Author: stevenattewell

Are you aware of any historical cases of a fool supplying inside information to historians like Mushroom did?

Jesters, no. But Mushroom is based on Procopius, who was a scholar and legal adviser in the Emperor Justinian’s regime (attached to the staff of the general Belisarius). Procopius is in/famous for writing multiple panegyric histories of Justinian covering everything from his wars to his public works, and then a Secret History that denounced Justinian, his wife Theodora, and Belisarius’ wife Antonina. 

The Secret History is quite salacious. In addition to lambasting Justinian as an incompetent tyrant as opposed to an enlightened ruler on the level of Augustus, Theodora was described as a scheming, debauched prostitute who totally dominated Justinian and constantly undermined his policies out of a desire to monopolize power, and Antonina was also described as an unfaithful wife who cuckolded Belisarius with his own step-son. 

How many arrows would an archer shoot per battle, what was the average percent of archers in a medieval army?

Many, so much so that they would often run out of arrows – at the Battle of Carrhae, for example, one of the reasons why the Parthian General Surena won so decisively is that he thought ahead and brought thousands of camels to carry extra arrows for his horse archers, allowing them to resupply in the midst of battle. 

As for the percent, it hugely varied depending on time and place and culture. At Hastings in 1066, William’s army was somewhere between 12-33% archers while Harold had almost none. At Crecy, the English army was about 66% archers (including both longbowmen on foot and hobelars, mounted archers), while the French army had only 20% archers and those were Genovese mercenaries. By the time we get to Agincourt, 80% of the English army were archers, whereas the French army was overwhelmingly knights and men-at-arms.

Im confused, why are peoples’ ages being changed?

opinions-about-tiaras:

racefortheironthrone:

GRRM made the kids too young, and that made some things (Arya in Mercy, Sansa’s upcoming wedding, etc.) creepy. The five year gap was supposed to fix this by aging up the kids, but that didn’t work out b/c of the impact on the storylines of Jon, Cersei, et al. so GRRM dropped that idea.

I’m pointing out that it probably would have been easier just to go back and change the text of AGOT so that the kids started older. 

Hmm, is this the actual problem?

I never saw the problem, or the reason for the five-year gap, being that some things involving the kids were overly creepy. Indeed, the creepiness always seemed part of the point; Joffrey, the prepubescent boy-king, ordering grown men to sexually humiliate Sansa, who is also a child, is supposed to be terrifying and horrific. Arya becoming a child assassin is supposed to make us take a step back and go “god damn, girl.”

The five-year-gap I think existed in order for Arya, Bran, and maybe even Rickon to master their various crafts and to put a few years on them so they don’t appear to be as weird children but instead as adults or near-adults when they re-emerged for the endgame. (Well, okay, not Rickon. Rickon is… very young.)

I know Martin is seeking to stare a lot of fantasy tropes in the face and rebuild and execute them into something better, but he can also make them work FOR him. And something that fantasy readers are quite happy to swallow whole is the idea of omnicompetent, wise-beyond-their-years children protagonists who master complex skills and talents incredibly quickly.

The readership will absolutely accept Arya turning into a badass trained-by-Faceless-Men assassin and Bran mastering greenseeing in under a years worth of time. We totally will. Is that realistic, to the extent realism should be a consideration? Not really. The skills of the Faceless Men and the greenseers are probably something that takes many years, maybe even a lifetime, to master. Hell, merely becoming a true master of something as mundane as a longbow takes like a decade! But we’ll absolutely accept it because we’re used to reading stories where that’s de rigeur.

The trope can be made to serve the story.

I was more thinking about stuff like “Mercy.” 11-year-old Arya as an assassin is something of a suspension of disbelief, but it doesn’t raise the same issues that an 11-year-old Arya acting as a femme fatale who uses her sexual wiles to seduce and then murder Raff the Sweetling does compared to if it was a 16-year old Arya. Likewise, whatever’s going to happen with Sansa’s upcoming marriage and Baelish’s obsession with her takes on very different tones if she’s 19 versus if she’s only 14. 

What if FDR lived through his 4th term?

warsofasoiaf:

Don’t expect a brave new world or anything like that, I think a lot of things would be very similar.
FDR’s health would still be poor and the strain of the job was clearly
getting to him simply from a health standpoint, so he was not going to
run for a fifth term.

