So with my knightly orders I tried as much as possible to make them different from each other as opposed to just “reskins” to use a video game term.
Having each order with a Valyrian blade feels a bit too samey – that they all were rich enough to buy one in the first place, that they had the same access to merchants from the great empire to the east, and so on.
Moreover, I think there’s something about the way that Valyrian blades work ini the setting, the way that they engender this obsession to have them, to take them, to never sell them, to pine after their loss, that would make it extremely difficult for a corporate body to own one. The temptation would be too strong for each man to try to claim the blade for their own House rather than let it pass later into the hands of a man from another House.
King of the Trident is probably the oldest title, a bit like Kings of Winter. It represents a claim to the defensible interior of the Riverlands, the part that would have been the hardest for the Westerlands or the Vale or the Reach etc. to conquer.
King of the Rivers and Hills is a more expansive title. The Hills portion represents a claim to the hill country that runs from Pinkmaiden to Harrenhal, the portion I’ve described as the “southern Riverlands,” which is the vulnerable underbelly of the kingdom because it’s not sheltered behind the riverrine walls of the Trident. The Rivers portion is not only a repetition of the claim to the Trident, but also a maximalist claim to all the rivers of the Kingdom, including the God’s Eye River and the Blackwater Rush, and thus might well represent a claim on the northern Crownlands, since King’s Landing and Rosby (and Duskendale, conquered by Benedict II, who may have been the first to use that title) are quite close to the Rush, Cracklaw Point is quite close to Maidenpool and borders on the Trident as it opens into the Bay of Crabs, etc.
River King is the colloquial term. If the two above are the titles that a Justman monarch’s court would use, I imagine River King would be the term used by the smallfolk or by foreigners to differentiate these kings from the many other kings of Westeros.
Well, keep in mind, I’m fairly sure Illyrio’s plan to get Dany to Pentos would have involved trying to get her together with Aegon and get her dragons under his control.
Dany and Aegon showing up as independent rival monarchs was not part of the plan up to mid-ADWD, and if it hadn’t been for Tyrion you likely would have had Aegon showing up at Meereen as one of Dany’s suitors, like Quentyn but with sex appeal (sorry, @poorquentyn, but it’s true) and one of the best armies in Westeros at the moment she’s under siege.
The problem is that Tyrion completely deconstructs Aegon’s Hero’s Journey, and so instead of the Hidden PrinceMarrying the Princess and Training His Dragon, Aegon’s destiny is to become the Mummer’s Dragon who will take the Iron Throne to the cheers of the mob, only to be roasted alive when the Slayer of Lies comes to take what’s hers.
So the personnel shifts in Essos turn out to have been really crucial: sending Barristan means Dany doesn’t get assassinated on the docks of Qarth (which would have been a major setback, but would have cleared the way for Aegon ultimately), but because Jorah has his own plan which doesn’t involve Illyrio, Dany doesn’t go to Pentos, so that plan is scotched. The problem here is that Illyrio is trying to work at arm’s length (which is good tradecraft, but there are…well, tradeoffs) across two continents, and unlike in cyvasse or chess, the pawns have wills of their own:
“Which plan?” said Tristan Rivers. “The fat man’s plan? The one that changes every time the moon turns? First Viserys Targaryen was to join us with fifty thousand Dothraki screamers at his back. Then the Beggar King was dead, and it was to be the sister, a pliable young child queen who was on her way to Pentos with three new-hatched dragons. Instead the girl turns up on Slaver’s Bay and leaves a string of burning cities in her wake, and the fat man decides we should meet her by Volantis. Now that plan is in ruins as well.”
And so do the best laid plans of cheesemongers gang oft alay…
Well, keep in mind that the rivers somewhat act against the roads, because you need to cross the rivers at a ford or bridge, and that provides a natural funnel-point that defenders can use against you, as we’ve seen with the Battle of the Fords.
