Reality is far from being boring. If anyone thinks the real world is less interesting than fiction, pick up something on the final decades of the Roman Republic and the transition to Empire. It was a real life Game of Thrones.
or ya know, look at Syria and Iraq
Guest_Marion_*
I didn't know the dead walking after being drowned horribly, burned and rotting corpses, people turning into lyrium and being harvested, questionable sexual activities in Orlais, BDSM, nudity, descriptions of people suffering before dying (courtesy of Cole), rotting bodies thrown into pits and a crazed former Magister trying to rule Thedas with a demon army was considered Disney-like.
True DAI is less gritty, but 10 years after a nasty blight, the world would seem less bleak, minus the Templars and Mages being idiots. Did we remain in the middle ages? No. We grew, adapted and became what we are today. A paved nightmare filled with gadgets that steal our souls. 
I liked the game, but while watching a recent G.R.R.M interview I immediately thought of the game at the 11:50 mark. What do you guys think? Is Dragon Age Inquisition similar to what he was describing?
https://www.youtube....h?v=Ms2LXYUlvc8
A bit late to the party (thanks, A(H3N2)), but to answer the OP’s question:
‘Yes, but with some qualifications’
I’ve watched and read quite a few interviews and talks with George Martin, and when he drops ‘Disney’ or ‘spunky girl’, he refers to mere symptoms of what he sees as more fundamental problems with a lot of fantasy.
Here’s some quotes from an interview with Time Magazine:
most of publishing regarded Tolkien as a freak: okay, this is one of those weird little books that comes along once in a while and it’s a bestseller for reasons nobody can comprehend, but no one will ever do another book like this. And it was [Lester and Judy-Lynn] del Rey at Ballantine Books, which later became Del Rey Books, who really finally challenged that assumption in the late-‘70’s, when they published the Stephen R. Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant and Terry Brooks’ Sword of Shannara, which were the first real attempts to follow in Tolkien’s footsteps… both with success. And that led to a lot more Tolkien imitators.
And as a Tolkien fan, I sampled a lot of it. And hated a lot of it. It just seemed to me that they were imitating Tolkien without understanding Tolkien and they were imitating the worst things of Tolkien. I mean, I loved Tolkien but I don’t think he was perfect. So I did want to do something that replied not only to Tolkien, but to all of the Tolkien successors who had followed that. And essentially made it a branch of, I don’t know, YA or something like that.
I was also reading a lot of historical fiction. And the contrast between that and a lot of the fantasy at the time was dramatic because a lot of the fantasy of Tolkien imitators has a quasi-medieval setting, but it’s like the Disneyland Middle Ages. You know, they’ve got tassels and they’ve got lords and stuff like that, but they don’t really seem to grasp what it was like in the Middle Ages. And then you’d read the historical fiction which was much grittier and more realistic and really give you a sense of what it was like to live in castles or to be in a battle with swords and things like that. And I said what I want to do is combine some of the realism of historical fiction with some of the appeal of fantasy, the magic and the wonder that the best fantasy has.
The battle between good and evil is a theme of much of fantasy. But I think the battle between good and evil is thought largely within the individual human heart, by the decisions that we make. It’s not like evil dresses up in black clothing and you know, they’re really ugly. These are some of the things that Tolkien did; he made them work fabulously, but in the hands of his imitators, they become total clichés. I mean the orc-like creatures who always do dress in black and … they’re really ugly and they’ve got facial deformities or something. You can tell that if somebody’s ugly, he must be evil. And then Tolkien’s heroes are all very attractive people and all that, of course, again this become cliché in the hands of the Tolkien imitators.
You know what I’m saying, I love Tolkien. I want to stress that here because I don’t want to come across like I’m slamming him. But I am responding to him. One of my favorite characters in Lord of the Ring is Boromir. Boromir is a traditional hero in many ways. He’s the Prince, he’s the heir to the great kingdom he’s very brave, he’s a great warrior and all of that, but ultimately he succumbs to the temptation of the ring. But then he dies heroically, protecting innocents. He has that wonderful sense of greatness about him.
