 Hey guys, I'm back. I know it's probably been a little while since a lot of you have seen my face, but you know, I have a new camera now and unfortunately I do not have a proper microphone at the moment. I wanted to have it by now, but you know, some shit happened and hopefully this sound quality should be better than the next one. I apologize for it now. But that out of the way, let's talk about a song of ice and fire. Woo! This is the introduction song. It's not very good, but it's not too long. A song of ice and fire is one of, if not the biggest hit in all of fantasy for probably the past several decades, if not of all time. It had a huge successful book series. It has a huge successful HBO show, which the final season is coming soon and everyone's super excited about it and a lot of people really love it. But to start off a song of ice and fire month, which hey, this month is, if you didn't know that, now you do, in order to start that off, I just wanted to talk about some of the best parts of the series and some of the worst parts. So I have the top five best parts about a song of ice and fire and the top five worst. And don't think I need to explain how top five lists work to you, so let's get going. Okay, so the number five best thing about these books is just the dialogue. I mean that really, because in both the show and the books, but mostly the books, the dialogue is not necessarily realistic, but it does have just this energy to it. This series is endlessly quotable. You have things like when you play the Game of Thrones, you win or you die. There is no middle ground. What is dead may never die, but rises again harder and stronger. There are no men like me. There's only me. Rhaegar fought valiantly. Rhaegar fought nobly. Rhaegar fought honorably. And Rhaegar died. There's a reason that a lot of the show's dialogue was taken directly from the books, because again, it's not super realistic, but it's just cool. It has this flavor to it, which adds a lot to both the characters and the world they inhabit. It just gives it life. The number five worst thing is the timeline. And to be fair, both George Double R. Martin and the writers of the show have acknowledged this in the past. George R. Martin has said before that the chapters that follow different characters don't necessarily take place in order, and they don't necessarily take place simultaneously too, because sometimes chapters will take place over the course of months or years even, and sometimes they'll only be a couple of hours. And so really, he just says don't think about it too hard. And the showrunners as well have mentioned things like, well, we tried to make it all happen simultaneously for a while, but then we ran into problems like Arya being on a boat for four episodes, and no one wants to see that. So they just sort of, again, gloss over it. And that does lead to problems like characters seemingly teleporting across the continent, or things like we have no idea how long Arya was in Braavos exactly. She obviously must have been there for a while, because you don't get that sort of training overnight, but we don't know how long. The number four best thing about these books is just the unapologetic nature. And by that, I mean the sex, the violence, the swearing, the death, that sort of thing. Because having all that doesn't make a book good on its own. I want to be clear about that. But what it does is, for example, the character deaths, you know, this series is famous for killing off major characters a lot, and that adds actual tension to the story. Because if in most old school stories, you were never really that concerned that the hero would make it, because you know, oh, he's the hero. Like, what's going to happen to him? He's the hero. He's going to get out of everything. Whereas in these, yeah, you are genuinely concerned because there's a very real chance that they will die, that they won't make it out. And for other things, like the just the brutality of the violence and all the sex that goes on, that does give this world its own flavor, which again, not necessarily realistic, but it does make it seem really, again, brutal, really dark, really grimy, just dirty. And so that just adds flavor. That's a word I'm going to be using a lot here is that it adds flavor to both the world and to the characters when everything is just very in your face, very straightforward. There's no dancing around the subject. Of course, that ties into the number four worst thing, which is excessive violence and swearing and sex. Let's be honest, the way that the HBO show is set up, there's just a lot of nudity and a lot of sex that really doesn't need to be there. Like, I feel like they just put it in there because they can. And sometimes the violence is the same way, although that's a little less obnoxious about it, I think, just in my opinion. And in the books, there are some sequences, which I'm not going to directly quote, but George D.R. Martin has a weird way of writing bodily functions and bodily fluids and describing them in way more detail than we really need. So that's one, it's just kind of gross. And two, like, it basically is the flip side of the coin for being unapologetic about everything is that sometimes it's just gross and unnecessary. Number three best thing is that these books and the show have some really, really hateable villains. Now that's harder to do than you might think because a lot of people think that, okay, if we just make a bad guy who's evil and does a bunch of bad stuff, then we'll automatically hate him. But it's more difficult than that because a lot of times when you wind up doing that, you just wind up making a guy who's evil just for the sake of being evil. But in the case of A Song of Ice and Fire, all the villains have reasons