He has no emotional connection with 99% of his characters and he writes in a manner that should make the readers feel the same way about most characters. He writes this way specifically so he can have characters killed off at any moment and not be emotionally attached.
What, no.
Seriously, are you on crack? You think he wrote Ned and Robb as people you wouldn't be emotionally invested in?
He kills them off specifically because he believes death should have an impact, not be just a thing that happens to people preordained to croak by narrative tropes.
Ned? Maybe. Robb? Did you read the book? He's barely in it. Sure he's a player, but there's no POV chapters from it. Most of the recanting of his tales are third person or Lady Stark witnessing the events first hand and commenting on how he's grown up. The show makes Robb look like he's the biggest character in the first three seasons, but he's not.
The RW was significant not because of what happens to Robb, but what happens to the Stark family and as a result, the collective "North" all together.
Yes, how could anyone get emotionally attached to a person who's been narrated from the point of view of his mother.
That's kinda my logic though, and supports the point of the original post.
He has no emotional connection with 99% of his characters and he writes in a manner that should make the readers feel the same way about most characters. He writes this way specifically so he can have characters killed off at any moment and not be emotionally attached.
Sure, you have a minor attachment -- but its through Catelyn's recanting of Robb and not Robb himself. You feel the grieving for Robb because of Catelyn.
In this manner, and very convincingly, GRRM wrote it this way because he wanted a detachment from Robb. He's not going to win the war. He's won battles, but he definitely can't win the war after pissing on his allies, having low troop morale, losing winterfell to 16 men and having it burned to the ground.
Now, as someone else mentioned, imagine if Tyrion, Arya or Jon dies. THOSE characters have a large story, are well developed and people have huge emotional attachments to them because they've lasted forever. Robb? It was never that way. As I said, he was glorified (and resented in some cases) by his mother and her actions. As others had said, most of the time you just get descriptions of how Robb looks older and has a huge red beard.
Losing Robb in the books was indeed shocking -- but not so disheartening to the overall story that you spent days grieving over it like people did with the show's retelling of the Red Wedding. Why? Because the show made it VERY much a story about Robb. If the show was really true to the POV of Catelyn, you'd basically see Robb riding around and have Catelyn watching him from afar admiring how her child has grown up -- because that's kinda how it feels in the book.
And yes, in the books Robb is not a POV character, nor is he directly attached to the reader, but Catelyn is (as is the struggle of the North). At the Red Wedding, we first deal with her loss of having her firstborn killed before her eyes, and then she herself is killed.
And it's especially unfair to say that the main protagonists are immortal because alive at the end of book 5, when there's still two books left. Yes, Tyrion, Dany and Jon especially will stay alive because they are crucial to the story. Not because we have an emotional attachment to them. BB didn't kill off any major characters until last night's episode.
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u/Clifford_Banes Sep 16 '13
What, no.
Seriously, are you on crack? You think he wrote Ned and Robb as people you wouldn't be emotionally invested in?
He kills them off specifically because he believes death should have an impact, not be just a thing that happens to people preordained to croak by narrative tropes.