Saruman is another interesting character the White Wizard whose been on the side of good literally hundreds, if not thousands of years, as the wizards are not men, they’re Maiar, they’re very long-lived. And yet he too, at the end you know succumbs. These are two characters where the human heart is in conflict.
As you say, you’re writing fantasy, you could give this story any sort of history that you wanted. Is there something that you gain from borrowing from the template of something we’ve seen in the real world, in our actual history, and using that in this world?
I think you gain a level of, I don’t know, realism. You’re not going to be careful in fantasy because it can easily pull apart. Magic is a particular — I mean, my fantasy is quite low magic compared to the majority of it out there. And in that sense, I was following Tolkien’s footsteps because if you actually look at Lord of the Rings as I did when I was writing this, [Middle Earth is] a very magical world in a sense, it’s a world of wonders and marvels and so forth, but there’s very little onstage magic. You know? You never see Gandalf doing a spell or, or creating throwing fireballs. You know, if there’s a fight, he draws a sword. You know? He does fireworks… his staff will glow. Minor stuff. Even the magic rings, I mean, the big powerful one ring, all we ever see it do is make people invisible.
You know, it’s not you know, it’s supposed to have these great powers for domination, but it’s not like Frodo can put it on and tell the Nazgul what to do. You know it doesn’t work that simply. It’s unknowable, it’s mysterious. And that kind of magic I think is good. One mistake I see over time in bad fantasy is they go for the high magic world. They have really powerful wizards and witches and warlocks who can destroy entire armies–and they still have entire armies! No, you got that A equals B here. If you’ve got one guy who can go, booga-booga, and your 10,000 men army is all dead, you’re not going to get together 10,000 men!
But people don’t think through the consequences. They have these very powerful wizards but yet they still have kings and lords who are… why wouldn’t the wizards rule the world? I mean, power gravitates to it, you know.
And then there are some things that are just don’t square with history. In some sense I’m trying to respond to that. [For example] the arranged marriage, which you see constantly in the historical fiction and television show, almost always when there’s an arranged marriage, the girl doesn’t want it and rejects it and she runs off with the stable boy instead. This never ****** happened. It just didn’t. There were thousands, tens of thousand, perhaps hundreds of thousands of arranged marriages in the nobility through the thousand years of Middle Ages and people went through with them. That’s how you did it. It wasn’t questioned. Yeah, occasionally you would want someone else, but you wouldn’t run off with the stable boy.
And that’s another of my pet peeves about fantasies. The bad authors adopt the class structures of the Middle Ages; where you had the royalty and then you had the nobility and you had the merchant class and then you have the peasants and so forth. But they don’t’ seem to realize what it actually meant. They have scenes where the spunky peasant girl tells off the pretty prince. The pretty prince would have raped the spunky peasant girl. He would have put her in the stocks and then had garbage thrown at her. You know.
I mean, the class structures in places like this had teeth. They had consequences. And people were brought up from their childhood to know their place and to know that duties of their class and the privileges of their class. It was always a source of friction when someone got outside of that thing. And I tried to reflect that.
Basically, he’s saying that a lot of fantasy – apart from the magical stuff, because that’s, well, magical – isn’t true to life, past or present.
DA:O did address a lot of this stuff; there’s the Arl of Denerim’s son and his abduction of a bride and several other female city Elves, there’s the caste system in Orzammar, the treachery or apparent treachery of Loghain and Arl Howe, the political infighting and intrigue among the Dwarves, plague and Tevinter slave traders, squalor in the Alienage and among the Dwarven outcasts etc. The supernatural threats are more prominent than in ASoIaF / Game of Thrones, but the narrative meat in DA:O lies overwhelmingly with the people, their actions and motivations.
Now, ‘Disneyfication’ is a term that originally referred to the ‘softening’ of European fairy tales by Disney, meaning the removal of a lot, if not most, of the cruelty and violence, and the replacement of tragic or at least ambiguous endings by happy ones. That, and the addition of lots of cute animals, singing and dancing…
One description of Disneyfication I’ve found is ‘the application of simplified aesthetic, intellectual or moral standards to a thing that has the potential for more complex or thought-provoking expression’.
