[the_af]

> There's a term for this, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verisimilitude_(fiction)

Yes, I'm aware of this term, back from when I read Tim O'Brien masterful Vietnam War novel, "The Things They Carried" (which I recommend if you haven't read it).

A Game of Thrones has plenty of verosimilitude. The thing about it is that's about feelings, the emotions in the reader. If you read it and something takes you out of the moment -- "wait, this makes no sense! this character would never do this!", "dragons!? nobody ever mentioned dragons before!", "what, one man defeated an army of hundreds single-handedly!?" -- that breaks verosimilitude. But within AGoT, very few things do this. It's self-contained and, within the span of your reading it, self-consistent. It won't resist a medieval history scholarly review, but then again, it's not meant to, and neither is it "shallow".