Quote Originally Posted by thorgrim29 View Post
Also, the heroes in jewel encrusted armor tend to die, a lot
Not really. I'm well over a thousand pages in and barely about 10 warrior hero type characters have been killed. To put this in perpective I'm fairly sure Moorcock killed off gods at a faster rate than that.

To back up my point while trying to avoid spoilers: In the first book we have a scene where an over 7 foot tall super-soldier fights a knight wearing a cape of flowers, and these are minor characters. There are barbarian tribesmen who burn off body-parts in their coming of age ritual. There's even a gigantic castle built on top of a mountain, and it's not even the most impressive castle in the series. A preist runs around with a flaming sword and he isn't important enough to appear on screen. there's a 700 foot tall man-made wall of ice. In the backstory Robert doesn't become king because of his great strategies, he does so because he smashes Rhaegar's ruby encrusted armour with a warhammer.

Now if it were just one or two isolated cases but it the consistently the rule for the series. All the castles are huge, multi-tiered superfortresses. All the knights are superhuman warriors. All the priests worship strange and terrible gods. There are plenty of exceptions yes but the books overflow with larger than life, mythic figures.