Just a backup in advance of the detumblring
Chapter-by-Chapter Analysis: Sansa II, ASOS
She would wear her new gown for the ceremony at the Great Sept of Baelor…that must be why Cersei is having it made for me, so I will not look shabby at the wedding. Synopsis: Sansa gets a new dress, goes hawking with Margaery, and has a conversation with Ser Dontos. SPOILER WARNING: This chapter analysis, and all following, will contain spoilers for all Song of Ice and Fire novels and Game of…
Chapter-by-Chapter Analysis: Catelyn II, ASOS
“It was the moment she had dreamt of and dreaded. Have I lost two sons, or three?”
Synopsis: “No I would not give no false hope/On this strange and mournful day/But the mother and child reunion/Is only a motion away…”
SPOILER WARNING: This chapter analysis, and all following, will contain spoilers for all Song of Ice and Fire novels and Game of Thrones episodes. Caveat lector.
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Politics of the Seven Kingdoms: the Reach (Part III)
credit to ser-other-in-law Introduction: Last time, we saw how a succession of frighteningly single-minded and capable monarchs turned the Kingdom of the Reach from a petty kingdom ruled from a hillfort into a powerful and dynamic state that could reshape the map of southern Westeros and defeat its regional rivals singly and in combination. In this part, we shall see how this state confronted the…
This is a tricky one, so bear with me: the answer is, we’re not entirely sure.
We know that the Sealords of Braavos are elected (for life) and we know a little about who elects them:
Neither prince nor king commands in Braavos, where the rule belongs to the Sealord, chosen by the city’s magisters and keyholders from amongst the citizenry by a process as convoluted as it is arcane. From his vast waterside palace, the Sealord commands a fleet of warships second to none and a mercantile fleet whose purple hulls and purple sails have become a common sight throughout the known world.
Part of what makes this complicated is that the electorate is composed both of magisters and keyholders, and it’s not clear whether all keyholders are magisters but not all magisters are keyholders or whether the two classes are completely separate. We do know that both magisters and keyholders form quasi-nobilities, with the Antaryons and Prestayns as two well-known houses of the former (the current sealord is an Antaryon, for example), and the Reyaans as one well-known family of the latter. Another complication is that the keyholders are officials of the Iron Bank of Braavos, which suggests something of the interconnection of state and corporation as was the case with the Dutch Republic and the Dutch East India Company.
There’s also a suggestion, and this is more speculative, that there’s also a legislative body in addition to the Sealord’s executive. The books refer to a Hall of Truth (and sometimes a Palace of Truth, although it’s possible they could be two separate buildings) which is distinct from the Sealord’s Palace, where keyholders are “summoned to the Hall of Truth to vote.” While this could just be where the elections for the Sealord are held, the phrasing suggests otherwise (given that the choosing of the Sealord is a much more drawn out process than a sudden summons would suggest). Also, given how much Braavos loves its liberty, it would be surprising if they were less democratic than Lys, Myr, and Tyrosh.
Sure. It’s a very complicated story that could easily fill up a semester, but I’ll do the super-quick version: the Republican Party abandoned Reconstruction in 1876 following gradual voter fatigue over Federal intervention in the South and then gradually shifted to merely pro-forma support of civil rights in the 1880s, and then gave even that up in the 1890s.
The next big moment is when black voters in the North in the 1930s and 1940s – who had become a significant voting bloc due to the First Great Migration – joined the New Deal coalition (a shaky but potent coalition that included southern whites, western farmers, “white ethnic” working class voters in the Midwest and Northeast, the labor movement, middle class liberals and former Progressives, etc.) following the 1936 election, when the Republican Party embraced austerity and opposed the New Deal, which many African-Americans relied upon for survival.
This then gradually (I’m talking 1940s to 1960s gradually) forced the Democratic Party to embrace the cause of civil rights. In turn, southern whites began breaking with the Democratic Party – first, in creating a legislative alliance with conservative Republicans after 1937 to block further New Deal legislation, second, with the 1948 walkout from the Democratic Convention that led to Strom Thurmond running for President as the “States’ Rights Democratic Party,” third, the gradual erosion of the (white) “solid South” in the 1952, 1956, 1960, and 1964 elections.
This formed the basis for the “Southern Strategy” pursued by Richard Nixon: he saw that the white South was up for grabs due to the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, and believed that he could win their votes without appearing to openly favor segregation by campaigning on “law and order” and “states’ rights” without explicitly mentioning race.
And the rest was history.