I would say that there are mechanisms for moderating the potential threat from a road network: first, use a riverrine navy to ensure that you have the better interior lines, second, build castles at strategic points along the road network to slow the enemy’s progress and whittle down their numbers through multiple sieges, third, build a lot of swing bridges on crossing points so that you can maximize your own flexibility vis-a-vis travel on road vs. travel on water and potentially cut off your enemy by denying them a crossing.
If the families were well-known to each other and their interests likely to align – the most common scenario we’re talking about is neighbors looking to consolidate their estates – you’d probably be pretty frank about it.
If on the other hand, the two families are not well-known to one another, they’d probably get more subtle about it: have the two sides meet at social occasions, see how the young people in question get along (this is why formal balls and dances were created, and why it’s very strange that cotillion culture still exists), then bring it up in such a way that neither side could lose face, probably as a hypothetical or something.
On the other hand, we have plenty of examples in Westeros of people being very blunt about offers out of the blue and rejected offers leading to hurt feelings, so…
Actually, Renly did sort of bring Eddard in on it, rather inadvertently:
Ned was not sure what to make of Renly, with all his friendly ways and easy smiles. A few days past, he had taken Ned aside to show him an exquisite rose gold locklet. Inside was a miniature painted in the vivid Myrish style, of a lovely young girl with doe’s eyes and a cascade of soft brown hair. Renly had seemed anxious to know if the girl reminded him of anyone, and when Ned had no answer but a shrug, he had seemed disappointed. The maid was Loras Tyrell’s sister Margaery, he’d confessed, but there were those who said she looked like Lyanna. “No,” Ned had told him, bemused. Could it be that Lord Renly, who looked so like a young Robert, had conceived a passion for a girl he fancied to be a young Lyanna? That struck him as more than passing queer.
See, here’s the thing about Renly and the investigation: it is not in Renly’s interest for the truth to come out unless and until he’s succeeded in getting Margaery into Robert’s bed. Because if the truth comes out and Robert is unattached, then Stannis becomes the heir to the Iron Throne.
However, if Robert is remarrying to Margaery, then the Tyrells replace the Lannisters in the King’s Landing power structure but because Renly’s brokered the deal and is romantically attached to Loras, they become allies to his faction. And while Stannis might temporarily be the heir to the Iron Throne, the moment that Margaery becomes pregnant, Stannis is out of the picture and Renly’s path to a Handship/Regency is clear.
So what’s happening above is that Renly is both trying to get info as to whether the Margaery as Lyanna 2.0 thing will work but also seeing if he and Ned are sympatico, and neither works. It previews Renly’s pitch to Ned, in that he completely misunderstands how to appeal to Ned and win him over.
As to why not Jon Arryn, well A. Jon Arryn suddenly dying kind of makes that impossible, and B. there’s no reason to assume that Jon Arryn would favor Margaery – he might push for some other marriage.
It’s a bit selective and kind of screwy – lumber is not the North’s only export, cattle aren’t only found in the Riverlands (and honestly the only big herds we hear about are in the Westerlands so…shrug), iron and tin are not found only in the Iron Islands, the gold mines of the Westerlands aren’t only in the north (Silverhill should have some mines near it, ffs), there’s no symbol for wine on the bloody Arbor, I don’t see how the Stormlands has much of an economy on amber, and given how often Dornish red is mentioned, you’d think they’d put it on the maps…
To raise a personal bone of contention: Vale map is completely screwed up, putting the Mountains of the Moon east rather than west of the Eyrie, basically smack-dab on top of the Vale which is a huge agricultural region. And there’s a bit of weirdness with the Vale exporting marble but for some reason the Eyrie is built from Tarth marble.
But I don’t see anything that’s blatantly contradicted by the books.
I think it’s more vast than you think, given how many different areas of land it includes:
Lord Jonos drained the last of his ale and tossed the horn aside. “What of the lands and castles we were promised?”
“What lands were these?”