I do think it is guilty of a fair degree of ‘Western-style modernization’. Sexual mores and gender roles are at the left-liberal modern Western end of the spectrum; social mobility seems to be much higher than in most historical periods (a commoner can become Duke and father-in-law of the King or the Thedosian equivalent of the Pope), the penal system seems to be pretty mild (at worst hanging or beheading, Enlightenment Era Europeans or early 20th century Manchu Chinese should have been so lucky).
Depicting the cruelty, harsh politics and squalor of historical societies isn’t necessary for an immersive or believable fantasy; there are also a lot of fantasy books, including some real classics, where these issues are ignored or skirted around because the focus of the story lies elsewhere.
However, DA:O does address them, they’re part of the world they wanted to show and the story they wanted to tell, but the game keeps it relatively simple and ‘clean’. It’s clear it’s not all sunshine in Thedas; there’s corpses hanging in the background in the dungeons beneath the Arl of Denerim’s estate and elsewhere you see impaled Darkspawn victims. But…it stays at a convenient distance; it’s a bit of visual background flavour that the player might or might not pick up, but isn’t going to make much of an impression anyway. We’re used to gory images, and what DA:O showed was pretty tame.
So I think that as a whole, DA:O wasn’t ‘Disneyfied’ in the sense of ‘cutification’, but it was an example of simplification / modernization and the partial rubbing out of really nasty / under your skin-getting in-your-face brutal stuff. That simplified, partially ‘defanged’ quasi-grittiness continued somewhat in a weakened form in DA2, but seems largely absent in DA:I. A friend of mine commented how ‘clean’ everything was in DA:I, even compared to DA:O. We’re not at the stage of dancing, singing cute animals yet, but we already have some upbeat songs to cheer people up.
In a general sense, I suspect Martin’s complaint about many fantasy authors lacking any real knowledge of (or interest in) historical societies and politics may apply to Bio’s writers. Maybe not entirely (probably not true for every member of the writing team), and may be a case of deliberate simplification. Still, I can’t help shake the feeling that what quasi-grittiness there was, was more derived from other ‘gritty’ fantasy literature than from actual history or mythology.
No, we’re a long way from The Rains of Castamere or the ‘ole time cheery European originals.....
George is a great writer, but not every fantasy story has to be "dark and gritty".
Origins wasn't even "that dark" to begin with. It certainly had a strong undertone of grit and depressing topics, but there was more than that. There was also a concurrent undertone of hope, endurance and there was a chance to make the world even a little better. It wasn't an easy chance, but it was there nonetheless. All while maintaining an aura of maturity which kept it from being a "disneyland fantasy".
DA2's a good example of a story "trying too hard to be dark, gritty and mature" to where it shoots itself in the foot multiple times. Also, the conflict is so dark, contrived and hopeless that darkness induced apathy sets in to where you don't care about what happens because all roads lead to an outcome that sucks. ASOIAF never crossed that line even in its darkest and most cruel moments. Those moments happened because of choices and consequences on the parts of all parties and these characters acted in accordance with their agency and characterizations. Not so with DA2 where a Grey-Grey Conflict devolves into Black vs Black with Hawke being forced to go along with a meaningless choice between the two because the plot says so rather than just leaving or striking out against both when that was within their power/agency to do so.
So the developers took a step back with Inquisition. It's not as dark or gritty as the previous games, true. But does that make it necessarily bad? Does that make it less "mature"? I'd say that it still handles itself well and it's in-game situation is portrayed relatively greatly despite several missed opportunities. Contriving stuff for the sake of forcing drama or conflict just for the sake of drama and conflict would have been repeating the mistakes of DA2 and we don't need that do we?
The problem with trying to be too "realistic" about the past is that the people of today have a very different set of values than the people of the past.
