Author: stevenattewell

the estimated time the teagues ruled the riverlands seems insane. if they truely ruled for a single millenia, much less almost five thousand years, there is no way they shouldnt have been able to establish themselves as the one true dominant house of the riverlands. is there anything that could possibly explain it?

They probably didn’t…it’s more that their time in office was at both ends of the Great Game period, which distorts appearances.

Also, especially in the Riverlands, you can never be clear how much of the kingdom they actually ruled…

where can we find a list of these planned essays?

Here, I’ll just copy-paste from the Kickstarter page:

@$500 pledged: bonus essay on elections in ASOIAF (the Night’s Watch, the Ironborn Kingsmoot, etc.).

@$1000 pledged: bonus essay on George R.R Martin’s influence on the deconstructivist fantasy subgenre (think R. Scott Bakker, Joe Abercrombie, etc.).

@$2000 pledged: bonus essay on Maurice Druon’s Accursed Kings series, the historical novels that George R.R Martin credits with inspiring ASOIAF.

@$3000 pledged: bonus essay series examining George R.R Martin’s Dunk and Egg stories, and what we learn about the history of House Targaryen and the Blackfyre Rebellions from these stories.

@$5000 pledged: bonus essay series covering the Great Councils of Westeros, their historical parallels with the rise of Parliamentary government in Medieval and Early Modern England, and how the history of Westeros could have changed dramatically had the votes gone the other way.

@$8000 pledged: bonus essay series on the Politics of the Seven Kingdoms. Seven essays examining the historical and political development of each of the Seven Kingdoms, their internal political rivalries, and their unique strengths and weaknesses as polities.

Great Game Timeline Project

In my Politics of the Seven Kingdoms series, I’ve tried to reconcile the timeline of the Era of the Great Game, those roughly six thousand years between the Andal Invasions and Aegon’s Conquest.

As part of that effort, I’ve decided to put together a GoogleSheets spreadsheet to construct as accurate a timeline as can be made. As you can see, it’s a bit threadbare atm, but it’s getting better. 

And in the absence of a working multiple-recipient message function in Tumblr, I figured I’d make it an open invitation. @goodqueenaly, @warsofasoiaf, @nobodysuspectsthebutterfly, @joannalannister, @hiddenhistoryofwesteros, your help would be greatly appreciated; if you shoot me a message I’ll shoot you a editor’s link to the spreadsheet. Also, if I’ve forgotten anyone who would be good to ask or who would be interested in helping out, please let me know. 

Thoughts on Game of Thrones Season 7 Episode 3, “The Queen’s Justice”

orangedodge:

racefortheironthrone:

Thoughts on Game of Thrones Season 7 Episode 3, “The Queen’s Justice”

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No delays this week, let’s get into the episode…
(more…)

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In addition to just wanting to raise the stakes for Dany, Grey Worm, and Tyrion, I’d thought there were also likely budgetary concerns behind the abruptness of Casterly Rock and Highgarden. There’s a note in the AmazonPrime edition of the episode about Euron’s parade being a last minute re-write that used hundreds of extras and took up a week of filming and a large portion of their budget. It wouldn’t be the first time that production broke down a bit with this series because they wanted to do something impressive with extras/real sets/horses and caused them to skip out on the action scenes

It’s sad that that note doesn’t surprise me in the least. 

Is there any basis for putting leather on top of a metal breastplate to protect from “the cold?” Or are they just setting up a means to disguise the fact that all of the extras are going to be wearing leather clothes in battle scenes instead of armor

None whatsoever. I think Benioff and Weiss wanted something to show that Sansa was being a good ruler when it came to military logistics, and just don’t understand that you don’t wear a breastplate against bare skin (which would be a problem in a frigid winter, I concede) but rather you wear a breastplate over quite thick padded jackets, which themselves are worn over one’s normal clothing, providing quite a bit of insulation from the cold.

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Indeed, the one example I can think of of cloth being added on top of armor is the precise opposite of the climate of a Northern winter: namely the long cloaks and robes worn by crusader knights over their metal armor to shield it from the sun, so as to cut down on the serious problem of heat stroke and heat exhaustion that they faced wearing metal armor in the Levant.