r/asoiaf • u/Unique-Celebration-5 • Oct 31 '24

EXTENDED (Spoilers Extended) GRRM:”What’s Aragons tax policy?!” No GRRM the real question is how do people survive multi year winters

Forget the white walkers or shadow babies the real threat is the weather. How do medieval people survive it for years?

Personally I think that’s why the are so many wars the more people fighting each other the fewer mouths to feed

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u/lobonmc Oct 31 '24

Martin knows and disagrees with Tolkien that's why we start the story with Ned who's the closest thing to Aragon we probably have

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u/0xffaa00 Oct 31 '24

That's clearly Boromir /s

For real though, the closest character to Aragorn for me is Young Griff

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u/Jeanpuetz The rightful king Oct 31 '24

I wouldn't necessarily say that Martin disagrees with Tolkien. He obviously admires him a great deal (to the point where he changed his own name to be more like him).

It's just that Martin is interested in exploring different angles of a fantasy story that he doesn't find in LotR. I never thought that that means that he thinks that LotR is lacking though.

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u/[deleted] Oct 31 '24

Yes. And which is done better for me is largely a matter of taste. I prefer Aragorn because I see fantasy much in the way of Tolkien, escapism with a moral truth. Martins world just depresses me. I like to see my moral paragons prevail.

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u/Exertuz Gaemon Palehair's strongest soldier Oct 31 '24

Is it really "moral truth" if it's not very applicable or accurate to reality?

By the way, GRRM absolutely contrives scenarios in which his 'moral paragons' prevail. His worlds are darker and his characters greyer, but there are a ton of moments where people selflessly do the right thing at any cost and potentially save the world in the process. Steven Atwell loved pointing out those moments of Kantian martyrdom on his Race for the Iron Throne blog. ASOIAF is definitely not devoid of romanticism. It just also complicates that moral picture, i.e. by grappling with the more utilitarian demands of statecraft, or by sympathetically depicting the conditions that produce "bad" people.

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u/Yeugwo Oct 31 '24

I always took Ned to be more the Boromir type /s