I am not sure what is being disagreed on here, honestly.
Devereaux seems to have two major claims:
First, that the period depicted in Game of Thrones / ASOIAF reflects the early modern period, not the medieval period, and the early modern period was more violent.
Second, that Game of Thrones / ASOIAF depicts a world where a lot of the mitigating factors that were actually present in medieval times, such as religion, were not in effect. Something that is striking to Devereaux is that various acts -- military atrocities, treason and backstabbing of various kinds, more personal forms of sin -- seem not merely to be frequently be done, but nobody seems to even view them as bad.
Devereaux described it more distinctly: Nobody seems to believe their own religion, and nobody seems to care when it implicates mitigating factors. Neither were true in the medieval era.
There's a populist religious revival on-screen after a long period of extreme religious corruption which has led to new foreign faiths taking root in sections of the populace. This isn't the default European state, but I wouldn't say it never happened.
I think asoiaf portrays the human cost of medieval warfare very well; the 'broken man' speech by septon Meribald is one of my favorite passages in all of fantasy. However, I think the rate at which castles are taken, especially by the golden company, is unrealistic. I get that Martin needs to move the story forward, but realistically it's going to take months of sieging to starve a castle out, especially the ludicrously large castles of asoiaf.
I think we're meant to understand that the Golden Company was betting on those castles' garrisons being *very* small—probably small to begin with (due to being small castles), and further thinned out by the War of the Five Kings. I don't recall any case of a castle with even a few hundred men being taken except by negotiated surrender (at least, not after the dragons die out).
We don't see most of the takings of castles so we don't know if the garrisons were small, the war of the five kings barely touched the stormlands and the golden company was even fractured when they took the castles. When you're on a castle wall even women and children become deadly weapons (see e.g. Richard the Lionheart) because they can throw rocks/boiling water, so you will need many many times more men to take a castle than there are inside. Again, we don't know the numbers, but given that we don't see e.g. Tarth soldiers anywhere after Renly's defeat it is highly probable that Tarth didn't lose much in TW5K and had much more than hundred men. Yet, as of TWOW Tarth has fallen even though half the forces landed on Cape Wrath (far south of Tarth). Just like, griffin's roost, rain house, crow's nest, mistwood and greenstone, all taken in like, two weeks?. Now we understand mistwood, but the other castles should have an incentive to hold out for as long as possible, given that the crown vastly outnumbers the golden company and can swoop in to repel them, at which point the castles that fought will be rewarded for holding them off, or at least not get punished for rolling over.
>A strange fact about Game of Thrones as a pop-culture phenomenon is how many fans wanted to view the story through that simple good vs. evil lens, in spite of the fact that the very first season had some very strong clues that that wasn't the kind of story fans were going to be getting.
Ozy, that is a completely normal fact about human nature. Let's think about how an innate, biological moral sense might have evolved. Of course we evolve instincts to detect danger, such as not jumping off a tall cliff. We also evolve a sense when other people are dangerous to us, for example, when we observe them harming other people. We want this danger to us neutralized, which means something like killing or exiling them. But wait - they were harming people, and that I why I see them as dangerous, and now I advocate harming them? Could someone else see it as me being dangerous, and could they advocate harming me in turn?
So we end up making complex rules about when and how it is okay to harm other people, and when and how not, and those who violate these rules are put into the box of Evil Villains, against whom doing harm is totally morally justified. Everybody else is presumed to be innocent.
I am not sure what is being disagreed on here, honestly.
Devereaux seems to have two major claims:
First, that the period depicted in Game of Thrones / ASOIAF reflects the early modern period, not the medieval period, and the early modern period was more violent.
Second, that Game of Thrones / ASOIAF depicts a world where a lot of the mitigating factors that were actually present in medieval times, such as religion, were not in effect. Something that is striking to Devereaux is that various acts -- military atrocities, treason and backstabbing of various kinds, more personal forms of sin -- seem not merely to be frequently be done, but nobody seems to even view them as bad.
>where a lot of the mitigating factors that were actually present in medieval times, such as religion, were not in effect
Religion is absolutely there, but 1) the septons are seen as corrupt 2) the elites seem to care little for religion.
Devereaux described it more distinctly: Nobody seems to believe their own religion, and nobody seems to care when it implicates mitigating factors. Neither were true in the medieval era.
There's a populist religious revival on-screen after a long period of extreme religious corruption which has led to new foreign faiths taking root in sections of the populace. This isn't the default European state, but I wouldn't say it never happened.
I think asoiaf portrays the human cost of medieval warfare very well; the 'broken man' speech by septon Meribald is one of my favorite passages in all of fantasy. However, I think the rate at which castles are taken, especially by the golden company, is unrealistic. I get that Martin needs to move the story forward, but realistically it's going to take months of sieging to starve a castle out, especially the ludicrously large castles of asoiaf.
I think we're meant to understand that the Golden Company was betting on those castles' garrisons being *very* small—probably small to begin with (due to being small castles), and further thinned out by the War of the Five Kings. I don't recall any case of a castle with even a few hundred men being taken except by negotiated surrender (at least, not after the dragons die out).
We don't see most of the takings of castles so we don't know if the garrisons were small, the war of the five kings barely touched the stormlands and the golden company was even fractured when they took the castles. When you're on a castle wall even women and children become deadly weapons (see e.g. Richard the Lionheart) because they can throw rocks/boiling water, so you will need many many times more men to take a castle than there are inside. Again, we don't know the numbers, but given that we don't see e.g. Tarth soldiers anywhere after Renly's defeat it is highly probable that Tarth didn't lose much in TW5K and had much more than hundred men. Yet, as of TWOW Tarth has fallen even though half the forces landed on Cape Wrath (far south of Tarth). Just like, griffin's roost, rain house, crow's nest, mistwood and greenstone, all taken in like, two weeks?. Now we understand mistwood, but the other castles should have an incentive to hold out for as long as possible, given that the crown vastly outnumbers the golden company and can swoop in to repel them, at which point the castles that fought will be rewarded for holding them off, or at least not get punished for rolling over.
I appreciate this post--I would have gone on being misinformed otherwise.
I agree that acoup is a great blog overall. Anyone interested might want to look at his Universal Warrior series, that goes over the way different cultures have looked at military professions: https://acoup.blog/2021/01/29/collections-the-universal-warrior-part-i-soldiers-warriors-and/
>A strange fact about Game of Thrones as a pop-culture phenomenon is how many fans wanted to view the story through that simple good vs. evil lens, in spite of the fact that the very first season had some very strong clues that that wasn't the kind of story fans were going to be getting.
Ozy, that is a completely normal fact about human nature. Let's think about how an innate, biological moral sense might have evolved. Of course we evolve instincts to detect danger, such as not jumping off a tall cliff. We also evolve a sense when other people are dangerous to us, for example, when we observe them harming other people. We want this danger to us neutralized, which means something like killing or exiling them. But wait - they were harming people, and that I why I see them as dangerous, and now I advocate harming them? Could someone else see it as me being dangerous, and could they advocate harming me in turn?
So we end up making complex rules about when and how it is okay to harm other people, and when and how not, and those who violate these rules are put into the box of Evil Villains, against whom doing harm is totally morally justified. Everybody else is presumed to be innocent.