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Critiques of ASOIAF


TheWitch

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On 26/09/2017 at 7:28 AM, falcotron said:

<snip>

The reason he keeps thinking about where whores go is because the only clue he has to her whereabouts is Tywin telling him that she went wherever whores go.*

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* By the way, I've never understood why Tyrion doesn't spend much time considering that one of Tywin's officers could probably have gotten a "finder's fee" for directing Tysha to, say, Petyr Baelish. Brothel owners are probably where most whores go, whether willingly or as de facto slaves, and there are plenty of brothels in Lannisport and in King's Landing for them to be sent to.

Ah, you give with one hand and take away with the other.

I never said, never even entertained the idea that Tyrion wanted to 'revenge on' Tysha 'because she was a whore', especially not after he learnt that she wasn't. That is a straw-whore argument.

The thing that grates is, after being incredibly thick-headed and being very bitter about Tysha being a ;lying whore after he had been so good as to marry her, Tyrion discovers that he can no longer use that as an excuse for participating in his perverted father's voyeuristic gang-rape thing. Then, after he murders his father because he is so angry about Tysha not being a whore after all (as if that would have made what he did any less a gang-rape at all), he goes straight back to mouthing his father's lie. Only this time, he knows it is a lie, that Tysha is not a whore. But he is just going to check out the nearest slave brothel, just in case Tysha decided to become a sex slave. Because whores are so into not making money out of sex. And Tysha isn't a whore, so its worth a look! Plus, he gets to rape a sex slave while he is there. Only it isn't rape, because he paid the guy whose carpet he vomited on. And he was so deeply traumatised by raping her that he vomited. And then had another go. 

It also seems to assume that, because she got gang-raped, even though she didn't have any experience in the sex industry before, his former wife must have become a whore, or a sex-slave. Because every woman that gets raped always is a whore. No other possibilities. Because, basically, what other options do women have but to provide more or less satisfactory sex. No other options.  And it isn't limited, stupid, mono-dimensional and sexist to think like that. It's just how it was, in the faux-medieval.

It is depressing to think that GRRM intended it to be read, exactly as you describe it - that we are to believe Tyrion's self-pity and his anger mean that he has suffered exactly as much as Tysha, and is therefore not a rapey murdering turd, but as a rape victim just as much as Tysa, even if he wasn't done by every one of his father's guards, and even if his status in society, his home, his freedoms and restrictions, were unchanged as a result of this trauma he has suffered so deeply, that it is only thirteen years after the fact that he stops blaming his co-victim. Actually, now I think about it, maybe the reason Tysha didn't murder anyone was because she wasn't quite as traumatised by the whole experience as Poor Tyrion. And lets not forget the trauma Tywin inflicts on Poor Tyrion when he forces Poor Tyrion to murder him. And Shae.

I'm divided on whether it is Tyrion or GRRM.  There is no doubt that Tyrion's pov is full of this kind of self pity, especially in Dance. But then, Tyrion is his author's favourite character, a very sympathetically written misogynist. And GRRM really doesn't ever leave the unmistakeably cis male perspective, not even (or should I say, especially when, he is writing a supposedly female point of view. 

For example, Dany's ability to see straight through the vests of the Dosh Khaleen, to where "their withered dugs swayed back and forth, shiny with oil and sweat."(AGoT, Ch.46 Daenerys V), or Dany applying spiceflower oil "on the tips of her breasts, and one last one, cool on her lips, down there between her legs."(Ch.03 Daenerys I) while wearing a sheer gown, not bothered that the perfume will go straight through her 'wisps' and ruin the scarily sheer plum silk with two distracting and awkward splotches, and also not bothered by a less than classy itch.) 

I guess, all in all, it would not surprise me if GRRM decides to have Tysha as sailors wife, or some other whore, or a sex-slave in a Lysene pillow house. But it still grates. Because she is not a whore, was never a whore, was just a thirteen year old that was raped by a bunch of rapists.

And this kind of blinkered sexism is not medieval. Medieval blinkered sexisim came with religious hangups.  Also, for the children of crofters, going back to mum and dad, or staying with them, was a viable option - another pair of hands to rick the hay or plait the straw or milk the goats or hoe the corn, rated more than reputation to the dowerless serfs that had to pay their rent in produce and labour. (Incidentally, the average age of marriage among women of this class in the medieval was early twenties, men mid to late twenties, older for the poorer, and in tougher times). If the father of the pisswater prince was willing to sell his son for a taste of Arbour gold, there is a possibility her parents might be induced to take her back and hide her shame, and help her spend a hundred silver stags and a gold dragon.

Maybe after being gang-raped Tysha wouldn't voluntarily have had sex with anyone ever again. Maybe that hundred silver stags and one gold dragon in her pocket give her the option of leaving the Westerlands and reinventing herself somewhere where Lannisters do not go. Medieval women had the option of taking thier own life (there is documentary evidence of female suicides in the medieval, as well as literary tropes like Chaucer's Dido, or Gower's Canace).

A lot can happen to a multi-dimentional character in thirteen years, regardless of how they support themselves or are supported. Tysha could be mother of a dozen children, or of one, with a tail, in consequence of the rape, or the life she lived after it. She could have been shipwrecked, or lived in a cave as mystic, used her sweet voice to become a singer with a mummers troop, travelled to Asshai to were a mask and learn the wisdom of the Maegi. She could be tatting fine lace in Myr, or selling oysters clams and mussels in Braavos. She could be a washerwoman in Stokeworth, a Septa in Oldtown. She might have become a tavern owner.  She had enough money to buy a brothel - why would she work for 50% of her own bodys earnings, when she could get 50% of every body's earnings as a madam?

