warsofasoiaf:

One big reason was morale. It took a lot of guts to advance against a line firing a hundred muskets in a line simultaneously, and morale was critical in warfare. The effect causes doubt, fear, as does a dozen people in the formation all falling over at once as opposed to one every so often. If you can break the spirit of the enemy, you can win the battle even if outnumbered. Units of troops are more effective than an organized mass, and breaking the formation often meant breaking the morale. It’s one of the reasons why professional troops were so valuable, their discipline and training kept their coherent. Muskets are largely inaccurate anyway, but a good volley toward a large body of troops has great visual effect. 

There’s also a benefit to unit cohesion, which is a less tangible thing. Training your units to fire and move together helps maintain formation and provides a psychological comfort to a soldier, which helps tie into morale as mentioned above.

Thanks for the question, Anon.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

It’s also about breaking up cohesion by slowing down the enemy. If one or two men die here or there, the formation can keep marching in step with only a few people having to step over a body. If a dozen men fall, then that’s a whole line that gets slowed down, and if you can rotate volleys effectively, you can slow down an advancing enemy to the point where their attack loses momentum.

Adding to your point about inaccuracy and limited range, muskets were also relatively slow firing, so as long as a formation kept moving at good speed, they only had to absorb a couple volleys before their attack hit home. However, if the formation got bogged down with corpses in the front ranks, this gave the defenders more time to fire, which increased their effectiveness.

A good (if somewhat exaggerated) example of this is what would happen to Napoleonic era French columns when they came up against British troops who had been drilled to fire and reload faster than the Continental norm. The French columns were very well-disciplined and were used to absorbing the punishment that the first few ranks might take while keeping up the momnetum necessary for the rest of the column to slam home, but faster volley fire meant that the columns often got bogged down and couldn’t close the distance before they were whittled down from a distance. 

I don’t have a graph, but I know ErrantBard’s ASOIAF timeline spreadsheet has some calculations. 

Hmmm…

I mean, a medieval Europe where the genders are completely equal would be so radically different that I don’t know whether it would be recognizable as medieval Europe (in which case, why not have a fantasy world that’s its own thing?), especially given the strong ties between patriarchal conceptions of the family and inheritance of land and military/political power by blood descent.  

But to answer your question, I could see arguments for either case. In a truly gender egalitarian medieval world, there would probably be less emphasis on status flowing from the father, so the argument would be that the child of a noblewoman is a noble because their maternal parentage isn’t (usually) open to question. On the other hand, if noblewomen’s rights (especially inheritance) were equal to men, I would imagine there would be a cultural fear of noblewomen getting snapped up by ambitious social climbers, so elites might establish a custom that children would be born common as a disincentive. 

I think he started to get that idea when Illyrio told him about Daenerys, but you’ll have to wait for me to get to AFFC/ADWD for a ore in-depth explanation. 

Riverrun was secure enough; the problems Edmure ran into was that Tyrion was massively violating the social contract (and he did manage to prevent that prison break), and that he couldn’t have foreseen Catelyn’s actions either. 

Moreover, Robb doesn’t necessarily want Jaime in a castle cell two whole kingdoms while he’s got him hostage. Contrary to the fandom impression that Robb was completely opposed to peace with the Lannisters, Robb was willing to make peace on his terms and would have needed Jaime on hand if necessary to cement the treaty (even if that was a few years later). 

Well, Dorne did. So yes, it’s possible. But it would take a lot of hardship and no small amount of luck. 

I think it will change the definition of who the us and the them is. 

Thanks!

@goodqueenaly had a good post on that topic. 

Well, I’m going to do essays about them, although they don’t have chapters so they won’t exactly be chapter-by-chapter essays.