Author: stevenattewell

Do you think Dany&Stannis will eventually come to blows or will he turn out as the wrong candidate for Azor Ahai reborn before that. Will Dany off Stannis or will the lie just be destroyed with Dany showing up&Melisandre seeing her living dragons?

In contrast to Dany’s struggle against Aegon VI or Cersei or the Greyjoys, I feel like her conflict with Stannis will be more metaphorical in nature. If Stannis’ plot goes as I expect, finding out that his Aulis sacrifice was for naught and seeing dragons in the flesh is going to leave him profoundly disillusioned. I don’t know if Dany will need to do more than show up and demonstrate that the prophecy meant her and Jon (and Tyrion) instead. 

Hi, I would really appreciate your opinion on a disagreement I’m havng here. My scenario was that Robb somehow manages to defeat the lannisters at the start of the war. So, does Balon still attacks the North if the northerners aren’t distracted fighting Tywin and can just go back up and kick their arse?My cousin says yes “because Balon is delusional and was attacking the north out of personal revenge and not logic”. But honestly, I cant believe even Balon would be THAT stupid. I mean, come on!

opinions-about-tiaras:

racefortheironthrone:

Have you seen Balon’s war plans? Yeah, he’s that dumb. 

The truly frustrating thing is that if Balon had been just a little bit smarter, right now his son would be the Lord of Casterly Rock and the ironborn would be incorporating the Westerlands into the Kingdom of the Isles, in strong alliance with the Kingdom of the North and the Rivers. Asha would probably be betrothed to Bran to seal this alliance. House Lannister would be an extinct rump, and Renly and Stannis would be duking it out for what’s left of the south. Dorne probably takes the opportunity to break away as well, and once that happens Littlefinger probably decides that the era of a united westeros has passed and gets Lysa to declare Robin Arryn the Falcon King, after which Littlefinger weds her and becomes Regent.

I mean. They’d all be fucked when winter comes, or Daenerys arrives, course. But man, Balon had a real opportunity here and he blew it.

To add onto this, Balon’s mistake is not seeing the bigger picture wrt to how to establish and maintain (”it is not enough to claim a country; it must be held. It must be held and made secure, in every generation.”) an independent Kingdom of the Isles in the broader Westerosi geopolitical situation:

  • Robb Stark is trying to create an independent Kingdom of the North and the Riverlands, in alliance with the Vale and the Iron Islands; 
  • Tywin Lannister, his chief enemy, is trying to hold the Iron Throne and its claims to the whole of Westeros.
  • Stannis and Renly are trying to wrest the Iron Throne and its claims to the whole of Westeros from Tywin. 

Given the dismal history of the Ironborn going up against a united Westeros (Dalton, Dagon, Balon), if the Iron Islands are to be an independent Kingdom, their highest foreign policy interest is to keep the continent divided. A victorious Robb Stark means that the North, the Riverlands, possibly the Vale (if the politics there ever returned to normal) are out of the control of the Iron Throne, and the Westerlands is at least in part or temporarily as well. If the three parties fighting to take the Iron Throne can be propped up and an outright victory prevented, the Iron Throne can’t call on the Reach or the Stormlands or half of the Crownlands, either. 

That is a geopolitical status quo – the Seven Kingdoms divided and distracted – that gives the highest likelihood for an independent Iron Islands to flourish.

But instead, Balon decides to attack the one force pushing for disunity and tries to ally with the Iron Throne without getting a formal agreement on his terms first, so that Tywin can easily ignore his request for alliance because the Ironborn have already given him what he needed. 

To reiterate, Balon is really dumb. 

Why did Illyrio send Barristan to Dany instead of Aegon? Barry’s reputation is seen as useful for the ruler he would turn up with.

Well, keep in mind, I’m fairly sure Illyrio’s plan to get Dany to Pentos would have involved trying to get her together with Aegon and get her dragons under his control. 

Dany and Aegon showing up as independent rival monarchs was not part of the plan up to mid-ADWD, and if it hadn’t been for Tyrion you likely would have had Aegon showing up at Meereen as one of Dany’s suitors, like Quentyn but with sex appeal (sorry, @poorquentyn, but it’s true) and one of the best armies in Westeros at the moment she’s under siege.  

The problem is that Tyrion completely deconstructs Aegon’s Hero’s Journey, and so instead of the Hidden Prince Marrying the Princess and Training His Dragon, Aegon’s destiny is to become the Mummer’s Dragon who will take the Iron Throne to the cheers of the mob, only to be roasted alive when the Slayer of Lies comes to take what’s hers. 

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So the personnel shifts in Essos turn out to have been really crucial: sending Barristan means Dany doesn’t get assassinated on the docks of Qarth (which would have been a major setback, but would have cleared the way for Aegon ultimately), but because Jorah has his own plan which doesn’t involve Illyrio, Dany doesn’t go to Pentos, so that plan is scotched. The problem here is that Illyrio is trying to work at arm’s length (which is good tradecraft, but there are…well, tradeoffs) across two continents, and unlike in cyvasse or chess, the pawns have wills of their own:

“Which plan?” said Tristan Rivers. “The fat man’s plan? The one that changes every time the moon turns? First Viserys Targaryen was to join us with fifty thousand Dothraki screamers at his back. Then the Beggar King was dead, and it was to be the sister, a pliable young child queen who was on her way to Pentos with three new-hatched dragons. Instead the girl turns up on Slaver’s Bay and leaves a string of burning cities in her wake, and the fat man decides we should meet her by Volantis. Now that plan is in ruins as well.”

