolkien talking about going to the latrine where there is no latrine. Yet another reason I am heartily glad I gave up on reading the SOIAF with the first volume, back in the before days when it was first published.
Unprecedented foresight and wisdom.
After getting burned by the Wheel of Time series, my "never start a fantasy series unless it's finished" rule has spared me from several much-hyped series that look like they will never be finished (GRRM and Rothfuss immediately come to mind).
You and a lot of other people. Larry Correia often rants about how badly this has ruined the market for new epic fantasy authors, though for some reason he blames GRRM rather than Jordan.
Jordan died from a rare disease. That's very different from GRRM and Rothfuss who are alive and well, but appear to have gotten terminal writer's block and/or lost interest in completing the series.
It seems to me that for many writers the fun is kind of in making up the story as you go along. JK Rowling who has had a pretty consistent regular output for 30+ years now, along with those thriller writers like Coben who churn out books on the regular, seem to do this - you can tell because they all suffer from the kind of plot holes that would be easily avoided if the whole story was very tightly plotted before the bulk of the writing began. They will usually have an idea of the vague events and ending, but most of what happens in terms of scene to scene or location to location stuff is probably decided at the time of writing.
By contrast, I think Martin probably suffers from the opposite problem. My suspicion is that he has known exactly how this story plays out in relatively minute detail (whether or not he shared all that detail with the show creators) for a long time because his great joy is world building, to the point that the actual writing is no longer a creative exercise in the same way. All that is left is hanging the prose of dialogue, description and second-to-second mechanical stage direction on the frame that he’s had in his head for many years, which is distinctly unsatisfying when one’s passion is imagining the setting and the grand sweep of events therein.
Classic pulp fiction and YA and mystery and adventure writers who churned out hundreds of books almost never cared about worldbuilding. Agatha Christie, Clive Cussler, these types had supporting characters come and go, backstories shift, large background elements were taken up and discarded, continuity was often broken with regularity to the point that even the ages of the protagonists often didn’t seem to make sense.
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