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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   2177 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 26, 2026

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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.

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