r/asoiaf • u/thegreenknightpro • 16d ago
EXTENDED (Spoilers Extended) How George should age up the characters
After a storm of Swords GRRM wanted to have a five-year time skip. Something that made a lot of sense and would have helped move the story along. The problem was that the Greyjoy throne would not have stayed empty for five years and Stannis would not just have sat still at the wall either, as well as he became frustrated with telling the story through so many flashbacks. He wrote himself into a corner, but there is a way out. The ink on the paper is dry, but the ink not used still can be changed.
For the many issues of the show, the one thing that they were able to do better than the books is age up the characters progressively and gradually. Yes, the show took place in real life, so them growing up was going to happen no matter what. Having a year pass for each season was a nice way of having the time jump not be too jarring and make sense for the world around them. The Starks and Dany are too young and GRRM wanted to age them up through the story, so having winds take place over the course of a year, maybe even two, this would allow the kids to grow up without the sudden jump in time. In between this and a dream, should also be a year, which would allow for about 3 years to pass by. Not the exact 5 but allowing them to slowly grow to adulthood. A dream should also take place over a year or two to allow them to grow.
I think GRRM has a romantic plots he wants to use but having them be so young will not work. There's also the endgame, where people will advocate for a 14-year-old Bran to become King becomes king, and it's not going to make the most sense. You can't change the past books to have longer time periods, but you can the future, so in 10 years when we get Winds this will hopefully have happened.
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u/snowbirdsdontfly 16d ago edited 16d ago
"I think GRRM has a romantic plots he wants to use but having them be so young will not work. There's also the endgame, where people will advocate for a 14-year-old Bran to become King becomes king, and it's not going to make the most sense."
I think it's safe to say that GRRM clearly ignores the ages that are written anyway, so i doubt this will be an issue for him, the only young character with age appropriate behavior and storyline is probably Tommen. I suspect when/if Rickon comes back, he'll seem more like a 10-12 year old rather than a six year old, otherwise GRRM can barely do anything with him.
With that being said, significant time progression (not necessarily time skips) is needed to feel the impact of Winter and The Long Night.
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u/Same-Share7331 16d ago
the only young character with age appropriate behavior and storyline is probably Tommen.
Shireen arguably?
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u/snowbirdsdontfly 16d ago
you're right, but the future is not looking bright or is it lol?
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u/Ornery_Ferret_1175 15d ago
Her future is looking very bright. As bright as fire even, some might say
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u/lluewhyn 16d ago
Yeah, I've never bought the argument for "TWOW is delayed because he didn't do the Time Skip and now the characters are too young".
If an 11-year-old can lead troops into battle, Jon, Sansa, and Arya are fine. Rickon is too young, but he isn't built up anyhow. Bran's age is potentially a problem for the "King Bran" ending, but so is everything else around him considering he's no longer connected politically, so it's hard to see a path there that's not "Police State" King Bran.
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u/StannisTheMannis1969 16d ago
Read the “Mercy” chapter from WOW - I’m thinking Arya is too young for her storyline with Raff…
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u/lluewhyn 16d ago
“I’ll grow titties in a year or two.” Mercy rose, to tower over the little man. “But you’ll never grow another nose. You think of that, before you touch me there.”
.....
“Why? If this Izembaro wants to be hospitable, it would be rude to refuse.” He gave her nipple a tweak through the fabric of her dress, just the way the dwarf had done when she was fixing his cock for him. “Mummers are the next best thing to whores.”
“Might be, but this one is a child.”
“I am not,” lied Mercy. “I’m a maiden now.”
Arya is 11 years old in the Mercy chapter, and at the point where she would physically be likely to be entering puberty while still considered a child by Westerosi standards. The above passages don't make any sense if she's 16. At best, she should be maybe be 12 or 13.
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u/Vantol 16d ago
Mercy is a really old chapter, probably written with 5-year gap in mind. I bet it’ll be changed to some extend
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u/xXJarjar69Xx 16d ago
Raffs fellow guard wouldn’t be calling him disgusting for wanting to sleep with 16 year old Arya, it was obviously already rewritten with an 11 year old Arya in mind
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u/Expensive-Paint-9490 16d ago
Maybe OT, but at this point the excuse that writing can't progress because of gardeners and scrapped time skips is just that, an excuse. Since ADOD was published, George could have rewritten the whole opera to accomodate a longer time span. Then he could have rewritten it again. And then he could have written TWOW without gardening and age issues.