Yes the prince probably would have raped the "spunky peasant girl", just like there would have been rife racial discrimination and racial slurs thrown into every day discussions, people spouting complete rubbish and pseudoscience that goes against everything we know today, shocking gender inequality, people being drawn and quartered out in the public for all to see...
But how much of that do people nowadays actually want to see? If every character was a massive racist and sexist, as they would have been in the past, it would be completely impossible for a modern audience to empathize with them.
snip
I broadly agree, but the thing is, Martin does it himself. Social mobility in the case of Loghain? Martin has a man born as a commoner become Hand of the King, second most powerful man in the realm. Twice (Davos and Septon Barth in the backstory). Spunky peasant girls? There's none in ASOIAF, but Arya pretty much has a 21st century outlook on life in that she hates the trappings of nobility and thinks peasants are her equals. Modern values? Westeros as a whole, and Dany in particular, have a visceral hatred of slavery that was just not present in the Middle Ages. Racism is not very present, hell Dragon Age deals with it more. Religious fanatism is pretty low, hell two very different religions cohexist in Westeros in pretty much perfect harmony, try pulling that stunt off in between catholicism and the Pagan gods of old. Meanwhile Dragon Age has religious wars every so often, and more fanatics than you can shake a stick it.
Besides, the real Middle Ages or Renaissance weren't doom and gloom with absolutely no social mobility all the time either. We have real rags to riches stories in cases like Mazarin, who went from Italian pauper to basically the most powerful man in France, or Popes like Pius X who was son of a post officier, or Basil I who was a peasant and became Eastern Roman Emperor, or Hideyoshi in Japan. It makes sense that exceptionnal people like Loghain or Leliana can attain power within such systems.
As I said before, Dragon Age focuses on other aspects of the setting than the gritty, let's-have-everyone-be-a-swearing-racist-*******-oh-so-realistic elements of, say, The Witcher, and I'm comfortable with that. They should still probably not make the fourth game as light as Inquisition was in places, but I don,t want the series to devolve into uber-grittyness for its own sake either.
I broadly agree, but the thing is, Martin does it himself. Social mobility in the case of Loghain? Martin has a man born as a commoner become Hand of the King, second most powerful man in the realm. Twice (Davos and Septon Barth in the backstory). Spunky peasant girls? There's none in ASOIAF, but Arya pretty much has a 21st century outlook on life in that she hates the trappings of nobility and thinks peasants are her equals. Modern values? Westeros as a whole, and Dany in particular, have a visceral hatred of slavery that was just not present in the Middle Ages. Racism is not very present, hell Dragon Age deals with it more. Religious fanatism is pretty low, hell two very different religions cohexist in Westeros in pretty much perfect harmony, try pulling that stunt off in between catholicism and the Pagan gods of old. Meanwhile Dragon Age has religious wars every so often, and more fanatics than you can shake a stick it.
Besides, the real Middle Ages or Renaissance weren't doom and gloom with absolutely no social mobility all the time either. We have real rags to riches stories in cases like Mazarin, who went from Italian pauper to basically the most powerful man in France, or Popes like Pius X who was son of a post officier, or Basil I who was a peasant and became Eastern Roman Emperor, or Hideyoshi in Japan. It makes sense that exceptionnal people like Loghain or Leliana can attain power within such systems.
As I said before, Dragon Age focuses on other aspects of the setting than the gritty, let's-have-everyone-be-a-swearing-racist-*******-oh-so-realistic elements of, say, The Witcher, and I'm comfortable with that. They should still probably not make the fourth game as light as Inquisition was in places, but I don,t want the series to devolve into uber-grittyness for its own sake either.
You seem to be raging against ASoIaF and The Witcher more than you're adressing Martin's point.
First, the examples you're putting forward are from periods and regions far from the medieval (mostly high to late, when it comes to fantasy) and feudal western and central European landscape. Sure, you can pull in the Renaissance, whatever. Bio seems to be fond of that too when it comes to the Orlesian sillyness.
