 Okay, so this will be the last video that I put out for A Song of Ice and Fire Month, and if you enjoyed it, then I'm glad. I'm glad you watched through all that, and I'm glad you listened to what I had to say. And for this one, just to round things out, I kind of wanted to talk about A Song of Ice and Fire in more of a, more of a meta sense. You know, I don't want to talk about the books themselves and what they do right, what they do wrong, what I enjoy. I want to talk about what the series can teach us about the fantasy genre, what it can teach us about the publishing industry, what it can teach us about fandom and writing in general, all that sort of thing. So, yeah, I don't have much else to say, but let's just get started. This is the introduction song, it's not very good, but it's not too long. So I think the first thing that the series teaches us that a lot of people took a little bit too much to heart is that low fantasy has an audience. For a long time, low fantasy was just such a niche genre which didn't sell that much and it didn't, like people didn't know about it that much. It wasn't in the mainstream at all. But once Game of Thrones came around and it was actually fairly popular and then more books came around the series and they actually were, you know, they were popular, they were bigger. Especially once the TV show came around, it became a huge success. People started to realize, hey, not every fantasy needs to revolve around magic stuff. You know, it doesn't need to be at the forefront. It can still be there, but we can have it be a little more grounded, more realistic. And on that same note, people saw that this was a very dark story and, well, they kind of took that and really ran with it. Because the other thing that we need to know here is that a little bit of darkness goes a long way. Now, if you've read these books, you know, obviously they are super dark and they are super dreary and depressing at times and that's not a bad thing. But the thing is that the first time somebody gets raped or the first time you see somebody's head get cut off or whatever, it's shocking and it makes you, you know, it makes you feel bad. You feel bad for them. But after it happens a hundred times, you just stop caring. And I did mention this a little bit in my best and worst of the series list, but still I feel the need to reiterate it and like that's something that can be, that's a lesson that can be used in all genres, in all forms of media, just a little bit of darkness goes a very long way. Another thing that I think we really learned from this is that audiences are smarter than we give them credit for. Now, see, most of the time in writing, at least when you're a beginner writer, you really want to give a lot of information to the audience so that they can figure out what's going on. And you usually wind up giving them too much, so there's no mystery or it just becomes an info dump or, you know, whatever, especially when you're writing something that's science fiction or fantasy because then you have this whole fantastical world going on. And it's also a bit of a problem in the mystery genre as well. Like, you know, murder mysteries, you have to give just the perfect amount of information that the reader can figure out what's going on before it's revealed, but at the same time you don't want to give it away so much that they figure it out too early. And like, well, okay, it's not a huge problem in the mystery genre, but it does happen occasionally because mystery writers have to be really good at that balancing act if they want to be successful. But anyways, the point I'm getting at is that audiences are smarter than we give them credit for. Okay, A Song of Ice and Fire is a really long series, it has a really detailed world, and it has a huge, gigantic cast of characters. And they don't give you a lot of the information upfront, but you don't need a lot of the information upfront, okay? You don't need to know everything about every culture. The audience can just sort of read little bits of it and figure the rest out for themselves. And again, maybe that's more of a beginner writer problem and veterans don't have as much of an issue with it, but that is something to keep in mind if you are a content creator of any sort. And even if you're not, it's just good to know that, yeah, audiences are smarter than we usually want to give them credit for. The next point I want to make is also something that I've touched upon before. And that's that every story, no matter how good it is, no matter what genre it's in, it needs to end at the right time. Now, this is a problem in television mostly, like I'm sure we've all seen a show which was good for like two or three seasons, but then it kind of wrapped up all the plot lines that it had, and there was just nothing else left for it to work with, and so it was just coming up with newer stuff, and it wasn't quite working the same way. All the character arcs were being rehashed and redone, and there's retcons, and you know, it's just not working out that well. And I'm not really saying that about The Game of Thrones TV show, I'm not talking about that in this video, I'm talking about the books specifically. They were originally planned as a trilogy, and it was all about the War of Five Kings and the others coming down and Daenerys coming over and trying to take over Westeros, and well, it lost focus very quickly, and so now it's just kind of going on a lot longer, it's going to be over twice as long as what it was originally supposed to be, and it's losing a lot of its focus, it's losing a lot of its character, it's losing its direction, it's just, it's going on too long and people are losing interest, and that kind of ties into my next point, I was