Author: stevenattewell

Anon Asks

How much trade does the iron throne do? Like what percentage of gdp would a typical medieval state have as imports and exports? What does this trade consist of? And how effected would westeros be if it were completely cut off from the rest of the world?

Well, if @warsofasoiaf asks…

The Iron Throne doesn’t do much trade itself, since it’s a government that derives most of its revenues from taxes as opposed to trading directly on its own account. Yes, Littlefinger has gotten into the wool trade, for example, but it’s unclear how much if any of that revenue actually goes to the crown instead of to Littlefinger.

If you’re asking how much international trade Westeros does, I think it’s rather low given that A. the overwhelming majority of the population works in subsistence agriculture, B. as Westeros is rather underdeveloped, there are severe limits to the spread of markets due to the inability to get goods to market, and C. Westeros’ exports are almost entirely natural resources (food, wine, wool, timber, etc.) and its imports are higher valued-added manufacturing. 

If you’re asking for a percent GDP figure, there are estimates that 16th century England had a foreign trade of less than 8% and that was after a huge surge in the wool trade and we haven’t seen in Westeros anything like the social and economic transformation that the rise of the commercial wool trade had on England from the 14th through 16th centuries. Likewise, I’ve seen estimates that the agrarian economy (i.e, just that part of the economy that came from producing crops) made up 85% or more of English GDP in 1300, which also suggests a low figure for Westeros.

What are your estimates for the populations of the shadow city and Planky Town?

Not very large, according to the WOIAF:

“There are no cities in Dorne, though the so-called shadow city that clings to the walls of Sunspear is large enough to be counted as a town (a town built of mud and straw, it must be admitted). Larger and more populous, the Planky Town at the mouth of the river Greenblood is mayhaps the nearest thing the Dornish have to a true city,”

Given that towns in Westeros tend to have ~10,000 people or less, I wouldn’t be surprised if the shadow city and the Planky Town have less than 30,000 inhabitants between them. 

I was going through your Riverlands developing post and it got me wondering: wouldnt giving a city charter to maidenpool, LHT, ect actually weaken your position as they would be now independent from a Feudal Lord?

1. It’s a tradeoff – you’re trading looser reins for greater growth.

2. Not necessarily – charters can be tailored to remove intermediary lords, i.e to de-subinfeudate (now how’s that for jargon), while retaining links between the liege lord and the city. Which is why, historically, kings gave charters to cities. 

You’ve talked a lot about Captain America, but what do you think of his nemesis, the Red Skull?

opinions-about-tiaras:

racefortheironthrone:

Good question!

Let me start by directing you to this essay here where I talk about how Jack Kirby and Stan Lee turned the Red Skull from a rather shaky pulp villain into a pretty damn good supervillain with a penchant for cigarette holders, giant Nazi robots, doomsday devices and improbable escapes.

They also gave him a rather interesting backstory in Tales of Suspense #66: Johann Schmidt was a penniless orphan, bullied and robbed because of his physical weakness, who couldn’t find regular employment (although as Steve Rogers points out, “my early years were no bed of roses, either”), who was working in a hotel when Hitler came into town, and the rest was destiny:

image

And that’s the core of the character – he is Hitler’s very own Nazi, his hand-crafted avatar of hate. But at the same time, you can see the personality defects – the self-hatred (especially centered around physical weakness), the adoration of power and strength, the “envy, the jealousy” – that would make him such an eager convert. In a way – and there’s a reason why they named him John Smith – he’s a perfect stand-in for any of “Hitler’s willing executioners.”

That’s what makes him such a good “dark mirror” for Steve Rogers – because the two of them have virtually identical backstories as poor, physically impaired orphans, but they reached such diametrically opposed ideological conclusions. Long before he volunteered for Project Rebirth, Steve Rogers had chosen the path of solidarity, and before Johann Schmidt got his mask/face, he chose the opposite. Hence why this moment works so well:

image

The Red Skull needs there to be some inherent, almost biological reason, why Steve Rogers succeeded where he failed, because otherwise he has no way of understanding his life. And it’s a big part of the reason why so many of his plans revolve around trying to break down Captain America – drive him crazy, take over his body, putting NYC in a bubble unless Cap gives in – to find that reason and overcome it. 

That being said, one major mistake I think people make with the Red Skull is that they try to make him too smart (he’s not a Batman-level strategic genius – he’s a monologuer, a gloater, a fan of the easily-escaped-death-trap and the explosion-prone-giant-robot) or too powerful (the Cosmic Cube should always be something he’s reaching for, but which always slips between his fingers). 

Under this rubric, his de-Nazification in the MCU (and they REALLY wanted to de-Nazify him there, to the point where they felt it necessary to have a superfluous scene where he kills a bunch of Nazis just to drive it home) kinda makes the character not work so well anymore, right?

