Author: stevenattewell

Poor Lorath always seemed to get too much of a bad rap in my opinion. Does the city have any redeeming qualities in your opinion?

Hey. Same anon that asked about Lorath before. I was reading through the WOIAF and it just kind of struck me that the fisherfolk and farmers overthrowing the Boashi is much more noteworthy than it gets in the text. Has there ever been another successful smallfolk revolution in Planetos? I get the feeling that Lorath is kind of like Haiti, the site of a momentously important people’s history that gets overshadowed by its poverty, probably caused by its satellite status to Braavosi capital

I always think of Lorath as akin to one of the post-industrial cities of the Northeast – not even one of the former greats in decline, but a scrappy woulda-been-a-contenda that never quite got its shot. It’s got some economic base – cod, whaling, sealskins and walrus tusks, velvet, trading for furs, ivory, and obsidian – but it’s kind of second-tier and it can’t exercise dominion over its own hinterland.

In terms of stuff that I find interesting about Lorath – the cult of Boash is an interesting ascetic egalitarian faith and I’m kind of sad it’s not around any more, the three princes is an interesting political system but it’s not around any more, but most of all the whole thing about the mazemakers and their connection to the Deep Ones. 

OTHO, Qarlon the Great is pretty boring and doesn’t add anything, and there isn’t much else. 

What was the dressing-down of the Sunderlands? I don’t recall reading about that.

Sorry, not the Sunderlands, the Borrells. 

Davos I of ADWD:

“As for your King Stannis, when he was Robert’s master of ships he sent a fleet into my port without my leave and made me hang a dozen fine friends. Men like you. He went so far as to threaten to hang me if it should happen that some ship went aground because the Night Lamp had gone black. I had to eat his arrogance.“

I noticed in your TWOIAF review, you mentioned how the Greens came across as a “bunch of chumps,” and after rereading TRP and TPATQ, I have to agree. Even though Daemon and Rhaenyra were so tyrannical, I couldn’t help but feel like the reader was supposed to root for the Blacks. Do you think GRRM intended for the two of them to be more sympathetic than they ended up coming across as?

I think GRRM intended it to be more of a “plague on both their houses” situation. Didn’t quite pull it off, but I think that was the intent. 

how does the feudal relationship work when a vassal has titles in multiple kingdoms? do responsibilities to multiple monarchs become hierarchical in some way, or do you just have to balance all of them?

Well to explore a pure hypothetical…What happens when a vassal in one realm becomes a sovereign in another? Is that vassal still a vassal? Or are they an equal monarch?

Ok, just for the sake of argument, let’s call the vassal Filliam of Schnormandy…no, that’s too obvious, how about Kenry the Second of Hingland…no, still too on-the-nose, ok, how about Nedward the Third Kantagalant?  

But seriously folks…the answer is it doesn’t and you get wars for hundreds of years, some very unkind words about national cuisine, hygenie, and culture, and then a lot of nationalist slap-fighting at international meetings for a couple more hundred years.

MS&T ending

Were you as bothered by the ending of Memory, Sorrow and Thorn as I was? I understand Seoman was the hero, but throughout the series he didn’t display any abilities as a military leader, a politician or an administrator; necessary qualities for a king.

Yeah, that was one of the weak points in the series – Seoman is a lot more of a Hero’s Journey Protagonist than anything you get in ASOIAF, and Tad Williams’ slow-rolls him a bit too much, leaving him just this side of the maturity and mastery you’d want (especially after the revelations about John Presbyter). 

Part of this has to do with Williams’ mystery plot with the swords, which had some drawbacks to compensate for its gut-punch. Part of it has to do with Williams’ spending way too much time with Seoman losing his mind underground. 

Given how wealthy and populous the Free Cities are, why do they rely so much on mercenaries? A loyal and professional army would be more reliable and effective than anything except the Golden Company. With how often Myr, Lys, and Tyrosh fight each other, I’d think they would be eager to gain any advantage over the others. Or Volantis in the days when the tiger faction ruled.

When it doubt, go back to the source….

The Free Cities rely on mercenaries for the same reason that the city-states of Renaissance Italy did. Standing armies are seriously damn expensive: while it’s something of a chicken and egg scenario, it took the emergence of the nation-state with its formidable bureaucracy to pay for the armies of the early modern period, and even then there were a lot of bankruptcies in the process before they got it right.  

If you’re a businesslike commercial republic, it doesn’t make any sense to absorb the immense costs of a standing army and the concomitant waste during periods of peace, when you can just rent a mercenary army for however long the war lasts. (And you thought the gig economy was new!) 

How do city land rights work in a place like King’s Landing? Does the Crown own all the land, lease it out to nobles and rich people, who then sub-let it and so forth? Just lots of squatting?

It could be anything – the Crown as direct land-lord, various forms of sub-infeudation, rent-farming, the list goes on and on…

But it’s unlikely to be squatting – even in the case of “clutter of ramshackle structures” on the wrong side of the Mud Gate, there were tenants who were damn pissed about having their stuff burnt by Tyrion and who wanted compensation.