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Different anon. If the Vale did join the WoFK for the Starks, would they be looking to form their own kingdom or just serve under the King in the North’s?

surfcommiesmustdie:

racefortheironthrone:

But would the River lords still acclaim Robb king? I assume the Vale would want it’s own independence, but would they divvy up the Riverlands with the North?

Discussed here and here. 

The Vale coming in on Robb’s side really changes the politics of that post-Camps council at Riverrun, because they would be a large contingent of socially conservative lords who don’t owe Robb a debt in the same way that the Riverlords would, and Robb would need to keep them onside because they’d be a plurality of his army. 

Does the marriage pact with Walder Frey still happen in the scenario? Robb would have to tie the Vale somehow.

Depends on when the Lords of the Vale arrive. If it’s somewhat late, Robb makes the marriage pact to cross over the Twins and attack Jaime’s army. If it’s early, Robb may decide to try to catch Tywin between their two armies instead, thus no marriage pact. 

Where does the yunkish slave army outside Meereen come from? I tought Dany freed all the slaves in the Yunkai and confiscated a good chunk of the Wise Masters wealth? Did she just take them by their word and didn’t check up on the slavers upholding their end of the bargain?

So this is a question I thought I had answered, but may have gotten eaten by a browser refresh or OS crash, because I can’t find it anywhere in my archives.

So where did the Yunkish army – which keep in mind, is only one part of a larger coalition which includes the forces of New Ghis, Qarth, Elyria, Tolos, and eventually Volantis – come from?

Well, a lot of them are mercenaries who the Wise Masters hired – the Company of the Cat, the Long Lances, the Second Sons, and originally the Windblown – because while Dany redistributed a part of their wealth, her terms that the slaves should be given “as much food, clothing, coin, and goods as he or she can carry” would leave the bulk untouched. 

But I imagine your main question is about these soldiers:

“There were more, near as mad or worse: Lord Wobblecheeks, the Drunken Conqueror, the Beastmaster, Pudding Face, the Rabbit, the Charioteer, the Perfumed Hero. Some had twenty soldiers, some two hundred or two thousand, all slaves they had trained and equipped themselves.”

I think there are two explanations for where these slave-soldiers came from. The first is that the Yunkish simply bought them on the open market when they re-established slavery and began re-arming for war against Cleon. Certainly this explains sub-groups like the Clanker Lords. 

However, this explanation doesn’t work for Yunkish commanders like the Little Pigeon and the Girl General, both of whom are described as having bred their soldiers, which requires multiple generations’ worth of time, and thus can’t have happened in the few months between Dany’s liberation of Yunkai and the second siege of Meereen. 

My explanation for this latter group is that they were probably not in Yunkai when it was attacked. See, it’s rather unusual for Wise Masters to produce and train soldiers, since Astapor specializes in the Unsullied and Yunkai specializes in sex slaves. Given that they lead their soldiers in person rather than selling them to others, and that they’re ambitious for overall military command, my guess is that the Little Pigeon and the Girl General and their ilk were working as mercenaries elsewhere in Essos when Yunkai was attacked, and then came back home to take revenge on Dany. 

Different anon. If the Vale did join the WoFK for the Starks, would they be looking to form their own kingdom or just serve under the King in the North’s?

But would the River lords still acclaim Robb king? I assume the Vale would want it’s own independence, but would they divvy up the Riverlands with the North?

Discussed here and here. 

The Vale coming in on Robb’s side really changes the politics of that post-Camps council at Riverrun, because they would be a large contingent of socially conservative lords who don’t owe Robb a debt in the same way that the Riverlords would, and Robb would need to keep them onside because they’d be a plurality of his army. 

Is pre-Blackwater Stannis worthy of the Iron Throne? I feel like all of Stannis’ worst qualities outweighed his good ones before his “cart before the horse” moment

I discuss this in my chapter-by-chapter essays: Prologue ACOK Stannis would not be a good king:

“…at this point in ACOK, Stannis would be a terrible king. Focused on his past to the exclusion of his present, on his personal injuries rather than the well-being of his subjects, inflexible and suspicious, a second King Maekar who himself ruled a brief time and died unhappily.”

Bloodraven gets a lot of flak for not deploying the royal forces to fight Dagon Greyjoy, but isn’t the whole point of having regional Wardens with tens of thousands of men at their command, is to have a decentralized military command who can rapidly react to threats from their cardinal direction without having to rely on central reinforcements?

