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Can You Name Some Things That are Different?


Sensenmenn

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Can you name some things that are different with GRRMs world compared to our world?

Things I have noticed are:

1) Magic! this one I'm not going to go into because is vary self explanatory.

2) The people are taller stronger and live longer than we do. An example is only in the last hundred years have we been living to our eighty's and that's do to the improvement of since and medicine. Yet people in GRRMs world have been living to that point and beyond with medieval standards of living fore ages. There has also been examples of people with greater strength, speed, endurance, skill, or stature than is possible for humans in our world.

3) Things like chemistry and genetics ether don't exist or are completely different from our world. I think that chemistry doesn't exist and is replaced with some thing like alchemy this means that things like gun powder, medicine, many gasses and elements don't exist. This means that a lot of advancement that we take for granted are not possible.

I would love to hear some that you guys can find!

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2 hours ago, Sensenmenn said:

2) The people are taller stronger and live longer than we do. An example is only in the last hundred years have we been living to our eighty's and that's do to the improvement of since and medicine. Yet people in GRRMs world have been living to that point and beyond with medieval standards of living fore ages. There has also been examples of people with greater strength, speed, endurance, skill, or stature than is possible for humans in our world.

I think this is more the exception than the rule. Sure, we have the Mountain who is absurdly large and strong, but I can't remember anyone else performing impossible tasks. Please tell me if I'm wrong.

Regarding the age of certain characters, we need to keep in mind that most of our POV's are rich nobles who have plenty to eat, have access to better health care and are generally living the easy life. Therefore, we should expect them to grow older (and also be taller) than the average peasant walking around Westeros. Sure there are still some exceptions like Maester Aemon and Walder Frey, but even their ages wouldn't be completely out of the question in our history. Hippocrates was said to have lived to be 99 in Ancient Greece, for example.

There is of course Bloodraven, but that harkens back to your first point: magic.

 

To come back to the title question, there are the prehistoric animals walking around Westeros (direwolfs, mammoths, possibly a velociraptor :D) and the mythological ones (dragons, krakens, etc).

There are also the absurdly high structures. Not just the Wall, which GRRM admitted was a mistake, but the Great Pyramid of Meereen and the Hightower are even taller (both 800 feet if I'm not wrong). Structures this tall weren't made on earth until the 19th century.

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12 hours ago, Sensenmenn said:

The people are taller stronger and live longer than we do

A handful of people in the entire story. They're no bigger than professional athletes (football and basketball anyways, maybe not soccer). I will give you that GRRM doesn't seem to have people be shorter in the past like in our world, but then again we have no timeline comparison.

12 hours ago, Sensenmenn said:

I think that chemistry doesn't exist and is replaced with some thing like alchemy this means that things like gun powder, medicine, many gasses and elements don't exist.

In our world chemistry stems from alchemy. I mean, Wildfire is essentially Greek Fire without the stickiness, it isn't magic. And surely the Maesters have some grip on what we'd call chemistry. 

And the ages in the past can probably be attributed to oral histories and so many people in families having the same name. The same thing happens to our histories. 

But to answer your question, I'm fairly certain GRRM has said the in-story earth is a little bigger than ours...don't see how that's significant though. 

For me the biggest difference other than magic is the existance of Elder Races and races that seems to be in a different species of human. 

The Children and Others are obviously tied to magic, but the Giants don't seem to be. There's also the "deep ones." Then there are the "Brindled Men" of Sothyros and the Men of Ibb, who basically read like Neanderthals (hairy, stocky, sloped forehead etc).  In our world, Homo Sapiens were the only show in town by the time we started recording history. 

Also, all things considered, it's a pretty religiously tolerant world. Even the Andal invasion doesn't seem to be a crusade as much as a land-grab. Priests from a plethora of religions seem to be everywhere...and there also doesn't seem to be the huge, worldwide religions like Christianity or Islam...I guess R'hollorism is close, but it doesn't seem to have gained any foothold in Westeros or the far east. 

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Wine and wine culture are different.

- Wine is categorized by its color and the country it comes from, but does not seem to have more specific regional varieties. Nobody, even very rich sophisticates, seems to call individual wines by specific names.

