Author: stevenattewell

What do you think so far of the Marvel Cinematic Universe version of Spiderman?

We haven’t even gotten a full MCU Spiderman movie yet, so it’s still early days. However, I do have to say that I buy Tom Holland more than I ever bought Andrew Garfield or Tobey Maguire – Tobey was always a bit too soft and saccharine for me to buy that he was the irreverent snarker behind the mask, whereas Andrew’s performance was way too much of an over-reaction to the backlash against Spiderman III, and came off as way too cool. 

That’s the thing about Spiderman/Peter Parker that makes him tricky: he’s a nerd and a bit nebbishy (although he kind of ages out of that a little – there had to be something there that Mary Jane Watson liked), but once he puts the mask on, he gains the confidence to express himself, even if that is as a smart-alecky motor-mouth. There’s a side of Peter Parker that has an ego, a yearning to show the world that he’s not Puny Parker any more – after all, the first thing he did when he got super-powers was to get in front of TV cameras – that makes him prank J. Jonah Jameson to get back at him, or not just fight the Kingpin but relentlessly crack fat jokes at him. 

As I’ve said above, it’s really easy to grab one part of that personality and not the other. And one of the things I really like about Tom Holland’s Spiderman is that I feel like you have both: he’s awkward and stuttery around Tony Stark, but he’s also showboating quite a bit at the airport fight. 

So I’ve got my fingers crossed for Homecoming. 

RFTIT Weekly Tumblr Roundup!

RFTIT Weekly Tumblr Roundup!

Hey folks! Work on Arya II proceeds apace (over 2,000 words written, and another 2,000 words in our quote outline), despite a few days where I was a bit low-energy and scratching out writing rather than truly flowing. I’m going to keep at it, and I fully expect to have it finished by Monday. In the meantime, let’s see we have on the Tumblrs: Why didn’t Tywin purge the Riverlords? Where did the…

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In your head canon, where did the turncloak mercenary Tyroshi swordsmen go?

According to GRRM:

Second; what did Robb do with the Tyroshi sellsword who dipped his banners at Riverrun?

I don’t know what Robb did with him… but =I= forgot all about him, I blush to admit.

Now that you’ve reminded me… I imagine he kept most of them with him when he went west. Having just marched through the westerlands when they were on the other side, they would have had a certain value.

I also would expect that he suffered some desertions… these men were not bound to him by oath or ancient loyalty, and there was plenty of plunder to be had…

So chances are they left his army after he got back to the Riverlands, when they found out about the Blackwater and thought they might as well get out while the getting was good, before Tywin and his new Tyrell reinforcements could wreak his vengeance on those who betrayed him. 

So the Citadel was founded by Peremore Hightower in the Age of Heroes thousands of years before writing existed in Westeros? Are we to take that as historical embellishment? I’m tempted to chalk it up to a mistake on Martin’s part but that seems like a really obvious and silly one if that’s the case. Could an order like the Maesters exist in any meaningful way before the invention of written records? It seems like the answer would be no.

The issue of the literacy of the First Men is one of the biggest inconsistencies in ASOIAF worldbuilding – although it’s possible to parse one’s way to coherence. On the one hand, Sam says in AFFC that: 

“The oldest histories we have were written after the Andals came to Westeros. The First Men only left us runes on rocks, so everything we think we know about the Age of Heroes and the Dawn Age and the Long Night comes from accounts set down by septons thousands of years later.”

And in WOIAF, Maester Yandel omits the First Men from the list of “lettered races” who left behind written records from the Dawn Age. So that’s the evidence we have that writing post-dated the Andals.

However, there is counter-evidence. WOIAF also repeatedly mentions “runic records” that were “written in the Old Tongue” which Maesters from the Citadel can read and have translated into the Common Tongue. A lot of these records go back into the Age of Heroes, and some even go back into the Dawn Age…and if you think about it logically, in order for the records of the Night’s King to have been destroyed, there must have been written records of some kind back in the Age of Heroes. 

(Further confusing the issue, the WOIAF has a rather ambiguous statement that the Starks’ “legends came before the First Men had letters” – which suggests that the First Men gained writing at some period, although whether pre- or post-Andal it doesn’t say.)