FDR commissioned the Manhattan Project, he would drop the bomb as surely as Truman would, and even though he called Stalin “Uncle Joe” during WWII when the U.S. and the Soviet Union were allies, the Cold War is inevitable. FDR was not going to sacrifice ties to Europe for greater ties to the Soviet Union, so I’d imagine things proceeding much as they did in our own history.

There’s still going to be a Red Scare in the United States after the loss of China, so don’t think for a second that McCarthy and Hoover aren’t going to get up to old tricks with FDR in the White House. I don’t see socialism catching on in the United States during the specter of the Cold War.

What could be drastically different would be his policy toward the armed forces and Korea. FDR wasn’t anything of the budget hawk that Truman was, so he probably would have had a much larger commitment to the UN-led forces in Korea. MacArthur still handles Inchon, but the question of whether FDR would treat differently with China, or whether China would have intervened in the Korean War all the same. I doubt FDR would let MacArthur nuke China, so I’d imagine it would be the same. 

The Presidency would still expand the scope of its powers drastically, including adopting the nuclear first-strike option as MAD and deterrence still become the prime stances of the Soviet Union and the United States. FDR had always embraced the expansion of the executive branch’s power, so I don’t see him changing that. FDR is leaving office before Khrushchev assumes the Premiership, so speculating on any foreign policy relationship between these two leaders would be pointless.

Ultimately, I do not see much in the way of changes from a foreign policy standpoint. FDR had his successor in Truman. But I would ask @racefortheironthrone for domestic policy changes, because given FDR’s focus on more domestic matters, that would be the area with the greatest potential changes.

Thanks for the question, Anon.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

Unfortunately, domestic policy probably wouldn’t have changed that much, because what prevented Truman from making sweeping changes in domestic policy – namely, a Congressional alliance between southern Democrats and conservative Republicans to block further expansion of the New Deal – was the same thing that had prevented FDR from making sweeping changes in domestic policy post-1938. 

I’m doing some fantasy worldbuilding for the heck of it (and also a possible future D&D campaign), and I’m very keen on moving my world out of ‘medieval stasis’ – not just technologically, but culturally/politically. Do you have any general suggestions on how the society/politics of a fantasy world can be post-medieval, yet still distinctly premodern? In particular, are there any specific developments you like which could have been, but never came to pass in RL history? Thanks.

Yes. Pick up some books on the Renaissance or Early-Modern Europe and use those as your inspiration for your world.   

Why would Varys consider Kevan a good man considering he was the loyal underling of a cruel tyrant like Tywin?

Let’s examine the scene:

“Ser Kevan. Forgive me if you can. I bear you no ill will. This was not done from malice. It was for the realm. For the children…This pains me, my lord. You do not deserve to die alone on such a cold dark night. There are many like you, good men in service to bad causes…but you were threatening to undo all the queen’s good work, to reconcile Highgarden and Casterly Rock, bind the Faith to your little king, unite the Seven Kingdoms under Tommen’s rule.” 

As I’ve said before, Varys is an arch-utilitarian who doesn’t blink at the idea of building Utopia by spilling an ocean of blood and raising up a mountain of skulls. Hell, this is a man who mutilates children so that they can’t betray his secrets, who does it “for the children” – and he’s not insane or lying, he’s weighed the short-term costs in human lives versus the long-term gains of a complete remaking of the social order by enlightened despot. (Incidentally, this is why utilitarian revolutionaries are so dangerous, because their faith in the future justifies any atrocity.)

So how would someone like that look at Kevan? 

I don’t think Varys would object to Tywin’s methods as much as his goals and his frame of reference – Tywin was fighting for the glory of House Lannister rather than for the greater good; his efforts to keep the Seven Kingdoms together with war and war crimes would have been undone by Joffrey’s unstable tyranny or Tommen’s well-intentioned weakness or Cersei’s paranoia and misgovernment; and none of these people have the very precise training and worldview that would allow them to be a “perfect prince” who could make systemic change. Hence the “bad cause.”

At the same time, when Kevan took control, he didn’t act for his own benefit but to strengthen the crown and restore order in the capitol – by rebuilding the alliance between House Lannister and House Tyrell that gave the regime its political constituency and military hegemony, by ending the clash between Faith and Throne that was dividing the body politic and threatening further uprisings. Varys sees that as the actions of a “good man,” one who looks out “for the realm.”