George RR Martin, his fanboys, and former fanbase

[BrunoMattei]

If George gives me his notes, I'd do it for free.

Seriously, if something ever happens to him, the most likely to finish writing are Elio and Linda.

I don't even like fantasy but I'd do it.

Spoiler: all the characters get raped to death.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

If George gives me his notes, I'd do it for free.

Seriously, if something ever happens to him, the most likely to finish writing are Elio and Linda.

Like it is known, the notes are literally the final season. At most just shift around characters so it clicks better than the tv show.

 

[Laburnum]

Didn’t George say he didn’t want anybody to finish the series if he dies before he finishes it? And he no plans to release his notes either?

Doesn't he have a few low-level minions with access to that sort of stuff though? When he's gone I can see at least one trying to go rogue to make a nice bit of cash polishing up whatever he's left lying around.

 

[Sargon's wife's son]

You have infants being smashed against walls. Lots of rape. People shitting themselves and vomiting during death. Robb and his wolf being beheaded and then their heads sewn onto the wrong bodies and paraded. Tons of open and festering wounds. We know that Theon has his skin flayed off and his penis cut off during torture though it wasn't graphic. Targs burning people alive. Stannis will burn his daughter alive. Entire armies of eunuchs. Euron cutting out the tongues of his crew. Euron raping men and women. Varys describing his own mutilation. Vargo Hoat has his limbs removed and he is forced to eat them to survive as torture. Blood and Cheese in the novel is more violent than the show. Viserys has molten gold poured onto his head. Ramsay flays a woman's fingers and hands and she eats them off of her body. The books are torture porn like the Saw or Hostel movies.

Here's the thing most of the horrible tortures done in medieval Europe is highly exaggerating and rarely happened and only was done to the worst prisoners of people who had valuable information or by people who were actual psychopaths.
Also Martin doesn't understand how long it takes to move a military and constantly gets things wrong the Battle of King Landing should ended in a Stanis victory somehow the The Lannisters move the military hundreds of miles with no one noticing because what a scouts an outriders.

Also Morton has no idea how massive assaults actually work stennis would have need hundreds of thousands of men to take kings landing not in the Ghetto Lake what 50,000.
The combined military of King's Landing could have very easily thrown them off the walls.
There's a reason most sieges did not end in assaults

 

[William Murderface]

Here's the thing most of the horrible tortures done in medieval Europe is highly exaggerating and rarely happened and only was done to the worst prisoners of people who had valuable information or by people who were actual psychopaths.
Also Martin doesn't understand how long it takes to move a military and constantly gets things wrong the Battle of King Landing should ended in a Stanis victory somehow the The Lannisters move the military hundreds of miles with no one noticing because what a scouts an outriders.

Also Morton has no idea how massive assaults actually work stennis would have need hundreds of thousands of men to take kings landing not in the Ghetto Lake what 50,000.
The combined military of King's Landing could have very easily thrown them off the walls.
There's a reason most sieges did not end in assaults

It isn't just in size of the armies or how quickly they can move, but they need fed and equipped. There's a reason for the old saying "amateurs study tactics; professionals study logistics."

Let's take a 50,000 man army. Each man needs fed. Let's figure one pound of beef, one pound of flour, and one gallon of ale per day per troop. 50,000 men at one pound of beef each means 50,000 pounds of beef per day or 25 tons of beef. If a cow can produce 500 pounds of beef each, that still means the army consumes 100 cows per day. A week's marching means 700 cows alone. Those cows are going to need to be fed and since there is no guarantee there will be grass or hay on the way, that means the forage needs to be brought with the army, so that's extra stuff to haul around. A cup of flour is about 4 ounces, so our ration of flour is four cups per troop per day. A barrel of flour was 196 pounds, or enough to provide for 196 troops. Let's round that up to 200 pounds, or 200 troops worth. We still need 250 barrels of flour per day. 1,750 barrels of flour for our week long expedition. Likewise, a barrel of ale is 36 gal/barrel, or for our army of 50,000 troops at a gallon per day, we need 1,389 barrels per day. Let's round that up to 1,400 barrels per day. Our week long movement means 9,800 barrels needed. And that's just for basic rations.

