Author: stevenattewell

Writing a fanfiction on this scenario if you’re interested but I wanted to ask again what your objection was to Ned installing Jon as King in the aftermath of Robert’s death? Your argument aboht Viserys made sense but as a half Stark with Ned as regent wouldn’t that solve the potential for recrimination?

It solves some of the problems – a King Jon would probably not want to revenge himself on the Starks in the name of his father – but not all of them. For one thing, this doesn’t exactly do much for the Tullys, Baratheons, Arryns, and Lannisters, who don’t have the same protection of blood.

But there’s a larger political problem: the rebellion was launched as an argument that the actions of King Aerys and Prince Rhaegar were so contradictory to the feudal social contract that they had forfeited their right to rule. Naming Jon as King goes back on that in a really egregious fashion: by acknowledging Jon as Rhaegar’s heir, you’re accepting his abduction of Lyanna as legitimate, which the Baratheons are going to have a problem with. Moreover, as Rhaegar was Aerys’ heir, you’re accepting that Aerys was a rightful monarch. 

Moreover, the Rebel Alliance had already acclaimed Robert as their King. So now Ned has forsworn his oath to Robert to put his nephew on the throne, which is going to be seen as both an unspeakable personal betrayal and dishonor for Ned and as rank self-interested treason in the eyes of the political class. Ned’s now going to have to deal with the Baratheons and the Arryns and Tullys who’ve sworn their oaths to Robert and his heirs, and he’s going to have to deal with the Lannisters who have every reason to fear a Targaryen restoration. 

So the only scenario I see coming out of this is a bloody and entrenched civil war, likely leading to the fracturing of the realm as the Vale, Riverlands, and Stormlands declare for King Stannis, Dorne and possibly the Reach splits the Targaryen loyalist faction (because the Dornish are not going to recognize anyone of Lyanna’s line ahead of Elia’s), and the Westerlands and Iron Islands are all out for themselves.

And since Ned’s not an idiot, he’s going to see this coming the moment he finds out about Jon’s birth and that’s why he would never name Jon King. 

did feudal lords ever have to worry about farmers cheating their taxes by cutting grain with sawdust or padding sacks of oats with gravel to make it look like they paying more than they really were?

Yes! In fact, it was a major problem in estate management, and a lot of what the stewards, reeves, bailiffs, and other officials had to deal with was peasants cheating their taxes by misrepresenting the number and health of their livestock, or agricultural products like cheese. The problem was that, as they added more officials to oversee their peasants and prevent this kind of tax fraud, they opened themselves up to being embezzled by their household and estate staff, especially because there was something of a custom of staff taking various bribes, kickbacks, and small-scale theft as perks to make up for the relatively small fixed salaries that came with those positions. 

In addition to direct management, lords had two other means for capturing value from their peasants. The first was local monoplies: lords would invest in some improvements on their land, like a mill to turn grain into flour or a weir to encourage river travel or a bridge to encourage road traffic, and then they would require people to use them and/or pay for their usage. To take the example of a mill, if you had peasants who were trying to cheat their taxes by stuffing all of the chaff from their weight into the sacks they owed the lord, you could require them to take their grain to your mill, where not only you could charge them a fee for the use of your mill, but you could also fine them for adulterating their product. And if you were crooked, you could also cheat them by cutting their grain yourself (thus keeping more wheat for yourself) or fixing the scales so that they’d have to give you more to make weight. 

The other was the manorial courts: you use the law to extract every rent and privilege you can from your peasants, whether that’s extracting additional feudal labor that might have been allowed to lapse in the past but could now be enforced, or equally common, by turning up the enforcement on taxation, labor, and feudal privileges to eleven and extract additional income in fines where you can’t in rent. 

So you can see something of a back-and-forth process, where the nobles try to squeeze every last drop of wealth from their peasants, while the peasants try to cheat their overlord at every turn, and the balance of power depended a lot on organization, force of personality, and broader legal and political circumstances (this is a big part of why royal courts were so important in the centralization of monarchy). If managed incorrectly, you got tyranny and oppression, peasant rebellions and bloody repression. If managed correctly, you got economic development and growth. 