“The east bank of the Widow’s Wash, from Crossbow Ridge to Rutting Meadow, and all the islands in the stream. Grindcorn Mill and Lord’s Mill, the ruins of Muddy Hall, the Ravishment, Battle Valley, Oldforge, the villages of Buckle, Blackbuckle, Cairns, and Claypool, and the market town at Mudgrave. Waspwood, Lorgen’s Wood, Greenhill, and Barba’s Teats. Missy’s Teats, the Blackwoods call them, but they were Barba’s first. Honeytree and all the hives. Here, I’ve marked them out if my lord would like a look.” He rooted about on a table and produced a parchment map.
Jaime took it with his good hand, but he had to use the gold to open it and hold it flat. “This is a deal of land,” he observed. “You will be increasing your domains by a quarter.”
Bracken’s mouth set stubbornly. “All these lands belonged to Stone Hedge once. The Blackwoods stole them from us.”
“What about this village here, between the Teats?” Jaime tapped the map with a gilded knuckle.
“Pennytree. That was ours once too, but it’s been a royal fief for a hundred years. Leave that out. We ask only for the lands stolen by the Blackwoods. Your lord father promised to restore them to us if we would subdue Lord Tytos for him.”
The entire bank of a river, two ruined strongholds and one ruined town, a valley, four villages (maybe five depending on whether Honeytree is a village, a town, or a stronghold), a market town, two woods, three hills…and all of this is just the disputed lands between House Bracken and House Blackwood that would represent a fourth of House Bracken’s current holdings.
To me, this suggests that House Blackwood probably holds most of the lands between the Red Fork and the Blue Fork (there’s not a lot of other Houses from that region – notably Fairmarket and Oldstones don’t seem to have houses associated with them) and a fair bit of land on the southern bank of the Red Fork, given Lord Bracken’s complaints. For their part, I think House Bracken controls most or all of the hill country east of Pinkmaiden and west of Harrenhal and from the south bank of the Red Fork to however far north Harrenhal’s demense runs.
In other words, between them the Bracken and Blackwoods likely control most of the central Riverlands, making them extremely difficult to control, especially if they temporarily band together against an outside intervention.
To use a metaphor that I don’t know whether @poorquentyn will agree with, Euron is the Saruman of ASOIAF rather than the Sauron of ASOIAF: he’s a magic user who fell to the temptation of power without the constraints of morality, and stared too deep into the palantir, until he was seduced by Sauron.
In other words, he’s not the main antagonist, he’s the intermediary antagonist the heroes have to deal with before they can get to the main antagonist; he’s the one who besieges Helm’s Deep to prevent the Rohirrim from riding to the rescue of Gondor, not the one who besieges Minas Tirith.
And ultimately this is why I have a problem with the army sizes during the Dance, which in turn are part of my overall problem with the Dance as military history. Where we have numbers to tell, the armies of the Dance are pretty small by the standards of later Westerosi wars:
Battle of Rook’s Rest: >800 greens, 100 blacks.
Battle of the Gullet: ~100 ships on both sides.
The Fishfeed: At least 2000 greens, at least 3,100 blacks.
The Butcher’s Ball: 3,600 greens, ~7,000 blacks.
First Tumbleton: >9,000 greens, ~7,000 blacks.
Second Tumbleton: <= 9,000 greens, 4,000 blacks.
While one could argue that, post-Aegon’s Conquest, the Westerosi had shifted to a model of having multiple smaller armies rather than one big host to avoid losing everything to one dragon, this creates another problem.
We know from later wars that the various regions of Westeros can field much larger armies in the several tens of thousands, so if that is the case, the various regions of Westeros should have had more armies in the field at one time, and should been able to raise new armies and be ready to keep fighting.
Moreover, these numbers create new problems for historical consistency: if only 2,000 or so Westerlanders marched east with Jason Lannister, then the Westerlands couldn’t have been “thinly defended,” and so Dalton Greyjoy’s reaving should have been met by 43,000 Westermen ready to defend their homes against the 15,000 Ironborn. But since we know the Westerlands were “thinly defended,” then the casualties at the Red Fork and the Fishfeed should have been larger by at least an order of magnitude.
RFTIT Tumblr Backup 