Plot errors

Or, “does this thing even work?” (the answer is no).

• A bitter 10-year winter: The winter is 1) famously not arrived yet, we’re waiting for it to this day, it’s not even autumn yet as of book #2; and 2) not 10 years but an unpredictable amount of years, the unpredictability being the worst part of it.

• The Queen’s sons and Robert’s brothers battle for control of the realm: The Queen has 2 sons, only one of them is battling and that’s debatable as he’s a puppet of the Lannisters and their alliances. Robert’s brothers are battling, yes, but also, famously, Ned’s son the King in the North, and the Reaver-King of the Seastone Chair. It’s famously called the War of the Five Kings, not the War Of The Previous King’s Brothers And His Sons.

• Robert’s young daughter, Princess Arya Stark: Arya is famously the daughter of Ned Stark and distinctly not a princess.

• The exiled last heir of the former ruling family tends to his dragons: The bot force-transed Daenerys Targaryen 😔

• The guardians of the realm’s Wall dwindle in numbers as menacing barbarians gather their forces: The guardians have already dwindled in numbers, literally millennia ago, and the actual menace isn’t the people beyond the Wall but what they’re running away from—viz. winter, a supernatural death force that is, famously, coming. Getting people to focus on the actual menace is the entire point of this sub-setting.

Synopsis errors

These are subtler than the funny plot errors but worse, because they defeat the purpose of a synopsis: informing the reader about whether this is their cup of tea, whether it it something they want to commit to right now.

• “Good and evil content for power”: ASoIaF is famously a series whose whole point is to deconstruct simple binaries of good and evil in fantasy, to present multiple perspectives simultaneously, all of them flawed to various degrees but still having valid points.

• “Menacing barbarians gather their forces”: As pointed above, the entire point of the story is that other peoples like the Free Folk aren’t actually barbarians, or if they are they’re still well justified in the menacing, or sometimes they are truly fucked up but then not any more fucked up than the more State-based societies, etc. Characterising them in this way sets up the reader to expect the wrong kind of novel. A proper synopsis would be to the note of: “Meanwhile, Ned Stark’s bastard son Jon Snow struggles to convince the Watchers on the Wall to put aside their prejudices and focus on the common threat, for winter is coming…”

• “Set in a glittering fantasy world”: This one is less wrong than it sounds as, unlike the TV producers, George R R Martin does understand that fantasy is made of glitter and dazzle, azure and carmine, and there’s plenty of colour,sparkle and glittering things in here. However, that phrasing doesn’t distinguish or characterise the books in contrast to any other conventional fantasy series, to the point of severe mischaracterisation. The distinguishing point of ASoIaF is precisely mixing that glitter and velvet with starving masses and diarrhea epidemics, to juxtapose genuine magic and awe with oppression and horror. “A glittering fantasy world” is like calling Dubai a “glittering urban city” or North Korea a “glittering green farmscape” and leaving it at that.

• “Deftly realised magic”: The series does the “return of magic” trope so there’s little magic or supernatural in the first two books, and what there is is very deliberately not “realised”—it’s left suggested, ambiguous and incipient, a thing of the shadows, where you don’t know if a prophecy is real or not, if a god is a god or a delusion. If you’re looking for a detailed and fully realised magic system, you’re reading the wrong type of fantasy.

Silly errors

• Queen Cerisi: How does a computer misspell Cersei’s name? How did capitalists burned billions to invent worse computers that are crappier?

• George Martin pursues the embattled Seven Kingdoms through a bitter 10-year winter: All by himself, then? Did he bring a cook at least? No wonder the final books are taking so long, the guy is waging a one-man war at his age.

• enriched by 8000 years of history: 8000 years. Why 8000 years. [untitled goose chasing meme] why 8000 years?!? the Dawn Age was over 12000 years ago, the Age of Heroes >10000, Aegon’s Conquest was about 300 years ago and the fall of the Targaryens 16; the relevance and richness of history increases logarithmically with recency, the remote eras are barely sketched, and there’s no special relevance to the 8000 mark. Maybe the first Long Night, but its dating is dubious, and there’s no reason why you would consider that sketch of lore as particularly “enriching” for the story but disregard the invasion of the First Men and the Pact which likely caused the Long Night in the first place.