No good harbors? Rivers ice up too much? Etc. 

Sworn Swords, hedge knights, etc. 

I mean, the Spring Sickness is kind of a major example, no?

The Winter Fever of 132-133 would be another. 

The Grey Plague of ~220 is another major example, with half of Oldtown and ¾ of the Citadel dying. 

Bits and pieces, but not the run as a whole. I have the first issue in my Marvel Unlimited library and planned to do a full run on it, but haven’t had the time lately. 

goodqueenaly:

In which I dabble in historical Targaryen fic

Keep reading

Read this very good fic. 

Ser Cortnay Penrose, the castellan of Storm’s End. 

1. Good at logistics and training, bad at everything else. As a commander, he defeated himself over and over again, either by assuming that the enemy had greater numbers than they did or through indecision as to when to commit resources. Even when given the enemy’s battle plan in advance, he only managed a draw. 

2. No, he would have been a terrible president. McClellan was utterly opposed to emancipation, freedmen serving in the U.S military, and civil rights for African-Americans. Most importantly, in 1864 his own party’s platform called for a cease-fire and negotiated peace, while McClellan ran on an impossible platform of continuing the war to restore the Union but not interfering with slavery, even as the war was destroying slavery. 

Good question!

So heraldry is a big part of it, hence why we see highborn children drilled to recognize sigils and house words. The immediate practical benefit is knowing who’s who on the battlefield, but it works as well off the battlefield, so that you can avoid awkward social scenarios by making sure that nobles can tell the social status of other nobles, because a key part of noble identity/culture was being very touchy about their status being recognized. (Hence why a lot of conflicts in medieval literature come about when someone’s hiding their identity and thus isn’t treated with the deference due.)

Another part of it has to do with more subtle signs of class distinction, the things that a social climber would have to learn to fake. Accent and diction, dress and fashion, manners and mannerisms, the soft and hard skills taught to nobles, and so on. 

As for Davos, he’s a different case because he is somewhat famous – breaking the siege of Storm’s End, Stannis knighting a smuggler and taking his fingers, etc. Wyman Manderly would have heard about that and added Davos to the roll of known nobility. 

julianlapostat:

racefortheironthrone:

1. I find the Crownlands rather boring, sorry. Also, as far as the Politics of the Seven Kingdoms goes, there is no chapter on the Crownlands, so it only appears as a bit player in other stories. 

2. Hah! The answer is: extremely laboriously. I still had A Wiki of Ice and Fire and the app, which gave me hints of where to look, but mostly what I did was use the search function on my e-book copies of ASOIAF and look for every single mention of each of the Free Cities and compile lists of page numbers and then type out quotes manually. 

I wonder about that?

Because there’s potentially interesting material on the Crownlands, namely the city of King’s Landing itself. It’s the one city whose smallfolk we know a great deal about, and overall, it’s a double with the Riverlands which is a region which we mainly know through its smallfolk at least in ASOIAF. We have a strong grasp of the politics of the Kingslander smallfolk as well, their hatred and dislike for Tywin, the revolt of the Antler Men and so on. Let’s not forget that the two major Smallfolk POV in the entire series are Kingslanders (Ser Duncan and Ser Davos).

And of course the Crownlands includes Duskendale and that was the site of the only known charter uprising. And AFFC has a good deal of politics with the Merryweathers and Brienne’s visit to Duskendale…

Sure, I get that, but the bulk of Politics of the Seven Kingdoms is about covering the pre-Aegon political development of the Seven Kingdoms, so…