Of course we also need physicians, blacksmiths, carpenters, engineers, and all those kinds of folks. Plus we need things like tents, ropes, iron for the blacksmiths, engineers tools, physician medicines and equipment, so on and so forth. And all of those folks need fed too. Let's assume they're in with the 50,000 men. But all their stuff is getting moved by carts and that means horses. The aforementioned problem of feeding the cows comes back to bit us because horses need fed hay too. Let's say we have one horse per 50 men. That still leaves us with 1,000 horses that need fed every day.

And we might not want to pillage the locals. If our army is moving among our liege lord's people, I can see where he doesn't want his troops stealing from them, if for no other reason than he needs their support and taxes to pay for all this. And he may not want to unleash his troops to steal from someone else's peasants because he wants them to not resist. But even if that isn't a consideration, how many towns and hamlets can provide the 100 cows or 9.800 barrels of ale or sheer amount of hay needed to move this army?

But none of that comes into GRRM's calculus of war.

 

[WhiskeyJack]

I can't believe we got real direwolves before we got Winds of Winter.

Let's take a 50,000 man army. Each man needs fed. Let's figure one pound of beef, one pound of flour, and one gallon of ale per day per troop. 50,000 men at one pound of beef each means 50,000 pounds of beef per day or 25 tons of beef. If a cow can produce 500 pounds of beef each, that still means the army consumes 100 cows per day. A week's marching means 700 cows alone. Those cows are going to need to be fed and since there is no guarantee there will be grass or hay on the way, that means the forage needs to be brought with the army, so that's extra stuff to haul around. A cup of flour is about 4 ounces, so our ration of flour is four cups per troop per day. A barrel of flour was 196 pounds, or enough to provide for 196 troops. Let's round that up to 200 pounds, or 200 troops worth. We still need 250 barrels of flour per day. 1,750 barrels of flour for our week long expedition. Likewise, a barrel of ale is 36 gal/barrel, or for our army of 50,000 troops at a gallon per day, we need 1,389 barrels per day. Let's round that up to 1,400 barrels per day. Our week long movement means 9,800 barrels needed. And that's just for basic rations.

Have you ever done the calculations for Martin's ridiculous Unsullied army? They make no sense at all, even ignoring that they're all incontinent weaklings from being castrated (penis and all) at age 5 and would never develop the muscle mass to be soldiers.

Only one in four lives to become a trained Unsullied, with each trainee getting a puppy the day they are castrated to raise and then strangle to death one year later. Then they have to buy a newborn in the slave market and kill it in front of its mother to finish their training and earn their helmet.

So roughly three dead slaves for every one Unsullied, and a dead newborn, which requires a lot of slave women staying pregnant around the clock just to supply constant newborns for killing.

Dany has 8000 trained Unsullied (and hundreds or thousands of partially trained ones besides), so that's effectively 32000 dead slaves for an army of Ellen Page's with no concept of mixed unit tactics.

Somewhere in Essos is a hell of a puppy mill.

 

[Tasty Tatty]

Fantasy was never about the logistics of the story, but about the message. Lewis and Tolkien have battles, but what matters to people is not how much the armies were paid or how were the all fed, but the fact that they defeated the enemy.

Sure, you still should give it some realism, because 100 men defeating an army of 10k feels more like Marysuism than a compelling story.

Didn’t George say he didn’t want anybody to finish the series if he dies before he finishes it? And he no plans to release his notes either?

I have the feeling that's something he said to make people asking about his death to shut up. Nobody likes to be asked "hey, when you dying so someone better can finish your job?"

Doesn't he have a few low-level minions with access to that sort of stuff though? When he's gone I can see at least one trying to go rogue to make a nice bit of cash polishing up whatever he's left lying around.

Those are Elio and Linda. In any case, they can always publish "Not a Song of Ice and Fire" and make it about the adventures of Alia, Dansa, Yrion, Juan, and Tatannis.

