Misc

This will be the section for any writing I want to do that doesn’t fall into the other categories very well. These will usually be real world topics like:

Real world historical analysis
Real world inspirations, verified or speculative
Real world mythology
Real world literature
Real world politics
Real world culture

I haven’t done a lot of this stuff and I probably won’t do much of it. But what little I do I will put here.

I’m mostly interested in building my understanding of the story as a self-contained thing. There seem to be a lot of analysts who like to analyze the story in the context of the real world, but not enough who analyze the story in the context of itself. I don’t know why I am so unmoved by real world analysis. I like history and love mythology, I just don’t think there is much to be learned about the story from them. When I read historical analysis I learn more about history than I do about the story.

Martin doesn’t generally copy and paste his inspirations into his writing, he loosely draws upon them and gives it his own spin. I have never seen anybody who is able to accurately predict the future of the story by digging through Martin’s inspirations, so I don’t think it’s a very effective mode of analysis either.

I’m not particularly concerned with predicting the story either, it just seems like the best way to measure understanding. The better I understand something, the better I should be able to predict its future behavior. But like other readers I am eager to find out what happens to the characters next.

I know that Stannis has a lot in common with Agamemnon, that the Wall is inspired by Hadrian’s wall and that Melisandre is inspired by Cassandra. And that stuff is all mildly interesting to me. But yes, for the most part I’m interested in the story as a story, for the time being and the foreseeable future.

I also tend to associate historical or mythological support with poor analysis and poor theories. A good theory or prediction will stand on its own merits by citing little more than the story itself. And somebody who has a good understanding of the story won’t need to draw from outside of the story very much to support his ideas. I do it sometimes myself, but I try not to do it very much and I try to treat it like a side-note that is not meant to lend unearned credence to the story analysis.