“Video” Podcast of HBO’s Game of Thrones, Season 5 Episode 1, “The Wars to Come”

Game of Throne is back, and so are we! Although in our case, it wasn’t a year-long wait.

Enjoy!

 

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Edmure means well. That both damns him with faint praise, but I think is also his salvation. By which I mean that Edmure isn’t very good at the things that lords are supposed to be good at – he’s a poor-to-middling general, he doesn’t have a very good hold on his bannermen, and he’s easily manipulated. Some of that has to due with him being an overgrown manchild who’s never had to mature but is desperately looking for fatherly approval, and he’ll grow out of that.

In his favor, though he’s one of the few lords in the entire series who genuinely cares about his own people. Edmure is a fundamentally decent person who acts first according to his own sense of right and wrong, and there’s precious few of them in Westeros. 

Could have sworn I had done this on tumblr, but a search didn’t turn up anything, so here goes:

the North – cross between Scotland and Northern England, but generally Celtic.
Iron Islands – Scandinavia in the Viking era.
the Eyrie – a cross between Switzerland and Wales. Lots of mountains and valleys, lots of castles filled with knights oppressing the former occupants. 
the Riverlands – I’ve always thought of them as Medieval Poland; lots of knights, but no natural defenses and powerful neighbors.
the Reach – Medieval France in the height of chivalry.
the Westerlands – possibly medieval Germany? Rather mountainous, lots of mining, known for craftsmanship and trade.
Dorne – Medieval Spain with a strong Moorish influence, although as GRRM has said, there’s strong Welsh elements there too
Stormlands/Crownlands – I get more of a Medieval English vibe, given their longstanding feuds with the Dornish and the Reach.

I’ll discuss this more in the next History of Westeros podcast I do. 

Hope that they can’t swim. 

Either they were hunted down or they became “broken men,” or it’s possible they joined up with the Brotherhood. 

joannalannister:

In modern fantasy fiction there is always a crisis of the system: both of the economic order and of the auras of power – the magic – that emanate from it. There is, in literary theory, even a technical term for this critical point: “thinning”. In their Encyclopaedia of Fantasy, John Clute and John Grant define thinning as “the constant threat of decline”, accompanied by a pervasive mourning and sense of wrongness in the world. […]

What happened with feudalism, when kings found themselves in hock to bankers, is that – at first – they tried to sort it out with naked power. The real-life Edward III had his Italian bankers locked up in the Tower of London until they waived his debts.

But eventually the power of commerce began to squash the power of kings. Feudalism gave way to a capitalism based on merchants, bankers, colonial plunder and the slave trade. Paper money emerged, as did a complex banking system for assuaging problems like your gold mine running dry.

But for this to happen you need the rule of law. You need the power of kings to become subject to constitutional right, and a moral code imposed on business, trade and family life. But that won’t happen in Westeros

–The Guardian

Speaking of that article….

According to Jaime IV of AFFC, the Freys at Riverrun have 2,000 men and they outnumber Daven’s contingent. So I would say anywhere between 500 and 1500? 

As for Volantis, they had 6,000 men just to guard against the Golden Company in Griff I, and they had 300-500 ships according to Victarion. so I would say anywhere between 10-30,000 infantry on those ships (30-100 per ship plus the normal crew). 

Because his “father” is a Northman and he was raised in the North. 

Before Robert’s death. As far as we know, Tywin was hoping to capture Ned, force an exchange of hostages, and present Robert with a fait accompli before the King knew that Tywin had attacked the royal banner.