The world-building is nice but it's barely beginning the more interesting bits (not-Robert's Rebellion).

 

I believe this is the first time I've ever heard of someone saying GRRM didn't have enough worldbuilding.

 

Really? Martins world building is absolutely awful. His characters are what make A Song of Ice and Fire so great.

 

His world building is in some cases extremely specific and his world is extremely big but a lot of the time he is also very vague. So in case of the north you end up wondering why those people are even relevant at all?

 

Yeah...it just doesn't feel right. Everything sounds weird and out of place. Nice touch though, with all the different tongues.

 

What Slavic imagery? Throwing some buzz-words like husars, 'szlachta', 'pocztowy', etc. and basically basing the Northern army on Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth does not make it Slavic. There is nothing Slavic in this fic. What do we get instead - canals (that BTW make sense), powerful Starks on the level of Stark-wank and some boring correspondence explaining why North is better than rest of the Seven Kingdoms.

 

Is there any crop rotation or printing presses?

 

Thankfully, no.

 

So I tried to go through this list and see what's actually worth reading, and got to the fourth straight page of wanking about The Prince that was Promised, saw there were 2000+ more messages in the thread, and thought I'd just ask instead: What's actually worth reading for this series?

I've read what already exists in The Black Prince, and I just read up to current on The Songs of the North series - those were pretty good reads. Most of what I've looked into on my own has been pretty dreadful though, I just have a talent for picking crap GoT fics apparently. Help a brother out?

 

Have you tried Knees Falling yet?

 

I have not. Bookmarked for later, thanks.

 

Summer Crowns and Rhaegar the Great/Terrible are the two best, consistently updating fics out there right now, in my opinion.

 

Summer Crowns is barely a story, it's a stomp with pretty much no real conflict. Every time it seems like there might be some it's waved away.

 

The idea was interesting (Robert becoming a sellsword). But the author goes directly to the juicy parts, nonstop. It gets quickly boring and skimming later updates (leave it at 19) gave bigger vibes of Stark wank.

 

Summer Crowns reads like a hybrid of sparknotes and an actual story. The authors will write some scenes with dialogue explaining the conflicts and then have a few paragraphs/chapters explaining how the conflict was overcome.

 

Summer Crowns is on AO3 now for those that think AH account might make them catch whatever the hell is wrong with the average poster there:

http://archiveofourown.org/works/12282615/chapters/27918744


It's 2 updates short at the moment

 

That thumbs up was for the funny comment, not the link to that bad story, btw.

 

And yet it's still better than that shite you recc'd a few pages ago, Nemrut.

 

These realms have a share of good ideas, but as an exersize in a world-building it leans on the lazy side.
Why so? Let's take an example (original text in quotes):

Spoiler

The canals, since they are so popular. The author deemed it necessary to provide the North with several canals which range between 100 and 350 kilometers in length.

So Bran the Builder worked his magic to build the shorter ones - which is okay, given his rep and magical age he lived in. The rest must have been built by regular Westerosi schmucks we know and love... somehow. Here is the author's explanation to that:

The civilization that built 300 mile long wall of ice has been gone for thousands of years, along with the secret of building like it did - as explicitely show in text:

So it's not exactly relevant to canals built after Bran the Builder.
As for real-life examples, one would be hard pressed to find 350-km long medieval canals in Eastern Europe, especially in Russia where a system of portages (rus. волок) was established precisely because rivers were not connected to each other, thus forcing traders to drag ships from one river to another where the path was the shortest. The Chinese Great Canal was a system of lesser canals connecting pre-existing lakes and rivers nature gratiously provided, just like ancient reiterations of canal linking Nile to Red Sea used lakes - and neither plowed non-stop through 350 km of land. What is perhaps most damning in this comparison is the fact that the North (as desribed in this fic) enjoys none of the centralization Romans or Chinese had at their height, which means that such project would not be possible due to the absence of strong central authority with both coin and pull to build/maintain such a thing. And without strong, centralized and rich authority to oversee them, the canals would quickly become unusable ruins, as evidenced by the very history of both examples - Grand Canal and its Egyptian cousin had to be rebuilt/reconstructed several times after periods of neglect.

To build 350 km-long canal the author placed between Blue Knife and Torren's Lake without any rivers or lakes inbetween, one would need an army of laborers - thousands or even tens of thousands of men dedicated solely to digging and transporting removed soil. These men would have to be fed, clothed and housed somewhere. In the periods of Westerosi super-winter, the work would have to stop - with all the additional costs it entails.
All of this would have to continue for decades or (much more probably) centuries - after all, Naviglio Grande (50 km, 1/7 of Blue Knife - Torren's Lake canal) took a century from first dig to being navigable.
Centuries of sinking gold into the ground, dozen(s) of Kings stubbornly refusing to abandon the dream of connecting two coasts of Westeros, relentlessly pressing their subjects for coin and manpower to complete the project. Entire works would be written on causes of such strong desire to build the thing in the first place.
Hundreds of thousands of men being born in laborer towns, growing up with minor work, spending their adulthood digging, meeting their twilight as foremen and going back into the dirt near the canal just like their fathers, grandfathers and grand-grandfathers did.
The building of one such canal would become a national legend on par with Starks unifying the North. There would be scores of songs about it, ranging from hymn to stubbron Stark Kings to a sad one about laborer burying his father near the canal. Each spring Stark Kings would have a ceremonial ride across the entire thing, celebrating their grand achievement. Maesters of the Citadel would write scores of books on the history behind the Grand Canal, on rebellions and plagues and intrigue that surrounded it. There would be a Canal Guild, dedicated solely to maintaining the monstrosity - cleaning it up from dirt and ice dams after the winter, working the gates, patroling the 350 km to look out for those in trouble.

But why bother with it all if one can just stick a few inapplicable examples and replace "North ... [is] ... poor and cold" with "North is rich and with canals"?
Same thing goes for languages, relationship with the Iron Throne, religion and social hierarchy which are supposed to replace/expand canon - things just get shoved in without much consideration about how it would all play in concert. The loss of causes and effects plagues these realms to no end.
It's disappointing.

 

I just read what’s available of ‘The Night Dragons’ by WrathofAvarice.
https://m.fanfiction.net/s/12728743/1/

Maester Aemon is the PoD in that he reaches out to Daenerys before he dies, and also just happens to have 2 dragon eggs.

The writing is a bit clunky at times, with abrupt jumps in perspective and time, but it’s a story I hadn’t read before at least.

What makes the story for me is that characterisation is on point for most everyone. Downside is that’s it’s been pretty smooth sailing so far, because dragons.

It’s about 30k words right now, but with it having been published on the 17th, that’s a pretty decent pace (although who knows how much of it was written at the time of publishing of course).

It’s worth a look imo. I read it in one go and enjoyed it. Not blown away, but nice.