The Reach would be the richest raw material to work with, but I feel like the Stormlands and the Vale are really under-utilized compared to other regions.
“She thought she glimpsed movement, but when she turned her head, it was only the king’s shadow shifting against the silken walls. She heard Renly begin a jest, his shadow moving, lifting its sword, black on green, candles guttering, shivering, something was queer, wrong, and then she saw Renly’s sword was still in its scabbard, sheathed still, but the shadowsword…the steel of his gorget parted…
And you can now buy it and read my essays, which I have been waiting for people to read a long time now, plus some excellent work by Jeff Hartline, Stefan Sasse, Aziz and Ashaya, Amin Javadi, and so many more!
Are the wars depicted in ASOIAF more brutal than their real world counterparts? For example, is the War of the Five Kings more brutal than the War of the Roses (and other wars of the medieval period?) Is the Red Wedding “worse” than the real-life Black Dinner? If the medieval period isn’t a good analog for the wars of ASOIAF, what period (and what wars) are? WWII? Vietnam?
How do you think GRRM’s fictional warfare compares to real world warfare, in terms of casualties, brutality, violence, etc?
It varies. The Wars of the Roses was extremely brutal, even by the standards of the day – the battle of Towton, for example, killed about 1% of the total population of England in a single day. In part, this was because both sides after a certain point decided to ditch the rules of war in favor of just massacring the other side. So the War of Five Kings doesn’t seem particularly disproportional, especially given we’re dealing with a population more than 10 times the size of England during the Wars of the Roses.
The Red Wedding is a lot more bloody than the Black Dinner – the only casualties of that historical event were the two brothers Douglas who had their heads chopped off. The Glencoe Massacre, which stands in for the “outdoors” section of the Red Wedding, only involved the deaths of 78 people, but that was a really high percentage of the population of the clan MacDonald.
It’s another Monday, so I have another essay up at Salon.com – this time, analyzing the role of religious faith and its interactions with secular power. Enjoy!
If you follow Race for the Iron Throne, you know that I’m in the process of getting ready for publication of a book of my Tower of the Hand essays, which will come with some pretty awesome book-only extras. We’re getting pretty close to being able to announce the launch date and other amazing stuff, but I wanted to share an excerpt from one of my new, never-seen-before essays:
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