Hey folks! Many of you have been asking me about my plans to cover Season 7 of the show – which I plan to do with some blog posts, nothing fancy like in previous seasons.
Well, one ship can be boarded and captured even at heavy loss, but a city-state with cannon technology now can enforce its will anywhere within cannon range by threatening devastating bombardment of coastal cities. Hence the term gunboat diplomacy.
Moreover, in terms of the balance of power, it’s a bit like what happened when the Monitor and the Merrimack gave birth to the era of the ironclad; as the London Times put it “whereas [previously] we had available for immediate purposes one-hundred and forty-nine first class warships, we now have two.” A cannon-carrying ship could manuever to maintain range against standard war galleys which needed to close to ram or board their enemies – as the Ottomans found out when they fought the Portugese for control of the Indian Ocean in the 16th century.
Honestly, the version he came up in the show – build trenches to avoid being flanked by Ramsay’s cavalry and neutralize Ramsay’s numbers, try to demoralize Ramsay’s army by questioning their leader’s fitness – isn’t bad. Indeed, even if Jon had known about the Vale cavalry, it might not have been a bad idea to distract Ramsay, turn his force into an anvil, and let the Vale be the hammer.
It’s more that the showrunners seem to have forgotten how they’d set up the battle – the trenches are mentioned but don’t appear on the battlefield, Ramsay’s cavalry are supposed to be the major threat but are actually inconsequential and it’s his infantry that are the real threat, there’s setup for the Umbers etc. to turn on Ramsay but no payoff.
For the most part, yeah. As Peter Jackson and Co. found out, it’s kind of hard to represent a shapeless evil presence without coming off as either indistinct (as in the Hobbit films) or faintly silly (the damned enormous firey eye again).
So you need a visible, physical presence to stand-in for the Great Other, the Heart of Winter. And what they’ve come up with isn’t bad, I just wish they hadn’t used the term “Night’s King.”
Because Benioff and Weiss seem to think that you have to be dark and cynical to be politically intelligent, and if you’re idealistic and righteous you also have to be politically stupid.
Chiefly, a failure to coordinate combined arms. When the Scottish and English armies encountered eachother at Falkirk, the English knights charged rather hastily before the rest of the army had gotten into position – but the Scots for some reason had left their archers outside the protection of the schiltrons, so while the knights bounced off the schiltrons to no effect, they overran and wiped out the archers as the Scottish pike and cavalry looked on. Compounding error with error, the Scottish gave King Edward time enough to get his knights back under his command and into formation, and then stupidly charged with their cavalry against Edward’s much larger cavalry and were driven off the field.
*credit to MIke Young
The Scottish schiltrons were left completely undefended, with no cavalry to chase off the English archers and no archers to punish the English cavalry and infantry. Edward was now able to use the same tactics that had been used agaisnt the Welsh at the Battle of Maes Moydog: surrounding his enemy on three sides, he simply had his archers advance and fire into the tightly-packed schiltrons, who couldn’t advance against the archers for fear of leaving themselves open to the knights. Once the schiltrons were weakened enough, Edward sent in the infantry, and the schiltrons broke, and then Edward sent in the cavalry to chase down the fleeing infantry, causing huge casualties.
To use a counter-factual for a moment, imagine that the Scottish archers and cavalry had remained on the inside of the schiltrons – Edward couldn’t have advanced his archers for fear of counter-fire and cavalry charges, reducing their efficacy, and sending in the infantry would have had the same problem. Now, these aren’t unsurmountable obstacles, and at the end of the day Edward had more archers, more cavalry, and more infantry than the Scots, but it would have given the Scots a fighting chance, which they didn’t have in OTL.
I think what you’re missing here is the connotation of “abomination,” which is religious in origin, whether we’re taking the original Latin meaning of an ill omen or how the word was used to translate from the Hebrew word “sheqets” which means ritually unclean or forbidden, taboo.
From this perspective, it doesn’t matter what Joffrey, Tommen, and Myrcella have done, it’s not a question of their culpability for an action, because in their very existence they are a violation of the laws of the Old Gods and the New. Hence why in the books the High Sparrow refused to give his blessing to Tommen without being “convinced” that the story isn’t true, because to do otherwise would be to taint the spiritual purity of the Sept of Baelor.
The ending of this episode was good (very little D&D dialogue!) and the Sansa scenes were cringe-inducing. And ugh, could they make it anymore obvious that Euron is playing Cersei?
Bleh.
Yeah, just wanted to chime in and also apologize for the technical problems. Needless to say, I would not recommend anyone use bluehost for WordPress hosting purposes.
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