And so do the best laid plans of cheesemongers gang oft alay…

Are the Lannisters okay with the Bo,tons accepting the Karstarks back into the fold or are they not aware of it?

neothoron:

racefortheironthrone:

They would care why?

I would guess, because Rickard Karstark had killed Willem Lannister and Tion Frey, two kin of House Lannister, and they may be angry because of that.

I would reply that:
* House Lannister may not even know that Cregan Karstark is currently a Bolton spy (Roose would have no reason to tell them)
* House Karstark had already paid for that act, with Robb’s execution of Rickard Karstark
* After nearly 40 years of Tywin being effective head of House Lannister, House Lannister has no moral standing to accuse another noble House of war crimes
* Roose and the Lannisters are expecting to be in competition, if not in conflict, when Spring comes – hard to see Roose caring about potential Lannister censure if he succeeds in pacifying the North

Ah, I gotcha. I mean, Kevan might care, but Tywin knows that Roose needs the Karstark infantry to make the Red Wedding happen and that takes priority over subsidiary Lannisters…for the moment.

Keep in mind, Tywin fully intended to betray Roose once he had no future use for him, because Lannisters pay their debts at a time of their convenience. 

What would happen to the Westerosi currency/economy if another region (lets say the Vale in the Mountains of the Moon) discovers a massive Casterly Rock sized gold/silver deposit and starts to seriously compete with the Lannisters in providing bullion to the people of the Seven Kingdoms?

Well, there’s going to be massive inflation, but also capital “deepening” and “widening,” so you’re also going to get increases in economic growth and productivity (depending on technology). 

Hi, I would really appreciate your opinion on a disagreement I’m havng here. My scenario was that Robb somehow manages to defeat the lannisters at the start of the war. So, does Balon still attacks the North if the northerners aren’t distracted fighting Tywin and can just go back up and kick their arse?My cousin says yes “because Balon is delusional and was attacking the north out of personal revenge and not logic”. But honestly, I cant believe even Balon would be THAT stupid. I mean, come on!

Have you seen Balon’s war plans? Yeah, he’s that dumb. 

Is it true that medieval peasants only worked 9 hours a day and 150 days per year?

Working hours depended mostly on how much light there was in the day, so it would vary from ~16 hours a day in the summer to ~8 hours a day in the winter. 

The 150 days per year thing is somewhat debated, depending on the scholar’s views of capitalism vs. their views of medieval serfdom and how one analyzes incomplete information for example, Juliet B. Schor argues:

During one period of unusually high wages (the late fourteenth century), many laborers refused to work “by the year or the half year or by any of the usual terms but only by the day.” And they worked only as many days as were necessary to earn their customary income – which in this case amounted to about 120 days a year, for a probable total of only 1,440 hours annually (this estimate assumes a 12-hour day because the days worked were probably during spring, summer and fall). A thirteenth-century estime finds that whole peasant families did not put in more than 150 days per year on their land. Manorial records from fourteenth-century England indicate an extremely short working year – 175 days – for servile laborers. Later evidence for farmer-miners, a group with control over their worktime, indicates they worked only 180 days a year.

This, along with the many church holidays imposed by the Church, suggests very few working days per year. However, others argue that the records only capture the number of days of labor for one’s feudal landlord, not the full amount of labor needed to maintain one’s own lands or perform the necessary labor of the reproduction of the household. It’s not like animals stop needing to be fed on Day 121 of a calendar year, for example. 

What does seem to be indisputable, though is that the emergence of capitalism – and one of the problems I have with this debate is that there were a lot of stages in between (the commercial revolution, the enclosure movements, the early stages of the Industrial Revolution), so you’re comparing capitalism to a moving target – involved a shift from less regular although occasionally quite intense labor to much more constant labor. E.P Thompson’s work effectively demonstrates how this was bitterly resisted out of a resentment against the discipline involved, that an outside force was telling you when you had to start and stop work – the factory clock, often resisted or challenged by the worker’s watch if they could afford one – or telling you that you couldn’t drink alcohol on shift, whereas before labor had been somewhat more self-directed and self-regulated. 

Do you think Orys Baratheon adopting the exact sigil and words of House Durrandon was a bit of lazy world building? It just seems that even if he had no sigil of his own he would want some distinction from the rule of Agrilac the Arrogant. Maybe at least say the stag wasn’t a “crowned stag” before the Conquest.

Not really, I thought it made a lot of sense. He’s a bastard in a society that really doesn’t look kindly to bastards, and he’s just made an unimaginable leap in status to just below that of King and Queens. Not to mention, he’s ruling over a kingdom that has, for 8,000 years, known no prince but a Durrandon to stretch a phrase. 

So borrowing the sigil and words of House Durrandon is a good way to signal that there’s going to be continuity rather than constant upheaval.