Here’s my theory: Sam doesn’t speak the Old Tongue and probably most Maesters don’t, unless they’re among that rare breed of Maesters interested in ancient history and archaelogy who took the time to learn how to speak the Old Tongue and thus read the runic records of the First Men. So Sam’s being a bit of an Andal cultural supremacist, in that he’s treating translations of surviving First Men records that were done after the Andal invasions as the only real records. But if you think about it, the Citadel is the one place in Westeros where, because it’s been kept safe by the Hightowers, First Men records and the ability to read them have survived. 

How would a lord of the Vale go about making allies out of the men of the mountain clans and securing their loyalty like the Starks did with their mountain clans?

Prevent the Andal Conquest of the Vale, I’m afraid. 

The major difference between the mountain clans of the Vale and the hill clans of the North is that the former were driven into the mountains by a victorious invading people and the latter weren’t. Now compound that sense of grievance – the killings, the forced conversions, the seizure of land at swordpoint – over thousands and thousands of years. 

Now, you might point to Jon Snow and Stannis trying to assimilate the wildlings into the North, and fair enough. However, there’s no Gift in the Vale to be given away as reparations/a place in the feudal order, there’s certainly no urgency among the mountain clans about the need to find safety within another society in the same way that the wildings want to get south of the Wall, and…well, how well is the assimilation of the wildlings going? 

Let’s ask Lord Commander Jon Snow.

What’s that you say? Attempts to assimilate a long-hated minority led to a revanchist coup? Or has Olly fallen down the well? 

Can you explain something to someone who’s very ignorant of US internal politics- how did the Republican Party go from being the champion of emancipation & anti-Secession in the mid 19th century to being viewed as a party of conservative whites opposed to POC ,in the current times?

Sure. It’s a very complicated story that could easily fill up a semester, but I’ll do the super-quick version: the Republican Party abandoned Reconstruction in 1876 following gradual voter fatigue over Federal intervention in the South and then gradually shifted to merely pro-forma support of civil rights in the 1880s, and then gave even that up in the 1890s. 

The next big moment is when black voters in the North in the 1930s and 1940s – who had become a significant voting bloc due to the First Great Migration – joined the New Deal coalition (a shaky but potent coalition that included southern whites, western farmers, “white ethnic” working class voters in the Midwest and Northeast, the labor movement, middle class liberals and former Progressives, etc.) following the 1936 election, when the Republican Party embraced austerity and opposed the New Deal, which many African-Americans relied upon for survival. 

This then gradually (I’m talking 1940s to 1960s gradually) forced the Democratic Party to embrace the cause of civil rights. In turn, southern whites began breaking with the Democratic Party – first, in creating a legislative alliance with conservative Republicans after 1937 to block further New Deal legislation, second, with the 1948 walkout from the Democratic Convention that led to Strom Thurmond running for President as the “States’ Rights Democratic Party,” third, the gradual erosion of the (white) “solid South” in the 1952, 1956, 1960, and 1964 elections. 

This formed the basis for the “Southern Strategy” pursued by Richard Nixon: he saw that the white South was up for grabs due to the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, and believed that he could win their votes without appearing to openly favor segregation by campaigning on “law and order” and “states’ rights” without explicitly mentioning race. 

And the rest was history. 

How many men do the brave companions actually have? And how does such a seemingly large multinational company come together, and where did Tywin find these evil fuckers?

They’re not that big, around 300 men. They’re a pretty recently-founded company, although they predated Vargo Hoat. 

As for where Tywin found them…although it’s not stated particularly clearly, Tywin clearly put the word out for mercenaries when he called the banners at Casterly Rock. 

Tywin didn’t seem to get very good/many mercenaries, for various reasons. My theory is that Tywin has a bad reputation among mercenaries for using them as arrow fodder to keep the wages bill down.

Among those he did get, the Bloody Mummers are in Tywin’s army after the Green Fork but we don’t hear of them before that although logically that means they would have had to be at the Mummer’s Ford and Tywin’s rampage across the hills of the southern Riverlands.