Martin is an interesting case. The guy has written very popular stories, he speaks well and engagingly without being ingratiating. He seems sane, pretty humble, expresses various ideas, a good number of which I generally agree with (so he must be sane, right)?
That said...I can't shake the feeling that Martin also suffers from some kind of severe emotional disorder that he covers well in his personal presentation but that is quite visible in his fiction. There is just too much gratuitous horror. The way the Unsullied are "manufactured" is insane. I won't go into detail, but it's completely nuts. There's what happens to Theon. There's the Red Wedding. I'm sure I've forgotten a lot. Rape (of women) is certainly recognized as something that happens in the world, but the most gratuitous horrific violence is aimed at men. And I get the impression the author feels somehow compelled to get that stuff in.
I hear this is seen a lot in depressed people, when their anger towards others, unexpressed, is turned inward. Not a psychologist here, for the record. But it almost sounds to me like Martin could have some of the same resentments and anxieties that we see in the public faces of the incels...but he turns that anger against men in his fiction and has a "feminist" personality.
This isn't to say that Martin is bad or his fiction is not okay or that armchair psychology has all the answers, but...I don't know. To me, this is a reminder of the following:
Just about everyone has problems (problems=emotional problems). Personal trauma, family trauma, trauma inflicted on you because of your sex or place in the world or whatever other feature you have. There are different things you can do with that pain. Some men who have poor experiences with women identify completely with that pain and become "incels." Some hide it with a super-feminist outlook and direct their anger towards their own sex, deliberately barking up the wrong tree. Some handle it more consciously, recognizing that not everyone is responsible for their poor experiences. And I'm sure there are many other ways, and a large set of possible responses to every textbook example of trauma (even if some responses occur more often than others).
How is this on-topic? In public discourse in the anglophone world (probably elsewhere) there is a tremendous amount of fakery: extended arguments for or against this or that thing, arguments you don't really believe yourself, but that you need in order to hide your real anxieties.
The classic example was the moral or religious arguments "against" homosexuality when those arguments were advanced by someone who was attracted to the same sex and couldn't admit it (this does not mean that anyone who advances such arguments is in fact attracted to their own sex, only that with some people, it's obvious that this is the case). But even now, in the middle of culture war 2.0, there is plenty of this going on. Many who subscribe to the most totalitarian version of "privilege theory," who fall all over themselves trying to confess their privilege (from being a certain race or sex), are clearly anxious about something else: social class and money. They can't bring themselves to say that
poor people are in a very bad position, that there is no meritocracy, and that they themselves in their privileged jobs are little more than paper-pushers. The whole twisting of oneself into a pretzel is, for many participants, nothing but an extended exercise in self-distraction: I don't deserve what I have, so I will pretend to be focused on why someone else doesn't deserve
not to have what I have.
So if there's to be an alliance, a lasting alliance, I don't think it can work unless the groups in question can be honest at least about those purposes for which they're going to be allied. Each little social clique is pretty carefully tailored these days for a specific set of anxieties and a specific set of distractions from them. People can make common cause for a time (as
here), but unless their common enemy really lasts a lifetime, I don't see it lasting.
I can't believe this thread was started last August.