Yeah, this is a pretty significant worldbuilding issue. Leaving aside Westerosi travel distances, most real-world wars in the Middle Ages and before were pretty long-lasting affairs. Sieges lasted a long time, fighting was seasonal, etc.
Author: stevenattewell
Regarding empires, do you think there’s any particular reason why Aegon chose to reduce the Kings of Westers to “mere” Lord Paramounts and name himself the sole king instead of letting the various kings keep their original titles and elevating himself to the title of emperor of a Westerosi empire? Was it a symbolic gesture on his part (maybe to show who really was the new top dog) or did he simply never contemplate the idea (as his native Valyria neither had kings or emperors)?
I think it’s more the latter – emperor is not a term that’s used outside of Yi Ti, so it wasn’t in Aegon’s political imaginary.
Hey, this might be a silly question but why do you think the Valyrians put together a dedicated Air Force when they knew that dragons were the true source of their power? Did the dragon lords not want to put their personal dragons in danger or did they just not want to create a military establishment where all dragon riders are equal?
I think it’s the latter – dragonriders weren’t the type to answer to anyone else; hell they had to create a republic just to ensure that everyone was formally equal to keep the dragonriders happy.
And also, you don’t normally need more than a few dragons at a time: a dedicated Air Force would be massive overkill in most situations.
Free State of Jones
Regarding the film, do you think it’s not a coincidence that Jones County along with counties that opposed secession like Cook County, Texas and the counties that made up West Virginia had the fewest slaves?
To add to your list, we could add Winston County, Alabama, pretty much all of eastern Tennessee, Searcy County, Arkansas, and western North Carolina.
And no, it’s not a coincidence at all – where slavery was weakest, southern unionism was strongest and vice versa.
What’s your general sense about Wolverine? As a character, an X-Man and how he fits with the mutant metaphor, whether the origin they finally decided for him was good or not (or if he should have an origin)?
My general sense of Wolverine is that, like most people I fell in love with the character at this exact moment…
…right before he solo’d the entire Hellfire Club from the sewers up to the upstairs rooms where the Inner Circle were holding the X-Men prisoner, and providing the crucial distraction that allowed Jean to free them and save the day.
As a character, before the rush of imitators in the Dark Era of Comics and Wolverine’s own massive over-exposure in the 90s, Wolverine was the original anti-hero. But rather than being driven solely by ANGST and MANLY RAGE, Logan had a lot more going on that made him a fully three-dimensional character: while a staunch individualist, he was also fiercely loyal to his friends; while hot-tempered even when his berserker rage wasn’t at issue, he was also a snarky jokester; and most important and most enduringly, he was a protector and a mentor to children. (Something at the core of both Death of Wolverine and one of my all-favorite series, Wolverine and the X-Men.)
As an X-Man, he was absolutely crucial to the dynamic of Chris Claremont’s X-Men: he was the raging yang to Cyclops’ repressed ying, constantly questioning and pushing. Without him, there is none of the drama or conflict that distinguished the rowdy, more adult All-New X-Men from their milquetoast, demerit-fearing OG counterparts. And while it’s been somewhat blown out of proportions, he was the third leg in the Scott-Jean triangle that played a major part in the Dark Phoenix Saga, the alternative partner who was A. into Jean, B. anything but repressed sexually, and C. a little bit dangerous and spicy (and thus a “gateway drug” for a Jean Grey looking to explore those parts of herself given life by the Phoenix).
On a deeper level than the romance-comics-inspired love triangle, I think the key to Wolverine’s popularity was that he was a better fit for the 1970s than the late 50s/early 60s A-Type Cyclops:
In terms of the mutant metaphor, once you get to the early 90s and the truth of Weapon X gets fleshed out by Barry Windsor-Smith, Logan is the epitome of mutant oppression, having been almost completely dehumanized by a military-industrial complex that tried to turn him into a living weapon, erased his memories and implanted false ones, conducted medical experiments on him, and on and on until he rebelled. And this was a key part of what made him tick as an anti-hero – rather than simply indulging in violence purely hedonistically, for Logan, resistance means rising above the level of the animal, of the weapon.