Mazarin is 17th century France, and he was the brilliant end result of three generations of upward mobility (the grandfather providing the father with the education necessary to become a notary, move to Rome, become a high-ranking servant of the princely Colonná family and marry a noble wife, the son starting his career as a not atypical minor aristocratic client of the Colonná. He's more a Littlefinger than a Loghain...). Of course, the emergence of increasingly centralized, bureaucratic governments that could use gifted men without ties to the powerful aristocracy helped too. But 17th century France is a far cry from the ' age of chivalry' of the high and late medieval period.
Pius X? Made his career in the late 19th century, a period with plenty of revolutions and social mobility. ALL of his 19th century predecessors were nobles (some more puissant than others).
Basil I...well, 9th century Byzantium was a relatively modest, centralized state and Basil's career was a rather unusual one. The rump of the Eastern Roman Empire at this time was not even remotely western / central feudal European - although western and central Europe at the time wasn't exactly feudal either, at least not yet. Mentally it's miles removed; this applies even more to Sengoku Japan and Hideyoshi's career.
Sengoku Japan? Well, I don't know enough of it to explain why Hideyoshi was able to rise to a position inconceivable in contemporary Europe; possibly it has something to do with the near-destruction of the old feudal order in Japan in the previous period. Something similar happened in the wake of the Chinese unification by the Qin, who basically swept away the old order, after which their own collapse ultimately paved the way for a peasant to become Emperor.
Point is, every type of period and society has their own ' social ceilings'. Talent and luck and connections will allow a person to rise higher than others who are less talented or lucky, but there is a point above which such a person can't rise. In fact, rising too high could be very dangerous, because typically these people owed their position to the patronage of a more powerful person or the sovereign himself. It was pretty much inconceivable for a commoner to rise to near-royalty in high to late medieval Europe, but a member of the aristocracy started at a higher level and could expect to rise higher, given luck, talent and connections. The talented commoner is ennobled, the noble son becomes a great magnate, the great magnate's son might become a king. Careers of this kind took multiple generations but they did happen; the de la Poles in medieval England were merchants who almost became royalty, the German Fuggers rose from peasants to a wealthy princely family.
Anyway, these historical parallels are ultimately somewhat futile, because the Creators of an IP are God and Master over it. Things in Thedas are what they say it is, whether it feels ' true to life' or not.
Second, the points regarding racism, religion and anti-slavery attitudes in Martin's work: I partly agree, especially on the anti-slavery stuff. But Martin's work is pretty weakly grounded when he moves outside his predominantly medieval Anglo-French 'comfort zone'. A recognisable form of racism was pretty much unknown in medieval times, however. A degree of xenophobia yes, religious prejudice was pretty strong, although this varied greatly depending on the specific century and the region.
I guess Martin sidestepped an issue he himself is somewhat uncomfortable with; religious fanaticism does enter with Melisandre and the High Sparrow, but religion, while clearly present, is not as dominant as it should be. That would even apply if Westeros had a more relaxed religious landscape like the old Persian, Hellenistic and Roman (Principate era) empires. Rituals, temples and gods would be all over the place.
The problem with trying to be too "realistic" about the past is that the people of today have a very different set of values than the people of the past.
Yes the prince probably would have raped the "spunky peasant girl", just like there would have been rife racial discrimination and racial slurs thrown into every day discussions, people spouting complete rubbish and pseudoscience that goes against everything we know today, shocking gender inequality, people being drawn and quartered out in the public for all to see...
But how much of that do people nowadays actually want to see? If every character was a massive racist and sexist, as they would have been in the past, it would be completely impossible for a modern audience to empathize with them.
The problem with trying to be supposedly 'realistic' is that it's a failure of understanding what your story is supposed to do in the first place.
Spoilers: Martin is not remotely 'realistic.' At all. And he has no interest in attempting to be.
I love Disneyland. I used to work there. True story.
I would like a Solas themed ride.
Solavellan is a Solas themed ride... although sadly we never got a "ride Solas" theme?
Religious fanatism is pretty low, hell two very different religions cohexist in Westeros in pretty much perfect harmony, try pulling that stunt off in between catholicism and the Pagan gods of old.