Like it is known, the notes are literally the final season. At most just shift around characters so it clicks better than the tv show.

Despite I don't like the idea, I still feel there is a lot of context we are missing to make it to King Bran that makes it a better story than what we were given. I don't need to like a story for it to be good and compelling, and I feel this is the case. It was a plot that was risky to make, the conclusion of a lot of decisions taken by the characters to reach to that point, and DnD didn't get the point or ignore it because they didn't like it.

 

[Kharash]

Tolkien have battles, but what matters to people is not how much the armies were paid or how were the all fed

But because Tolkien was a good writer and knew his stuff the logistics behind the scenes always make sense even if he never draws attention to it. His story sure didn't suffer for it.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

But because Tolkien was a good writer and knew his stuff the logistics behind the scenes always make sense even if he never draws attention to it. His story sure didn't suffer for it.

This. You don't need to autistically explain things if you leave enough leeway for the reader to see the numbers make sense. It's why the Aragorn Tax Policy is a retarded argument, you don't need to say what it will be, because knowing the character and its past you can easily believe he'll be a fine king.

Despite I don't like the idea, I still feel there is a lot of context we are missing to make it to King Bran that makes it a better story than what we were given. I don't need to like a story for it to be good and compelling, and I feel this is the case. It was a plot that was risky to make, the conclusion of a lot of decisions taken by the characters to reach to that point, and DnD didn't get the point or ignore it because they didn't like it.

Pretty sure if GRRM knew the context to make this ending not suck balls, he would have written it by now. It's the familiar case of being locked into an ending despite the work no longer fitting it.

 

[William Murderface]

This. You don't need to autistically explain things if you leave enough leeway for the reader to see the numbers make sense. It's why the Aragorn Tax Policy is a retarded argument, you don't need to say what it will be, because knowing the character and its past you can easily believe he'll be a fine king.

It's also more than a little bit hypocritical to want Tolkien to get into the weeds of Aragorn's tax policy and then handwave away questions about how Stannis is feeding his army or how an army of fanatical eunuchs works once you start thinking about it.

That said, I know having dragons torch cities is exciting and makes for a nice dramatic scene, if I were realistically going to use them in my war, I would use them to go after the enemy's farms and ranches and infrastructure (such as it is in a medieval setting). It's perfectly fine if the enemy can raise an army of a million troops if he can't feed them. And I would stockpile food for a year or three before I start my campaign, not only to feed my own troops but so as soon as the enemy collapses I can feed the survivors as I roll through their lands and can stave off famine and win some level of loyalty from the peasants.

 

[FatR]

It isn't just in size of the armies or how quickly they can move, but they need fed and equipped. There's a reason for the old saying "amateurs study tactics; professionals study logistics."

Realistically troops on a campaign would pillage constantly (the very first book in history which provided us a detailed eyewitness overview of a military campaign, Anabasis, provided us with descriptions of a mercenary army pillaging the territory of its own employer and taking non-insignificant casualties when some mountain tribes fight back), and situatons when half an army dies from hunger, cold and disease within a single campaign would be pretty regular. Until the invention of railroad, wars were inevitably devastating not because of deliberate atrocities (although those happened too, depending on time and place), but because there was simply no way to solve the problem of pillaging. Restricting the size of your armies to what you could realistically feed only worked in times of poorly organized states, when feudals were not eager to sacrifice their retinues, which served as the basis of their power and status. Otherwise the enemy could simply swamp you by raising more men, and losing many of them to poor food and dysentery won't matter, as long as enough bodies get to the battlefield.

But again, most fantasy authors have pretty outlandish troop numbers, so, again, all of this wouldn't matter, if Martin did not pretend that he's describing Realistic Medieval Warfare (tm).