It is unavoidable that current events and societal preoccupations would color what topics historians are interested and how they approach those topics. Pace to those historians who believed in the Noble Dream of Objectivity, but historians aren’t robots and there’s no way to eliminate it from our scholarship. The only thing we can do is be honest and self-aware about it: as David Blight says, we all have biases and don’t trust anyone who says they don’t.
To take a classic example, the Dunning school of American history was fatally flawed by the fact that the men who made it up were almost entirely white Southerners whose fathers had fought for the Confederacy and who were themselves violently hostile to Reconstruction and the idea of black civil rights, and trying to create a “usable history” for the dominant politics of white reconciliation in the 1890s-1910s.
At the same time, the Dunning school would never have been overturned if it hadn’t been for the discipline reacting first to WWII and the ideological threat of Nazism (which led a lot of scholars to rethink the “needless war” thesis and the idea of fighting a war for the ideal of human equality, however flawed in practice), and then the rise of the civil rights movement and especially its popularity among Northern college students in the 1960s inspiring a whole bunch of historians to re-examine the Civil War and Reconstruction from the ground-up and completely undermine the Dunning school.
Wait… Did I just lose the other half of that history post?
I think you might have, anon. If only there was some way for me to message you directly….
Politics of the Seven Kingdoms: The Reach (Part I)
credit to ser-other-in-law Hey folks, so this essay is looking like it’s going to be as long as the Westerlands essay if not longer, so I decided to pre-emptively break it up into pieces so it’s easier to read (and write, to be honest). Part I covers the geography and prehistory of the Reach, Part II will cover the rise of House Gardener and the construction of the Reach as a polity, Part III…
That is absolutely not Renly’s “general political direction” and it points to how Renly is profoundly misunderstood by the fandom. Despite his pretentions to meritocracy and popularity, Renly does not believe in the concept of an elective monarchy or Great Councils at all. He says this directly:
“Robb will set aside his crown if you and your brother will do the same,” she said, hoping it was true. She would make it true if she must; Robb would listen to her, even if his lords would not. “Let the three of you call for a Great Council, such as the realm has not seen for a hundred years. We will send to Winterfell, so Bran may tell his tale and all men may know the Lannisters for the true usurpers. Let the assembled lords of the Seven Kingdoms choose who shall rule them.”
Renly laughed. “Tell me, my lady, do direwolves vote on who should lead the pack?” Brienne brought the king’s gauntlets and greathelm, crowned with golden antlers that would add a foot and a half to his height. “The time for talk is done. Now we see who is stronger.” Renly pulled a lobstered green-and-gold gauntlet over his left hand, while Brienne knelt to buckle on his belt, heavy with the weight of longsword and dagger.”
When you take away the witty repartee, Renly’s political theory is naked tyranny – his personal excellence or popularity only matter to the extent that they attract soldiers to install him as king by force of arms, and you can see how paper-thin those rationalizations are when Catelyn tells him to put his money where his mouth is and stand for election in front of the political community and Renly says no.
I’m honestly perplexed how people keep missing the fact that Renly is a hollow man: the thematics are everywhere, from Donal Noye comparing him to copper to Maester Cressen remembering him as a pageantry-obsessed attention-seeking child. The tragedy of Brienne in ACOK is that Renly doesn’t give a damn about her (as Loras says later, “Renly thought she was absurd. A woman dressed in man’s mail, pretending to be a knight”), he only gives her the cloak because Barristan didn’t show up and he knows he can make use of her (“He said that all his other knights wanted things of him, castles or honors or riches, but all that Brienne wanted was to die for him”), he knows she’s in love with him and treats her like a dog he can summon and dismiss whenever he wants (”His words seemed to strike the girl harder than any blow she had taken that afternoon. “As you will, Your Grace.” Brienne sat, eyes downcast.”).
And as I’ve explained in my recaps of AGOT and ACOK, Renly does all of this knowing that Joffrey is not Robert’s heir, that Stannis is telling the truth, that he himself has no right to be king. HE IS A BAD MAN WITH GOOD PR.
Chapter-by-Chapter Analysis: Tyrion II, ASOS
“And my father? Who does he have spying on me?”
This time the eunuch laughed aloud. “Why, me, my lord.”
Synopsis: Tyrion meets with Varys (yay!) and then with Shae (boooo!).
SPOILER WARNING: This chapter analysis, and all following, will contain spoilers for all Song of Ice and Fire novels and Game of Thrones episodes. Caveat lector.
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