George "Rejected Runt" Martin, who is 5ft 6 (168 cm) tall, writes fiction from the perspective of an envious midget who wants to see the tall fall.
Fat, shy and bitter is no way to live.
Table of Contents
As George RR Martin and JRR Tolkien are rival titans of popular Western epic fantasy, this essay will compare Martin to Tolkien where relevant.
Napoleon complex
George "Rejected Runt" Martin, who is 5'6" (168 cm) tall, writes fiction dominated by a malignant Napoleon complex. r/asoiafcirclejerk agrees.
The Napoleon complex theory has a scientific basis:
Short men are indirectly aggressive toward taller men, study finds | Big Think
A recent study examined the Napoleon complex through economic games. The results showed that shorter men are more likely than taller men to keep a disproportionate amount of resources for themselves, but only when the other player can't retaliate. The study suggests that the Napoleon complex is most likely to manifest in situations where the shorter man has all the power.
Martin is master of his own fictional Westeros, and can denigrate the tall without fear of retaliation.
Why so bitter? Martin is only 9 cm (5%) shorter than average for his cohort, which was 5'9" (177 cm), same as today. Therefore OKCupid data is relevant:
[PIC: Unsolicited Messages per Week, by Height: Men vs Women]
– The Big Lies People Tell In Online Dating | OkCupid
JRR Tolkien was tall for his time, and married his true love. The average height for his cohort was about 170cm, which is 5'7". According to the OKCupid chart, being 2 inches taller than average might give a 10% boost in female attention. Shortness hurts more than tallness helps.
5'6" men get about .6 messages per week, vs about .8 for 5'9". So Martin's height puts him at a -25% disadvantage in female attraction. Hardly insurmountable. Unfortunately, these pictures from his first marriage tell the rest of the story:
Awkward
The awkwardness of these photos makes clear why the marriage failed after 4 years, and why Martin developed a bitterness towards tall men, leading him to invest a dwarf with all the moral nobility he could muster:
Lord Tyrion Lannister is the youngest child of Lord Tywin Lannister and younger brother of Cersei and Jaime Lannister. A dwarf, he uses his wit and intellect to overcome the prejudice he faces.
Peter Dinklage, born June 11, 1969, Morristown, New Jersey, U.S, American actor who was perhaps best known for his role as Tyrion Lannister, a humane and clever dwarf with a penchant for debauchery, on the HBO television show Game of Thrones (2011–19)
For anyone unfamiliar with the term, a self-insert character is typically defined as the fictional version of yourself that lives out your dreams and fantasies in a novel, short story, or most commonly, fanfiction.
Obese
Martin is also obese. Samwell Tarly is thus another huge self-insert character: a fat cowardly virgin scholar who rises to the top through the power of plot armor and being a niceguy™. (White Walkers inexplicably decline to kill him twice. Maybe they are whale conservationists?)
Samwell is proclaimed a great warrior for cowering and backstabbing, whereas the Mountain is written as an evil mindless beast because he is large and muscular. Martin exhibits no awareness that strength requires discipline to cultivate, which may explain his corpulence. Muscle burns fat.
Emasculated
Varys the fat eunuch is the third self-insert:
Tyrion and Varys Being an Iconic Duo | YouTube
Varys looks masculine with his strong jaw and features, which is inaccurate. This was a missed casting opportunity for a FtM transsexual such as Elliot Page. Real eunuchs looked and acted boyish and effeminate:
[PIC: Ottoman eunuch | Wikipedia]
Chinese imperial eunuchs were notoriously petty and self-centered, yet Varys is written as one of the few true patriots of Westeros, despite lacking any children to motivate his concern for posterity. Patriotic self-sacrifice is a masculine trait for the same reason that drunk driving is a masculine trait: testosterone. (Something GRR Martin should probably consider supplementing.) While men are more aggressive and competitive than women, they are also more willing to sacrifice their material self-interest for abstract concepts such as patriotism and honor. It is common for male mammals to fight over territory and females.
The real reason that Varys is written as a paragon of patriotic masculinity is that he is another Martin self-insert character, of course. Food is the only pleasure left to Martin.