originally going to make these two separate points, but I think it works best here. It's that every fan base moves on eventually, because if the story doesn't end when it's, when it should, when it's at the best time, then one, it just gets more boring and the quality gets lower after that, but two, in this case, we just haven't had anything for a long time, okay? Dance with Dragons came out almost eight years ago, and the Winds of Winter is still nowhere in sight. A Dream of Spring is, well, a dream, and I want to reiterate again, George R.R. Martin does not owe us anything, okay? He's not a content machine that just pumps stuff out for us to consume, he's a person, and if he just wants to give us the finger and go retire, he's allowed to do that. It would be a bit of a dick move, but he's allowed to do that. And the thing is that every fan base, no matter how passionate it is, because this is a very passionate fan base, okay? You'll still find people making theories and stuff, even though there haven't been any books coming out in eight years, and the show still has a very dedicated fan base and all, but we've mostly moved on, okay? I don't have the same level of passion for these books that I had four or five years ago, because, you know, they're great books, don't get me wrong, and I still really like them, and one day I might go back and reread all of them again, but it's just hard for me to care for this much of a period of time if there's nothing being given to me. So let that be a lesson. Every fan base, no matter how passionate it is, will eventually move on, and every story needs to end when it's supposed to end, and I'm sure you can apply that to a million other franchises. I'm not gonna bring any of that up right now because I don't want to start a fucking comment war, but that's it. The next thing is that imitators are both annoying, and they kind of ruin the original work. Now, in this case I'm talking more about the TV show, because once the Game of Thrones TV show came around and took off, everyone kind of wanted their own Game of Thrones, everyone kind of wanted to imitate that style, so they came out with like super dark stories, and every ever, it's really violent, and there's sex all over the place, and just... they kind of missed the point. Like, the reason that Game of Thrones worked so well is because, one, it was fantasy, and that's not a genre you see a lot on television, and certainly not with high enough budgets to do it justice, and two, which ties back into the books again, is that it works so well because of characterization, and I'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute, but the characters are amazing, even the evil ones and the good ones they're all great, and that's what draws you in more than anything, and all the imitators kind of missed that, and there's plenty of imitator books too, I just they're not as well known, that's why I use the shows as an example, but the thing about that is that when people consume that other media, which is kind of similar, but it just lacks the same soul, it doesn't have the soul, we'll say, when they do that it kind of takes away from the original because they're hitting the same points over and over and people get tired of it. Now another good example of this in the world of books was The Hunger Games, you know, that came out, and I'll defend those books as being fine, you know, they're not amazing, but they're decent books, and then there were a million imitators that came out over the next like five, six years after the first book came out, and so they really took away from The Hunger Games, because when you read all those other books that are basically, I don't want to say rip-offs because that's being a little uncharitable, but fuck it, we'll say rip-offs, when you're reading all those other books that are basically just rip-offs of The Hunger Games, and you're seeing the same tropes, the same character archetypes, the same cliches, and they're done more poorly, that means you start seeing problems with those archetypes and cliches and tropes, and then that takes away from your initial enjoyment of The Hunger Games, and so what this teaches us about not only a song of ice and fire, but about books and all forms of media in general, is that when you're successful you inspire imitators, but those imitators kind of take away from the original work. This one is short. Characters are more important than plot. Now for all the problems with the song of ice and fire, how it's kind of unfocused and like if you were to explain to someone who had never read it or seen the show what it was about, it would be a little difficult to do so. Like, oh yeah, it's about this guy, this lord who goes down to a city because his friend is the king and he wants to help him out, he's becoming his new hand of the king, which is basically Prime Minister, and meanwhile the daughter and the son of the last king are kind of plotting to come back and they're doing this by her marrying this barbarian warlord, and also there's like this big ice wall which is supposed to protect us from like snow zombies, and it's kind of difficult to explain. That's basically one of my biggest problems with it, you know, the lack of focus, but I've already gone on enough about that, so what I just want to say is that even though the plot really isn't that easy to explain, and in a lot of ways it's not particularly good, the characters are so good and you still want to know what happens with them and you want to follow them, you want to watch them succeed, you want to watch them fail, the characters are way more important than the plot and you'll follow them basically anywhere, and so yeah, characters are more important than plot, that's it. I think this should be