#grrm can't math

[beyondmistland]

The Florents would make so much more sense if GRRM had Stannis say in ACOK they can field two thousand knights (as opposed to two thousand men).

[racefortheironthrone]

how liquid is a tournament prize of "forty thousand golden dragons to the champion" going to be? even if it comes in the form of gold plate and not an actual sack of coins, would it be easily transportable to anyone who doesn't already have guards and a retinue to take care of it? that is, i wondered if a hedgeknight champion would practically be able to claim all of their prize

So this is something where GRRM made something of a mistake due to his issues with math - not only is Sandor's prize a ludicrous amount of money, 40,000 dragons should weigh approximately 720 pounds, which is more than a draft horse can carry.

IIRC, Sandor's prize seems to have been given out in currency as opposed to plate, which makes it a bit too liquid - hence the ease with which he's robbed by the Brotherhood or Anguy is conned out of it by unscrupulous vendors.

[molicioushat]

How Ladies Die

An Analysis on Women and Their Deaths in A Song of Ice and Fire series

Preface

A year or two ago I read @joannalannister‘s post on the statistics of women dying in childbirth in ASOIAF and the historical  numbers.  And I was quite struck by this line: 

“The only way I could say whether GRRM’s share of female deaths in childbirth is higher or lower than the predicted 7% is if I had the total number of women in Westeros who die in childbirth versus the total number of female deaths, which isn’t a statistic I have.”  

So I started wondering how those numbers might have looked.  Of course I put that thought to the back of my head and moved on.  

And then this post came up more recently and I started thinking about it again.  I had been plowing through Fire and Blood and I was quite upset at Queen Alyssa Targaryen’s death, especially since I love ariel2me’s fics on Robar and Alyssa, (and I’m very upset at having those headcanons torn asunder, thanks grrm).  So I’m sitting there mulling over all this when I thought, “why don’t I make this list?” 

And I did.  I complied every woman I could find into this list.  And it is depressing.  And then I went and combed through the books to find women who died in other ways.  And it was depressing.  Because it was just so much violence.  Women were being raped and murdered all over the Riverlands.  War is hell and the innocents suffered the most, women and smallfolk, but especially if you were both.  I had to take a break from it, it was so awful.  

But I did it.  I made the lists.  So we can now analyze the data.

Analysis

Childbirth, and Dead Women  

These are most complete lists at this moment of 1/11/19  Now I might have missed some but we’re going to run with the data I have at this moment.  In the future, after we get more material, I may make more lists and another analysis.  

My method was to search the words, childbirth, childbed, labor, miscarried, miscarriage, killed, drowned, murdered, to find characters who died.  In addition, there were characters, like Queen Naerys for example, who I remembered off  the top of my head.  There are plenty of women who have died that we have no clue how they have died, such as Queen Mariah Martell, and the Unnamed Princess of Dorne.  Both are dead but we don't know how they died.  So I didn’t included them, though I probably should have.  I also didn't include women I suspected died from complications or partially due to childbirth, such as Lady Ashara Dayne, and Lady Waynwood, wife to Ser Denys Arryn.  Lady Ashara died from suicide, perhaps complicated by a post-partum depression?  And Lady Waynwood died from “grief” according to Littlefinger, and her newborn son died not long after her.  

As Ladies Die in Childbed has a total of 31 women 

As Ladies Die Part 1 has a total of 75 women

As Ladies Die in Part 2 has a total of 73 women

In total that is 179 Women

I would like to state that this is only a sample of the population of women.  As a sample this is not the complete picture, but it’s the best we have so far.  (Polling date pre-elections are based on a sample group of people meant to represent the population, but it’s not always accurate.)

Now we can take the 31 who died in Childbirth and then find the percentage out of the total 179 women.  We would arrive at 17.32% which is higher than @joannalannister‘s predicted 7%.  That's even higher than the 10% maternal mortality rate suggested by the Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History.

Okay, so let’s try and see if we get better number with only the women* who had children and how many pregnancies, and how many died.  So we have 136 pregnancies, and 26 women who died in relation to childbirth.  That’s a rate of 19.12%.  That’s even worse than the previous result!