Coward
Some argue that Martin is more realistic than Tolkien because Martin shows the horrors of war. Tolkien knew the horror of war firsthand, which is why he didn't wallow in it. Martin avoided the Vietnam war as a conscientious objector. Point to Martin!
However, to call Martin realistic is ludicrous. He thinks women can fight men in plate. That never happened. He thinks fat eunuch slaves make elite swordsmen due to the slash resistance of their blubber! Reality check:
FACT Open House 2012 - Poleaxe in Armour | YouTube
If you do not understand why biological differences are relevant in melee, have someone from a higher weight class "explain" it to you. Make sure to wear a mouthpiece.
Fighters are always allowed to challenge a higher weight class. If any woman wants to fight men, she can have a line queued up in 10 minutes ready to do it for free. If she's good, she might even win a few times… but then she'll get injured, because women's bodies are not designed for butting heads. Female fighters know this from sparring with men, and are too smart to get into the ring with them. Watch what Ronda Rousey does, not what she says.
If you need a military job at which women outperform men, the answer is urban sniper. Spiders are matriarchal. The Drow are an awesome matriarchal fantasy society. We don't need ludicrous incongruities like Brienne of Tarth, ok?
Gladiators were never castrated, because that would make them cowards. We literally castrate bulls to make them stop fighting. The only military function of a eunuch is as a palace guard who won't screw your harem. "Eunuch" literally means "bed guard". Missing puberty makes a much weaker man. Hence the bullying in junior high.
When Martin wrote his Unsullied, he was probably thinking of Janissaries, who were NOT castrated. They were motivated to fight so they could marry at 40. Men are willing to die for pussy, not gold. (Have you ever heard how soldiers talk?) That's why mercenaries are unreliable. Only a feudal lord or state can credibly guarantee a man a wife, farm and honorable place in society, and the same for his clan. In the absence of durable marriage, the US military has difficulty meeting its recruitment targets, even during relative peace. Difficult to justify getting your legs blown off while your wife blows civilians. Immigration is one solution to this problem, and we all know how that turned out for Rome.
Pervert
GRR Martin wrote a dying world poisoned by his sexual perversion and status frustration. Martin's plot tears down all that is noble and fair, ruining the world until at last damaged and desperate beautiful women are within his self-inserts' feeble reach. The constant sexual assault is a symptom of his buried bitterness towards women and the tall men they chose over him. The world must learn to stop overlooking the dwarf!
Heightcel
If you are a man and not short, you're probably surprised at the vehemence with which women insist on dating a man who is taller while she's wearing heels. Gentlemen, just because we don't notice something, doesn't mean it's not important. In my opinion, a successful outfit leaves a man incapable of remembering what color shoes his date is wearing. Vive la difference.
[PIC: OKCupid messages vs height: men & women]
As you can see from the OKCupid messages chart, height is a major problem for short men and tall women. However, since women get much more attention overall, only short men risk invisibility in the dating market. This is why height is a big deal to short men and kind of irrelevant to the rest of us.
Short guys do have to try harder. You'd see a much more dramatic chart if OKCupid gave the percentage response rate of short vs tall guys. Even moreso when graphing (inches guy is taller) vs (percentage female response rate). But OKCupid doesn't want to ruin their business model by driving away the low-status males, because those are the ones who buy premium accounts to compensate.
To forestall the inevitable: I am 5'11", and my wife fits under my chin. Tiptoe kisses are cute.
There is no need to respond with your height. If you're short, just say that.
Or don't. I'm aware that many short guys have wives. Prince was 5'2" and got laid like a rug. There's more than one way to make your presence known.
The advantage of being short is that you live longer, because your heart doesn't have to pump blood as far up from your feet. Play the long game.
Objections
Tolkien wrote for children.
The Hobbit was written for children; the Silmarillion was not.
You're just hating on Martin for his looks.
His fiction disgusted me before I knew how he looked. His physiognomy is merely a relevant causal factor.
You hate short/fat people.
I just said Prince is cool. Do you need me to pick a cool fat guy too? Alright, go big or go home:
Bruce Bruce "You know You're Fat When" | YouTube
In one Bruce Bruce show a dwarf rolled up late with two hotties, and Bruce Bruce said, "That's my natural ally right there." Hate the Game, not the player.