- The role of religion in wine is different. One of the big reasons wine became available all over Europe, even in places that couldn't grow grapes, is that wine was sacred to the Church and they had it shipped all over - and even then there were big cultural divides between "wine drinkers" and "beer drinkers" at various times. And then Islam of course banned alcohol, and thus the wine trade was kind of cut off. In A Song of Ice and Fire, the trade in alcohol and in wines specifically seems mostly unrelated to religion and seems to be widespread everywhere. Although the differences between wine drinkers and beer drinkers do seem to persist somewhat, they seem a little different than in the real world - more of a personal preference and issue of self-identification than a cultural and economic norm.

- Notably worth pointing out is that Jeor Mormont is able to drink wine at the wall pretty much daily, and none of the institutions that would have made that likely in the real world exist for him (he doesn't seem to get much trade in anything else, he doesn't follow a religion that prioritizes wine, he lives hundreds if not thousands of miles away from any monasteries or vineyards). In the real world, he almost certainly would have drank beer, cider or mead.

- The relative flavor of a wine seems to work differently with terrain in Westeros than it does in real life. Unless there are some really funky ocean currents happening (and that's another difference), we would generally expect wine from the Arbor to have more tannens in it than wine from Dorne or the rest of the Reach, due to a more consistently warm climate, but it is frequently described as sweeter. The clearer explanation is that different countries specialize in very different varieties of grapes and there isn't trade in this between countries, which would also be different than how it is or was in the real world.

- Also we don't know much about the geography of the Arbor, but from what little we know it doesn't seem particularly well-suited to growing grapes, as it most likely has lots of wind coming in from all sides and I don't recall it as being described as particularly hilly or mountainous.

- A lot of the weirdness here might be because almost all our main characters are aristocrats, and as such have atypical access to things, but it seems to be generally true of foods that geographic barriers or differences that in our world would have prevented specific people from eating specific foods quite so often are more flexible in Westeros - especially for things like brown bread, quail's eggs and potatoes.

- And I'd have to check, but I'm not sure the books make distinctions between ales and lagers that make sense given geographies - my gut is that they're a bit closer to reality than the wine distinctions (which are still 70% or so there and are mostly different on the margins), but this is definitely something I'll pay attention to the next time I'd read the books.

TL;DR - How wine is named, how it is shipped everywhere regardless of religion, how it seems to be by far one of the most widely available traded goods, how few people drink locally produced wine, beer and spirits, how a lot more people drink wine regardless of culture, and how and where grapes grow all seem to be a little different from the real world.

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4 minutes ago, LokisRaider said:

I always think it is odd that after what 5000 years they are really haven't advanced much in the forms of technology. Just look at the last 2000 years of human history and where we were and are insanely different.

Its been confirmed by GRRM that guns won't work in this world which means that advancements like we would expect might not be possible.

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36 minutes ago, GyantSpyder said:

Wine and wine culture are different.

- Wine is categorized by its color and the country it comes from, but does not seem to have more specific regional varieties. Nobody, even very rich sophisticates, seems to call individual wines by specific names.

- The role of religion in wine is different. One of the big reasons wine became available all over Europe, even in places that couldn't grow grapes, is that wine was sacred to the Church and they had it shipped all over - and even then there were big cultural divides between "wine drinkers" and "beer drinkers" at various times. And then Islam of course banned alcohol, and thus the wine trade was kind of cut off. In A Song of Ice and Fire, the trade in alcohol and in wines specifically seems mostly unrelated to religion and seems to be widespread everywhere. Although the differences between wine drinkers and beer drinkers do seem to persist somewhat, they seem a little different than in the real world - more of a personal preference and issue of self-identification than a cultural and economic norm.

- Notably worth pointing out is that Jeor Mormont is able to drink wine at the wall pretty much daily...

-... And I'd have to check, but I'm not sure the books make distinctions between ales and lagers that make sense given geographies - my gut is that they're a bit closer to reality than the wine distinctions (which are still 70% or so there and are mostly different on the margins), but this is definitely something I'll pay attention to the next time I'd read the books.

TL;DR - How wine is named, how it is shipped everywhere regardless of religion, how it seems to be by far one of the most widely available traded goods, how few people drink locally produced wine, beer and spirits, how a lot more people drink wine regardless of culture, and how and where grapes grow all seem to be a little different from the real world.

Not sure how important it is to the story, but this was a very intriguing read. Thank you.

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18 minutes ago, Sensenmenn said:

Its been confirmed by GRRM that guns won't work in this world which means that advancements like we would expect might not be possible.