Because then he’s back to being just another pulp villain. I mean, almost literally; the opening scene of CA:TFA where he steals the cube from the church could be right out of an Indiana Jones movie. This is less interesting than Nazi Red Skull, in my opinion.

Well that’s one reason they didn’t use him after the first movie, although overall I thought they made it work as well as a mainstream Hollywood film that needs to play globally can work. 

In the Captain America movie, is Doctor Erskine Jewish, as he is in the comics? The movie version never mentions that, even when it would naturally come up when discussing his interactions with Nazis. Does it actually work better if Erskine is non-Jewish German but still despises Nazis?

This is a tricky one, because you need to start from a place of understanding Jewish subtext in film and other media, so I’m going to do a very TLDR version of this history:

Back in the 1920s and 1930s, the Hollywood studio system was dealing with a “family values” backlash, and one of the ways in which the “family values” crowd liked to bash Hollywood was to bring up the fact that a lot of the people who ran Hollywood were Jewish immigrants and were thus alien to the values of the American heartland (which of course got revived during the Cold War with the Black List and the McCarthy hearings). 

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One of the ways that Hollywood dealt with this, in addition to instituting the Hays Code was to really de-emphasize Jewishness in its products. Not that Hollywood didn’t continue to make products that came out of Jewish theater – the Marx brothers, for example – they just didn’t identify characters as Jewish and used circumlocution and veiled metaphor to discuss Jewish themes. Hence, even when you could fight the caution of the studio bosses to get them to greenlight an anti-Nazi picture like Casablanca (as late as 1942!), the screenwriters and directors had to smuggle in Jewishness under the radar:

So in 1941, when Jack Kirby and Joe Simon introduced us to Captain America and the name of the scientist who gave him his powers was Professor Reinstein at a time when the most famous Jewish emigre scientist in the world was Albert Einstein, the subtext was clear: Captain America’s serum is the result of Jewish emigre science, here to save us from the threat of Nazism. And while it’s changed somewhat in the last 60-70 years, the fact that the 2011 film has Doctor Abraham Erskine be both a scientist and a quasi-rabbinical figure, the subtext is still there:

You’ve talked a lot about Captain America, but what do you think of his nemesis, the Red Skull?

Good question!

Let me start by directing you to this essay here where I talk about how Jack Kirby and Stan Lee turned the Red Skull from a rather shaky pulp villain into a pretty damn good supervillain with a penchant for cigarette holders, giant Nazi robots, doomsday devices and improbable escapes.

They also gave him a rather interesting backstory in Tales of Suspense #66: Johann Schmidt was a penniless orphan, bullied and robbed because of his physical weakness, who couldn’t find regular employment (although as Steve Rogers points out, “my early years were no bed of roses, either”), who was working in a hotel when Hitler came into town, and the rest was destiny:

image

And that’s the core of the character – he is Hitler’s very own Nazi, his hand-crafted avatar of hate. But at the same time, you can see the personality defects – the self-hatred (especially centered around physical weakness), the adoration of power and strength, the “envy, the jealousy” – that would make him such an eager convert. In a way – and there’s a reason why they named him John Smith – he’s a perfect stand-in for any of “Hitler’s willing executioners.”

That’s what makes him such a good “dark mirror” for Steve Rogers – because the two of them have virtually identical backstories as poor, physically impaired orphans, but they reached such diametrically opposed ideological conclusions. Long before he volunteered for Project Rebirth, Steve Rogers had chosen the path of solidarity, and before Johann Schmidt got his mask/face, he chose the opposite. Hence why this moment works so well:

image

The Red Skull needs there to be some inherent, almost biological reason, why Steve Rogers succeeded where he failed, because otherwise he has no way of understanding his life. And it’s a big part of the reason why so many of his plans revolve around trying to break down Captain America – drive him crazy, take over his body, putting NYC in a bubble unless Cap gives in – to find that reason and overcome it. 

That being said, one major mistake I think people make with the Red Skull is that they try to make him too smart (he’s not a Batman-level strategic genius – he’s a monologuer, a gloater, a fan of the easily-escaped-death-trap and the explosion-prone-giant-robot) or too powerful (the Cosmic Cube should always be something he’s reaching for, but which always slips between his fingers). 

If the Riverlands had had stable and strong rule that was unquestioned (maybe House Justman?) how much more developed could the Riverlands be? Would there be city at Maidenpool or Saltpans, bigger ports with more traffic? Could they expand? They’d probably never be able to get around the fact they’re central and likely to be a war theatre but could they work around that be instituting defences in specific places?

See here. 

So yeah, it could be way more developed, you’d probably see Maidenpool, LHT as cities. 

And yeah, solid defenses by Stony Sept and the Ruby Ford would be a big help.