George RR Martin donates Hobbit first edition to Texas university

At a cursory glance, these are the main reasons. There are more, but I don't feel like launching into a full scale tirade right now.

George R R Martin doesn’t understand that if you do something too much, the reader won’t care as much. This is mainly centred around how he relentlessly kills off characters. It happens so often that you find yourself not building emotional bonds with characters, and not caring when they die, as least as much as you would care if death was less frequent.

Enormous Mary Sues. Not as bad in the show as it is in the book, though. Take Jon Snow. Perfect at everything he does, but simultaneously disliked, and has a white wolf as a companion, with red eyes. Textbook fanfiction character. Danaerys Targaryen. A girl with purple eyes and silver hair who can control dragons and is immune to fire. I might have seen fifty characters with purple eyes and none of them were that well written.

Too many characters that get too little development! Once again, they improve on this in the show, by cutting down on the immense number of trivial and pointless characters that Martin shovels into his books, I assume to bulk them out. Seriously, there’s a chapter with a dinner party where the book just detours so that it can introduce like 15 characters and houses, almost none of which ever have that much importance.

There’s more to sex than just writing out sex. That is, if you want to make a point or spread some sort of theme/message. GRRM doesn’t want to make a point with his sex, he just likes writing out boobs. Just cause. And he doesn’t really understand how boobs work, either. They don’t sway from side to side beneath a woman’s clothes. And he’s guilty of something that I know Snarktheater has mentioned many times. If you can’t say ‘Penis’, you’re not mature enough to write about them. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to read GRRM talk about ‘manhoods’ and ‘her sex’ and other stupid terms. Just say it, George. Vagina, vagina, penis, vagina, vagina, vagina.

There is a shit ton of rape in these books, and as I stated before, it doesn’t have any reason to be in the books. There’s very little development of them, and a woman who’s just been raped should be written as showing at least some sort of emotional response later on. In the real world, rape is a big deal that stays with people for a long time, and authors shouldn’t be telling their readers that it’s normal to rape someone, or that they will just move on with their life after you do. If the following quote doesn’t convince you to stay away if you’ve been raped, nothing will. 'She began to find pleasure even in her nights, and if she still cried out when Drogo took her, it was not always in pain. That’s right, boys. If you just keep raping her, she’ll start liking it eventually. And there are no negative consequences. She starts loving Drogo, and when he dies, it’s shown as sad. This, a relationship founded on forced marriage and rape, is considered highly romantic by many people.

There is no plot, whatsoever. The entire thing is carried on subplots. You can’t make a seven sentence story out of this. There is no arch, no beginning, middle or end. It’s written like a soap opera, basically, so that the author can drag it out over thousands of pages, and no one will mind. It isn’t fulfilling to read, and it’s unsatisfying to finish, because you don’t feel like you have finished anything. As a consequence, none of the books stand up that well on their own. *You can’t claim points with a GBTIA audience by having a gay couple on one page, and then have the omnipotent narrator call their relationship an abomination on the next page.

GRRM is really predictable. I can’t say how many times the following scene has played out, but it has to be at least three times. - You have a fight between two people, one seems to win, decides to gloat instead of kill their opponent, and the opponent ends up killing them instead.

The magic in this book series is so half hearted. There are never any clear rules or boundaries hammered out, which is basically a way for GRRM to add a deus ex machina into almost every scene that involves magic. Because we don’t know what magic does and doesn’t do, how it is done, who does it, why some people can do it and some people can’t, etc.

I maintain the position that having a story that separately follows multiple people is awful, when done in the form of a book. By half way into the first book, you will have decided which characters you like and which ones you don’t. When you start the second book, you’ll either have to force yourself to read through the character chapters that you dislike, or you’ll be skipping them altogether. What’s more annoying is that there are so many POV characters that when you finish a chapter you liked, you might have to wait another 5 to 10 chapters before you can pick up where you left off. This works well in a tv setting, but not in a book.

The prose is purpler than a night-elven penis, stuck in a bottle. *All of the POV characters are indeed white people. There are plenty of POC characters, and one of the main storylines takes place in a land that is mainly populated by POC, but even the character of that storyline is white.

'Winter is coming'. No. Winter is not coming. It will not come for at least four or five of the books.

/r/books Thread Link - varietyreports.com