Mesopotamian girl sending clay tablets to her best friend who lives five city states to the west: what if..... Enkidu begot Gilgamesh with child?🤭
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Mesopotamian girl sending clay tablets to her best friend who lives five city states to the west: what if..... Enkidu begot Gilgamesh with child?🤭
Local restaurant having trouble with whores apparently.
ARE YOU FUCKING WITH ME
new asoiaf/got worldbuilding discourse just dropped! check out the author’s blog for more thoughts on asoiaf, lotr, and more.
I would like to know why "Westeros is too big for the kind of vassalage-based polity we're told it has"? That sounds like it would be an interesting explanation.
The really short version is that the kind of setup he wants the world to have is too unstable for the breadth of territory and interaction of cultures and politics.
(And honestly I often think that while GRRM was thinking Wars of the Roses, the actual interpersonal and inter-fiefdom shit he wants is actually suited to half a millennium earlier, in the Heptarchy, and that was even less centralized and less well organized and less integrated than the Wars of the Roses.)
The long version is . . . honestly quite long: it involves getting into the nitty-gritty of what logistically it takes to get large numbers of people to agree to follow basic sets of rules, to operate their world in the same way, to agree that this rule applies here and this rule applies here and even if those rules are unfair and unjust, to even apply them consistently. Have you ever tried to organize a community group to do something the same way? Like that except a million times more Plus Swords and Violence.
The kind of feudal vassal-overlord relationship set that's supposedly working in GoT is one that's personal and immediate and inevitably also breaks down into war every few generations (at the longest). By the time you're actually trying to work on the scale of people, institutions and mileage that's involved in GoT, you have to have institutions that outlast people.
They will probably still be some level of nepotistic/etc - I'm not saying that you end up with Perfect Fair Egalitarianism. But you can trace this progression in every large organized empire that lasts (and this is a crucial point) beyond one or two generations - and make no mistake, even Westeros itself is functionally an empire (that is: a centralized government ruling over a number of disparate and originally politically independent regions which were originally united by conquest). You have to be able to appoint someone who is basically competent to oversee things that need to be done; you can't rely purely on who inherits political power where. You also have to make sure they CAN'T just go "you know what? fuck this shit I'm out" with the whole of their army or they will do this . . . .at least once a reign.
(Even in England, York went through a period of basically doing this every new king. They were subdued! They swore allegiance to a king! . . . that king died and even though he was succeeded by his heir in quick and orderly fashion, York went "right, fuckit, fuck off, we're done!". . . . .and the new king had to go subdue them. And then he died and although he was succeeded in orderly fashion, York went - )
If you want Westeros to work, the royals have already so thoroughly intermarried and politically intertwined with the Starks that much like the duchies of York and so on just became parts of the English crown, titles and positions to be handed to certain levels of that government structure (like yes: those levels were "the blood heirs of the ruling monarch" but it's still just part of the government in a monarchy), Winterfell isn't a separate political entity just barely agreeing to be part of the whole thing with a totally separate lineage, Winterfell is an extension of the centralized royal family. Ditto everything else. Or you maybe still have local rulers allowed to do local things, but they're operating within the empire/centralized government under the supervision of a governor/proconsul/satrap/whatever you want to call them who arranges the centralized taxation and military drafts and so on.
And like: you're free to ignore all of this and have fun with the stories, don't get me wrong. "Shut up there's dragons, just let me have fun" is a valid position to take . . . as long as you slash the author do not then try to make claims for 'accuracy' or 'realism'.
Incidentally, here's France during roughly the high point of French feudalism:
And this is, if anything, downplaying how decentralized things were. The "County of Barcelona" was functionally several much smaller counties at that point and the only reason they weren't independent is because they were still bothering to send tribute to the King of the Franks. Most of the larger duchies had a similar degree of decentralisation within their own borders, with assorted counts and barons pretty much just doing whatever they wanted. Some areas that are the same color on here were ruled by one person, but others were ruled by brothers or even cousins (or, for the pink areas, just coworkers since those are ecclesiastical territories), and even where it was one person it was less "political unification" and more "same guy owns the land". In most of the kingdom, "county" was the highest level of actual political unity; above that it was just "sure, I'll follow the king as long as he doesn't expect me to actually do anything besides pillaging my neighbors". It took 600 years of war, politics, strategic fucking, and pure luck to get France from this to the absolute monarchy that got itself guillotined
Over in the Holy Roman Empire, the stem-duchies self-destructed one-by-one, some slowly while others disintegrated the insant one particular ruler died without a strong heir
England did pretty well all things considered... because of Alfred of Wessex spreading his first kingdom's burh-and-herepath network and the shire system to the rest of his domains to make fending off Norse attacks easier, and because of Danish and Norman invasions that both replaced chunks of the nobility, and because of a fuckton of castles being built specifically because of what feudalism led to elsewhere, and because of reforms like the Magna Carta, and because of atrocities like the Harrying of the North, and they still had multiple civil wars throughout the medieval period
And at the other end of Eurasia, here's what China looked like when it had something akin to feudalism:
This is late enough in the Warring States Period that a lot consolidation had already taken place as well. 250 years earlier the map looked more like this:
Feudalism is a political system based on family trees and rent and that doesn't lend itself well to large-scale organisation, especially back when the fastest modes of transport were sailboats (reliant on bodies of water) and horses (horses)
This is the FUNNIEST SHIT I HAVE EVER SEEN
Reblogging for cultural enrichment
bout time I brought back the Laurel and Hardy flex tape-
From The Killers, 1946. A Film Noir Classic
I’m an archivist, behold my growing collection was of old photos mirroring timeless memes I’ve come across at various places I’ve worked.
stacys mom turned me into a frog!
im eating flies and live inside a log!
stacy cant you see she has placed a spell on me!
now im in a bog and look just like a small green frog
do you guys wanna see the most perfectest png of my cat
polite bubby.png
ohhhhhh bubby from orange cats
Hi sorry I saw a transparent jpeg and immediately put your cat in a situation hope that's cool
WHATS HE DOING UP THERE!!!!!!!!!!!!!
gagging you with our red string of fate to shut you up for one fucking second
YOUR EMAIL FINDS ME ON THE FIELD OF BATTLE
deepen the shadows bro. it'll be ok
i meant art-wise but if any dark sorcerers see this. you do you
this is one of my favourite posts of all time
favorite word?
It’s good to have fancy, ornate, five-dollar words like opalescence or intaglio, and it’s good to have simple practical words, like smack or door or blaze, but the best word, the most important and most useful word, is fuck
(found in a comment thread about dragon age 2)
do you mean. fucking
BODAHN???
I'm sure you'll be pleased with the goods my boy and I have collected. And with your discount!
Me when someone else has a heavy accent when speaking English: That accent is charming and I can tell they put in a lot of effort to learn English.
Me when I have a heavy accent speaking another language: They are going to shoot me the second I open my mouth aren’t they