for what they do. Now, they might be petty reasons, they might be stupid reasons, they might be reasons we can't quite identify with, but they are reasons that we understand. And so because of that, yeah, we hate them even more because they aren't just people that are evil for the sake of being evil, they're just sociopaths who are doing horrible things in order to get what they want. However, it's also easy to sort of make it go in the opposite direction where you make the villains a little too sympathetic so you wind up rooting for them instead of the heroes, which in these books would not be that hard to do because some of the heroes are dicks. The whole thing is a very delicate tightrope walking act and George Double R. Martin has managed to pull it off great. The TV show has managed to pull it off, uh, I don't think quite as great. Like, they still make you hate the villains, but they don't go into quite as much detail about why they're doing what they're doing and part of that is just, you know, the differences in the medium, you can't get in their head as much. But still, great job in both cases. Number three worst thing, Zombie Viserion. Now, okay, spoilers for season seven of the show here. If you haven't watched it, then do that or if you just don't care, then keep watching. But for those of you who forgot, uh, near the end of season seven, John Snow and some others went north of the wall to capture a white so they could bring it down south and show it to people. And they got trapped. And so Daenerys took her three dragons, including the green one, Viserion, and went up, killed a bunch of the whites, and rescued them. But while they were there, the Night King, the King of the Others, or the White Walkers in the show, he shows up and he throws an icicle spear and it hits Viserion and kills him. And it is actually really shocking when you first see that. It's very, whoa, okay, he can kill dragons that easily. And then later, he brings his body back to life as a white, as a, you know, a snow zombie, essentially. And again, that's kind of cool. That's neat. I liked that. That makes the Night King look like more of a threat. But then, at the very end of the season, the Night King flies on Viserion and Viserion blows fire at the wall and destroys it so the others can come south. Here's a problem with that. One, Viserion breathes blue fire, which is actually even hotter than regular fire. And two, fire kills whites. Like, fire is one of the only things that can kill whites. From the first time we see them, or not the first time, but the first time they fight them and kill them in season one, when Gior Mormund gets attacked by one and Jon saves him and throws a lantern at one and melts it, that's when we realize, okay, they can be killed with fire. If Viserion has fire inside of himself, how does he not melt? How does he not kill himself when he does that? That's really stupid, guys. Number two best thing about these books is that there is no POV from any of the kings. Now, when I say any of the kings, I specifically mean the kings from the War of Five kings, which takes up a pretty substantial chunk of this series, anyways. Now, in most of these sort of stories, there would be one guy who was clearly the good guy, or maybe one guy who was clearly the bad guy and some other guys who were sort of in the gray area or something like that. But in this one, they're all sort of good and they're all sort of bad. And the way that the books keep you from identifying with any one of them too strongly is by not having any chapters that follow their POV. The only times you get to see them is from other people's perspectives. You know, you don't get to go into Stannis Baratheon's head and really find out what he's thinking, why does he feel the way he feels, why does he act the way he acts. You just have to see it mostly through the eyes of Ser Davos. And through that, you actually get an idea of why Ser Davos is so loyal to him, and you do get an idea of how his mind works and why he does the things he does. But you don't actually get inside his head, which means you have to judge Stannis based on his actions and not his intent. And it goes the same way for all of the other kings. You don't judge Joffrey but because he feels this way about something. You judge him because, well, he's a fucking psycho, and you see all the shit that he does and you see the way he affects other people. Now this is a small thing, but it is huge in making these books stand out among the fantasy crowd because so many of them would have had at least a little bit of time devoted to one or more of the kings showing their ideologies inside their heads. And hey, maybe we would understand why Robb Stark decided to betray Walter Frey a little bit more if we actually were inside his head. We actually saw his exact thoughts when he did it. But instead, we don't get that. We have to sort of extrapolate from other things. And we also have to just judge him for being an idiot because that was a stupid move on his part. And so that kind of puts you in the shoes of maybe not necessarily a normal person in Westeros, but pretty much anyone who isn't a king in Westeros. The number two worst thing about these books is the lack of focus. Now, I know that this was originally meant to be a trilogy and George W.R. Martin has even famously said that it was supposed to be finished by 1998, and it's now 2019. So yeah, just draw your own conclusions from that. But anyways, point is it starts off fairly straightforward. There is a war in Westeros which has multiple sides, multiple fronts about who will become king, and there's some people that want to break off. And then there's Daenerys, who wants to come in and take over as well. And then there's some stuff going on at the