Category: Uncategorized

I was more considering the wildfire-tipped arrows/bolts being used to besiege a castle/walled city, seeing as how the substance burns through stone. Because right now, apparently the most effective method of utilizing wildfire is using a suicide bomber, and I can’t see that working against a land fortress. Does anyone besides insane Targaryens and a creative Tyrion use wildfire in warfare, given how much trouble it is?

I still think that runs into the same problem – transporting, storing, and distributing wildfire is hugely dangerous. Hence, Aegon IV’s wooden dragons. 

But that doesn’t mean people aren’t going to use it.  My grandfather spent much of WWII riding around on dirt roads in India, in the summer, in a military jeep with leaky dynamite jostling around in the back that they would use to blow up railroad bridges and/or inconvenient hills that were in the way of railroad construction.  Leaky dynamite is incredibly volatile and unstable, and I’m kind of amazed that my grandfather didn’t get blown up a dozen times. 

Point being – generals can be astonishingly lax about safety protocols as long as there’s a decent chance at a good payoff. The issue with wildfire is that the odds of it blowing up in your face are really good, and it’s ultimately counter-productive – you usually want that town or castle after you’ve taken it. If everything’s on fire, you’ve just spent a lot of time and money to get nothing. 

Do D&D and HBO own the rights to “The World of Ice and Fire”? Like if something was totally original to that book, could they even use it in the show. Don’t know how (Tyrion or Cersei starts talking about The War of the Wombs or something as a random example although that seems more GMMR than Elio & Linda), could they even do that without payment & permission from Elio & Linda especially on content that was not writing by George R.R. Martin which major chunks of that book were?

I’m really not sure. These kinds of licensing deals can be very complicated – look at the whole Marvel situation for a good example of how creative works can be chopped and split up and recombined – so it’s possible either way. 

And keep in mind, even the sections Elio and Linda were writing were based on GRRM’s outlines, IIRC. 

If you took an arrow and replaced the metal arrowhead with an arrowhead-shaped glass jar filled with (somewhat stable) wildfire, how effective would such a thing be? How about something similar scaled up to a ballista? Because the usual method of tossing pots with catapults seems terribly inaccurate, and Tyrion’s suicide bomber ship method only works so many times…

Well, the arrow-sized one would seem to multiply the problems of the catapult – more people handling a weapon means more chances for someone to drop one and set the city on fire. 

And ballistas aren’t particularly more accurate than catapults. 

Chapter-by-Chapter Analysis: Jon IV, ACOK

Chapter-by-Chapter Analysis: Jon IV, ACOK

“When the direwolf raised his head, his eyes glowed red and baleful, and water streamed from his jaws like slaver. There was something fierce and terrible about him in that instant.”

Synopsis: Jon Snow and the Great Ranging arrives at the Fist of the First Men, and Timmy’s fallen down a well.

SPOILER WARNING: This chapter analysis, and all following, will contain spoilers for all Song of Ice and…

View On WordPress

Do you think it’s a blind spot in the worldbuilding that we don’t know about more Valyrian steel swords? The World Book gives the suspiciously precise figure of 227 in Westeros and we only know about 7 in current use. Even if only 100 were long swords rather than daggers/axes/whatever, there are less than 1000 noble houses in Westeros right? Shouldn’t that mean that one in 10 have VVS at the bare minimum? Doesn’t it seem weird that we haven’t heard of more?

Well…given that I estimate that there are somewhere around 2 million highborn in Westeros, less than 1,000 houses makes for absurdly large families. I think there’s a lot more than 1,000 houses. It’s just that most of them are relatively minor ones that we barely hear about – like the Forresters, for example. 

Do you feel that as a result of their anger over the Red Wedding large parts of the fandom just give LSH a total moral blank check? She murders a mentally disabled man and an envoy under a flag of truce. Also, she is willing to execute Brienne, the one true knight in Westeros, Hyle Hunt, who at least fought the bloody mummers with honor, and Podrick Payne, a clearly non malicious teenager.

I think the mistake you’re making here is treating LSH like a normal human character. LSH is a manifestation of nemesis, and thus is a primal force of retribution, above ordinary considerations of morality. 

Did Merytt or Petyr Frey deserve to die? No. Neither did the children of Niobe, Chrysippus son of Pelops, the sons of Thyestes, Iphigenia at Aulis, or Cassandra at Mycenae, but the curse of the House of Atreus brought them to their deaths all the same. The curse of the House of Walder has yet to complete its business, but that’s what LSH is for.