"Fantasy needs magic in it, but I try to control the magic very strictly. You can have too much magic in fantasy very easily, and then it overwhelms everything and you lose all sense of realism. And I try to keep the magic magical — something mysterious and dark and dangerous, and something never completely understood. I don’t want to go down the route of having magic schools and classes where, if you say these six words, something will reliably happen. Magic doesn’t work that way. Magic is playing with forces you don’t completely understand. And perhaps with beings or deities you don’t completely understand. It should have a sense of peril about it.”
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If you sell the rights to HBO you will have to keep making excuses for why you are not finishing the books
Okay fat frick, leave the rules unrwitten. It’ll make everything simpler when Sanderson comes in to add Planetos into the cosmere
May as well get someone to finish the books
there’s a healthy midpoint between excessive sanderson detail and completely avoiding the topic like grrm
>tfw there's no writer who can combine Sanderson's ability to churn out books like he's on an assembly line with Martin's ability to write decent characters
I don't hate Sanderson, but if I have to read one more Shallan PoV chapter and listen to everyone praise her for saying "haha great means fat in certain contexts" I'll kill myself
*Also the way his Mormon shit infects his writing. In Well of Ascension, Vin needs to take her shirt off to treat a wound, and her husband blushes and leaves the room.
12 fricking years.
I gave my books away years ago I have moved on.
At this point he should just say "Look I don't wanna write it anymore, my inspirations gone. I don't care about it, the ending was similar to the TV show and nobody liked it anyways so whats the point"
Learn how things work. He sold the rights. HBO owns the rights. ALL the rights.What do you not understand?
okay? so HBO can milk asoiaf all they want with bullshit spinoffs. that doesn't mean martin has to keep writing a story he has no way to finish.
The man might as well just say this. Everybody knows it already. A man who is demoralized and doesn't care about his work is not going to put out anything worth reading anyway, even if he pushed himself to do it. It'll be shit, complete shit
GERM saw his magnum opus everywhere, sitting on the top of the mountain. Then the ending came, which is what he told the two israelites would happen, everyone hated it and now it has been scrubbed from all memory. Then he sits on Twitter and despairs about it, blaming everyone but himself. He's the one who sold the israelites his shit to frick up and he's the one not sitting his fat ass down to write. It is all on him
>this fat frick can't go further because he cucked himself with his troony magic
Needs more gay weener. More BIPOC. Slava Ukraini. More sex scenes.
If you seeth at his quote you also have to criticize Tolkien because he also does the same thing with Gandalf in his books
Hes right.
true. Tolkien treated magic in a similar way. It was very rare and not exceedingly powerful.
It’s dumb because he speaks as if he is the grand authority of magic and it’s something real he can define.
hes talking about it as a literary device. He is right. If you oversaturate a fantasy book with magic and just have it be an all powerful deus ex machina that can do anything, then you destroy any semblance of immersion or realism the book offers. The stakes are gone and it is so far removed from reality that it feels like a cartoon. If you give it strict mechanics explained clearly in the book then it loses all of the wonder and mystery.
Its also counter intuitive in that he's trying to add realism to a genre that is fantastical hence its name, and is meant to be unrealistic and escapist.
>and is meant to be unrealistic and escapist.
So it can't be anything else? Have you ever head of sub-genres, of mixing genres, why do any posterior work have to respect any fundamental origins of the genre? That is such a weird fetishism
It's like nothing new can ever happen because it would betray whatever came before and made a striking appearance
Honestly that's just feels like gatekeeping to me
Found the quote he mentions LOTR and magic
Good question, Jason. The proper use of magic is one of the trickiest aspects of writing fantasy. If badly done, it can easily unbalance a book.
In my case, one of the things I did was go back and reread the Master, J.R.R. Tolkien. Virtually all high fantasy written today, including the work of most of the authors in LEGENDS, in heavily influenced by Tolkien.
Rereading LORD OF THE RINGS, it struck me very forcefully that Tolkien's use of magic is both subtle and sparing. Middle Earth is a world full of wonders, beyond a doubt, but very little magic is actually performed on stage. Gandalf is a wizard, for instance, but he does most of his fighting with a sword.
That seemed to be a much more effective way to go than by having someone mumbling spells every paragraph, so I tried to adapt a similar approach in A GAME OF THRONES.
>That seemed to be a much more effective way to go than by having someone mumbling spells every paragraph
No it's not.