Show me the psychological study where fit guys hate fat guys. It doesn't exist. Many of us will get fat when we're old; should we hate ourselves? Tolkien got fat. Don't confuse contempt for gluttonous sloth with hatred for the obese.
You hate GRR Martin.
Is it your vocabulary that's stunted, or your emotional range? I don't even despise Martin. I enjoyed some of his books!
I've listed Martin's flaws, and they're not that bad. Would that all the world's monsters wrote bad fiction instead of doing bad deeds.
Hate is an intense emotion. Avoid using it frivolously, and one can dispense with juvenile expletives. Perhaps you hate Trump. I hate Joe Biden. Long live hate.
GRR Martin's flaws are worth analyzing as part of the culture war, and to rebut his critique of Tolkien. He is to be congratulated for managing to make himself Tolkien's rival, if only temporarily. Like a boxing match, it is nothing personal.
When I found I disliked Martin's books, I moved on without so much as writing a review. Only repeated indirect exposures to his work due to his popularity kept me aware of his existence. Finally I had to read some of his lore to understand a reference someone was making, and this essay is the result. A coroner does not grow emotional when he dissects to determine the cause of death (which is frequently obesity).
I love Tolkien. We both worship the same God of Love. That is the motivation.
The Inquisition is thorough, not merciful. My investigation concludes that GRR Martin is in league with Hell. His character flaws are pertinent to his fall. Fame has a price.
(Incoherent ad-hominem).
Why not just say you despise me? Are you afraid to profess negative emotion? Do you think vindictively lying is good for your soul?
My favorite is the accusation that I'm short, which ironically endorses the Napoleon complex.
Try connecting the personal criticism to an argument that rebuts the thesis. Intelligent disagreement has already honed this from a one-line shitpost to two lengthy essays.
Or cry to the mods to remove it for being a meanie. That's what most Redditors do. Whatever works!
As someone who is a die-hard fan of Tolkien and all that he represents, and also a newly made fan of Martin's work, I really feel the urge to disabuse you of some faulty assumptions and mistakes you have made. I would love to have a full-fledged dialogue with you in any other format if possible. Let me start with a proper rebuttal from the beginning
1. I do not care much for physiognomic analysis and denigrating people for how they look, but your fault is in assuming that Martin's self inserts somehow relate to his own shortcomings. This is true, but not to the extent that you assume. First of all, let's start with Sam. Sam Tarly might be obese, but his obesity comes not out of him being a lazy turd but being consistently emotionally, psychologically and physically abused by an incompetent, narrow-minded and shallow father. I would like to call your attention to the fact that there exists not one (like in our medieval Europe) but two institutions in Westeros for nobles like Sam who are not martially competent to achieve some level of success and power in their lifetimes. His father repeatedly refused to send Sam to the Citadel simply because of some abstract notion of it being cowardly servitude. If Sam had simply had a more understanding paternal figure (even like Mace Tyrell or Eddard Stark) then he would by now be a happy dude chilling at the Citadel or at some lord's castle. We are then posited the question: is he a fat, cowardly man without self belief lacking confidence due to his own faults, or due to people around him not seeing the goodness that he has? I wonder where you stand on Randyll Tarly
2. Tyrion Lannister is not a good man. Martin has, on repeated occasions, described him as a villain. Any reading of ASOIAF that does not have the Lannisters cast as villains is fundamentally flawed because that is how the series is meant to be read. The main Lannister sibling trio are sympathetic, yes, but they are intended not to be "morally grey" or an equal alternative to the Starks, but foils to the core protagonists, i.e. the Starks. That's why the book starts in Winterfell, not Casterly Rock or King's Landing. They are all also filled with immense guilt and trauma due to, again, a terrible father. Tyrion specifically is not an attempt at a self insert by Martin but instead a study of a character who becomes a horrible unsympathetic villain despite starting a decent man who is cursed by society due to faults that are, again, not of his own design. He is a decently accomplished fighter, has a cunning mind for war and politics, is very learnt in certain regards, is loyal to his house and kin DESPITE knowing their horrible crimes and treachery and stays loyal to them till the bitter end till he is irrevocably alienated by his father. Again, had he not been born a dwarf, he would have had a good life. We do not see any evidence of self-insertism with him, people generally despise him for being an ugly