the last point, and for a second I just want to talk about the dangers of discovery writing because if you're not familiar with writing, there's basically a spectrum that most writers will fall onto, and on one end of the spectrum is outline writing, aka planners, or you know, there's different names for it, I call them outliners, and so those are the people that, you know, plot everything out, they decide what's going to happen, who's going to do what before the story even begins, and then once they sit down to write they're just, you know, they're just writing it out essentially, and making a longer outline you can almost say because in a lot of cases the outlines are very, very thorough, and on the other end of the spectrum you have discovery writers, aka gardeners, aka just, you know, these are guys that write as they go, okay, they just sit down and decide that day like okay what cool thing do I want to happen, let's have that happen, and then they just go through until it feels like the story is done, and again you don't have to be full one or full the other, you can fall somewhere on the spectrum, I'm definitely leaning more towards the discovery writer side of things, but you know, I do occasionally think of like, okay, I want to have it end this way, that sort of thing, anyways George double R Martin is very much a discovery writer, he's said as much plenty of times, and in general the advantage of discovery writer is that you write great characters, which I've already said he does, and because you know, the characters are just doing things, they're reacting naturally to things as opposed to reacting in a way that the plot wants them to react, and so that is a definite advantage of this, however, it also means that the vague ideas that he had planned for the ending keep getting pushed away, and they keep getting pushed, oh yeah that's it, they keep getting pushed farther and farther away, and they keep getting built up to the point where nothing that happens is going to be satisfying, like no matter how this ends, people are going to be very upset, and not in the sense that like, okay, it's the internet age, everyone is going to be upset about how their favorite book series ends, or their favorite TV show ends, or whatever, but I mean that in the sense that it's just going to be built up so impossibly large in the audience's heads that whatever happens at the end is just going to feel like, oh okay, well that's not very satisfying, and beyond that it also, another problem with discovery writing is that you sometimes have to go back and redo stuff, and don't get me wrong, editing and rewriting is a part of the writing process no matter where you fall in the spectrum, but with discovery writers it's way more important because that's how you make sure everything lines up properly, that's how you make sure everything's consistent, that's how you make sure there's no plot holes, et cetera, and George Treveller Martin, again, he has to rewrite stuff a lot, he's been pretty open about that, like I remember when A Feast for Crows came out, uh, or I don't remember, but I've heard that when A Feast for Crows came out he said it was supposed to be like a year until A Dance of Dragons came out and he wound up basically rewriting that entire book, and that's why it took six years, so essentially this teaches us the dangers of discovery writing, okay, that if you have not written out the whole series yet, and you're just seeing where it goes, then, well, you can wind up sort of writing yourself into a corner, and then it can be difficult to get yourself out of it, and I think, I haven't actually heard anything about this, so don't take my word for it, but I think that is part of the reason that the Winds of Winter is taking so impossibly long to come out, is because George Treveller Martin has written himself into a corner or two, and he really doesn't know how to get out of it, and so, well, it's not like he can go back and rewrite the first five books, because those are already published, you know, you can't, I mean, I guess he could release new editions, but that would that would be pretty bullshit, honestly, so yeah, that's it, so I think that just be aware of the dangers of discovery writing, if you are one, I certainly am myself, and that's about all I got for you today, so I know that this was pretty meta, but a lot of these ideas have been just nagging at me, nagging at the back of my head for a long time now, it's just, it's just been making me think that, you know what, A Song of Ice and Fire isn't just a book series, it really is a phenomenon, you know, it had a huge adaptation, the books themselves were hugely successful, it has a gigantic fan base, there's tons of spin-offs and all kinds of stuff, and that is, in a lot of ways, a good thing, and I mean, I'm not complaining about it, I'm not saying like, oh, this should be a small niche thing so that only a couple of us nerds can enjoy it, because if that were the case, I would probably have never found out about it. A Song of Ice and Fire is one of the series I read, I think I read it when I was first starting high school, and that's part of what got me into fantasy, and I just think that there's a lot of lessons we can learn from it, and just a lot of stuff about like what works, what doesn't, and I don't mean in the technical sense like how to actually write these books, but just in the sense of how media affects the world, and how the world affects media, and how media affects other media, and well, that sounded kind of pretentious, didn't it, but you know what, that's about all I got to say, so thanks for watching, thanks to Des Brennan, and thanks to all my other patrons, check out my page and all that, and I will see you guys later.