 

[William Murderface]

Realistically troops on a campaign would pillage constantly (the very first book in history which provided us a detailed eyewitness overview of a military campaign, Anabasis, provided us with descriptions of a mercenary army pillaging the territory of its own employer and taking non-insignificant casualties when some mountain tribes fight back), and situatons when half an army dies from hunger, cold and disease within a single campaign would be pretty regular. Until the invention of railroad, wars were inevitably devastating not because of deliberate atrocities (although those happened too, depending on time and place), but because there was simply no way to solve the problem of pillaging. Restricting the size of your armies to what you could realistically feed only worked in times of poorly organized states, when feudals were not eager to sacrifice their retinues, which served as the basis of their power and status. Otherwise the enemy could simply swamp you by raising more men, and losing many of them to poor food and dysentery won't matter, as long as enough bodies get to the battlefield.

But again, most fantasy authors have pretty outlandish troop numbers, so, again, all of this wouldn't matter, if Martin did not pretend that he's describing Realistic Medieval Warfare (tm).

I get that, but we're talking about fantasy feudalism where those things don't necessarily happen. Lords raise troops, off they go, there's a couple big battle scenes, and then the book moves on. Reality was a whole lot nastier. But even with pillaging galore, troops still needed fed and paid and hired and transported and all of that and writers like GRRM just tend to gloss over those things because A) they aren't all that exciting and B) they really don't understand the intricacies of them. Even ancient and medieval logistics are a hard subject to grasp and who wants bothered when you can write about torching a city with dragons, a rape scene, or having diarrhea on the side of the road?

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

I get that, but we're talking about fantasy feudalism where those things don't necessarily happen. Lords raise troops, off they go, there's a couple big battle scenes, and then the book moves on. Reality was a whole lot nastier. But even with pillaging galore, troops still needed fed and paid and hired and transported and all of that and writers like GRRM just tend to gloss over those things because A) they aren't all that exciting and B) they really don't understand the intricacies of them. Even ancient and medieval logistics are a hard subject to grasp and who wants bothered when you can write about torching a city with dragons, a rape scene, or having diarrhea on the side of the road?

I remember they did have a talk on pillaging on book 4 but even then it's, at best, a retard defence (ie, "it happened because no one cared for the immediate consequences after the war"). It's weird how Warhammer Fantasy has better talk of logistics than the most famous and successful feudal fantasy novel.

 

[Tasty Tatty]

Can't remember if it's discussed with this detail in the book, but during the first season, Robert explains this is one of his fears: the Dothraki don't need to face them in battle, only go town after town burning it all down to make the people resent the king for not doing anything and that could cause uprising, civil war, and loyalties to move to Dany.

And that was before the dragons.

Once the dragons were old enough to fight, all the logistics were useless. She had the upper hand.

 

[Laburnum]

Those are Elio and Linda. In any case, they can always publish "Not a Song of Ice and Fire" and make it about the adventures of Alia, Dansa, Yrion, Juan, and Tatannis.

Aren't they the forum orbiters? I thought he had some more professional assistants who helped him out with his work, other than those two.

 

[regalterry]

the Dothraki don't need to face them in battle, only go town after town burning it all down to make the people resent the king for not doing anything and that could cause uprising, civil war, and loyalties to move to Dany

There's another aspect of realism that Martin ignores here though.

Just like IRL Mongols would have had a hard time doing their usual horse archer song and dance within the confines of Europe, with all its rivers, dense forests, hills, mountains and castles, so would the Dothraki face the same issues in Westeros. It's the reason Parthians were never actually able to attack too deeply into Roman territories, while Romans could and did bring the fight to them by not engaging them in the field and just rushing for their cities.

The Dothraki would likely fare much worse than actual Mongols, who did employ heavy cavalry, infantry and siege engineers to supplement their armies.

And this is all once again ignoring the logistics of such an army. Each Dothraki likely has multiple steeds to be able to keep up a speedy advance, probably 3 to 4 - now imagine having to ship such an army across the sea, horses and all, and then keeping them supplied in the field. Plus, they're basically useless in sieges.

Once the dragons were old enough to fight, all the logistics were useless. She had the upper hand.

Dragons are wonder weapons, great for your personal prestige, and to scare enemy troops, but she ultimately had only three of them, and all it takes is one lucky shot to bring one down. You can't win the war with dragons, let alone conquer and hold territory, and Dany herself is an absolute imbecile when it comes to waging war.