Being raped at thirteen has never, in any era, made sex work, by choice or by slavery, the only option for the next 57 years of one's threescore and ten, simply because of one's gender. Incidentally,  'Finders fee'? - it seems odd to me that you think it is realistic for one of the rapists to sell the rape victim to a brothel, but not steal from her when he knows she is now in possession of a sizable fortune.

And also: 'de facto' slave? "where four bored slave girls were lounging about...All four had tears tattooed beneath one eye...Her back was crisscrossed by ridges of scar tissue."(ADwD, Ch.27 Tyrion VII) There is no hint that these girls are anything but slaves, no pretence that they are doing this for personal gain or from personal choice.

Remember his experience in Selhorys?

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The whores of Lannisport and King’s Landing were free women. Their sisters of Selhorys were slaves, their bondage indicated by the tears tattooed beneath their right eyes. Old as sin and twice as ugly, the lot of them. It was almost enough to put a man off whoring. Tyrion felt their eyes upon them as he waddled by, and heard them whispering to one another and giggling behind their hands. You would think they had never seen a dwarf before.

I could accept that Bella at the the Peach, who feels free to offer Gendry sex for free, might be a de-facto slave, given that she has apparently been born and raised in the brothel, and is too young to have had the opportunity to explore options beyond what she has grown up with, even supposing she had access to things like education or alternate occupations. Likewise Rosy, whose mother is selling off her virginity, although she currently works as a barmaid and may well continue to, there is in both these instances an appearance of choice, a seeming ability to have sex for free when she wants, in Bella's case, or to do something other than have sex for money, in Rosy's.

There is nothing 'de facto' about the chattel sex-slaves in the Volantene brothel. Anyone who does not put themselves trenchantly and fixedly in the point of view an entirely self-absorbed punter, can see there is a difference between sex-workers, who work because they gets paid, and sex-slaves, who are assaulted by the patrons of thier owners because they are slaves. There is also a difference between a whore and a woman who has casual sex, and between a woman who has casual sex, and one who is raped.

Tyrion, as self-absorbed a punter as any, (in fact, now I think about it, Sunset girl could have been as much Tyrion avenging himself on those sex slaves that giggled at him for being a dwarf, as his quest to find a person whose sole defining feature is that she was not a whore, in a brothel.) and he often does find these differences ineffably subtle. He is amazed that Chataya can have grace and dignity while being a whore, bitterly certain for thirteen years that 'his sweet Tysha had been a lie', and perversely incapable of believing Shae was doing him for money, that he takes the jewels and finery he paid her and leaves her destitute, his wife's maid, perfectly positioned to become his sister's/father's/sell-sword's catspaw.

But even he, at his self-pitying worst, can detect that the Volantene girl had not in any way chose to have sex with him, not in any sense willing. Although, the distinction, like the stripes on her back, only struck him after he got his moneysworth. And didn't stop him getting himself some more. Also, when he comes out he makes a point of tipping her owner generously. That is weird, like she owes him, because now she might only have to clean his sick off the carpet and get raped in a room that smells of vomit, instead of being whipped for being raped by a guy that vomited all over the carpet, or apparently so Tyrion hopes. (Poor Tyrion, so equally traumatised. Possibly more so than slave-whore. After all, he felt so sick after that rape, he vomited. She just acted like a dead thing, probably didn't feel anything at all.)

There is this thing going on, with Alayaya, with Shae, where Tyrion and Tywin are playing this voyeristic rapey game of cat and mouse with each other. Like Tywin goes 'the next whore I catch you with, will be punished' and Tyrion goes straight out and puts a whore (or, in Tysha's case, a non-whore) in the situation where his father can punish her. Where he is forced to be part of his father's punishment of her.

So his father tells him he is going to King's Landing, no whoring, and he tells Shae 'I'm taking you to King's Landing'.  Then he 'carelessly' visits Chataya's, making a point of preferring Alayaya, 'as a blind' to his real relationship. When Alayaya is in Cersei's clutches, he gives her a kiss and promises to free her, in order to 'blind' Cersei. As is usual, Tyrion's promises amount to nothing, and Tywin flogs Alayaya and sends her wherever whores go (back home to mum).

Then it is too risky to keep Shae in her manse, so he takes it, and her freedom, and her fine clothes and her jewels, and makes her Lollys servant. But that isn't close enough. So she becomes Sansa's servant. But the sight of her doing drudge work around the Red Keep is too much of a turn-on, so he gets Varys, who at least pays lip-service to having a qualm that this might get Shae hanged, you know. So Varys organises for Tyrion to have sex with Shae by the light of a single candle in his own quarters (I firmly believe, with Tywin looking on, as aranged with Tywin. On an only slightly related topic, it woudn't surprise me if Tywin was stoking up the Cersei/Jaime incest thing by 'making sure they never met' and then secretly scooting round to the Eel Alley spy rooms Varys had set up to perv on the consequences).

Only when they are done risking her life (with Tyrion's full knowledge and consent, not Shaes) , Shae asks if she can see the wedding (and I'm still suspicious about her motives, but that is beside the point I'm making at the moment). Tyrion tells her

Quote

'“Shae,” he groaned, “it is not safe.”... how could I let this happen again, after Tysha?

