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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2419 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 26, 2026

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One thing bugging me about the dragon show and perhaps the biggest thing in the whole series that makes no sense is how did the Targaryen’s remain in charge for 129 years between the last dragon and Robert’s Rebellion. They didn’t heavily intermarry or have a lot of people related to them. They were basically aliens who lost their special ability. I would expect them to last like 6 months without dragons.

Are there any historical parallels? The Europeans to the new world were few for a time but maintained better technology and most likely 10-15 IQ points higher intelligence. The show gives no indication targs were smarter.

I mean that’s a triviality compared to the Starks ruling Winterfell unbroken for 8,000 years!!

Timescales don’t make any sense in Westeros. The only helpful explanation is that the multiyear winter cycles basically frustrate change momentum and society is stuck in a particular local minimum of social technology it can’t escape. Basically can’t risk major upheavals without risking the entire continent plunging into famine on a hair trigger. Armies become thus much less willing to mobilize, lords don’t go along with destabilizing plots etc.

In this scenario, aegons Conquest, the Dance, Robert’s rebellion, and the Wo5K are extreme aberrations against otherwise bias toward extremely careful stability

Unfortunately, this isn’t actually played out at all in the books or shows, and the actual limitations of preparing for and surviving long winters is just ignored. Winter doesn’t even seem to exist on House of the Dragon.

True on the Starks especially with how martial Westeros seems to be. You aren’t holding power for 8,000 years with the amount of military power in Westeros.

I recently stumbled across this blog which touches on a lot of this in detail: https://acoup.blog/2019/06/12/new-acquisitions-how-it-wasnt-game-of-thrones-and-the-middle-ages-part-iii/ The author's conclusions are that the economic system in Westeros doesn't make any sense at all, but I'd say that is forgivable (who cares if King's landing has to support 500k hungry mouths or only 80k, just adjust the numbers), unlike the larger sin of misunderstanding how politics and kingdoms operated in a medievalish setting.

you are a king who has suddenly come into a lot of land, probably by bloody conquest. You need to extract revenue from that land in order to pay for the armies you used to conquer it, but you don’t have a pile of literate bureaucrats to collect those taxes and no easy way to get some. By handing out that land to your military retainers as fiefs (they become your vassals), you can solve a bunch of problems at once...First, you pay off your military retainers for their service...Second, by extracting certain promises (called ‘homage’) from them, you ensure that they will continue to fight for you. And third, you are partitioning your land into...chunks small enough to be administered directly

castles, something Westeros has in abundance. Castles – in the absence of castle-breaking cannon – shift power downward in this system, because they allow vassals to effectively resist their lieges. That may not manifest in open rebellion so much as a refusal to go on campaign or supply troops

Tywin Lannister wants his army, he only gets it if House Falwell, and Ferren and Foote and Clegane choose to come out and fight for him. If Tywin wants to administer the countryside, change a law, count his subjects, impose new taxes – he can only do these things if the houses under him follow through

What is unusual here is how frequently key characters deviate from the norms these societies need to function – Westerosi nobles are stunningly treacherous for people who rely on systems based in trust for survival. In a system which runs on trust and reputation, elites tend to value trust and reputation

The problem here comes in the later seasons and how they re-contextualize all of this concern. That problem has a name, and it is Cersei. Cersei breaks all of these rules...And yet it doesn’t matter. The Lannister bannermen in the penultimate episode mount the walls to fight a doomed battle for her anyway. Not only is that behavior inexplicable, it hardly seems possible. Who, after all, is raising and leading these men? Who is coordinating supplies and grain shipments to the capital? Remember, the reason for this distributed system of political leadership is that the central state does not have the administrative apparatus to raise armies or feed cities on its own – it has to outsource that to vassals.

One thing those articles never engage with is Westeros' seasonal weirdness; summers last a long-ass time and outside of the North winter doesn't seem that bad, that changes a lot of assumptions about agriculture. Everything in Westeros is on a larger scale and has that classic fantasy "thousands of years" timescale for its civilizations. The seven kingdoms have history that goes back further than the roman empire; when Europe was full of dudes who painted themselves blue, they were building castles n shit. That's a lot of time spent in the steel age, even with fantasy medieval stasis in effect. I can believe they have better metallurgy/materials technology and architectural knowledge than the IRL middle ages did, and we as readers don't hear about it because none of our viewpoint characters are architects.

I think the best parallel is the successor states to the Mongolian Empire in established areas of complex civilizations in China and Persia, where the skills of being steppe conquerors long eroded but the dynasty persisted for longer.

Did the common people know the dragons were extinct in Game of Thrones until long after it happened?

I'm pretty sure it wasn't a secret, the death of any dragon is a big event, the critters are famous and the targs show them off as part of pageantry.

Apparently as time went on, the dragons got stunted and deformed and unimpressive until the last one hatched was the size of a dog.

Unless you lived in the one city that had all the dragons until the war, you would probably never see a dragon in your entire life. There were like 10 and Westeros is the size of the Americas, north and south.