 

[Stab You in the Back]

Dragons are wonder weapons, great for your personal prestige, and to scare enemy troops, but she ultimately had only three of them, and all it takes is one lucky shot to bring one down. You can't win the war with dragons, let alone conquer and hold territory, and Dany herself is an absolute imbecile when it comes to waging war.

A dragon is an incredible weapon that could conceivably strike anywhere, at any time. While cities may be equipped with siege weapons, Dany would dominate the roads, the mountains, the countryside. Armies would not be able to travel without risk of being decimated en route to their destination. At that point, then, it only a matter of time. Dany has her traditional armies lay siege to a city while the dragons ensure no supplies and no reinforcements are ever forthcoming. And she can pick off city by city until she reaches King's Landing. And then, if she's smart, starve them out.

 

[regalterry]

A dragon is an incredible weapon that could conceivably strike anywhere, at any time. While cities may be equipped with siege weapons, Dany would dominate the roads, the mountains, the countryside.

You're falling into the same trap so many people do when presented with a wonder weapon.

She only has three dragons. Yes, they can fly and breathe fire, but there's still only three of them and they are irreplaceable.

They need to rest, to be fed, to sleep, they're temperamental beasts that are not always going to do what their rider wants them to do.

Meanwhile Westeros is a whole continent. There's already "historical" precedent in Dorne on how to neutralize the threat a dragon presents on a strategic level. You don't even need to kill the dragon, merely damaging one wing is enough to render it useless. You're also ignoring the threat of subterfuge - when a dragon is on land and sleeping it's incredibly vulnerable, one good slash with a blade against the membrane of its wing could easily take it out of action, or they can be poisoned etc.

Don't get me wrong, they're a nice weapon to have, but they're not going to win the war for Dany, and neither are the Unsullied or the Dothraki. Her army composition is genuinely shit and basically needs Westerosi support to get anywhere.

 

[Chuckwagon]

There's another aspect of realism that Martin ignores here though.

Just like IRL Mongols would have had a hard time doing their usual horse archer song and dance within the confines of Europe, with all its rivers, dense forests, hills, mountains and castles, so would the Dothraki face the same issues in Westeros. It's the reason Parthians were never actually able to attack too deeply into Roman territories, while Romans could and did bring the fight to them by not engaging them in the field and just rushing for their cities.

The Dothraki would likely fare much worse than actual Mongols, who did employ heavy cavalry, infantry and siege engineers to supplement their armies.

And this is all once again ignoring the logistics of such an army. Each Dothraki likely has multiple steeds to be able to keep up a speedy advance, probably 3 to 4 - now imagine having to ship such an army across the sea, horses and all, and then keeping them supplied in the field. Plus, they're basically useless in sieges.

Yes - all the great Eurasian steppe hordes which actually made an impact on the course of history were very much adept at absorbing those they vanquished into their ranks as auxiliaries, bringing their own talents & expertise to further empower the horde and basically letting them snowball against progressively bigger & stronger enemies. Attila's Huns were very much not just a horde of Huns by the time they hit the Western & Eastern Roman Empires, at that point the Huns were ruling and recruiting from a huge mass of East Germanic (Gepids, Goths, Heruls, Scirians, etc.) & Sarmatian (Alans, etc.) tribes. He recruited Romans as well - for example Flavius Orestes, the father & puppetmaster of the final Western Emperor Romulus Augustulus, was a Pannonian Roman who served Attila as a court secretary between 449 and 452 AD, and Roman engineers were probably the ones who built him rams & siege towers to attack Roman cities with (as the Huns having such siege engines was reported as a new & concerning development by Roman sources of the time).