*looks at the followers of R'hollr and the Drwoned God*
yeah....about that....
*looks at the followers of R'hollr and the Drwoned God*
yeah....about that....
It could be spoiler , so ...
Good post, but snipped for brevity and great justice.
I'm not raging at all. I like The Witcher (and can't wait for TW3) and I absolutely love A Song of Ice And Fire. My point was more that, as great a writer as he is, Martin has a tendency to denounce tropes that he then uses himself, or that a portion of his fanbase thinks he's more trope-busting than he really is. I mean, if a prevalent fan theory is proven right, one of the cornerstones of his supposedly gritty fantasy epic is an (apparently) painfully cliché and straightforward love story producing a somewhat by-the-numbers teenage hero. That doesn't mean he cannot pull it off and do it well, but I simply ask that we not act as if Dragon Age was that much more idealistic than ASOIAF. As Martin says himself, he's off to inject some realism in fantasy, not to make it a completely realistic historical simulator (thankfully). I believe Dragon Age also does just that.
I do realize Pius was stretching it, but the point is, exceptional circumstances can produce such things. Loghain becomes influent after, basically, single-handedly liberating Ferelden and being best buds with the king, and Leliana only becomes Divine after the Chantry veers on the edge of collapse (her softened ending is way too wishy-washy for my tastes, however). It's not as if they came to their position because they were Chosen Ones who crowdsurfed their way to the highest positions because the plot demands it.
@Steelcan: I was more talking about the peaceful coexistence between the Faith of the Seven and the Old Gods of the North since the Andals settled. The Ironborn don,t need the Drowned God to be assholes that no one wants around, and you have a point with the Red God but that's mostly reduced to Melissandre and her followers so far, nothing like the inredibly bloody religious wars that have blazed over Europe over the centuries.
@Steelcan: I was more talking about the peaceful coexistence between the Faith of the Seven and the Old Gods of the North since the Andals settled. The Ironborn don,t need the Drowned God to be assholes that no one wants around, and you have a point with the Red God but that's mostly reduced to Melissandre and her followers so far, nothing like the inredibly bloody religious wars that have blazed over Europe over the centuries.
as for the Old Gods/Faith of the Seven, the Andals tried to conquer the North, they just failed, its been hundreds of centuries since then so eventually they probably came to an accord
as for the Old Gods/Faith of the Seven, the Andals tried to conquer the North, they just failed, its been hundreds of centuries since then so eventually they probably came to an accord
So any conflict between the Faiths of the Old gods and the Seven happened hundreds of years before the actual presented story?
Hence the lack of any true religious conflict in ASOIAF with the key exception of the Militant High Sparrow using the Faith Militant to overthrow Cersei.
The problem with trying to be supposedly 'realistic' is that it's a failure of understanding what your story is supposed to do in the first place.
Spoilers: Martin is not remotely 'realistic.' At all. And he has no interest in attempting to be.
Pffft.
Yeah, you not liking how realistically your ideology turns out in ASoIaF does not mean that it is not realistic.
Sounds more like you're mad that said Disneyland fantasies aren't validated by ASoIaF more than anything.
Oh, and you're arbitrarily making up rules again!
So any conflict between the Faiths of the Old gods and the Seven happened hundreds of years before the actual presented story?
Hence the lack of any true religious conflict in ASOIAF with the key exception of the Militant High Sparrow using the Faith Militant to overthrow Cersei.
To be fair, the Faith Militant rebelled against Targaryen rule for a decade and was then disarmed.
What bugs me a bit is that every single southron castle has a Godswood. That's a bit akin to every single medieval European castle having statues of Thor or Zeus. Or, well, every Andrastian Chantry having a carving of Mythal or a Paragon statue or somesuch. It just seems extremely unlikely to keep such religious symbols. I wouldn't expect this kind of religious tolerance today, let alone in the Middle Ages.