Nuh uh
>The danger with magic is that the victory could be unearned. Suddenly you're in the last chapter and you wind up with a deus ex machina. The hero suddenly remembers that if he can just get some of this particular magical plant, then he can brew a potion and solve his problem. And that's a cheat. That feels very unsatisfying. It cheapens the work. Well-done fantasy – something like Tolkien – he sets Lord of the Rings up perfectly, right at the beginning. The only way to get rid of the ring, the only way, is to take it to Mount Doom and throw it in the fires from which it comes. You know that right from the first. And if we'd gone through all that, and then at the end of the book suddenly Gandalf had said, wait a minute, I just remembered, here's this other spell, oh, I can get rid of the ring easily! You would have hated that. That would have been all wrong. Magic can ruin things. Magic should never be the solution. Magic can be part of the problem.
Fantasy doesn't need magic.
Georgie boy is right, it's why I almost always pass the endless seasonal animes set in magic high schools.
thank god i started the books last summer and finished few months ago so at least i wasnt bitter for 12 years lmao
Never watched GOT or read his series but I've seen some of the things he's said quoted here and there. Other than his weirdly braindead criticism about Tolkien's lack of Aragorn's tax plan, he says a lot of things I completely agree with. He seems to be a pretty smart writer. Very strange to me that it's almost assured he'll die before his series is finished. He's in his mid 70's at this point and has two mode books to complete, the last being over a decade ago.
He's living proof that you shouldn't pay someone until they deliver a complete work. Same concept with early access games, etc
>living proof
not for too much longer i hope.
That doesn't really apply to an epic fantasy novel series. the first 4 books came out in decent time
Then the TV show came and gave him all the cash he would've made if he finished the series. See how that took away his motivation?
if I was him I would regularly update full drafts of the final books for posthumous release/completion as I polish them in case I die of being fat and old
There are no drafts at all lol
didn't say that but I hope there are or even better that he hurries the frick up. the obsession with tangential stories while the main series is incomplete is irritating
It's a blank word doc, minimized somewhere between his blog and interracial porn tabs
Ironic that the books about the magical school is finished and had far greater cultural impact.
This take is the exact opposite of Sanderson, and consequently one of the big reasons why Sanderson is mediocre. If I wanted thoroughly reasoned and balanced magical systems, I'd play a video game.
Say what you want about him but he's right. Harry Potter and that shit is so lame
The Lord of Light stuff was cool because you never knew if it would work or not or what would happen
He's right, you know. And I don't think this is an actual jab at Harry Potter. Those are completely different books and made for a different audience. But even in Harry Potter, a lot of the magic works in a way he's describing. I'd argue that most of the major story beats throughout the overall narrative are the results of magical accidents and magic not doing what characters think it's going to do.
There's two kinds of magic in Harry Potter that I'm making up right this moment. There's low magic, which is shit like "expelliarmas" and "wingardium leviosa". These spells are reliable and replicable. In fact, they aren't magic so much as they are biological forces that are present in Wizardkind that we don't quite understand the physiology of as readers, but presumably there are wizard "scientists" who have studied all this using the scientific method. And if there aren't then there easily could be. It's all testable and replicable.
Then there is high magic. We see this sort of magic a lot in the series, but even the most learned academic characters don't really understand it and they only have best guesses for what is actually occurring. This would be like the Mother's Love/Bond of Blood spell which protects Harry throughout his time at Hogwarts, but only if he is able to call the Dursely house home. It occurs spontaneously under certain conditions and it's rarely done on purpose. Presumably there is a lot of this going on in the world and the characters don't fully understand it and probably don't even recognize it a lot of the time.
And that is the sort of thing that could have been explored in the extended Wizarding World stories like Fantastic Beasts if Rowling was a more competent writer. I think you could set a more adult oriented, high falutin story in the vein of ASOIAF in the Harry Potter universe with the sort of magic GRRM is describing here. It's not going to happen, but it could be done.
your low-high analysis is spot on
but it works perfectly fine for what HP is. it doesn't need something more fleshed out like Wheel of Time.
When is the next book going to be released?
People will shit on Rowling but her ass managed to write all 7 of her books George, and that makes her infinitely better than you. You're never gonna finish jackshit.
It's kind of interesting how the big theme of LOTR is magic fading from the world, but in ASOIAF the opposite is true, where magic becomes more prominent over the course of the story. In AGOT there's basically no magic until Dany's dragons are born and by ADWD we're getting POV chapters of magic users.
this guy is on par with tolkien if not a little bit better and im not sure why he gets so much hate from Cinemaphile (formerly Cinemaphile)
No one fricking asked shut the frick up
nah
I'm almost certain his inability to finish his shitty books is due to his out of control narcissism.
What a classless boob.
>everything he makes tries to imitate and mock Tolkien
I hate americans so fricking much.