Really? That's so weird. That must have been an interesting interview.

I had always imagined that Planetos could evolve scientifically. I always thought it would be interesting to ask GRRM what Planetos might look like 30k years from now.

I'm not sure I like the idea of it not being able to support technology due to some sort of magical suppression. With the exception of the magic, there is something VERY realistic about GRRM's world. It makes the books more enjoyable for me. It's funny though, because i would never want to see a futuristic Planetos. I just like to think that science has as much potential on their planet as it does on ours.

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48 minutes ago, GyantSpyder said:

 

Wine and wine culture are different.

- Wine is categorized by its color and the country it comes from, but does not seem to have more specific regional varieties. Nobody, even very rich sophisticates, seems to call individual wines by specific names.

- The role of religion in wine is different. One of the big reasons wine became available all over Europe, even in places that couldn't grow grapes, is that wine was sacred to the Church and they had it shipped all over - and even then there were big cultural divides between "wine drinkers" and "beer drinkers" at various times. And then Islam of course banned alcohol, and thus the wine trade was kind of cut off. In A Song of Ice and Fire, the trade in alcohol and in wines specifically seems mostly unrelated to religion and seems to be widespread everywhere. Although the differences between wine drinkers and beer drinkers do seem to persist somewhat, they seem a little different than in the real world - more of a personal preference and issue of self-identification than a cultural and economic norm.

- Notably worth pointing out is that Jeor Mormont is able to drink wine at the wall pretty much daily, and none of the institutions that would have made that likely in the real world exist for him (he doesn't seem to get much trade in anything else, he doesn't follow a religion that prioritizes wine, he lives hundreds if not thousands of miles away from any monasteries or vineyards). In the real world, he almost certainly would have drank beer, cider or mead.

- The relative flavor of a wine seems to work differently with terrain in Westeros than it does in real life. Unless there are some really funky ocean currents happening (and that's another difference), we would generally expect wine from the Arbor to have more tannens in it than wine from Dorne or the rest of the Reach, due to a more consistently warm climate, but it is frequently described as sweeter. The clearer explanation is that different countries specialize in very different varieties of grapes and there isn't trade in this between countries, which would also be different than how it is or was in the real world.

- Also we don't know much about the geography of the Arbor, but from what little we know it doesn't seem particularly well-suited to growing grapes, as it most likely has lots of wind coming in from all sides and I don't recall it as being described as particularly hilly or mountainous.

- A lot of the weirdness here might be because almost all our main characters are aristocrats, and as such have atypical access to things, but it seems to be generally true of foods that geographic barriers or differences that in our world would have prevented specific people from eating specific foods quite so often are more flexible in Westeros - especially for things like brown bread, quail's eggs and potatoes.

- And I'd have to check, but I'm not sure the books make distinctions between ales and lagers that make sense given geographies - my gut is that they're a bit closer to reality than the wine distinctions (which are still 70% or so there and are mostly different on the margins), but this is definitely something I'll pay attention to the next time I'd read the books.

TL;DR - How wine is named, how it is shipped everywhere regardless of religion, how it seems to be by far one of the most widely available traded goods, how few people drink locally produced wine, beer and spirits, how a lot more people drink wine regardless of culture, and how and where grapes grow all seem to be a little different from the real world.

 

That's a lot of words to say GRRM is a beer drinking man who only knows wine by color. 

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51 minutes ago, GyantSpyder said:

Wine and wine culture are different.

- Wine is categorized by its color and the country it comes from, but does not seem to have more specific regional varieties. Nobody, even very rich sophisticates, seems to call individual wines by specific names.

- The role of religion in wine is different. One of the big reasons wine became available all over Europe, even in places that couldn't grow grapes, is that wine was sacred to the Church and they had it shipped all over - and even then there were big cultural divides between "wine drinkers" and "beer drinkers" at various times. And then Islam of course banned alcohol, and thus the wine trade was kind of cut off. In A Song of Ice and Fire, the trade in alcohol and in wines specifically seems mostly unrelated to religion and seems to be widespread everywhere. Although the differences between wine drinkers and beer drinkers do seem to persist somewhat, they seem a little different than in the real world - more of a personal preference and issue of self-identification than a cultural and economic norm.

- Notably worth pointing out is that Jeor Mormont is able to drink wine at the wall pretty much daily...

