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Is there an essay out there that details your feelings on Stannis’s right to rule/morality? From what I’ve read in your CBC analysis you seem to like him but you don’t have the mindless worship mentality a some of the fandom has. His utilitarian views when it comes to blood magic really screw with my conception of justice so when he’s deemed a just King I don’t follow at all. I really like how you think he’s a deconstruction of the sacrifice theme of traditional fantasy btw.

If you’ve already read the relevant CBC essays from ACOK, then I guess this essay and this essay would be the only things left.

Also, you might want to read this tumblr piece on legalism.

My overall attitude is that early ACOK Stannis would be a horrible king, whereas post-ASOS Stannis is the king Westeros desperately needs. 

As for blood magic, I think it’s important to carefully parse which instances we’re talking about. I’m in the camp that Stannis was genuinely ignorant about Renly’s death and probably Penrose’s too – Melisandre’s whole shtick is about convincing Stannis she can see the future, so telling him she can kill his enemies contradicts that. 

But Stannis is, however reluctantly, on board for the leeches, equivocates over Edric Storm, and has zero problem burning traitors. In terms of how he sees it, Stannis is something of a consequentialist when it comes to justice – what matters most is the just outcome not the method, Melisandre is the new hawk, and killing someone is killing someone so why is blood magic less moral than any other method? Hence his whole thing about making use of Renly’s former supporters despite hating pardoning people he finds contemptible. 

If there is an element of deconstruction, I think it also applies to justice. Fantasy readers especially, reared on a long tradition of fantasy grounded in epic clashes of Metaphysical Good vs. Metaphysical Evil, have a tendency to think that justice is a 100% unalloyed positive, because we think of ourselves as good people who would be fine in a just world. 

Well, there’s a long tradition, seeing humanity as more sinful and frail and thus prone to come in for punishment in a purely just world, that argued “Use every man after his desert, and who should ’scape whipping?” or:

The quality of mercy is not strain’d,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
‘Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown;
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway;
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice.

Or as GRRM puts it, “there is no creature on earth half so terrifying as a truly just man.” 

What do you think are the most important or biggest retcons in terms of how they diverted the flow of the story?

Are we including the Ur-Text? Because then I think AGOT counts as the biggest retcon. 

My biggest retcon peeves are the small things: Bloodraven being Maekar’s Hand, Aenys I not being married to his sister (although I may be mis-remembering things), Aegon V not fighting the War of Ninepenny Kings, etc. 

Do you think Grrm kinda botched the dothraki in military terms, since irl the nomadic armies tended to be rather innovative? I realise that the mongols are an exception (as allways), since they conquered very advanced civilizations which gave them a massive boost in siege warfare and general know-how, but 10th century hungarians, without any of that displayed enormous cunning and a depth of understanding of warfare, take their campaign against King Berengar of Italy, where they even

they even managed to assault Venice, though unsuccesfully, with a mounted army. It is just beyond belief, that for centuries, their tactics would only regress, given the near constant infighting between the khallasars. Or alternatively, not one of the free cities got a leader with ambition, or a temporary lack of funds with for tribute would go and beat them in the many, MANY ways they could be beaten? That say, after the performance of the Unsullied against them, no one of power ever

ever thought it would be cheaper to beat them once soundly, and get free of them for a generation or two? Essos supposed to be the advanced continent after all.

I think the issue is that GRRM wanted the Dothraki to be a huge potential threat, but didn’t want them to have conquered Essos, so he needed to find a middle ground and so gave them a couple flaws so that they wouldn’t have overrun the continent. 

But not every nomadic army is particularly innovative. Some just come and go. 

The value of amethysts in ASOIAF seems to vary quite widely, with Daemon’s amethyst necklace in The Mystery Knight being apparently worth more than everything Dunk owns, but the fool/ household knight Dontos can still plausibly provide an amethyst hairnet as a gift for Sansa. Do you think amethyst is one of the five cardinal stones or is there some Planetos version of Brazil rendering them commonplace? How much do you think they’re worth?

It’s not plausible that Dontos could give an amethyst necklace. But given that he brings them up immediately after he’s talking about this friend who’s going to liberate Sansa, I don’t think Sansa thinks he personally paid for them. 

During the medieval era, was copper, in general, more expensive than iron (Fe , not steel)? This relates to the Green Grace’s statements concerning Meereen’s mineral wealth. Was copper still in relatively high demand, despite the widespread use of iron and steel, even before the development of cast bronze cannons? TY- RSAFan

Not really. The glory days of copper were in the Bronze Age. Once you can work iron, copper loses a lot of its value. 

Daeron II got a lot of scorn for being all scholarly and cultured. And this apparently made some lords go over to his half brother Daemon who by contrast was a great athlete and warrior. Yet we know Rhaegar was also very scholarly and cultured yet he seems to earns praise for it by his contemporaries. Why was Rhaegar who wasn’t didn’t seem so manly is better regarded than a more boisterous warrior like Robert while Daeron wasn’t when compared to his arch enemy?

Rhaegar wasn’t particularly praised for being scholarly:

“As a young boy, the Prince of Dragonstone was bookish to a fault. He was reading so early that men said Queen Rhaella must have swallowed some books and a candle whilst he was in her womb. Rhaegar took no interest in the play of other children. The maesters were awed by his wits, but his father’s knights would jest sourly that Baelor the Blessed had been born again.”

Rhaegar was praised because he made a turnaround from that and all of the sudden became an amazing tourney knight out of nowhere. 

If Robb doesn’t marry Jeyne Westerling is there still a Red Wedding? I’m not trying to avoid the RW here, to the contrary, I’m trying to find some other things that could cause it or an event of similar magnitude.

According to GRRM:

“…knowing old Lord Walder’s character, it is likely he would have searched for some way to disentangle himself from a losing cause sooner or later, but his desertion would likely have taken a less savage form.”

So probably you’d get a scenario similar to the RW, except that the guests are captured rather than killed. 

Do you think the smallfolk’s support for the Kingswood Brotherhood was a result of Tywin Lannister’s undoing of Aegon V’s reforms?

There’s not a lot of evidence (and fyi, Tywin was finishing the job that Jaehaerys II started, so let’s not let the latter off the hook), but it seems like it:

“If you want their help, you need to make them love you. That was how Arthur Dayne did it, when we rode against the Kingswood Brotherhood. He paid the smallfolk for the food we ate, brought their grievances to King Aerys, expanded the grazing lands around their villages, even won them the right to fell a certain number of trees each year and take a few of the king’s deer during the autumn. The forest folk had looked to Toyne to defend them, but Ser Arthur did more for them than the Brotherhood could ever hope to do, and won them to our side. After that, the rest was easy.”

Dayne essentially won that conflict by giving the common folk enough incremental gains to outweigh the Brotherhood’s redistribution-through-theft.