So I see people suggest Kang the Conqueror as the next Big MCU Villain (especially since the Fox thing hasn’t gone all the way through yet). This might be tough to answer until we have a post Avengers 4 status of the universe, but how would you bring him in?

Good question!

To be honest, it depends on where things stand with Phase Four and how that interacts with the Fox/Disney deal. I could see Marvel Studios going with Doctor Doom in Phase Four, since Doom works equally well as an Avengers villain, a Fantastic Four villain, an X-Men villain, or a Spider-Man or Doctor Strange villain. (He’s sort of the universal adaptor of supervillainy.)

To be honest, Doom kind of does everything that Kang does with time travel and faked deaths and the like, but with a lot more flair, and I could see Marvel going with Doom out of a desire to show off that they could succeed with him where others had failed so often. 

I did also see a tease from the Russo brothers that they might do a Secret Wars, which is a very simple way to get all of their new and old characters together and have them fight, and the Beyonder isn’t a bad pick for Big Bad as long as one stays away from his completely insane Secret Wars II incarnation:

image

We’’ll have to stay tuned, true believer. 

I haven’t read the books in a while so seeing Nettles being the fire witch surprised me. Where’s the text evidence for It? I always thought she would go to Essos to make it harder for people to find her.

So, here’s where Nettles’ story seems to have ended:

“ From King’s Landing came a raven bearing the queen’s message to Manfryd Mooton, Lord of Maidenpool: he was to deliver her the head of the bastard girl Nettles, who was said to have become Prince Daemon’s lover and who the queen had therefore judged guilty of high treason…

How the prince and his bastard girl spent their last night beneath Lord Mooton’s roof is not recorded, but as dawn broke they appeared together in the yard, and Prince Daemon helped Nettles saddle Sheepstealer one last time. It was her custom to feed him each day before she flew; dragons bend easier to their rider’s will when full. That morning she fed him a black ram, the largest in all Maidenpool, slitting the ram’s throat herself. Her riding leathers were stained with blood when she mounted her dragon, Maester Norren records, and “her cheeks were stained with tears.” No word of farewell was spoken betwixt man and maid, but as Sheepstealer beat his leathery brown wings and climbed into the dawn sky, Caraxes raised his head and gave a scream that shattered every window in Jonquil’s Tower. High above the town, Nettles turned her dragon toward the Bay of Crabs, and vanished in the morning mists, never to be seen again at court or castle.” (P&Q)

So Nettles, facing a death sentence for treason, leaves Maidenpool heading northeast towards the Bay of Crabs. We know that Nettles and Sheepstealer “vanished before the war’s end, and none could say where they went until year after.” 

We then learn that the Burned Men’s coming-of-age ceremony “originated in the years after the Dance of the Dragons, some maesters believe, when an offshoot clan of the Painted Dogs were said to have worshipped a fire-witch in the mountains, sending their boys to bring her gifts and risk the flames of the dragon she commanded to prove their manhood.” In terms of unaccounted for dragons after the Dance, we have Sheepstealer, and the Cannibal, but only Sheepstealer was ever linked to a rider much less a female rider, and was last seen heading in the direction of the Vale.

Occam’s Razor says that Nettles took up a new life as a fire-witch of the mountain clans. 

Anyone else bothered by the fact that Iron Man hasn’t just…eliminated the oil industry?

wendynerdwrites:

chrisdwoo:

So in the first Iron Man movie we’re told that his “box of scraps” we’re told the first Arc Reactor generates some 3 gigajoules per second. Given that 6 gigajoules is about equivalent to the burning of a single barrel of oil, that first shitty arc reactor produced the energy equivalent of 43,200 barrels of oil per day or the entire oil production of Peru.  Now, worldwide crude oil production is like 80 million barrels per day, but Stark’s built how many of these arc reactors? 

Yeah, that’s just one of the 8347239484 things that bothers me about Iron Man, including almost everything to do with Peter Parker.

