I am italian so i do not know english history well, could i ask you what historical house was the inspiration for the blackfyres?

There’s a number of possibilities, depending on how you interpret things. If you focus on Aegon/Young Griff, you might see them as equivalents to the Tudors – a royal line founded on an uncertain claim (House Tudor’s claim descended from Henry V’s widow and from Henry VII’s mother being a great-great-granddaughter of Edward III), living in foreign exile as mercenaries, and making an unexpected crossing after the main civil war is over.

If on the other hand, you focus on the successive Rebellions and the way that they were held up as an alternative to an unpopular king, I think they more resemble the Jacobites.

Is Summerhall another thin place? The ghost of high heart talks of gorging on grief there and rhaeghar enjoyed hanging out there? There’s also Jenny’s song of dancing with ghosts.

It may be, but we haven’t spent enough time there to know.

Thanks for the reply re: Maidenpool. All good points, but I am still curious as to why Aegon gave himself such a meagre slice. And I think any way you cut out, the Crownlands are easily the weakest region. There is also a question of timing, given the decision to include Maidenpool in the riverlands. The Mootons bent the knee before the riverlords did, at the same time as the Darklyns. Their new lord even commanded Aegon’s army for a time! Maidenpool would have greatly increased Aegon’s control

I discuss my theories about why Aegon didn’t take more here. The Targaryen monarchy was intended to be a dracocracy, where mere human concerns about land and numbers of soldiers simply didn’t matter.

Also, keep in mind the necessities of feudal politics. Without large centralized administrations, kings don’t have the capacity to directly rule large areas. Moreover, in feudal societies, the support of the lords is dependent on the king’s generosity at giving out wealth. So trying to hold all the lands yourself works against the king’s own interests.

In this case, his interest in keeping the Riverlands a going concern after a nasty period of being imperial conquests and the battleground of Westeros, when the new overlords were a relatively weak house.

Shouldn’t the Lannisters try to become a naval power given their wealth and proximity to the Iron Islands?

They have some naval power – 25 warships isn’t nothing. And at times they have had more: there was the extended war with the Iron Islands during the Famine Winter over the mutilation of Lelia Lannister, there was Gerold Lannister’s raid of the Iron Islands to take his hundred hostages, Tommen II’s great golden fleet lost in Valyria, Tommen I’s fleet which he used to bring Fair Isle into the Kingdom of the Rock.

But something happened at some point to moderate the Lannisters’ naval ambitions, and led them to discourage Fair Isle from maintaining a navy of its own despite the Ironborn threat. Not sure what that was; it’s possible that, after the Conquest, the Lannisters thought they didn’t need a navy since they could call upon the Royal Fleet.

Help me solve a dispute- do the secondary lords pay taxes to their Lord Paramount lieges?

It’s not entirely clear how taxation interacts with the process of subinfeudation, and it’s not helped by the fact that when we see lords interacting with their vassals, it’s almost always between immediate vassals.

The only clue I can think of is that the Redwynes have to pay excise taxes on wine to the Crown despite being vassals of the Tyrells. That may suggest that lords pay taxes both to their immediate liege lord and that lord’s liege lord, or that the Redwynes are a special case because they are directly exporting goods to foreign countries on a scale that most vassals wouldn’t.

You know how Stannis offers to make Renly his heir until he has a son? Well isn’t he his heir already, given that a male already inherits before a female?

I think it’s the difference between heir presumptive (who can be displaced if another heir comes along in the mean time before the current ruler dies) and heir apparent (who can’t).

It’s also about a pardon – from Stannis’ perspective, Renly has forfeited his heir status by rebelling against him. So he’s offering it back.

Would you say that High Heart is a possible “thin place”, knowing what happened their? “When [the Singers] died, they went into the wood, into leaf and limb and root, and the trees remembered.” (DwD Bran III). RSAFan

Maybe a mini-one? After all, that is where Erreg became known as a kinslayer, so something had to go down there.

The thing about thin places is that it’s not just a place of supernatural power, it’s a concentration of human suffering. Hence why I would say that a place like Winterfell is NOT a thin place. Nor is the Isle of Faces, or similar places. They are places of power yes, but that power derives from sources other than human suffering.

I think it’s surprising that Maidenpool is considered part of the riverlands, when given the history of House Mooton it was amongst the first to realise the power of the dragons and swear fealty to Aegon. Wouldn’t it make more sense for the Iron Throne to want it in the Crownlands, for their own coffers, to act as a strong northern defence on the border of royal lands, and to act as a counter-weight to Duskendale (re: second port status)?

I don’t find it that surprising. Maidenpool has been part of the Riverlands for thousands and thousands of years before the Targaryens ever arrived in Westeros. And the Mootons only swore fealty after having been beaten on the field and having their lord slain in battle, so it wasn’t painless.

As to why it wasn’t included in the Crownlands…well, Aegon had already considerably extended the Crownlands by incorporating a good chunk of the northern Stormlands, and that had a deleterious long-term effect of weakening the Stormlands vis-a-vis Dorne and other potential threats. Taking Maidenpool from the Riverlands would significantly diminish an already-weak province, leading to greater problems in the future.

Also, he just didn’t need it. Aegon’s policy and that of his successors, was to boost King’s Landing as a port at the expense of Duskendale. Why include another potential competitor port?

How common historically were secret treaties like the marriage pact for Viserys and Arianne? It makes sense that you would want a heavy hitter with at least a veneer of impartiality as witness for an agreement like this (thus the Sealord rather than some random clerk from the Iron Bank), but were witnesses more likely to be strictly impartial, or were they usually involved to some degree? Thank you!

Secret treaties were absolutely commonplace for much of recorded history – hence why it was such a big deal when Woodrow Wilson put banning them as one of the first of his Fourteen Points during WWI . According to Chad Khal, there were no less than 593 such treaties made between 1521 and 2004.

As for witnesses, that’s a bit more unusual. In no small part because they were so common, states just treated them like normal treaties, requiring only the signatures of the parties involved. You’d hardly want a lot of witnesses to a secret treaty, lest you compromise the treaty’s secrecy.

Does Professor X actually do all that much for mutants? In the movies at least he seems like a terrible activist

I’ve discussed this in some depth over at Graphic Policy. A lot of this stems back from the way that the mutant metaphor was originally developed – early on, there’s just not that much exploration of anti-mutant prejudice that mutants need protecting from, so the emphasis in on this weird strategy of improving human-mutant relations by fighting evil mutants. (since the original idea was that mutancy was just an easy way to introduce a bunch of heroes and villains without having to think up individual origin stories)

His biggest pro-mutant moment in the early comics is the X-Men taking down the sentinels. However, even then, you see Professor X engaging in a narrow form of activism – his first instinct when Bolivar Trask whips up an anti-mutant witch hunt is to engage him in an academic debate, trying to use his credentials as an expert to influence public opinion. It doesn’t go very well, even before Trask sends in the genocidal robots.

And when I have time to write my essays on how Claremont approached the mutant metaphor, you’ll see that this is kind of his main mode of political activism. He’ll testify against Senator Kelly’s Mutant Registration Act, he’ll engage in TV debates with Reverend Stryker, he’ll organize Magneto’s legal defense at the International Court of Justice, etc. And he’ll have his school, where he’ll educate several generations of mutants (OGs, Giant-Sized, New Mutants).

But, in no small part because these are still superhero comics where the main event is introducing problems that can be solved with punching, we never see Xavier engaging in movement-building: we don’t see mutant rights groups being formed at a local, state, or national level, we don’t see a Mutant Equality Bill being proposed to counter the Registration Act, we don’t see Xavier leading protests or direct actions, etc.