I don’t think it’s strange as much as a deliberate choice by GRRM. 

After Hastings, William’s control of England required him to maintain the loyalty of the army he had gathered from across Northern France (mostly from Normandy, but there were also quite a few from Brittany and Flanders, Bolougne) by redistributing English land to his followers. He could also use English land as a way to entice new reinforcements to cross the Channel.

Aegon had a different situation: he had a very small number of followers to be rewarded – “accounts differ on how many swords set sail from Dragonstone with Aegon and his sisters. Some say three thousand; others number them only in the hundreds.” (WOIAF) – and more importantly, it was really his and his sisters dragons that won him Westeros. When you look at the Conquest, whether it’s the capture of the Vale by Visenya after Daemon Velaryon’s fleet was defeated in the waters off of Gulttown, or Aegon burning Harrenhal, or Rhaenys’ dragon blocking Argilac’s final charge at the Last Storm, or the three dragons together at the Field of Fire while most of Aegon’s infantry broke on the field, it’s always the dragons who are the deciding factors and who are often saving the day when his conventional forces fail.

So Aegon had less of a pressing need to reward the Valyrians who he brought from Dragonstone and Blackwater Bay, and more of a need to pacify the pre-existing power structure through maintaining the social contract. 

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Prince_(Marriott)/Chapter_XII

We don’t have good stats, exactly, but this source might help you out.

Yeah, the officers are free:

“"I know of Valyrian steel,“ said Dany. "Ask the Good Master if the Unsullied have their own officers.”
“You must set your own officers over them. We train them to obey, not to think. If it is wits she wants, let her buy scribes.”

As for the Tiger Cloaks, I would imagine it comes down to the officer corps being freeborn, a carefully-inculcated internal culture of pride and discipline, and better treatment than other slaves.   

Probably the last. 

By primarily worshiping Athena. 

opinions-about-tiaras:

I am not at all Steven, but I am prepared to argue that WWI did not have good guys. It was one pack of imperialist powers and their most imperialist-y against another. The only reason the Allies look better than the Central Powers is because France and Britain were less authoritarian polities… but the third major ally was, you know, Czarist Russia.

WWI was a bunch of assholes sending a whole generation of their young people to die in trenches in order to see who would continue to retain the power to have the biggest swinging dick on the Continent and who would get to maintain and expand their overseas empires. That’s basically all it was. The Central Powers may have been worse in that they were more “old school” in this regard than the Allies, and because they were the aggressors, but that’s a thin reed.

racefortheironthrone:

If we’re talking about causes rather than conduct, I would recommend reading Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers, which really changed my thinking on this question. 

Clark has generally been accused by many historians for being too Pro-Prussian. Hans Ulrich-Wehler called his perspective “bewilderingly one-sided”. Why does blaming Germany for starting World War I excuse or glorify that of other powers? I think one can see World War I as being pointless (the weakness and failure of creating peace) and can also take to task the motivations by many nations for the war (chiefly to dial back revolution) while still blaming Germany as the main cause.

For the sake of keeping this conversation on one track, I’m turning this reblog into an ask-answer. 

I would agree that Clark tends to lean towards revising German culpability downward and Russian culpability upward, although part of that has to do with the fact that he’s responding to a literature which had previously focused very heavily on German culpability. I found Clark more useful for bringing Austria and Serbia more into focus, and especially the ways in which Balkan politics had been rewarding hardcore nationalist brinkmanship for some decades before WWI, and how that dynamic fatally intersected with changing diplomatic and foreign policy between Germany and Russia over the Balkans and between Germany and Britain over naval policy and Turkey and colonial policy in Africa and Asia, and on and on, to produce WWI.

As for why blaming Germany tends to excuse or glorify the other powers…well, that’s sort of what happened with the Treaty of Versailles, no? If Germany was the main cause, then that de-emphasizes everything else, whether that’s Serbian irredentism, or Russian pan-Slavism, or Austria’s increasingly desperate attempts to put a lid on nationalism, or France’s desire to avenge themselves for 1871, and on and on. 

But I do want to note something that makes this debate so hard to have: look how quickly we went from a discussion of the historical causes of the conflict to a discussion of moral blame for the conduct of the war. 

It could but it probably wouldn’t, I was wrong about that. 

If we’re talking about causes rather than conduct, I would recommend reading Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers, which really changed my thinking on this question. 

I have a number of essays/essay series that are part of Kickstarter fulfillment, so finishing those up.