No. For one thing, the Wardens are not royal generals of a standing army, their titles simplify military chains of command in national crises, but they don’t come with budgets and warehouses and staff officers. Most importantly for this particular crisis, they don’t come with fleets. 

The problem that the Wardens of the North and West faced is that while they had land armies with which they could rush around trying to put out Dagon’s fires, they didn’t have the naval power to go after him directly. Nor did they have any authority over the only fleet on the west coast – the Redwyne fleet – that could have gone after him directly. 

The Iron Throne did, but didn’t use it. And that’s a problem for the whole feudal social contract, because “a king who does not protect his people is no king at all.” 

Hello, Can you explain more deeply why Asha wanted Sea Dragon Point and the Stoney Shore? Or at least what the Iron Islands could do with these two places. SDP apparently has bogs, which is one of the places that has peat (useful for heating purposes). Also, do you have estimates how much more territory the Iron Islands would have if they got those two places? Would it double? I think that if Asha thought she had a shot at the Kingsmoot then these places must have potential use. Thanks.

In general, she chooses thoses areas because they’re coastal, and thus would be easier for Ironborn to reinforce and resupply in the event that the Northmen tried to take them back, and easier to get Ironborn to settle since they’re not trying to get fishermen to become fishermen, and because the Ironborn have held them in the past. 

As to why those places specifically, Sea Dragon point likely belongs to House Glover (given its proximity to Deepwood Motte) and thus would be land that House Glover could transfer legally to the Ironborn, providing legitimacy to Asha’s conquest. Stony Shore, which the Ironborn occupied during the War of Five Kings, probably doesn’t have any other population than the fishing villages (because of the poor quality of the soil), and thus may indeed have been (temporarily) depopulated by Theon’s raids, which will make it easier for the Ironborn to continue to hold.

In terms of how much space, Asha describes them as “ten times larger than all the isles put together.” I estimate (*WARNING: A HISTORIAN IS DOING MATH*) the Iron Islands is about 16-25,000 square miles, that Sea Dragon Point is about 17,000 square miles, and the Stony Shore is maybe 20,000 square miles, so Asha is exaggerating somewhat, but the overall point isn’t wrong. 

It occurs to me that Jaime’s sulky act surrounding his regicide might have less to do with breaking his oath to avert a holocaust than with his own dysfunctional relationship with Tywin. Have we ever seen an account of Tywin’s reaction to Aerys’s death?

I don’t think it’s got a lot to do with his relationship with Tywin – Aerys ordering Jaime to kill his father is the catalyst that gets Jaime to finally act on his feelings, but the feelings that were already there before Tywin enters into it were primarily about the conflict between his romantic conception of knighthood and the horrific reality of serving a mad king who got his rocks off on burning people alive. 

As for Tywin’s reaction to Jaime killing Aerys specifically, I think he would have seen it quite similarly to how he saw the death of Rhaenys and Aegon:

“We had come late to Robert’s cause. It was necessary to demonstrate our loyalty. When I laid those bodies before the throne, no man could doubt that we had forsaken House Targaryen forever.” (ASOS, Tyrion VI)

For Robert to become king, Aerys needed to die. Jaime killing Aerys was another example of the Lannisters demonstrating their loyalty to the new regime, and was thus the necessary and practical thing. 

OTOH, I think Tywin would have felt very differently about what Jaime did after. Sitting the Iron Throne ahead of Robert could have jeopardized the Lannister-Baratheon alliance; if you’re going to sit the throne, you only do it if you mean to rule and have a plan that you’ll ruthlessly pursue to make it happen.

And so on. 

I heard that DCEU is giving Black Adam his own movie what are your thoughts on that since this is something that MCU has never tried giving an villain an archenemy at that his/her own movie.

The underlying issue is that the DCEU has the Rock signed up and eager to play a DC character, that the Rock is a legitimate box office draw at a time in which relatively few celebrities actually can drive box office on the strength of their names, but for some reason the DCEU has pencilled him in to play a villain and not a hero and then got cold feet about having him in the Shazam origin story.

Now, Black Adam has more recently been more of an anti-hero than a pure villain, and as I said above the Rock is enough of a legit movie star that maybe he can escape the curse of solo villain movies just not working conceptually or structurally.