wall with the others. Okay, it's a little spread out, but it's all focused on this one location, and it generally mostly focuses on the War of Five Kings, so it's not too too bad. But we are now five books in, and Daenerys is just kind of dicking around in Slaver's Bay, like she's just conquering cities there and then trying to hold on to them and then losing control of them and then having to try and reconquer them. We have to follow all this stuff about Cersei screwing up things in King's Landing. We have to follow all this stuff about Little Jon Connington secretly being a Targaryen and wanting to come in and take over as well. And then we have to follow all this stuff about the Greyjoys having a succession crisis and Robb Stark getting killed, and the story really does go all over the place after a while. And don't get me wrong, it's not bad. I still enjoy it just because I enjoy most of the characters, I enjoy following them, but like ask yourself, what are these books really about? Like after A Storm of Swords, what is the story about? What is the story following? I don't know. It's kind of hard to say. Now the show fixes this a little bit because, you know, it's gone off from where the books were. And it's definitely shifting towards the others, you know? It's like, okay, this is the big threat, so we're just going over here and it kind of had Daenerys finish up her storyline fairly quickly, which again, I'm grateful for just because it wasn't very good, I didn't think. And well, yeah, overall it just handles it a lot better and it has a much more focused direction because again, it's difficult to even describe what these books are about because they kind of go all over the place. And the number one best thing about A Song of Ice and Fire, at least in my opinion, is the characterization. Now I had trouble thinking of what the number one spot should be here because characterization is just such a broad term. Like it goes for the heroes, the villains, the side characters, the minor characters, the people you only see once and have maybe two lines of dialogue. But the thing about all of them is that they're all great. I mean it, I mean literally every character in these books has some level of personality to them. They don't just exist as some parts in the story. They aren't a cognitive machine. They are their own person and they do have a place in this world and they do have a place in the story. Even if it's infinitesimally small, infinitesimally small, I have trouble with that word, sorry, even if it's that tiny, they have a part to play and they all have a personality and they all have their own thoughts and beliefs that are shaped by their various experiences. Even just the tiniest, tiniest character. I really want to hammer that in because they all do. Not just the main people we follow, not just the main villains they fight against, not just their friends, their family. Everyone does. And that's a feat that when you consider how many hundreds of characters are in these books, that's a feat that's very difficult to pull off. There are a lot of authors out there that can't even make two or three characters really come to life the way George Double R. Martin makes all of his come to life. And there are people out there who write epic fantasy with hundreds or thousands of characters but a lot of them just feel bland and like they're just put in there just because. But George Double R. Martin has managed to avoid all of that and quite frankly I think that's greatest strength as a writer by a pretty huge margin. So yeah that's the that's the best part about these books and about the show. And the number one worst thing about the A Song of Ice and Fire book series is that there is no finish to it. Yeah I know I know I'm real original complaining that Winds of Winter isn't here yet and look I get it George Double R. Martin doesn't actually owe me anything. I understand that I really do and if you're one of those people that like harasses him on Twitter and stuff to tell him where's Winds of Winter where's Winds of Winter don't do that because that's that's just a dick move. But again if you have a story that's really this good and is you're this invested in it and even if it kind of goes all over the place you can still sort of see it might be working towards something really big and something grand and something cool. And it's just not finishing which again there are people who have basically decided that the Winds of Winter is never coming out and even if it does a Dream of Spring has to come after that. So it takes what nine or ten years for the Winds of Winter and then another nine or ten years till a Dream of Spring it's kind of hard to keep up any any level of engagement for that long. And I'm sure anyone who's watched a television show that's been cancelled prematurely will tell you it's very frustrating to get invested in a story and then just not see how it ends. And you know I don't even know if I really need to go into more detail about that that's just it's frustrating to get into something that's probably not going to end or just will end in an unsatisfying way or something like that. It's just it's frustrating it's difficult and well yeah it's by far the worst part of these books. So that's everything that I have for you today. Thanks for watching this far and prepare yourself for the rest of A Song of Ice and Fire Month which is all April by subscribing and liking and leaving comments so that other people will actually see this video because the YouTube algorithm really sucks and I hate it. And yeah I'll see you again in a couple of days for some other Game of Thrones related stuff. Bye. Here's all my patrons and stuff their names are on the screen now. 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