Watsonian answer:

The original arc reactor designed by Howard Stark and Anton Vanko, had issues with scaling and the availability of rare earth elements, hence why it was limited to a demonstration plant powering a single factory. Tony Stark’s miniaturized reactor was much more efficient, but its cutting-edge technology is incredibly difficult to replicate (Stane and the whole of Stark Industries couldn’t manage to do it), which I imagine would lead to difficulties with mass production. It also involve the use of unstable elements that poison the user, which would be a major consumer safety and environmental impact problem. 

Tony does make improvements, synthesizing a new element based on his father’s theoretical work that allows for industrial arc reactors that don’t poison people. And he is making strides towards advancing industrial usage, creating the Industrial Arc Reactor that powered Stark Tower.

However, while Iron Man has been getting better at the production of individual reactors – as we see from Spider-Man: Homecoming – he’s not yet at the level of mass production, and it doesn’t look like he’s gone much further in the realm of industrial usage (one buidling is not a whole city). I imagine that there’s also something of an issue of military applications as well – Loki used the Arc Reactor to power the portal, Vulture wants to steal them to power weapons, etc. 

So like any new technology, it’s still developing. In our universe, solar and wind technology are entire industries and growing quite rapidly, but they haven’t yet replaced coal or oil due to a host of political, economic, and structural factors. 

Doylist Answer:

Reed Richards is Useless. You can’t have technology advances become so disruptive that they would make the setting unrecognizable compared to our own. 

“Timett son of Timett…he may have Arryn blood in him…” Whoa wait what? How did I miss this?

So let’s talk about Timett son of Timett. 

image

The Burned Men are a particularly fearsome mountain clan from the Vale, who broke off from the Painted Dogs to worship a fire-witch (almost certainly the fugitive Nettles with her dragon Steepstealer). The Burned Men are known for their fearlessness demonstrated in their coming-of-age ceremony where they burn off a body-part, a ceremony deriving from the practice of sending young men as tribute to the fire-witch who would have to prove themselves by daring the flames of Sheepstealer. And the Burned Men once carried off the daughter of Alys Arryn (Jon Arryn’s sister)…

Timett became a red hand (war chief) of the Burned Men from a very early age by burning out one of his eyes at the coming-of-age ceremony, which scared the hell out of the normally unflappable Burned Men. Timett fought for Tyrion at the Green Fork and Blackwater with some distinction, and then returned to the Vale with the spoils of war:

“The Burned Men are fearless since Timett One-Eye came back from the war. And half a year ago, Gunthor son of Gurn led the Stone Crows down on a village not eight miles from here. They took every woman and every scrap of grain, and killed half the men. They have steel now, good swords and mail hauberks, and they watch the high road—the Stone Crows, the Milk Snakes, the Sons of the Mist, all of them. Might be you’d take a few with you, but in the end they’d kill you and make off with your daughter.“

So now you have the mountain clans armed and armored equivalent to knights, with experience in fighting knights in open battle, and Timett leads the toughest of their clan. 

My speculation is that, once the Knights of the Vale go north to pursue Sansa’s claim to Winterfell, Timett will seize the Eyrie. And in a bit of dramatic irony, it’ll turn out that he’s actually the rightful heir, as his claim outranks that of Harry the Heir (who descends from the youngest of Alys Arryn’s daughters). 

Great example with Edward the III.  It reminded me of Edward the 1st (Longshanks) whose army killed Simon of Monfort and desecrated his body afterwards.  Edward was raised for much of his childhood by Simon and was BFF’s with some of his sons.  Edward as crown prince supported Monfort’s provisions, but turned on him when he realized that he would be opposing his own father the King, Henry III.  Like you said in other words, blood is often thicker than friendship.

Yeah, Edward I was someone who approached relationships in a very instrumental fashion. He learned as much as he needed to from Simon de Monfort – the Model Parliament of 1295 was clearly modelled after Simon de Montfort’s radical parliament of 1265, and Edward clearly realized that a partial reform could bring about increased compliance and lower discontent – and then turned decisively against him to maintain the power and preeminence of the monarchy that he was about to inherit.