The king/royal family would do royal processions every few years, touring the kingdoms and bringing the dragons with them to show off. During the targaryan golden age, if you lived in anywhere slightly significant, like Maidenpool or wherever, you probably saw a dragon once, that time the royal processions came through when you were 5.

They had been ruling for 130 years prior to the Dance of Dragons, the civil war that killed off most of the dragons. That creates a lot of institutional inertia. Also the seven kingdoms were called that for a reason - they weren't exactly inclined to cooperate to kick a Targaryen off the throne, if it meant elevating their rival next door.

After the Dance of Dragons there was a pretty long period of regencies and conflicts, where it sounds like the different kingdoms were effectively fighting over who would rule by proxy. It really was a downward trend from there, until Robert's Rebellion ended the dynasty.

Well they have a good shot at 'divine right to rule', as good as any theocracy or real monarchy at least? Institutional legitimacy?

They seem to have won a series of rebellions and only got overthrown because of exceptional madness in their ranks.

https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/First_Blackfyre_Rebellion

Just because everyone hates the current regime doesn’t mean they’re going to agree on a replacement, especially since Westeros wasn’t even one country when the Targaryens arrived. Robert getting personally slighted by Aegon and going on a suicidal revenge spree finally created a scheming point for everyone to rally around. Many such cases in real history.

I think auto-correct corrected away "Schelling point". But yeah, in the context of Westeros, they kind of have scheming points where all the back stabbers gather together to betray each other.

It wasn't uncommon for elective monarchies in Europe, for example, to pick foreign nobles as their King - better to have someone from outside the existing system who is not party to any of the various internecine squabbles come in and rule you, rather than risk somebody from the other camp gets in.

a scheming point

I assume you meant Schelling Point, but Scheming Point works just as well!

The Ptolemids seem like the closest parallel. They managed about 300 years before the Romans knocked them over and IIRC kept it, ah, in the family, so to speak.

It seems to me that for all Martin's talk about what is Aragon's tax policy, he really didn't think very hard about the details of his world building. See the size of the kingdom, the height of the wall (the show halfed the book's described size and he thought it was too tall upon seeing it) and many others.

I suspect he liked William the Conqueror so stuck him in without including all the details that allowed William to actually secure authority.

It wasn't even a lot of talk, it was a cheap throwaway line. I don't see any reason to think Martin was ever any deeper on setting stuff. AP Euro hammered the acronym PERSIA into my brain. Politics, Economics, Religion, Social, Intellectual, Artistic. How deep did he go into any of that for Westeros? He basically just did neat, fun crap at comic book depth, while having pretty solid characterization and a couple centuries of ancestries.

Tolkein at least was explicitly doing Mythos. What's Martin's excuse?

I haven't read the relevant books but I get the distinct impression that Tolkien definitely took the time to hammer out a lot of the PERSIA stuff, too.

I think he did think a lot about world building but there were either areas he forgot to tie up or couldn’t think of a way to tie things up. It’s not uncommon to have sci-fi to have holes that can not be completed.

Best I can come up with is the Targs without dragons would need to be rather poor. Where all the other houses would fight for the targs if another house tried to be king because the funds siphoned off by the royals was small and a new King would likely try and find ways to boost his income.

But overall 30 maybe 100 Targaryen blood people aren’t ruling a land without dragons. The British could rule India I assume because trade was very profitable for elites. The US ruled Afghanistan mostly with bribes (pre-invasion per capita income was $500/post invasion $1k). Not entirely sure how Britain was in with the Chinese but I’ve heard Heroin is a lot of fun. The Spanish actually fucked a lot the Aztec ruling class creating an elite and I assume had better weapons, money, and there was some religious prophecy. US, Argentina, and Australia didn’t have population centers. Ukraine is in this endless war because Poland got rich and is like 12x Ukrainian per capita income. Assad still had like 15% of the population his ethnicity pre-war and richer backers. The Jews who some say rule the world probably have average IQ a standard deviation above average and invented nukes and AI. Non of these seem to apply to what the Targs had when dragons died.

It seems to me that for all Martin's talk about what is Aragon's tax policy, he really didn't think very hard about the details of his world building.

If JRRT was economics nerd instead of linguistic one, the trilogy would definitely have 50 page appendix about Sauron's tax policy and full org chart of Mordor internal revenue service. Be careful what you wish for.

I'd find that pretty interesting, because I am an economics nerd.

Are there any novels with economics appendices?

ACKS (the Adventurer Conqueror King System) has a 12-page economics appendix, but it's a tabletop RPG, not a novel.

Not originally, but classical regency romances now need massive appendices explaining the social and economic structure of vanished world of early 19th century Britain, world as strange and foreign to 21st century as Shire or Gondor.

Reading the Regency

How accurate is that guide? I'm surprised that the author doesn't try to build up their own cred in the foreword, unless I missed it, although she does seem to cite her sources in the comments.

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