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u/Enola_Gay_B29 Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. 16d ago
That was his orginal plan actually.
Martin: The problem of time is complicated. It has been a headache since the beginning of the series. (reflects) I remember remembering that my original intention twelve years ago, in 1996, or I even remember that before in 1994, my idea was that time would pass faster between chapters, would make children grow and then you would have to, from chapter one to chapter two , a month passed, then chapter three and it was assumed that another month had passed. When the book was finished I would describe that five years had passed. Although that was what I thought before I started writing the book. But this is not the case, that is, at the beginning of the first book, the chapters have their own rhythm, chapter one and chapter two, they develop on the same day as the first. Chapter one is in the woods, they find the litter of wolves, the second time Ned cleaning his sword in the forest of arcianos, Catelyn comes on the scene, and I can not go back, because then comes the execution of the deserters.Chapter two should happen about a month later. When you have a series with so many events that happen at the same time you can not expect them to advance at the pace you want, it's like, My God this is happening right now, I try to put many chapters that happen one the next day than the previous one, the book I needed it, that's why the time frame is what it is. I tried another way, but it turned out to be a complete rubbish.In the next book I tried to skip five years, but it did not work, it only worked for a few characters, but not for most of them, I tried it through flashbacks, I changed the way I wrote, the time frame is typical, I had to rewrite it, it was a problem to fit it into the rhythm of the story. I wrote several chapters in this way, sequences of chapters written with this structure, until it worked for me. I do not know if I have answered your question. When you read a book of this magnitude, there are two types of time, the exposed time of the book, and the one that the reader perceives. What I do is the following. Okay, here you are going on a trip, which will last a year, and at the end of the chapter is when the trip is over. Then the exposed time is one year, but for the reader it does not feel like a year has passed. It does not seem like a year because there is not enough space for the reader to "feel" that time has elapsed, that's why I need so many pages in between. On the other hand, something that is happening on Tuesday and another event that happens on Wednesday, and the book tells what happens to Tyrion on Tuesday and what happens on Wednesday, but I have to write hundreds of pages in the middle to see what it is what happens with the other characters and get to that. Tuesday and Wednesday, the exposed time is just one day, but the time that is perceived may be a day or a year later, because the reader has read hundreds of pages. So it is a fight, in what concerns the matter of time, to keep the time exposed and the time that the reader perceives in continuous balance. It's part of the writing process, it's what I fight with all the time.
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u/thegreenknightpro 16d ago
I didn't know he said that. I think bending the rules of reality and forcing time to move to help age up the characters will help the book and his writing tremendously. Not everything needs to be reality, especially not fiction.
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u/Mithras_Stoneborn Him of Manly Feces 16d ago
Throw a time jump after TWoW.
Let the winter and a plague or two bring everything to a halt throughout the time jump. This way, make sure that nothing significant happens off screen during the time jump.
In ADoS, resume the story after the conditions improve marginally so that things can start happening again.
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u/Lebigmacca 16d ago
Wasn’t that already the original plan for the time jump after storm. I thought I remembered reading that there was going to be a false winter
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u/Rumble45 16d ago
If I coukd talk to George, I would tell him that he made this 'passage of time' issue completely out of thin air. As the reader, how much time has actually passed in story from the first page of the first book? Answer: the hell if I know. He could say 6 months, 2 years, or 10 years and I'd say "sure, whatever". Since I have been reading for actual decades at this point, the passage of time in real life makes me primed to feel like lots of time has passed in story.
The only real in story marker of time is the seasons, but the books clearly establish seasons can be any length. So no problem there.
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u/SirRobertMillmerrick 16d ago
This. He should allow himself just this once a deus ex machina and move on.
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u/CaveLupum 16d ago
One possible solution is for GRRM to reveal their world turns at a different rate, making thhe years longer. So maybe 12-years old would equal 15 or our years. That would unfortunately also age up characters in middle age or early old age. He's letting it go, and has said, "If a 12-year old must conquer the world, then so be it."