The Mongols did much the same to conquer China. The Song dynasty in southern China had all of Europe's advantages on paper and then some; very rough terrain (loads of forest/jungle, mountains and massive rivers) where horse archer tactics would've been less effective, immense fortresses, a ridiculously huge population (they're Chinese so that's to be expected) and on top of it all, they also wielded gunpowder which the Europeans didn't have at the time. Kublai Khan overcame all of the above by using a mostly-Chinese army & navy, raised from the northern Chinese territories he & his predecessors had already conquered, such that the Yuan conquest of the Song looked a lot more like one Chinese empire conquering another than the Mongols riding roughshod over the Song while throat-singing. A serious Mongol push into Europe would probably have resembled a blend of their own approach to China & the Hunnic invasions from 800 years prior - using buckbroken conquered peoples like the Cumans and Russians to push against, say, Poland and Hungary (which they already did successfully IRL, they just didn't stick around), then recruiting buckbroken Poles & Magyars to sustain their momentum against the HRE and so on, not a swarm of horse-archers camping around & needling German castles (at least not JUST that).

Of course, in yet another failure of worldbuilding, Martin's Dothraki are never once shown even trying to assimilate conquered foreigners into their ranks & employing them as auxiliaries on any meaningful scale. They destroy every town they come across that can't fight them off, wiped civilizations like Sarnor off the face of the planet instead of making even the most basic effort to try to understand & integrate them as the Huns did with the Romans or the Mongols did with the Chinese, and not only do they always take the plundered idols of their enemies back to Vaes Dothrak as trophies (whereas real nomadic empires were generally pretty religiously tolerant) but the Great Stallion religion actually commands them to destroy all signs of civilization (not just cities, even simple farms & plowed fields are not to be spared) to heal Mother Earth (thereby making ANY sort of coexistence with settled civilization functionally impossible). Add it to the pile of reasons, alongside their '''''tactics''''' and lack of armor, that they really should not be a threat to anyone who's progressed past the Stone Age technologically & socially...

Now, GRRM has said that he didn't just 'loosely' base the Dothraki off the Mongols, Huns & other Eurasian steppe hordes, but also the Plains natives like Comanches & such. Which makes them being so pointlessly, ridiculously destructive and hostile to anything resembling post-Stone Age civilization make a little more sense, since peoples like the Comanche really were horrifically brutal & destructive prairieniggers lacking the refinement & social adaptability of the Eurasian nomads IRL. However, gunpowder aside, the Plains Indians never managed to establish a nomadic empire of their own which didn't melt away before the power of their settled neighbors (namely, 'Murica) and their general inability/unwillingness to integrate conquered peoples (just other natives, not even talking about any European settlement they might've conquered here) massively kneecapped them by providing Uncle Sam with no shortage of rival native tribes who'd happily sign up with the Indian Scouts to buckbreak their enemies & tormentors (for example, the Crow fought for the US against the Sioux, the Tonkawa against the Comanche, etc.).

Yet despite adopting their most brutal & ruinous habits, the Dothraki never suffer the consequences that realistically followed for the Plains Indians. Hell nobody is mentioned to have so much as tried turning one khalasar against another (whether with financial bribes, a strategic marriage, whatever) in the history of Essos, even though khalasars are known to fight one another and it's literally the #1 most obvious trick settled civilizations would use to divide & - if not conquer - then at least manage hostile nomads on the horizon (America nothing, China did it all the time with the Mongol tribes before Genghis unified them, for instance). Even Dany's marriage to Drogo is, of course, supposed to facilitate a Dothraki invasion of Westeros and consequent Targaryen restoration rather than bringing peace or an anti-other-Dothraki alliance between Pentos & Drogo's khalasar.

 

[IAmNotAlpharius]

their general inability/unwillingness to integrate conquered peoples (just other natives, not even talking about any European settlement they might've conquered here)

I need to look it up but I remember reading they did integrate a poor agrarian tribe that were forced off the east coast. But I agree with your statement overall.

What’s egregious is he lives in New Mexico and he should have a better understanding than most of plains/nomadic culture. Besides their hatred of civilization I also thought it was retarded that he made them so antagonistic towards shepherds because the nomadic people GRRM based them on are all nomadic pastoralists. They *were* shepherds!

As you pointed out they also tend to be more open towards outside religions and honestly we should’ve seen them taking in sieges engineers, religious leaders, and smiths from Essos. I also hated how they were used in the show even more.