You’ll have to read my Politics of the Seven Kingdoms series to find out. 

Salt and silver I talked about as universal commodities. 

Seed…well, I guess the Dosh Khaleen want to get laid like everyone else…it may have something to do with fertility rituals, it may be something of a nod to the way that the Dothraki are somewhat mulitcultural through their attitude that the son of a Dothraki and a slave is a Dothraki, or it might be the obvious. 

Decided to throw this anon up because a bunch of people have asked me about it and I wanted to explain what I thought again, although I would recommend people read my Dany chapter essays first. I think there’s a lot more cultural complexity to the Dothraki than some people think:

• From the beginning of Dany’s chapters, we can see an element of cultural adaptability and flexibility in the fact that the Dothraki own property in Pentos where they live in opulent surroundings, wear fine silk clothing, etc. and then when they leave Pentos they put their Dothraki clothing back on.
• When Dany is learning the ways of the Dothraki as she travels east with the khalasar, we learn a lot about how their world shapes the way the Dothraki see things. The Dothraki don’t believe in privacy because they share close quarters among the khalasar; they have an honor system built on the surveillance of the individual by the whole of the khalasar, and that these relationships of honor are the coin of political power as opposed to inheritance.
• When Dany arrives in Vaes Dothrak, we see how the Dothraki act as a vital part of a continental economic system, we see Vaes Dothrak as a place where many cultures come together but also as an expression of the Dothraki ideology of Manifest Destiny.

And so on and so forth. 

Probably by putting a military blockade on the Rose Road. Keep in mind however that most of the land in the Reach is owned by the Tyrells and their bannermen, and even if the peasants of the Reach are freeholders, it’s likely that the mills are owned by the local lord, so they probably don’t have independent access to processing facilities. 

Even then, transporting grain hundreds of miles to King’s Landing would mean transporting it past the Tyrell army encamped at Bitterbridge and the Tyrell scouts who were combing the north bank of the Mander. Even if you got past them, you’re bringing precious goods into a warzone – you might be able to sell your grain at a markup, but there’s no guarantee that Stannis’ army or Tywin’s army or Robb’s army or whoever don’t take your grain by force. 

And even then, you’d have to take the money back through that same warzone, and even if you get home, you’re going to have to answer to your local lord about why you committed treason. 

Underdevelopment is very common in slave societies. The logic goes like this: in the first place, slave societies by definition have most of their capital invested in slaves and the commodities that slaves produce. 

But on top of that, because capital tends to chase the highest rate of return on investment and slavery tends to be very, very profitable, you get persistent under-investment in anything not related to slavery and mono-crop plantation slavery at that. 

Hence why you have things like the Southern United States during the Civil War having only 15% of U.S manufacturing, 29% of railroad capacity, and 13% of banking, not because they were poor, but because why invest in anything but cotton and slaves Hence why you had sugar islands in the Caribbean that had to import all their food from the mainland even though the land was perfectly fertile, because no one who wanted to get rich would plant their fields with anything but sugarcane. 

So the Astapori likely let their city crumble into ruin because there’s more money to be made in investing in slaves than investing in infrastructure. 

Because it’s not bland or one-sided (which, what does that even mean in relation to an entire culture and society). Check out my Dany AGOT essays.

elanabrooklyn:

d3-14:

(I figure this will get the appropriate people’s attention) 

A quick preface: Yesterday a friend of mine told me the story of how she was scouted by DC Comics to participate in their “talent” workshop. My colleague, who worked as a professional for 7 years and had books from Marvel under her belt, made time to meet up with a rookie editor only to subject herself to the editor’s rejection and novice opinion as to how my colleague may one day meet the standards of the DC talent workshop- some other time I’ll talk about how lame this DC Comics talent workshop is in how it is manufacturing the spectacle of demand for their brand by creators and using that to forego the cost and editorial aptitude it takes to curate and build a stable of … but they had the gaul to ask my colleague to do test pages, so here’s my opinion on that.

If you’re Marvel or DC or a company, like BOOM, that profits off large licenses, you should pay for samples from prospective contractors. The hours that an artist spends making a sample are bankable hours; it’s work. By not paying for that sample art, these corporations are offsetting the cost of their R&D on labor. Artists shouldn’t have to shoulder the burden of a corporation’s R&D. 

“But how do they know if the artist is appropriate for the book?” If you’re asking for a sample, you’re interested enough to pay for the sample. Should artists pay to waylay the risk that the editor or whomever solicits the sample isn’t qualified to shrewdly select prospective artists for a property? If you can’t afford for the samples, maybe drop one of the dozen batman books you’re putting out, and put that money towards R&D.

What’s more is that there’re few ways for the artist to recoup the cost of making the test pages that are the intellectual property of that corporation. 

I think in order for we artists to get treated more fairly, we are going to have to stick to standards of practice. Companies exploit the lack of communication and solidarity between artists. We can’t really trust corporations, ones with a history of exploiting labor, to have our best interests in mind so we are going to have to keep the lines of communication open and hold corporations to a standard. Hold the line!

…that said, I’ve done free samples for comics corporations before. And I regret it. I won’t do it again.

For many it’s exciting to have an opportunity to work for a large company or on a property or license that has pop culture currency and visibility. Large companies exploit this. It’s important, however, to consider the value of the labor that went into sustaining these brands. Brands that are big enough to garner enough capital to sustain a film production, let alone the occasional 300 dollar sample page from a cartoonist. 

Ron is doing the brave and necessary step of starting a conversation around workplace standards. We need more artists and writers to do this. Companies are relying on artists seeing each other as all sources of competition rather then as allies.

I’m dismayed that DC is steering experienced female pros to do a talent workshop that’s supposed to be for people who are new. Maybe DC can’t tell the difference between a woman with published work that they need to treat like a pro vs a woman who’s a complete beginner and that does not bode well.

Also I wish we had Ron writing and drawing a Cloak and Dagger book. But I’m even more excited to get his solo work coming out @imagecomics this year.

Under-developed compared to what? It’s inhabited, it’s got a castle at Flint’s Finger, etc. If I had to guess, I’d say that Cape Kraken probably doesn’t have very good soil, since the presence of the Flint Cliffs and the name of House Flint suggests that there earth is rocky and rather poor in topsoil. 

And the wetwood seems to be part of the Neck proper, from context, as opposed to part of the Cape. 

Climate and geography make things much more difficult by making agriculture very difficult. 

Without agriculture, you don’t get settled populations (especially true in the wildlings’ case, because they’re mostly nomads who have to keep following the elk and reindeer herds) which make large-scale organization easier because people know where to find other people and they can make long-term investments in infrastructure, and eventually small settlements become larger settlements become towns become cities. 

Without agriculture, you also don’t get much in the way of surplus food, which you need in order to have people specialize in non-food-production activities which down the road will create the basis for commerce, writing, communication, etc., to have population growth that creates both the demand for social organization and the labor supply to staff it, and to have exportable commodities that could allow you to make some social/technological leaps through engaging in trade with more organized neighbors. 

That’s not to say it’s impossible – there are wildling villages relatively close to the Wall, and we have Hardhome as well – but it’s much much more difficult.