It is like a game he plays, knowing he putting her life in danger for a quickie, and by making her Sansa's maid. Then scolding her for the recklessness of even suggesting she could be one of the crowd at the feast. Like her life is not hers to decide, but his.

You perhaps struggle to see Tyrion as a rapist. I don't. He bashes women, he threatens to rape them (Cersei especially), he does rape them. That is what rapists do. He might (or might not, hard to tell really) have been traumatised by raping Tysha. He was very upset when he found out thirteen years later that she had never lied to him, that he had been coerced into betraying her. But whether he was traumatised or not, he raped her.  And it would have been rape if she had been a whore. And she would have been his wife, if she had been a whore.

It's like when he murdered Tywin. There is no doubt he was traumatised by murdering his father (all that thrumming and drinking and where do whores go, afterwards), there is no doubt he was coerced (by Varys, who thoughtfully positioned the perfect weapon for the deed above the chest of Shae's clothes and jewels, knowing that otherwise, Tyrion would be too short to reach it. Everything from Jaime's rescue to Tyrion arriving at Illyrio's was helped along by Varys). But for all that, Tyrion murdered his father, and however traumatic it was for Tyrion, he was evidentially not equally murdered, or as much a victim as his actual victim.

ETA Sun1Oct: I've just re-read the account of Tysha that Tyrion gives Bronn (AGoT, Ch.42 Tyrion VI) and realise that going home to dad was not an option for Tysha - he died of a fever.  We don't know what happened to her mother, but the father dying probably means their croft has been leased to someone else as well.

One infuriating little thing I noticed - Tysha told Tyrion where she was going when she first met him on the road, and his recollection is "on her way to … well, nowhere, really." So, before he had married her, before he had raped her, before his marriage was annulled, she had told him where she had been heading, but he just couldn't be bothered remembering anything she said that was so irrelevant to him. It's not like her pretty face, or which dragon killed Ser Byron Swann in the Dance of Dragons. And (it seems) he had already decided that was not going to happen, now she had met him.

The other thing I noticed, is the story still has a lot of unanswered questions. For example, who the men chasing her were, and why they were in hot pursuit (clearly something had happened to start the chase very recently, and also, they seem to have already torn her dress half off her back.) and what happened to them - apparently Jaime just let them vanish into the woods, then came trotting back. Also not explained is why a member of Ayrs Kingsguard is riding back from Lannisport with his brother at that point in time.

There is plenty of room in this telling for Tywin to have set this encounter up...the girl was on foot, so the croft she came from was likely on lands rented from his land-steward, or a factor of his land-steward. As Tyrion noted- it was unusual to have lawless predators so close to Casterley Rock - so maybe these are lawful ones, serfs or employees of Casterley Rock. I'm thinking, if Tywin had somehow set it up,  it would probably have been as an attempt to get Jaime to break his vows, rather than a whim to divest Tyrion of his virginity as soon as humanly possible. 

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24 minutes ago, Walda said:

Only this time, he knows it is a lie, that Tysha is not a whore. But he is just going to check out the nearest slave brothel, just in case Tysha decided to become a sex slave.

It also seems to assume that, because she got gang-raped, even though she didn't have any experience in the sex industry before, his former wife must have become a whore, or a sex-slave. Because every woman that gets raped always is a whore. No other possibilities. Because, basically, what other options do women have but to provide more or less satisfactory sex. No other options.

It seems like you're assuming that all of the women in those slave brothels are there by choice. They're not. That's why they're called "slave brothels".

Also, I'm not sure you know what "de facto" means. It doesn't mean "technically" or anything like that, it means the exact opposite. A de facto slave is someone who is a slave in every meaningful way, even if they aren't called a slave. Like the "servants" and "farmhands" in Pentos. Because they technically aren't slaves, they technically can't be sold, but because they are de facto slaves, people sell them anyway and just call it something different.

And I'm pretty sure if you bring a girl to Petyr Baelish and said "This one's parents don't know where she is, and won't ask after her because they know Tywin would probably have them killed if they did", he'd buy her from you but put it down in the books as a finder's fee, and use her as a whore against her will and prevent her from leaving but put her down on the books as an employee. which would make her a de facto slave.

We know the kind of people Tywin promotes, and the kinds of behavior he encourages. Slavery may be against the moral code of Westeros, but so are rape and murder; a man whose favorite vassal is the Mountain probably doesn't promote moral people. So, if Tywin ordered one of them to get rid of a whore and didn't want to ever hear about her again, why wouldn't they sell her into slavery? Maybe they'd be afraid of Tywin finding out and thinking of it as stealing from him, but that's the only thing that would restrain them. And I don't think it's any more unrealistic that they'd steal her fortune. Why wouldn't they? They've basically been instructed not to think of her as a human being.

42 minutes ago, Walda said:

You perhaps struggle to see Tyrion as a rapist.

Not in the slightest. Which is exactly why I struggle to see how Tyrion's story could be going down "a rapey tac". It's like saying Sandor's story is going down "a murdery tac". They're not just at-risk guys who are in danger of becoming rapey/murdery if things continue as they have been.

1 hour ago, Walda said:

It is depressing to think that GRRM intended it to be read, exactly as you describe it - that we are to believe Tyrion's self-pity and his anger mean that he has suffered exactly as much as Tysha

No, GRRM did not intend it to be read as if he has suffered exactly as much as Tysha. GRRM intended it to be read as if Tyrion were deluding himself into believing he has suffered exactly as much as Tysha.

