I'm going to have to say that comparing this to most fantasy series isn't very fair, you'd be hard pressed to find one series that's as well fleshed out as some of the individual books in this series are. A lot of the fantasy similarities have to do with just story telling in general, and the start of the series, EotW. I mean there ARE similarities, but even someone with a good eye for them is going to be stretching things a lot, RJ seems to have purposefully tried to mix and blend common elements and logical ideas together, but in such a way as to make them seem very believable and original.