In terms of origin stories, well, there’s been some better and some much, much worse. If I had to choose, I like Barry Windsor-Smith’s ambiguous version, where you get the sense that he definitely had a life before Weapon X, but where you can never be sure what’s real and what was a simulation that Weapon X implanted in his mind.
Addition to previous question, is there someone else who have handled Reconstruction better than Johnson?
Any other human being eligible for the office who could maintain a pulse and the physical ability to sign their name.
If Lincoln lived, how would Reconstruction have been different?
Discussed here.
Anon Asks:
5before the agricultural rev you needed like 90-99% of the pop farming but what were the ratios after it hit off and in more developed countries today?
Well, if we take the U.S for an example, about 80% of the workforce was engaged in farming in 1810 – that’s post-agricultural revolution and post-commercial revolution, but pre-industrial revolution.
By 1850, with the industrial revolution well underway but not completed, about 55% of the workforce was engaged in farming. By 1900, that’s down to 40%, and by 1960 down to 8%. Today, 2% of the U.S population is engaged in farming.
If you’d like current comparative data, see here:
Who is closer to Herny VIII, Maegor I or Aegon IV?
Mix of both and Robert Baratheon.
It really bothers me that GRRM called Aegon IV “the Henry VIII of Westeros”; Aegon IV is far more a caricature of Henry VIII than he is like the real deal. We don’t see traces of Henry VIII’s genuine piety and religious feeling in the Unworthy King, Aegon’s promotion of the bastardborn Daemon clashes with Henry’s obsessive search for a legitimate heir, and for his many faults, Henry VIII was far more competent than Aegon IV ever was.
I’m all for Henry VIII being remembered as a wife-killing brutal monster by people, but reducing him to simply that ignores his very long reign as king. Aegon IV is Henry VIII’s worst traits. I’m less inclined to pin Robert Baratheon with Henry VIII because Robert went around creating bastards willynilly and Henry VIII only had one confirmed, like 4 rumored, and was actually rather conservative with his taking of mistresses compared to other monarchs at the time.
Well, the reason why I pin Robert Baratheon has less to do with the bastards, and more to do with Margaery Tyrell and Renly’s plot to make her Robert’s queen.
Is the dreadfort built near a gayser or a volcano ?
Studied history as my main, switched career, and it as a strong interest. I actually have a question on the act of retelling of history. Just how grounded is the retelling of history caught in current events in your opinion? Obviously there is bias present in the author, but it seems to me that the retelling becomes a point to highlight events and people to lend weight to a cultural/societal ideal/though while ignoring the rest. Continued ==>
It is unavoidable that current events and societal preoccupations would color what topics historians are interested and how they approach those topics. Pace to those historians who believed in the Noble Dream of Objectivity, but historians aren’t robots and there’s no way to eliminate it from our scholarship. The only thing we can do is be honest and self-aware about it: as David Blight says, we all have biases and don’t trust anyone who says they don’t.
To take a classic example, the Dunning school of American history was fatally flawed by the fact that the men who made it up were almost entirely white Southerners whose fathers had fought for the Confederacy and who were themselves violently hostile to Reconstruction and the idea of black civil rights, and trying to create a “usable history” for the dominant politics of white reconciliation in the 1890s-1910s.
At the same time, the Dunning school would never have been overturned if it hadn’t been for the discipline reacting first to WWII and the ideological threat of Nazism (which led a lot of scholars to rethink the “needless war” thesis and the idea of fighting a war for the ideal of human equality, however flawed in practice), and then the rise of the civil rights movement and especially its popularity among Northern college students in the 1960s inspiring a whole bunch of historians to re-examine the Civil War and Reconstruction from the ground-up and completely undermine the Dunning school.
Wait… Did I just lose the other half of that history post?
I think you might have, anon. If only there was some way for me to message you directly….
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