The PoVs in this story are full of rationalizations and even flat-out delusions. We're not meant to take them at face value. And neither are we meant to ignore them when they make us uncomfortable and then find ourselves baffled by the characters' actions. Many of these characters are fucked-up people, and GRRM wants to understand—and wants us to understand—why they're fucked up. Not to justify them or help us fill out a moral scorecard for each one; he doesn't care about that. Just to understand them for its own sake, because he believes that's what literature is for. If you don't want to understand the minds of rapists, honor killers, self-destructive sociopaths, sadistic murderers, etc., that's understandable, but you can't deny that a large part of this series is about exactly that.

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8 hours ago, falcotron said:

The PoVs in this story are full of rationalizations and even flat-out delusions. We're not meant to take them at face value. And neither are we meant to ignore them when they make us uncomfortable and then find ourselves baffled by the characters' actions. Many of these characters are fucked-up people, and GRRM wants to understand—and wants us to understand—why they're fucked up. Not to justify them or help us fill out a moral scorecard for each one; he doesn't care about that. Just to understand them for its own sake, because he believes that's what literature is for. If you don't want to understand the minds of rapists, honor killers, self-destructive sociopaths, sadistic murderers, etc., that's understandable, but you can't deny that a large part of this series is about exactly that.

This is a very charged discussion, for good reason, and I think Walda and Falcotron are providing very good points of view, that are not particularly in some "polemical debate", or of a "net/trolling" bs kind of thing. But, then, or...

The last "or" is a problem. GRRM might be a misogenist or simply a product of a male dominated society as he grew up in (ditto me). Or he might be willing to write fiction to challenge simple stereotypes (regardless of his actual beleives/feelings/etc.) Or, he might cynically portray violence against women since that "sells".

My viewpoint is shallow. GRRM analogizes times where sexual violence was a given; where the rights of a woman to have control of her destiny were extremely rare. He does this with "gusto". Is this a problem - yes. Is it a problem with GRRM or the historical things that he draws on?

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On 22/09/2017 at 4:57 PM, TheWitch said:

What critiques do we all have of ASOIAF?

In terms of world building, story arch, structure, plot etc

Not here to bash GRRM or the books, but we can all critique things we enjoy!

While I respect the level of world-building in his books, I wish GRRM's pacing would go back to AGoT, ACoK and ASoS where you felt the story going forward and the parallels between various characters and plots were a little easier to keep track of. Now, there are so many characters running around and their plans are so convoluted that I'm puzzled as to how any of it is going to matter given how close Winter is. 

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On 9/23/2017 at 1:46 AM, Ghost+Nymeria4Eva said:

How so?

The laughable incompetence of Essos's worldbuilding has been described at length by many others, so I'll just focus on economics for now:

Let's start with Braavos. They are apparently a powerful trading empire. Yet they sit on the very far edge of all trade routes with the wealth of the Jade Sea. Due to distance, the only places that have any reason to trade through them directly are Lorath and the North, as all others have to go through several other major cities, Westerosi or Essosi, to get to them. They are shilled as Fantasy Venice, and yet Venice was in a central position with outposts all over the place, while Braavos is isolated (which is a major part of its backstory because apparently for hundreds of years they were running this trade empire in secret... yeah...). Even something as cheap as firewood is so expensive there that Sam is forced to give up on it at the onset of Winter otherwise he wouldn't be able to afford a trip for a handful of people to Oldtown. How the city can afford enough wood for their Arsenal to be capable of building a warship a day is beyond me.

After the stupidity of Braavos, we get to Slaver's Bay. Somehow, an entire region with three massive city-states manages to base its entire economy on buying untrained slaves, training them (in the case of Unsullied, for a solid two decades of intense training, including the use of unique drugs and food and shelter for three times as many soldiers as they produce, since it's stated 2/3 wash out and die), and then selling them, somehow at a profit. This is the main export of Slaver's Bay, by design. They don't grab slaves either, that's the Dothraki. There is absolutely no way this should be profitable.

But even the standard Essosi shit worldbuilding pales in comparison to Westeros. First of all, there's the in-story perception by supposedly knowledgeable characters that Robert was a bad king because he spent a lot of money and borrowed a lot of money, which I rant about at length here. Second is how GRRM seems to think the world works on RTS logic where more gold = more power. Tywin Lannister is somehow the richest man in Westeros because he owns many gold mines and has produced vast quantities of gold at near-unlimited quantities for literally generations without devaluing it (man, someone should have told the Spanish how to do that), and he somehow has more objective wealth than Mace Tyrell, who produces most of the realm's food and rules over a land three times as populous, in a world where winters can last for years and where storing vast amounts of food for winter is the difference between life and death.

The Golden Dragon is another example of GRRM's lack of comprehension of scale. The crown is 6 million gold dragons in debt, and it seems like that's supposed to be a lot. Yet in the same scene where that's mentioned, it is stated that a tourney of the sort that Robert threw dozens of would take 100,000+ gold dragons to hold, with a 100,000 prize. The Hound, after winning said tourney is somehow not among the wealthiest men in Westeros, and manages to spend most of it in a few weeks on whores and booze, and is somehow carrying 9,000 on his person only to be robbed by the Brotherhood Without Banners. This is in the same universe where a sellsail fleet under Sallador Saan (29 ships and thousands of men) costs Stannis 30,000 a month to operate (which points to something in the range of 150,000 gold dragons a month to operate the Royal Fleet), and yet Anguy the archer manages to spend 9,000 in a couple weeks on whores, booze, a pair of boots and a nice dagger.