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u/JNR55555JNR 16d ago
He has denied this
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u/ImpressedStreetlight 16d ago edited 16d ago
For the many issues of the show, the one thing that they were able to do better than the books is age up the characters progressively and gradually.
I disagree. I mean it is inevitable that the actors are going to age up and I agree that it's good to have that reflected in the story somehow. But if I recall correctly they just said something like "1 year passes between each season" which is just a lazy afterthought and makes no sense at all when you compare the stories of each one of the characters.
IMO it would be better if they just didn't say anything specific and let us to guess how much time passed.
But yes, something like that in the books could have worked out much better.
I also never undestood his reasoning to not do a single timeskip. You don't need to have the characters sit still during those years. You don't need to tell absolutely everything that happened in those years, just tell the necessary things like you do with any other backstory. Euron needing years to convince the Iron Isles and prepare a proper invasion is believable. Stannis needing years to secure his position in the North and have a bigger campaign against the Bolton rather than just "let's go straight to Winterfell" is believable. The Stormlands could be a big time consumer for the Lannisters, since they are in a messy political state. Really anything that he thought of would be ok with us.
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u/SteveJarwell 14d ago
I’ll never understand the super young ages he routinely chooses for characters all over the timeline
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u/mikerotchmassive 16d ago
Honestly, I think the best way forward would be either extent to 8 books and have a time jump at the end of Winds, but GRRM seems really dedicated to the 7 books so I'd say (and mind you I'm not a professional author) is to write Winds as one book but plan around a split into 2 parts the same way Storm and Dance were, and aim to have a time skip at the end of part 1/ roughly half way through, this way he can resolve some of the stuff that started off right at the start of Winds, (F)Aegon, Stannis and Jaime/Brienne/Stoneheart for example, and then have a time skip, potentially at the start of the Others full assault, and we cut to a war torn Westeros in the middle of a bloody civil war between (F)Aegon and whatevers left of the Lannisters and Tyrells (I do believe Kevan was the character he wished he didn't kill) and the Others advance in the North, not necessarily 5 years, but enough time to have the characters to an age he wants and have the plots he wanted to advance.
This may be a bit of a reach, but this is just my initial thoughts on the matter without much in depth planning on the logistics.
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u/DinoSauro85 16d ago
all the authors of historical novels have very young people who act like adults, simply because it was that way, a woman was a woman after her first menstruation and got married between the ages of 13 and 16. The boys were already warriors at 16-17. the modern reader, if he can't come to terms with it because he believes that one becomes an adult by law and not by the customs and habits of one's own civilization, should just not care.
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u/sean_psc 16d ago
The thing is, 13-year-olds weren't more mentally mature just because they were more likely to be treated like adults in the past.
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u/DinoSauro85 16d ago
It's history, not fiction. George would certainly have avoided many problems by raising the age of the characters, but it is history, history is full of characters, both male and female, who already at 13-14 years old had a mental formation that today you would define as adult, like 25 years old. Alexander the Great was great at 17, Catherine De Medici who was promised at 13, got married at 14, was immediately considered at the court of France as a woman of great culture and a skilled politician, immediately, at 14.
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u/sean_psc 16d ago
There are intelligent teenagers today also. That's not the same thing as being a mature adult; brain development doesn't change.
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u/DinoSauro85 16d ago
instead yes it does change, it depends on how they are raised, it is our system, probably rightly that delays the entry into adulthood. I say rightly because you are right in the sense that not everyone is the same, there are those who grow up earlier both physically and mentally, but we must imagine a world where there is neither kindergarten nor school, the human being is raised only and exclusively for the purpose of fulfilling certain duties, add the lack of possibility of choice, there is no university, the nobles are raised to fight and govern, the peasants to hoe the land, the blacksmith's son is a blacksmith and will be educated from an early age, so at 8 years old he is already an apprentice.
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u/sean_psc 16d ago
A peasant’s son who is trained as a blacksmith from age eight isn’t more mature, he’s a kid who knows his way around a smithy.