-... And I'd have to check, but I'm not sure the books make distinctions between ales and lagers that make sense given geographies - my gut is that they're a bit closer to reality than the wine distinctions (which are still 70% or so there and are mostly different on the margins), but this is definitely something I'll pay attention to the next time I'd read the books.

TL;DR - How wine is named, how it is shipped everywhere regardless of religion, how it seems to be by far one of the most widely available traded goods, how few people drink locally produced wine, beer and spirits, how a lot more people drink wine regardless of culture, and how and where grapes grow all seem to be a little different from the real world.

Not sure how important it is to the story, but this was a very intriguing read. Thank you.

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1 minute ago, BricksAndSparrows said:

Really? That's so weird. That must have been an interesting interview.

I had always imagined that Planetos could evolve scientifically. I always thought it would be interesting to ask GRRM what Planetos might look like 30k years from now.

I'm not sure I like the idea of it not being able to support technology due to some sort of magical suppression. With the exception of the magic, there is something VERY realistic about GRRM's world. It makes the books more enjoyable for me. It's funny though, because i would never want to see a futuristic Planetos. I just like to think that science has as much potential on their planet as it does on ours.

It's not that Planetos can't evolve scientifically, it's that enough things are different that Planetos can't evolve in the same way that our world has. We have technological advancements that they can't have, such as guns. If gunpowder had not been possible in our world we would still be using swords and spears and shields. 

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5 hours ago, Lord Vance II said:

 

In our world chemistry stems from alchemy. I mean, Wildfire is essentially Greek Fire without the stickiness, it isn't magic. And surely the Maesters have some grip on what we'd call chemistry. 

 

The Wildfire in GRRMS story is magic isnt it? The creation of it involves spells etc that work better now that there are Dragons in the world again so im sure its a magical substance. Plus im sure ive seen GRRM state his wildfire is magic, id have to search for the quote though.

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2 minutes ago, Macgregor of the North said:

The Wildfire in GRRMS story is magic isnt it? The creation of it involves spells etc that work better now that there are Dragons in the world again so im sure its a magical substance

I don't know what GRRM has said about it. But I wouldn't be surprised if the alchemists "magic" is chemistry to make the wildfire. In the type of world this story is in the line between science and magic is thin.

For example, Melissandre tells Selyse (I think it's her) about how she uses special powders and such to make flames grow and make it look like magic. Of course, she's knowingly doing it, but what I mean is maybe one of the "magic" ingredients in wildfire is actually just a chemical catalyst or something. That which cannot be explained if often magic. 

Of course, it could be magic and I missed a line or two. 

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6 minutes ago, Lord Vance II said:

I don't know what GRRM has said about it. But I wouldn't be surprised if the alchemists "magic" is chemistry to make the wildfire. In the type of world this story is in the line between science and magic is thin.

For example, Melissandre tells Selyse (I think it's her) about how she uses special powders and such to make flames grow and make it look like magic. Of course, she's knowingly doing it, but what I mean is maybe one of the "magic" ingredients in wildfire is actually just a chemical catalyst or something. That which cannot be explained if often magic. 

Of course, it could be magic and I missed a line or two. 

It may have been about something else he was talking about, maybe Dragonglass actually, he said something like 'in my world there's magic so it's different'. Anyways, where tricks etc and things like wildfire are concerned yeah the line is a bit thin between science and magic I suppose, I think I just always thought of it as magical due to the connection to the Dragons magic making the spells work better during the creation. That certainly seems magical.

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14 minutes ago, Lord Vance II said:

I don't know what GRRM has said about it. But I wouldn't be surprised if the alchemists "magic" is chemistry to make the wildfire. In the type of world this story is in the line between science and magic is thin.

For example, Melissandre tells Selyse (I think it's her) about how she uses special powders and such to make flames grow and make it look like magic. Of course, she's knowingly doing it, but what I mean is maybe one of the "magic" ingredients in wildfire is actually just a chemical catalyst or something. That which cannot be explained if often magic. 

Of course, it could be magic and I missed a line or two. 

I always read it as an alchemical reaction and when I said this world uses alchemy instead of chemistry I ment fantisy alchemy not real world alchemy. You can't make  wildfire with any thing on the periodic table and the mastere have potions that actually work this means our understanding of chemistry do not apply to this world because it has its own laws.

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