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8 minutes ago, Nihlus said:

Let's start with Braavos.

Your mistake is that you're expecting Braavos to be medieval Venice, which is utterly fails at, instead of golden-age Amsterdam, which it actually works fine at, location and all.

Well, except for the minor fact that golden-age Amsterdam absolutely requires post-Renaissance investment banking, trade, and technology, and neighbors that aren't far behind. Put 1680 Amsterdam in the middle of the 14th century and… well, I was going to say they'd starve in a month, but they'd drown long before that.

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1 hour ago, falcotron said:

Your mistake is that you're expecting Braavos to be medieval Venice, which is utterly fails at, instead of golden-age Amsterdam, which it actually works fine at, location and all.

Well, except for the minor fact that golden-age Amsterdam absolutely requires post-Renaissance investment banking, trade, and technology, and neighbors that aren't far behind. Put 1680 Amsterdam in the middle of the 14th century and… well, I was going to say they'd starve in a month, but they'd drown long before that.

Until I discovered the fandom a few months ago, I assumed Braavos = Amsterdam. :)

Not holding to Nihlus' economic views, one thing is for sure - the books do not have a coherent economic system.

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On 27/09/2017 at 4:44 AM, Walda said:

Ah, you give with one hand and take away with the other.

I never said, never even entertained the idea that Tyrion wanted to 'revenge on' Tysha 'because she was a whore', especially not after he learnt that she wasn't. That is a straw-whore argument.

The thing that grates is, after being incredibly thick-headed and being very bitter about Tysha being a ;lying whore after he had been so good as to marry her, Tyrion discovers that he can no longer use that as an excuse for participating in his perverted father's voyeuristic gang-rape thing. Then, after he murders his father because he is so angry about Tysha not being a whore after all (as if that would have made what he did any less a gang-rape at all), he goes straight back to mouthing his father's lie. Only this time, he knows it is a lie, that Tysha is not a whore. But he is just going to check out the nearest slave brothel, just in case Tysha decided to become a sex slave. Because whores are so into not making money out of sex. And Tysha isn't a whore, so its worth a look! Plus, he gets to rape a sex slave while he is there. Only it isn't rape, because he paid the guy whose carpet he vomited on. And he was so deeply traumatised by raping her that he vomited. And then had another go. 

It also seems to assume that, because she got gang-raped, even though she didn't have any experience in the sex industry before, his former wife must have become a whore, or a sex-slave. Because every woman that gets raped always is a whore. No other possibilities. Because, basically, what other options do women have but to provide more or less satisfactory sex. No other options.  And it isn't limited, stupid, mono-dimensional and sexist to think like that. It's just how it was, in the faux-medieval.

It is depressing to think that GRRM intended it to be read, exactly as you describe it - that we are to believe Tyrion's self-pity and his anger mean that he has suffered exactly as much as Tysha, and is therefore not a rapey murdering turd, but as a rape victim just as much as Tysa, even if he wasn't done by every one of his father's guards, and even if his status in society, his home, his freedoms and restrictions, were unchanged as a result of this trauma he has suffered so deeply, that it is only thirteen years after the fact that he stops blaming his co-victim. Actually, now I think about it, maybe the reason Tysha didn't murder anyone was because she wasn't quite as traumatised by the whole experience as Poor Tyrion. And lets not forget the trauma Tywin inflicts on Poor Tyrion when he forces Poor Tyrion to murder him. And Shae.

I'm divided on whether it is Tyrion or GRRM.  There is no doubt that Tyrion's pov is full of this kind of self pity, especially in Dance. But then, Tyrion is his author's favourite character, a very sympathetically written misogynist. And GRRM really doesn't ever leave the unmistakeably cis male perspective, not even (or should I say, especially when, he is writing a supposedly female point of view. 

For example, Dany's ability to see straight through the vests of the Dosh Khaleen, to where "their withered dugs swayed back and forth, shiny with oil and sweat."(AGoT, Ch.46 Daenerys V), or Dany applying spiceflower oil "on the tips of her breasts, and one last one, cool on her lips, down there between her legs."(Ch.03 Daenerys I) while wearing a sheer gown, not bothered that the perfume will go straight through her 'wisps' and ruin the scarily sheer plum silk with two distracting and awkward splotches, and also not bothered by a less than classy itch.) 

I guess, all in all, it would not surprise me if GRRM decides to have Tysha as sailors wife, or some other whore, or a sex-slave in a Lysene pillow house. But it still grates. Because she is not a whore, was never a whore, was just a thirteen year old that was raped by a bunch of rapists.

And this kind of blinkered sexism is not medieval. Medieval blinkered sexisim came with religious hangups.  Also, for the children of crofters, going back to mum and dad, or staying with them, was a viable option - another pair of hands to rick the hay or plait the straw or milk the goats or hoe the corn, rated more than reputation to the dowerless serfs that had to pay their rent in produce and labour. (Incidentally, the average age of marriage among women of this class in the medieval was early twenties, men mid to late twenties, older for the poorer, and in tougher times). If the father of the pisswater prince was willing to sell his son for a taste of Arbour gold, there is a possibility her parents might be induced to take her back and hide her shame, and help her spend a hundred silver stags and a gold dragon.

Maybe after being gang-raped Tysha wouldn't voluntarily have had sex with anyone ever again. Maybe that hundred silver stags and one gold dragon in her pocket give her the option of leaving the Westerlands and reinventing herself somewhere where Lannisters do not go. Medieval women had the option of taking thier own life (there is documentary evidence of female suicides in the medieval, as well as literary tropes like Chaucer's Dido, or Gower's Canace).

