What Separates the Kingkiller Chronicle from Game of Thrones?

[Herbert Playz]

How does a song of ice and fire and kingkiller chronicles differ? For me A song of ice and fire's world building is massive. Martin has so much more content to his series right now and he gives his readers a ton of details that for most authors, are completely insignificant for example, throughout the first 5 novels in the books we get a ton of paragraphs just describing the food that characters are eating. Some people view this level of food detail a bit gratuitous but I love it. I think it really helps to bring the world to life.

Also, Martin has a ridiculous number of characters in his novels. Most of them come from noble houses, great and small and those houses have long detailed histories with many members that don't even show up in the mainline series. Also since Martin uses multiple viewpoint characters we are able to explore the world through the eyes of characters of vastly different backgrounds and motivations. Since these characters are in different locations it makes the story more epic.

Rothfuss on the other hand choose a very unique way of telling telling his story, we see everything from Kvothe's viewpoint. Kvothe is in the present, telling a story mostly about past events to other characters who were not around. Since Kvothe is the only one telling the story, it opens up the possibility of an unreliable narrator.  Everything that we see and experience is from his perspective.

What makes it even more interesting is that Kvothe comes from an ethnic group that is known across the world as gifted in the art of storytelling. So there is even more reason to have doubts about how events unfolded. These ideas of unreliable storytelling and untrustworthy narrators run throughout the entire series. So for the reader even though we are getting information about the present condition of the world and have a first hand account of many past events we view it all as one big puzzle.

Piece by piece we are given information from certain characters in Kvothe's story about the history of the world, like little breadcrumbs leading to a greater truth but some of the clues conflict. Kvothe makes some characters seem unreliable and others completely trustworthy with good intentions. Its incredibly fun trying to put the grand mystery together without all the pieces fitting neatly. The Kingkiller Chronicles really gives me a sense of mystery. The tone is creepy and sad and mysterious. 

I love both of these series just in different ways. I think its really sad that neither author really comments all that much on the other's work.