Now I could add women like Queen Mariah Martell into my calculations, but I would like to stick with the data we have right now.  I could mess with the data a bit more but I think I’ve stretched it as far as I can.  So that leaves us with a 17.32% to 19.12% death rate.  That’s almost 1 in 5 women dying from childbirth.  That is just way too high!!  We know grrm can’t math but this is unacceptable.  I’m hoping we get more information in Fire and Blood volume 2 that will tilt the scale more towards, the 7% number, especially since we have the Great Spring Sickness.  I will say I am not looking forward to slogging thru TWOW, because it’s probably going to increase Ramsay’s kill count (and no one wants that) and that will be depressing to read.  Which would make this even more depressing.  

Feel free to use this data however you want.  If you want to try and calculate differently, please do, just link the pages if you decide to use them.  Also if you feel I missed someone please message me.  They won't be added to the current lists but they will be on the next ones.  

*note I will post the list of women I included for this if anyone wants, just can’t do it now.  

[nobodysuspectsthebutterfly]

Wasn't Aemma Arryn the heiress of the Vale? Trying but failing to understand why Alysanne wondered about Daella's death & fought for Rhaenys's rights but shrugged when her 11 year old granddaughter was sold off to Viserys.

No, Daella Targaryen was Rodrik Arryn’s second wife.

To the astonishment of every woman at the court, save mayhaps the queen, Princess Daella chose Lord Rodrik to be her husband. “He seems good and wise, like Father,” she told Queen Alysanne, “and he has four children! I’m to be their new mother!” What Her Grace thought of that outburst is not recorded. Grand Maester Elysar’s account of the day says only, “Gods be good.” –Fire & Blood

Of Rodrik’s four children by his first wife, the eldest two were girls, Elys (three years older than Daella) and Amanda, and the younger two were boys. The inheritance of the Vale went through one of the boys, not Aemma. (Which also answers the question people have had regarding Lady Jeyne Arryn – she inherited at age 3, after her father -- one of Rodrik’s sons -- and older brothers were killed by Stone Crows.)

As for why Alysanne didn’t protest Aemma’s marriage – that was in 93 AC, after Aemon’s death on Tarth a year earlier (which tore her apart, in addition to the other tragedies in the previous decade), the year she was last able to fly (painfully, unsteadily), shortly before she fell and broke her hip, around the time she started to go deaf… she wasn’t the same woman she had been 40 years before. And furthermore, it was right in the middle of the Second Quarrel, when Alysanne was refusing to talk to Jaehaerys because of his decision about Baelon and Rhaenys. But despite her disagreement about the inheritance, Alysanne was always close to Baelon, so probably he convinced her at some point that Viserys and Aemma would be well-suited, a good match for her beloved Daella’s orphaned little girl. And though the marriage was rather early, it wouldn’t be consummated until after she had flowered, so… yeah.

(Though I do think there’s some issues with the timeline and characterization, due to rewrites or something, the fact that the bits about the Second Quarrel and Aemma’s marriage was written in 2012 vs the bits about Alysanne being close to Baelon written in 2017ish. Not to mention GRRM’s usual math issues. We’ll have to see if anyone clarifies.)

[beyondmistland]

The fact Lorimar Peake's daughter was only the seventh Peake maiden to become Queen of All the Reach is another example of GRRM being bad at math.

[racefortheironthrone]

By your army and population calculations shouldn’t some of the kingdoms of westros per the populations given to us be different?like the vale and riverlands being 40k?

Well yes, GRRM is known for not always getting his math right when it comes to army numbers, most notably having to do with the Riverlands.

[racefortheironthrone]

Reading your Anguy question, how much money was 10,000 gold dragoons actually worth? Was it a realistic pot for winning a contest?

See here for my estimates on the value of a gold dragon. 

As for whether it’s a realistic pot, it’s a bit tricky, because medieval tourneys don’t seem to have given out prizes in cash, but instead gave out prizes in jewelry, plate (hence why so many modern sports tournaments have “cups” as trophies), and the like. And without these objects to hand, it’s a bit hard to value how much a “gold vulture” or a “very rich ring” should be valued at, or (given how popular diamonds were in medieval tourneys) how to appraise precious stones in the abstract. 

However, I can say that 10,000 dragons work out to something on the order of 6,000-7,000 English pounds (in 1300 CE pounds, that is), which is far, far bigger than any tourney prize I can find an example of. 

So I think this another example of math being GRRM’s Achilles’ heel. 

[nobodysuspectsthebutterfly]

@omgellendean reblogged your link and added:

#heights #useful references #i love this site and now it’s even better #btw if you throw in dunk and rohanne’s heights you will lol really hard just saying (@nobodysuspectsthebutterfly)

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