A lot can happen to a multi-dimentional character in thirteen years, regardless of how they support themselves or are supported. Tysha could be mother of a dozen children, or of one, with a tail, in consequence of the rape, or the life she lived after it. She could have been shipwrecked, or lived in a cave as mystic, used her sweet voice to become a singer with a mummers troop, travelled to Asshai to were a mask and learn the wisdom of the Maegi. She could be tatting fine lace in Myr, or selling oysters clams and mussels in Braavos. She could be a washerwoman in Stokeworth, a Septa in Oldtown. She might have become a tavern owner.  She had enough money to buy a brothel - why would she work for 50% of her own bodys earnings, when she could get 50% of every body's earnings as a madam?

Being raped at thirteen has never, in any era, made sex work, by choice or by slavery, the only option for the next 57 years of one's threescore and ten, simply because of one's gender. Incidentally,  'Finders fee'? - it seems odd to me that you think it is realistic for one of the rapists to sell the rape victim to a brothel, but not steal from her when he knows she is now in possession of a sizable fortune.

And also: 'de facto' slave? "where four bored slave girls were lounging about...All four had tears tattooed beneath one eye...Her back was crisscrossed by ridges of scar tissue."(ADwD, Ch.27 Tyrion VII) There is no hint that these girls are anything but slaves, no pretence that they are doing this for personal gain or from personal choice.

Remember his experience in Selhorys?

I could accept that Bella at the the Peach, who feels free to offer Gendry sex for free, might be a de-facto slave, given that she has apparently been born and raised in the brothel, and is too young to have had the opportunity to explore options beyond what she has grown up with, even supposing she had access to things like education or alternate occupations. Likewise Rosy, whose mother is selling off her virginity, although she currently works as a barmaid and may well continue to, there is in both these instances an appearance of choice, a seeming ability to have sex for free when she wants, in Bella's case, or to do something other than have sex for money, in Rosy's.

There is nothing 'de facto' about the chattel sex-slaves in the Volantene brothel. Anyone who does not put themselves trenchantly and fixedly in the point of view an entirely self-absorbed punter, can see there is a difference between sex-workers, who work because they gets paid, and sex-slaves, who are assaulted by the patrons of thier owners because they are slaves. There is also a difference between a whore and a woman who has casual sex, and between a woman who has casual sex, and one who is raped.

Tyrion, as self-absorbed a punter as any, (in fact, now I think about it, Sunset girl could have been as much Tyrion avenging himself on those sex slaves that giggled at him for being a dwarf, as his quest to find a person whose sole defining feature is that she was not a whore, in a brothel.) and he often does find these differences ineffably subtle. He is amazed that Chataya can have grace and dignity while being a whore, bitterly certain for thirteen years that 'his sweet Tysha had been a lie', and perversely incapable of believing Shae was doing him for money, that he takes the jewels and finery he paid her and leaves her destitute, his wife's maid, perfectly positioned to become his sister's/father's/sell-sword's catspaw.

But even he, at his self-pitying worst, can detect that the Volantene girl had not in any way chose to have sex with him, not in any sense willing. Although, the distinction, like the stripes on her back, only struck him after he got his moneysworth. And didn't stop him getting himself some more. Also, when he comes out he makes a point of tipping her owner generously. That is weird, like she owes him, because now she might only have to clean his sick off the carpet and get raped in a room that smells of vomit, instead of being whipped for being raped by a guy that vomited all over the carpet, or apparently so Tyrion hopes. (Poor Tyrion, so equally traumatised. Possibly more so than slave-whore. After all, he felt so sick after that rape, he vomited. She just acted like a dead thing, probably didn't feel anything at all.)

There is this thing going on, with Alayaya, with Shae, where Tyrion and Tywin are playing this voyeristic rapey game of cat and mouse with each other. Like Tywin goes 'the next whore I catch you with, will be punished' and Tyrion goes straight out and puts a whore (or, in Tysha's case, a non-whore) in the situation where his father can punish her. Where he is forced to be part of his father's punishment of her.

So his father tells him he is going to King's Landing, no whoring, and he tells Shae 'I'm taking you to King's Landing'.  Then he 'carelessly' visits Chataya's, making a point of preferring Alayaya, 'as a blind' to his real relationship. When Alayaya is in Cersei's clutches, he gives her a kiss and promises to free her, in order to 'blind' Cersei. As is usual, Tyrion's promises amount to nothing, and Tywin flogs Alayaya and sends her wherever whores go (back home to mum).

Then it is too risky to keep Shae in her manse, so he takes it, and her freedom, and her fine clothes and her jewels, and makes her Lollys servant. But that isn't close enough. So she becomes Sansa's servant. But the sight of her doing drudge work around the Red Keep is too much of a turn-on, so he gets Varys, who at least pays lip-service to having a qualm that this might get Shae hanged, you know. So Varys organises for Tyrion to have sex with Shae by the light of a single candle in his own quarters (I firmly believe, with Tywin looking on, as aranged with Tywin. On an only slightly related topic, it woudn't surprise me if Tywin was stoking up the Cersei/Jaime incest thing by 'making sure they never met' and then secretly scooting round to the Eel Alley spy rooms Varys had set up to perv on the consequences).

