pseudo: I agree that Jason seems to be using realism and idealism in a different sense than I think we would. But to be fair to him, it is also the sense in which these words are commonly used in public discourse or, for example, in an introduction to IR course. GRRM seems much less likely to advocate the claim that there is a reality which can be spoken about and known by human beings. His views seem to comport with those of the nominalist. And so the fundamental line between Tolkien and GRRM is probably that of Tolkien’s fairly consistent Catholicism, which draws the reader out into a shared reality, rather than taking its point of departure as the frame of reference or viewpoint of individual characters which can never really know the truth about each other.

sff: I want to believe that GRRM is writing with that level of sophistication, but have doubts because of the problems noted above, as well as the significant obstacles that have begun to show up in the later books with plotting and character development. Aria certainly doesn’t make sense anymore, for example, and who really knows what he’s doing with the weird Manichean elements of his meta-theology? He seems to have overpopulated a world and now doesn’t know how to move the story forward. But I’m still holding out hope that he’ll return to the elements of the medieval Romance which predominated in Storm of Swords.

Perhaps more should also be said about why the books are both better and worse than the HBO series, and the prospect that GRRM is learning something, and so having to rethink some things, because of his involvement with the show?

The main characters appear to exhibit an enlightenment era cynicism in a pre-enlightenment setting which makes for an anachronistic and incoherent world. The Hobbesianism is a little TOO Hobbesian in a world that had yet to experience the conditions that made Hobbes Hobbes. There was no Reformation,no Galileo, nothing to suggest an alternative to the superstitions of their day and yet everyone operates as though there will be no wrath awaiting them in the next life, or whatever equivalent there would be in their world.

Consider as a contrast the example of the wonderful HBO series Rome where even the most desipicable characters were wary of the wrath of the gods catching up with them. Indeed Julius Ceasar forgave the two main characters at one point based on the rationalization that he believed they were protected by the gods and he didn’t want to cross them.

As enjoyable as Game of Thrones is, its realistic the same way that Madman is a ‘realistic portrayal of the 60′s’, in that its idea of realism consists of flattering today’s fashionable notions of what is realistic.