Hello, I really like your blog! Someone here once compared the vital need for Northern independence from the rest of the kingdoms akin to America’s independence. I know enough about Colonies, Monarchies, and Democracy to know how wrong they are to a large extend, but not informed enough to explain it. Could you please help me out :) ?

Hi, and thanks!

I think that there’s a lot of potential independence parallels that one could make, from many different time periods. Some of those are more apt than others, and some have very different implications than others. (For example, I think we would consider an appeal to the American Revolution as an example very differently from an appeal to the Confederacy.) 

As a historian, I wouldn’t necessarily start with an 18th century independence movement which had a very different economic, political, and cultural context, if I was looking for parallels for a very medieval polity like Westeros. I might look instead to the Scottish independence wars of the 13th and 14th centuries, especially since that’s probably what GRRM was working off of when he was writing ASOIAF.