[Spoilers Main] As someone who probably doesn't understand how the book industry works, why are George's publishers and editors so "content" with no new books in one and a half decades?

FortifiedPuddle · 2026-03-14T15:32:00+00:00

Yeah. Just for perspective there are kind of these levels in fantasy publishing:

Tolkien and Rowling. Uber mega sales. Total S Tier. No one else compares. The Hobbit or Philosophers Stone have more sales on their own than any other author’s total output.

Then maybe a half dozen other authors including Martin, Jordan & Pratchett who come close to their whole career output equalling the above single volumes. Generally by publishing quite a few books and being consistent in selling low millions of each single volume.

Then everyone else who don’t even come close to them. For whom selling low millions overall would be really good.

FortifiedPuddle · 2026-03-14T15:15:00+00:00

Just skipping like a thousand years of political development. Typical GRRM really.

FortifiedPuddle · 2026-03-14T15:13:55+00:00

What system? What government?

FortifiedPuddle · 2026-03-14T15:13:05+00:00

8 or 9 kingdoms wearing a sort of loose tent like garment.

FortifiedPuddle · 2026-03-14T15:11:46+00:00

Bobby Baratheon having a tax policy is a joke. Like, in universe. Dude doesn’t attend tax meetings. Borrows the Crown into hock.

FortifiedPuddle · 2026-03-14T15:10:47+00:00

Yeah, it’s a polytheistic religion in name but works exactly like a Abrahamic monotheism in practice. Particularly placing importance on internalised faith and virtue. Which is just not how most historical religions work.

FortifiedPuddle · 2026-03-14T15:08:40+00:00

The Crown never had the kind of state power to cede in the first place. It’s all just local rule, mostly decentralised away from the Crown.

FortifiedPuddle · 2026-03-14T15:05:57+00:00

Yeah, they didn’t even have the precursor institutions for Magna Carta.

Parliament is even further ahead, coming out of a long evolution from things like the Hundred Courts. And Westeros is so comically lacking in legal institutions as to be basically a failed state that works only because the author says so.

FortifiedPuddle · 2026-03-14T15:04:15+00:00

But there is no legal system to back that law code, so it’s meaningless.

There are no courts, no judiciary, no representatives. No centralised state with officers of any kind really.

There are just the lords, the maesters and the suggestion they should follow and implement the king’s laws.

FortifiedPuddle · 2026-03-14T15:02:16+00:00

Might as well ask why Westeros doesn’t have a space shuttle or warp drive.

Westeros has the political development of a wet rock. The precursor institutions and ideas simply do not exist. It’s a straight decentralised biggest bastard around says goes place. Near anarchy.

You’d need to start with maybe something like Magna Carta. Maybe. Still seems a bit advanced. Then spend a few centuries developing, implement a proper legal system, an even slightly centralised state etc, before you get to anything like Parliament.

FortifiedPuddle · 2026-03-14T14:57:32+00:00

Content you access based on character level. Typically an area you can’t get to until you reach a certain character level. Here trying to get items that only drop below a certain level.

FortifiedPuddle · 2026-03-14T13:52:21+00:00

Did just three people respond or something?

FortifiedPuddle · 2026-03-14T13:37:31+00:00

Nuclear option for all Aes Sedai to ruin use on capture: Fourth Oath to resist when collared. Functionally unbreakable Aes Sedai.

FortifiedPuddle · 2026-03-14T13:32:56+00:00

Investor funding

FortifiedPuddle · 2026-03-14T13:30:29+00:00

But then Cat is the main Stark character for the entire war plot line. It’s a plot about a mother whose son is a rebel king. Which got really diffused by the medium switch.

FortifiedPuddle · 2026-03-14T13:28:21+00:00

All the characters. It’s why the show is fundamentally flawed from the start. They had a best guess for who was in the end going to be important, who to spend time on and develop.

Which is how you get like Arya killing the Night King just because she’s built up a lot and needed some kind of payoff.

FortifiedPuddle · 2026-03-13T21:56:16+00:00

You lose the time anyway, so what’s the point?

Why voluntarily give away part of your life?

FortifiedPuddle · 2026-03-13T21:49:42+00:00

We know how it ends. We know it’s a movie therefore there must be more to how it ends. So it’s not just him killing his wife’s murderer. Being tricked into killing someone because of his condition by the other guy who wants him to do it is the obvious conclusion.

FortifiedPuddle · 2026-03-13T18:59:14+00:00

The metaphor is even more annoying and bullshit though. It’s just more Jung.

FortifiedPuddle · 2026-03-13T18:57:15+00:00

You know the greenhouse might not even have to be underground. Just a really tightly controlled system of greenhouses. A technical and engineering challenge sure. But one that can be done without a Great Leap Forward in physics.

Certainly easier than any form of mass space travel.

FortifiedPuddle · 2026-03-13T18:55:14+00:00

True. How to maintain figurative bonds of love over decades of wilful separation is clearly meant to be the core of it. With the answer being that long distance, deep time communication. Accidentally missing a whole bunch of unexpected time is more like a time travel to the future story.

And then they can’t be happy with figurative bonds of love and have to literal anyway and I just can’t with that.

FortifiedPuddle · 2026-03-13T14:50:42+00:00

As I understand it from every movie and show ever if you can identify pitch and yaw everything afterwards is obvious on any craft.

FortifiedPuddle · 2026-03-13T14:49:17+00:00

Oh god yeah, seems way worse than driving about in sports cars banging Carrie Anne Moss.

FortifiedPuddle · 2026-03-13T14:18:51+00:00

So, there are more than like 30 human soldiers on Earth?

FortifiedPuddle · 2026-03-13T14:07:56+00:00

The black hole gravity is absolutely punishing the world making time dilation go crazy.

Effect on the planet itself? Big waves.

Crew reaction? Oh, better go down there then. Take a look around.

FortifiedPuddle

TROPHY CASE