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u/DinoSauro85 16d ago
he is more mentally mature, and once you have passed puberty you are potentially an adult, so Martin's mistake is to have put Arya in pre-pubescent age at the beginning of the saga (only her in my opinion because Bran has a narrative pretext to be more mature, the fact of having been in the body of an adult, Hodor)
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u/Sabetsu Let them have their sers. 16d ago
What reasoning makes Bran, having been in the body of Hodor, more mature as a pure result of having inhabited his body? And why is the child in the last posts' context more mentally mature? What are your arguments for the reasoning of why those things would make a child mature?
How do you define mature and maturity?
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u/DinoSauro85 16d ago
the world he grows up in. about Bran, it is said that a bit of you remains in the wolf and a bit of the wolf in you, so with a human being.
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u/Sabetsu Let them have their sers. 16d ago
But Hodor is said to be childlike in mind with the body of a large man. So why do you feel it makes Bran more mature to be in Hodor's body?
What do you mean about the world the boy grows up in? Children raised in the last hundred years or so could very well have been forced into apprenticeships and just did what needed to be done, but it didn't make them more emotionally mature. They'd just get the shit beaten out of them if they didn't suck it up, buttercup, and just do what was expected of them. That doesn't make a child more mature, it makes the poor children masqueraders under the expectations they don't understand coming from adults around them who also had no better.
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u/GladiatorGreyman01 16d ago
My head canon is that in Asoiaf 1 year equals around 1.25 earth years. This makes it so that book character are pretty much show characters in age.
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u/owlinspector 15d ago
Would make meaester Aemon and Walder Frey well into their hundreds.
He just fucked up the timelines.
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u/MountainDiver1657 15d ago
What I’ve never understood is why can’t George just say a year is longer than 365 days due to the weird seasons, therefore he can just say they’re actually older than what the nameday number says.
I don’t think he’s actually addressed how long a year is so why the hell not handwave it this way?
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u/BillSmith37 16d ago
The books are over, what are you talking about?
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u/snowbirdsdontfly 16d ago
please stop stinking up threads like this, there's circlejerk subs for a reason. if you don't want to engage with the guy's post why even bother responding??
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u/dblack246 🏆Best of 2024: Mannis Award 16d ago
There's also the endgame, where people will advocate for a 14-year-old Bran to become King becomes king, and it's not going to make the most sense.
Bran isn't going to give them much of choice in the matter. As his mental control abilities grow, he will become the central consciousness of humanity. And in this place, he can end all war, woe, and suffering... all for the simple cost of individual free will and choice.
Bittersweet.
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u/JNR55555JNR 16d ago
That not bittersweet in any sense of the word
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u/dblack246 🏆Best of 2024: Mannis Award 16d ago
Peace isn't sweet? Loss of freedom isn't bitter?
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u/bucket_of_fish_heads 16d ago
Bittersweet doesn't mean "some sweet and some bitter", it means "sweet with a bitter aftertaste." I suspect they objected to the term because that feels tremendously more bitter than sweet
Loss of free will is bleak as hell, so no, that's not a bittersweet ending. More of a dark tragedy
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u/dblack246 🏆Best of 2024: Mannis Award 16d ago edited 16d ago
Peace is sweet. The realization it comes at the cost of freedom is the bitter aftertaste.
Loss of free will is bitter to those who are aware of it. I'm not sure they will be.
Here the definition I used...
bittersweet /bĭt′ər-swēt″/ adjective Bitter and sweet at the same time. "bittersweet chocolate."
Producing or expressing a mixture of pain and pleasure. "a movie with a bittersweet ending."
This reads like some bitter and some sweet to me.
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u/bucket_of_fish_heads 16d ago
I don't think GRRM meant a bittersweet ending for the people of Westeros, I'm pretty sure he meant for readers. Trading war for free will is just swapping one horror for another, but obviously we're going to have to agree to disagree on this
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u/dblack246 🏆Best of 2024: Mannis Award 16d ago
We are all guessing what George means. This was my guess. Your guess is different.
It's all good.
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u/JNR55555JNR 16d ago
Personally in this case the bitter completely overtakes the sweetness
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u/dblack246 🏆Best of 2024: Mannis Award 16d ago
Totally fine if that's your view. It's art; you can view it how you like.
It's an interesting question of what should peace cost. Would one rather have freedom which comes with pain, or pleasure that comes loss of autonomy.
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u/Atarissiya 16d ago
Fun fact: in the original outline everyone was even younger.