Only when they are done risking her life (with Tyrion's full knowledge and consent, not Shaes) , Shae asks if she can see the wedding (and I'm still suspicious about her motives, but that is beside the point I'm making at the moment). Tyrion tells her

It is like a game he plays, knowing he putting her life in danger for a quickie, and by making her Sansa's maid. Then scolding her for the recklessness of even suggesting she could be one of the crowd at the feast. Like her life is not hers to decide, but his.

You perhaps struggle to see Tyrion as a rapist. I don't. He bashes women, he threatens to rape them (Cersei especially), he does rape them. That is what rapists do. He might (or might not, hard to tell really) have been traumatised by raping Tysha. He was very upset when he found out thirteen years later that she had never lied to him, that he had been coerced into betraying her. But whether he was traumatised or not, he raped her.  And it would have been rape if she had been a whore. And she would have been his wife, if she had been a whore.

It's like when he murdered Tywin. There is no doubt he was traumatised by murdering his father (all that thrumming and drinking and where do whores go, afterwards), there is no doubt he was coerced (by Varys, who thoughtfully positioned the perfect weapon for the deed above the chest of Shae's clothes and jewels, knowing that otherwise, Tyrion would be too short to reach it. Everything from Jaime's rescue to Tyrion arriving at Illyrio's was helped along by Varys). But for all that, Tyrion murdered his father, and however traumatic it was for Tyrion, he was evidentially not equally murdered, or as much a victim as his actual victim.

I strongly disagree with some of the points you have made about Tyrion's participation in Tysha's gang rape. Forcing your 13 year old son to watch his wife being gang-raped and then coercing him to participate is sexual abuse. Tywin is the perpetrator and both Tysha and Tyrion are his victims.

For Tywin, a girl like Tysha could only be a gold-digger (like his father's mistress) and the gang-rape was designed to turn her into the whore that he already saw her as being. Forcing Tyrion to participate was intended to teach him a 'sharp lesson' that could never be forgotten. Tywin had Jaime lie about Tysha being a whore because he wanted Tyrion to believe that no-one could possibly ever love such a monstrous imp. In reality, it was Tywin himself who was the monster of that particular story and the crossbow arrow that killed him was a long time coming.

Doesn't mean that Tyrion isn't a very grey character who does some appalling things (such as the murder of Shae and the rape of the sex slave) and he definitely failed to think enough about what Tysha might be suffering even if she had actually been a whore (and you're right to point out that she was very young and a virgin when she slept with Tyrion, which Tyrion was well aware of).

My country (like many others) is currently in the midst of a Royal Commission into the sexual abuse of children, including teenagers, within institutions (particularly religious ones) and I think Martin is absolutely right to depict coercing a teenager to perform a sexual act as abuse. If I have a critique, it's probably that he sometimes seems more interested in the perspective of the male perpetrators of rape than their female victims.

I notice that you don't seem to give any weight to Tyrion's experience as a disabled person in a very ableist society that often despises him as an ugly dwarf. Tyrion's disability is very much part of his story and character.

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16 hours ago, Nihlus said:

Let's start with Braavos. They are apparently a powerful trading empire. Yet they sit on the very far edge of all trade routes with the wealth of the Jade Sea. Due to distance, the only places that have any reason to trade through them directly are Lorath and the North, as all others have to go through several other major cities, Westerosi or Essosi, to get to them. They are shilled as Fantasy Venice, and yet Venice was in a central position with outposts all over the place, while Braavos is isolated (which is a major part of its backstory because apparently for hundreds of years they were running this trade empire in secret... yeah...). Even something as cheap as firewood is so expensive there that Sam is forced to give up on it at the onset of Winter otherwise he wouldn't be able to afford a trip for a handful of people to Oldtown. How the city can afford enough wood for their Arsenal to be capable of building a warship a day is beyond me.

Braavos gets rich by trading in secret with Westeros and some other kingdoms for reasons that are actually important to the overall plot. (Being Secret City is very important to Braavos history, and also to the overall story about the fire magic thing). Obviously, they managed to achieve this without being in the middle of a trade route. I don't have much knowledge of ancient Venice, but Braavos reminds me a bit of modern day Singapore. Sure, Singapore is in the smack middle of a major shipping route, but that's not how they got rich. (When it was a colonial outpost, the pace was a real criminal-infested dump in fact.) The city state has absolutely nothing in terms of natural or land resources, but they got rich by playing at finance. TWOIAF mentions Braavosi made a special dye, that was their first major commodity, and they expanded. The trade routes were already established by the Valyrians, so Braavosi only had to get their goods there. And then, like Singapore, they got rich using financial instruments I suppose, mainly the Iron Bank. The original escaped slaves there were also skilled apparently, so it's not hard to believe that they managed to build something out of nothing. Also, Braavosi don't make their own ships as far as I remember. The original ships they got were stolen Valyrian ones, and afterwards they probably bought ships or the wood to make them. 

16 hours ago, Nihlus said:

After the stupidity of Braavos, we get to Slaver's Bay. Somehow, an entire region with three massive city-states manages to base its entire economy on buying untrained slaves, training them (in the case of Unsullied, for a solid two decades of intense training, including the use of unique drugs and food and shelter for three times as many soldiers as they produce, since it's stated 2/3 wash out and die), and then selling them, somehow at a profit. This is the main export of Slaver's Bay, by design. They don't grab slaves either, that's the Dothraki. There is absolutely no way this should be profitable.

