Help someone got me ranting on how Westeros’s economy and agriculture make NO SENSE WHATSOEVER before bedtime
how am I supposed to go to sleep now
Okay basically:
You get the European High Middle Ages by achieving agricultural surplus.
NOT having agricultural surplus means: You just barely have enough food to make it through the winter. Producing food is the highest agricultural priority. Everyone who CAN make food DOES make food. Major agricultural events like harvest, planting, fishing, roundup, and butchering are all-hands-on-deck events where the entire community has to work together to make sure you last the winter.
These are Earth winters in Northern Europe. Winters that last a couple of months.
The High Middle Ages in Europe were made possible because agriculture got good enough that some places could produce WAY more food than was necessary, which allowed others to specialize. You need a LOT of agricultural surplus to get:
- Cities full of common people who don’t contribute to agriculture at all
- (As opposed to: a village-based economy)
- A class of idle rich whose women focus entirely on decorative handicrafts and whose men use massive amounts of metal to pretend to fight each other
- (As opposed to: Noblewomen who were intimately involved in organizing the production, distribution, and storage of food and clothing for the entire community; warriors wearing armour made of leather and using weapons like spears that required less metal)
- Wars that economically devastate an entire region by killing massive amounts of peasantry
- (As opposed to: War that is deliberately focused between combatants because agricultural workers are expensive and necessary)
The last one is the especial kicker. That kind of economic and agricultural devastation is very characteristic of the Hundred Years War, which ASOIAF is mostly based on. It arose when you got so much agricultural surplus that you could literally set fire to crops and mills and kill peasants and still make it through the winter.
So Westeros is, essentially, an incredibly food-secure society.
And then
You tell me
THAT WINTER LASTS ANYWHERE FROM A FEW YEARS TO ALMOST A CENTURY???
And all the Starks do to prepare for it is sound ominous and put glass greenhouses in a stone castle?????????????
Man so much this.
I never got involved with GoT because I’d been warned it was grim in a way I find unfun, but I heard it was about a bunch of people competing to be ruler of a region defined by periodic multi-year winters, of which the first in a while was coming up soon. And that the writer had described his goal as ‘like Tolkien but with more realism.’
And I assumed for actual years that a core element of the entire drama was the different would-be leaders and factions having different logistical plans to prepare for the Ice Zombie Climate Change Decade (including presumably at least one ‘That’s Fake Haha’) and how much of what kinds of supplies are to be stored in what ways, for whose benefit, and the constant loss of precious time as everyone backstabs each other, while the constant shifting of power means that no one’s infrastructure plans get fully realized, so Westeros has about 20% of the necessary granaries and Winter Is Coming.
Until I casually asked a fan who’d been explaining the ice zombies and the Crazy Big Wall to me what the culture’s norms for caching food for the long winters had been, traditionally, only to find that nothing of the kind had ever come up.
For admittedly neither the first time nor the last, I was so bitterly disillusioned in a cultural phenomenon in which I had steadfastly declined to participate.
#i know#this is not the first time i have ranted about this on this blog#but!#but!!!#i just cannot get over#he ripped off Pern and bragged about his realism and couldn’t be arsed to care about the agricultural economy in any meaningful way#and he wants to talk his worldbuilding up contra TOLKIEN?#man that guy may have stylized his politics#but at least i understand how people in middle earth#are alive#anyway
I love it when people are Mad About Worldbuilding. Those are my kinda people.
I would 1000% be there for a North where they look grim and dour to Southerners because they think the Southerners are fucking morons who are way too frivolous and are not preparing enough while the North has been busting ass to actually, really, seriously prepare for the next who-knows-how-long winter since the end of the previous one bc Winter Is Coming you fucking grasshoppers and the idea of the South being able to order them to part with even one single grain of their stores or one salted sardines when the going will inevitably get tough is galling and makes every true Northener want to just put a sword through their hearts and spare the North from them and their feasts.
I want the entire North to have figured how to survive on, like, mushrooms they grow in dark rooms that they just need to keep heated up and have no actual need for sun, and like drinking a little bit of your horse’s blood every day and then carefully tending to the wound, and thus storing dried and dehydrated grain that would be somewhat inedible for humans but can keep their cattle going a long time. I want them to specialize in long term storage of foods like salting and drying. I want them to have invented glass jars sealing, and be mildly off put by even the though of food that goes bad in only a couple of days. (They see someone just leave a tomato on their counter without doing anything to cook/prepare/conserve it and get twitchy.) I want them to have an agriculture based on lichen and to be professionnal ice-fishers.
I want the North to have a food culture that is so wildly different from all the other groups that they’re constantly told their food is weird and bad.
This was created by someone who takes jabs at Tolkien during interviews for not spending more time on “Aragorn’s tax policy”…
I wonder if the long winter idea seemed like a good idea at the start, then all the politics and war and stabnation and rapeicity took over and seasonal stuff got sidelined or even forgotten.
The next books are called “The Winds of Winter” and “A Dream of Spring”, so those seasons may be getting a bit more attention.
Let me know if it happens.
Have never read or watched ASOIAF/GOT but. Whaling. Whaling should be like the main industry in this world during the cold time
if u guys like this shit you should read this detailed blog where he rips the entire concept of the dothraki horse lords to shreds lol https://acoup.blog/category/collections/that-dothraki-horde/
This blog fucking SLAPS!
george martin’s face off
I am listening through the audio version cackling with GLEE over its beautifully pedantic bitchiness. It makes for 2-3 hours of listening and I am GONNA listen to ALL OF IT instead of sleeping. Thank you so much for sharing it with us.
Current favourite quote (which happens to be the last bit I read up to, because it keeps topping itself):
“Now, I am not saying that Martin planned to construct his Dothraki out of Native American stereotypes and bad Halloween costumes. In fact, I am fairly confident he intended nothing of the sort. But in the absence of doing some effective research (and it is going to become increasingly apparent that at least effective research was not done) there was quite possibly nothing else to inform the effort other than what was ‘in the air’ of the popular consciousness.”
I hope ancient and military historian Dr. Bret C. Deveraux, visiting lecturer at UNC-Chapel Hill, has a very I Fucking Love You Dude day.
Also, to everyone defending ASOIAF like “It’s not supposed to be history, it’s fantasy,” have you not been paying attention to all the frickin’ times your own author and showrunners have blown their own horns about “historical realism”? George RR Martin practically built his brand by sneeringly implying that anything with less rape and racism was just namby-pamby whitewashing because only HE has the guts to portray all the (looks at smudged writing on hand) sexy sexy violence.
It’s 2022 and ASOIAF showrunners are STILL putting on clown noses and talking about how they HAVE to include gory scenes of rape, violation, and murder, because 🤡that’s what life is really like in a patriarchy🤡.
neil-gaiman