dwarf, one of his KEY character traits is that no woman will love him and the sole woman who had he did nothing to stop her being gangraped by his father's soldiers and then himself. He is haunted by it and copes through a nihilistic attitude that parallels his brother Jaime in the beginning by convincing himself that no woman will ever love him and all the love he has is bought with coin. The revelation that Tysha had loved him shatters his worldview, completely destroys him. Suddenly, he learns that he HAD found his one true love who loved him despite being short and ugly, and he raped her; he subsequently descends to villainous madness. This poignant conflict is what sets Tyrion up to be one of the best characters in the series and a great character of literature in general. Reducing him to a projection of authorial shortcomings is extremely farcical and belies a surface level reading with lenses so tinted with pre-existing biases that they are bordering on being great beach shades
3. Oh what have you made of Varys. How did you not see that he is not some great patriot but a complete liar and hypocrite, exactly what an eunuch is. He is driven not by some greater heroic patriotism but by some crude agenda in his twisted mind where he thinks the deaths of hundreds, good men as he knows himself, is somehow justified because it will result in a wise and noble philosopher-king sitting the throne. He is exactly the kind of man you seem to hate so much on this blog, an idealist activist trying to usher in an unachievable utopia without realising that the price he has paid, the means for the ultimate beautiful end, are unforgivable. Varys is probably the worst character, the most villainous evil person in the story, because his moral compass is intact. He knows Eddard Stark is a good man, he knows that a living farce, an abomination of incest sits the throne, and he does not care, because the end result is the utopia of a perfect king. How many has he doomed to die in a war he could have avoided simply to see his own ends through. "For the Children!" is such a blatant and obvious analogue to "For the Proletariat" that only a person blinded by hate and his own ego and sense of superiority would be unable to see it. Varys is the ultimate deconstruction of any ideological fanatic crusader or terrorist, presented to the reader in a very simple package to understand.
What I can conclude from your essay is that you have not properly understood or read the series to be making such calls, nor can you understand what Martin actually thinks or believes. As for his love life, I will recommend you to watch this video (please not the timestamp):
https://youtu.be/uF96WOuFd7A?list=PLCsx_OFEYH6un7-8efHOg-UL5WdQ9gLSN&t=187
All in all, I would like to say that I think you should try and overcome your biases and open your mind to the possibility that a beautiful story does not need to be about the noble and the fair fighting the dark and evil, but could also be about the disgusting and weak achieving true nobility by means of their own effort, overcoming the bounds set on them, the damning by fate and society telling them you are supposed to be bad, you are supposed to be an outcast. Martin's work will NEVER be as monumental or seminary as Tolkien's epic; Middle-earth is by far the crown jewel of fantasy literature and everything else is at best an imitation, all living in its shadow. ASOIAF tries to make its own hill next to the Everest of Tolkien, a hill that is as much about the fundamental weaknesses and the nature of Men as is Lord of the Rings. Instead of exploring the good we are capable of, it simply goes the other way, to see how low, how base we can truly be. It opens the lid on the question of how we went from Numenor and Gondor to the modern world. It dares to peek into the shadow of Mordor and ask what goes there, ask what was in the hearts of the Easterlings and Southrons who flew Sauron's banners. It is not a mockery of all that is good and fair in the world; rather, it is about how we make a mockery of it, what our greed, fear, pride, ambition and lust drives us to. Simply decrying it as a nihilistic toxic fat and short man exploring his own inner abyss ignores the fact that such an abyss exists within us all. We all have the ability to be Boromir, Pippin, or Wormtongue just as we can all be Stannis, Jaime or Jon.
PS: Maybe it's because you are older but I find your claim of being tall at 5' 11" hilarious. I am nearly the same height myself (179 cm or 5' 10" and some change) and I have spent my short (heh) life painfully aware of how short I actually am. I think it's due to the Internet and the inflation of standards within my generation (surely you are aware of the 5'11" vs 6' meme) and how men below 6 feet are an absolute no go for several women, but it might also have to do with me being around men who were almost always taller than me. The gist here is that you are NOT tall and you should not act so smug about what is by now a very average height. Especially if you are White or Black.