I think religion is not so much needed, in already cited the The Witcher, just a few stories you will see mention here and there about religion.(perhaps because of Geralt be an '' almost '' atheist.) The northern kingdoms have different religions, of course has some who preach a single god or a single entity(and are hostile to other religions.), but in general the religion has little influence in the series.
Well for one, almost all Gods woods in the South lack Weirwoods as they were cut down or destroyed. Secondly the Sandals were invaders, its hard to entirely stamps out religious practices and cultural ones that stem from them. Also the followers of the Old Gods were still powerful in some places.To be fair, the Faith Militant rebelled against Targaryen rule for a decade and was then disarmed.
What bugs me a bit is that every single southron castle has a Godswood. That's a bit akin to every single medieval European castle having statues of Thor or Zeus. Or, well, every Andrastian Chantry having a carving of Mythal or a Paragon statue or somesuch. It just seems extremely unlikely to keep such religious symbols. I wouldn't expect this kind of religious tolerance today, let alone in the Middle Ages.
I'm not raging at all. I like The Witcher (and can't wait for TW3) and I absolutely love A Song of Ice And Fire. My point was more that, as great a writer as he is, Martin has a tendency to denounce tropes that he then uses himself, or that a portion of his fanbase thinks he's more trope-busting than he really is. I mean, if a prevalent fan theory is proven right, one of the cornerstones of his supposedly gritty fantasy epic is an (apparently) painfully cliché and straightforward love story producing a somewhat by-the-numbers teenage hero. That doesn't mean he cannot pull it off and do it well, but I simply ask that we not act as if Dragon Age was that much more idealistic than ASOIAF. As Martin says himself, he's off to inject some realism in fantasy, not to make it a completely realistic historical simulator (thankfully). I believe Dragon Age also does just that.
I do realize Pius was stretching it, but the point is, exceptional circumstances can produce such things. Loghain becomes influent after, basically, single-handedly liberating Ferelden and being best buds with the king, and Leliana only becomes Divine after the Chantry veers on the edge of collapse (her softened ending is way too wishy-washy for my tastes, however). It's not as if they came to their position because they were Chosen Ones who crowdsurfed their way to the highest positions because the plot demands it.
@Steelcan: I was more talking about the peaceful coexistence between the Faith of the Seven and the Old Gods of the North since the Andals settled. The Ironborn don,t need the Drowned God to be assholes that no one wants around, and you have a point with the Red God but that's mostly reduced to Melissandre and her followers so far, nothing like the inredibly bloody religious wars that have blazed over Europe over the centuries.
That's because people don't get what Martin is actually writing. He's not aiming to write some massive gritty reboot of all fantasy. He's just writing a partial deconstruction of a great deal of fantasy tropes that derived from post-Tolkien authors and (especially!) experimenting with POVs in a way that's common to the horror/fantasy he used to write. His major thing is disempowered protagonist, or bystander POVs. All of that makes for a novel experiment fantasy-wise, because these tropes just don't exist, but it's not some unreal gritty world.
*Snappy snipped here*
As Martin says himself, he's off to inject some realism in fantasy, not to make it a completely realistic historical simulator (thankfully). I believe Dragon Age also does just that.
I do realize Pius was stretching it, but the point is, exceptional circumstances can produce such things. Loghain becomes influent after, basically, single-handedly liberating Ferelden and being best buds with the king, and Leliana only becomes Divine after the Chantry veers on the edge of collapse (her softened ending is way too wishy-washy for my tastes, however). It's not as if they came to their position because they were Chosen Ones who crowdsurfed their way to the highest positions because the plot demands it.
That's because people don't get what Martin is actually writing. He's not aiming to write some massive gritty reboot of all fantasy. He's just writing a partial deconstruction of a great deal of fantasy tropes that derived from post-Tolkien authors and (especially!) experimenting with POVs in a way that's common to the horror/fantasy he used to write. His major thing is disempowered protagonist, or bystander POVs. All of that makes for a novel experiment fantasy-wise, because these tropes just don't exist, but it's not some unreal gritty world.
A commoner becoming fantasy pope isn't surprising. John XXII was the son of a shoemaker, for example.
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