>>24835739 (OP)
Michael Moorcock used to say that he considered himself a "bad writer with big ideas, which is better than being a big writer with bad ideas". In a lot of ways GRRM is the same, specially because he too is part of the "muh subversion of high fantasy" crowd, much like Moorcock.
Reading this specific book, the first of the ASOIAF series was like being hit by a car to me with how terribly written it is. This book manages to have good and bad prose simultaneously within the same paragraph. Genuinely good descriptive, atmospheric paragraphs that then jump to exposition delivered by either the narrator or dialogue with as much subtlety as writing the information on a baseball bat and hitting the reader on the face with it. The first Catelyn chapter tries to expose Jon Arryn's role in Ned's life, his relationship with Robert Baratheon, the seven gods in relation to the old gods, Mance Rayder, the long night, how old Rickon is, who Robert is married to, who the Lannisters are, the Wall, the wildlings, and so on and so on within like six pages. Weird how some moments that require good descriptions like when Daenerys sees her dragon eggs for the first time, which the narration mentions is the most beautiful thing she has ever seen, are delivered in this blasé, simplistic prose, while other random moments of Tyrion eating a turnip are more densely embellished, as if the author can't control his own energy levels towards writing his own scenes, and bursts of spontaneity come to him at random. Action scenes are very hit or miss but centrally cathartic ones like The Mountain vs The Red Viper are writing in this material, objective, simplistic, blasé style, that delivers no tension, no escalation, no stylistic measures to increase and decrease a sense of speed, anything. At some point in the fight a young squire is hacked to pieces and it's delivered with such blasé language you have to do a double-take. Extremely on the nose with how it is leading its characters and its history beats. Everything is very one-dimensional and forced, you have blatant despotic royals who practice or are products of incest, you have an actual estimative done by fans that within five books there are 214 rapes either depicted or mentioned. Indulgently edgy in many of its portrayals independent of its intention being a "muh feudalism bad" take that comes very timely in 1996.
Reading it is disappointing to a straight up macro-level, because it really makes you face how under-exposed normies are to prose fiction in general. When they read the wrestling of a dorky fat kid with attempting poetics they gush about how well written it is. It goes to show that it was a commercial fiction fad that could have easily been stuck within "niche" literature of edgy and overly dense historical fiction inspired fantasy, but ended up being popular with people when they're only 15 and never read outside of their genre. All around mediocre at best.
