Author: stevenattewell

What are you thoughts on each Marvel Netflix series? While I enjoy all of them, with the exception of Iron Fist, in my opinion it seems that they tend to fall in the second halves of their series.

I like the Marvel Netflix shows as well, but I feel like they would be massively benefited from not having to fill 12-13 hour-long episodes. The phenomenon you’re experiencing is that the shows take the first few episodes to establish the main character, their antagonist, and then raise the stakes – which is the norm for serial dramas – but then have to put the plot “on hold” for a few episodes of filler so that they don’t get to their planned climax at episode 9 or 10. 

Even when done well, this means that the pace of the show notably slows down; when not done well, you get a jarring detour where characters suddenly ignore previously urgent motivations in favor of whatever side issue will eat up enough time to make the 13-hour structure work. 

So going forward, I would recommend to Marvel/Netflix to just tighten up the shows by 2-3 hours (which should make them cheaper to produce, too). 

Is there a free market in property inside the walls of Westeros’ major cities and how would such a system be incorporated into the wider medieval/feudal environment outside the walls

Buildings on land could be bought and sold more easily than the land under them, but any expert on English land law will tell you that the intricacies of medieval leases doesn’t quite resemble a free market. (For one thing, given that the mortgage didn’t exist, you certainly couldn’t get secondary markets.)

You mention that feudal rents were nominal so didnt account for inflation, what difference would it make if they did adjust according to inflation/how could that be done?

Given that the Price Revolution played a major role in the relative decline of the nobility’s economic and thus military and political power, allowing for the rise of both the bourgeoisie and the monarchical nation-state…it would change a lot.

Not that things wouldn’t happen – the commercial and industrial revolutions are still going to happen, and the early modern military revolution is still going to happen, regardless of the position of the nobility – but it’s more that the nobility would be better positioned to fight the political ramifications of these changes. Whether they would succeed and make all of Europe look like a rationalized Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, or fail and the only difference is that it takes a lot more violence for those political revolutions to succeed, I don’t know.

One of the major changes that would happen is that the peasantry of Europe would be much, much worse off, because one of the few routes to upward mobility they had was making more money off of the increase in food prices relative to their rent. So maybe you’d see a lot more peasant rebellions than in OTL?

have you seen GOTG 2? Non Spoiler question, where do you rank Ego the Living Planet in the Kirby Pantheon?

I saw GOTG2 this weekend! It was pretty damn good.

Ego’s pretty good. I mean, he’s no Galactus or Celestial or the Fourth World, but he’s a giant planetface and that’s pretty cool.

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 So some thoughts on GOTG2:

For a sequel that couldn’t change the status quo too much (because the Guardians are going to be in Avengers: Infinity War), I thought it did a good job telling a smaller, intimate story that’s really more about deepening and examining the psychologies of the individual Guardians and their relationships with one another. 

And that’s why I have a problem with people saying it was just a retread of the first film, even if they admit that it was just as funny and colorful and surprisingly sentimental as last time. Because the first Guardians movie didn’t really give Gamora and Nebula much character at all, let alone a really moving examination of two people struggling with an abusive childhood; likewise, Yondu in the first film is mostly just a heavy there to be fooled by Peter, whereas in the second film, you get this deep dive into an unexpectedly complicated and compelling person whose loss hits incredibly hard. 

Moreover, GOTG2 did a decent job of expanding the world of Guardians: the Spvereign were a great addition to the weird and wacky cosmic world that Marvel is building (and rather than being a throwaway villain, will continue to be significant through their creation of Adam Warlock), Peter’s heritage got revealed and expanded, the culture of the Ravagers was explored in way more detail than I expected (complete with a new team of possible antagonists or allies for the next film who all come out of the original GOTGs), etc. 

And finally, the damn thing was beautiful. 

Is it fair to suggest that, besides his desperate desire to prove himself to his Father (or at any rate his father’s memory, since Lord Hoster was lost in a fever even before he died), Sir Edmure’s drive for the “Big Win” at the Battle of the Fords was founded on straightforward Feudal Politics? (given his future vassals had all but gone over his head to swear fealty to Robb Stark, Sir Edmure clearly needs a PERSONAL victory to shore up the personal prestige crucial to a Lord Paramount).

I certainly think so. 

Edmure’s reputation before the Fords was not good – the “floppy fish” song that Tom Sevenstrings popularized is the kind of young man’s embarrassment that’s hard to live down but can be plastered over by solid accomplishment, but the combination of the Golden Tooth and the battle under the walls of Riverrun meant that Edmure had nothing to his name but catastrophe. 

But the Fords looked like it could change all that: first, it was a victory against Tywin Lannister, the man who had ravaged the Riverlands so badly; second, it was a battle where Edmure united the Riverlands in one army for the first time since that disaster at Riverrun, making it a test of the loyalty of his lords; third, since it was taking place at the same place as his earlier failure, it was almost physically over-writing the story. 

Maester Steven, could Sir Simon Strong and his grandsons have died at the Butcher’s Ball or on the march to that slaughter? (Also, may I please take this opportunity to Thank You for your continuing efforts to answer all queries and compliment you upon the high quality of your scholarship?).

You’re very welcome!

It could be, but you’d think it would have been mentioned that such a high-ranking prisoner died in those circumstances. 

What is the difference between nobles and merchants the idea is that merchants only sit around doing nothing making money of others work but isint that basically the same thing nobles do except they make it law that the people under them a half to pay taxes that the nobles use to buy pointless things like dresses

As with most questions of class, it comes down to questions of ideology and and power. 

Ideologically, the ideals of the nobility and of the merchant class were entirely opposite: noblemen were supposed to be open-handed (especially since their power originated from them acting as “ring-givers” to armed men), ostentatiously luxurious (so as to display their glory and magnificence that set them apart from the common herd) and pleasure-seeking, bold and reckless in pursuit of fame and glory; merchants were supposed to be thrifty, sober, and prudent. 

The nobleman saw in the merchant a coward who would debase himself (and debase others) for mere profit, and who valued his skin more than his honor; the merchant saw the nobleman as a hypocritical parasite who despised anyone who worked for a living and exalted his own idleness, while excusing mindless debauchery and bloodshed by appeal to obsolete virtues. 

But as a Marxist historian would argue, there is always the means of production. The power of the nobility was in landed wealth and their rights to extract labor and taxes from those who dwelt on their land. The power of the merchant was in capital, and thus to a feudal mindset represented that terrifying impossibility: wealth not based on land and feudal tenure, notional, imaginary wealth that could fly through the air invisible like spirits and reshape entire economies, and somehow turn a peasant into a magnate richer than any nobleman, threatening the social hierarchy. 

And to a merchant, the medieval order itself was the dead hand of the past, the obstacle to all progress. As Polayni notes, capitalism requires free markets in land, labor, and money – feudalism had frozen land into an unbreakable chain of agreements between lords and vassals; serfdom had chained men to their land and their ancestral occupations; faith had deemed lending money at interest to be a mortal sin.