Obviously, the slave cities are based on the slave economy of America and Europe during the colonial era. The economy of the American south, for example, was entirely built on slave labor, and the south got really rich off that until the Civil War. The slavers own the slaves, they don't have to pay them. That's a lot of money saved on paying for labor.  And the slaves do everything from farming to soldiering without getting an actual salary. Slaves are the in-demand commodity of free cities, and they sell chattel around the world so it's not hard to believe that they turn a major profit. We don't see many slaves in Westeros, but even some Westerosi buy them, like Patchface (but when they come to Westeros they are not legally slaves). Also, how can slave soldiers not be profitable? Maintaining an army is expensive when you have to actually pay the soldiers. But when you can just own the soldiers, like the arrows and the swords, you only have to pay for food, clothing, etc, and not a salary. The money and resources spent on training the slaves would be similar to training a non-slave army. And now imagine how much the slavers can save by not paying extra salaries. And the Unsullied are a highly trained force. Cities like Pentos, which are super rich thanks to trading commodities with the far east, apparently pay those slaver cities a lot of money to hire or buy Unsullied, so the bottom line is more than covered. Why would buying slaves not be profitable? The slave cities pay next to nothing for get the slaves from Dothraki and pirates and whatever. It doesn't cost anything for the slave grabbers to enslave people, and whatever they get in return for human chattel is profitable. For the slavers, they can pay little for slaves and then pay a bit more to get them trained, and then they have a highly valued commodity to sell or use. So I don't really see the problem how the slave trade can not be lucrative for places like Mereen. That's exactly the reason why such a horribly oppressive system endures. 

17 hours ago, Nihlus said:

First of all, there's the in-story perception by supposedly knowledgeable characters that Robert was a bad king because he spent a lot of money and borrowed a lot of money, which I rant about at length here. Second is how GRRM seems to think the world works on RTS logic where more gold = more power. Tywin Lannister is somehow the richest man in Westeros because he owns many gold mines and has produced vast quantities of gold at near-unlimited quantities for literally generations without devaluing it (man, someone should have told the Spanish how to do that), and he somehow has more objective wealth than Mace Tyrell, who produces most of the realm's food and rules over a land three times as populous, in a world where winters can last for years and where storing vast amounts of food for winter is the difference between life and death.

I highly doubt the gold mines Casterly Rock produces "unlimited amounts of gold." It doesn't get devalued because the demand across the world is bigger than the supply from this one place. Remember, The Lannisters sell gold in Essos as well. Also, Lannisters are rich because they control Lannisport, the main trade connection between the east and the west. The Tyrells produce the most food on the realm but I don't see them selling it across the realm. Westeros has an agrarian economy with small local farms. Tyrells probably sell some of the food, especially to  nearby areas, but not everywhere. Food is a perishable good, while gold is not. That's why Lannisters can sell gold around the world and profit like crazy. As for the point you make about winter, the people are obviously not preparing for it. No one is storing food, the opposite is happening where farming land is destroyed by war. 

And the fact that Robert bankrupted the realm thanks to his negligence and ignorance about basic economy is not an in-story perception. We are told how much debt Robert puts the realm in so we are the ones making that connection. 

17 hours ago, Nihlus said:

The Golden Dragon is another example of GRRM's lack of comprehension of scale. The crown is 6 million gold dragons in debt, and it seems like that's supposed to be a lot. Yet in the same scene where that's mentioned, it is stated that a tourney of the sort that Robert threw dozens of would take 100,000+ gold dragons to hold, with a 100,000 prize. The Hound, after winning said tourney is somehow not among the wealthiest men in Westeros, and manages to spend most of it in a few weeks on whores and booze, and is somehow carrying 9,000 on his person only to be robbed by the Brotherhood Without Banners. This is in the same universe where a sellsail fleet under Sallador Saan (29 ships and thousands of men) costs Stannis 30,000 a month to operate (which points to something in the range of 150,000 gold dragons a month to operate the Royal Fleet), and yet Anguy the archer manages to spend 9,000 in a couple weeks on whores, booze, a pair of boots and a nice dagger.

The Hound wins only 40,000 as the champion. Nearly 90,000 is spent on all the winners of various competitions. Well, if the Lannisters managed to give the crown 3 million gold dragons, 40, 000 is not enough to become the wealthiest man in Westeros overnight. Also, land ownership is the real marker of wealth in the realm, not currency. I don't remember the time period where these people spent the money. But if someone has cash on hand, it will definitely get spent, especially when they are aimlessly wandering. There are no banks in Westeros or a concept of saving cash. So the natural instinct would be to spend cash without risking it getting stolen (especially for a traveller). It's really easy to spend money at bars, even in ancient ones, because these places are just giant traps that get drunk men to spend money mindlessly. So it's not completely unbelievable that happens. Even the good majority of people who win lotteries today don't manage to keep their money. 

GRRM is not giving us a highly detailed account of the economic system in Westeros and Essos to draw definitive conclusions clearly. It's based on how economics were conducted in the medieval and colonial periods, so I don't really see how what he has written so far makes no sense. 

 

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On 28/09/2017 at 2:18 PM, Wall Flower said:

Forcing your 13 year old son

While I agree that what Tywin does is paedophilia (or, if you prefer, hebephilia) and constitutes sexual abuse of all participants, as well as emotional abuse of Tyrion, and physical and emotional of Tysha, not to mention abduction and deprivation of liberty, and (in his capacity of Warden of the West) legal abuse.

There is probably financial abuse as well.  Using money to control others is financial abuse, even when transactionally giving rather than taking the money. Tysha isn't a whore; these men have not contracted her to provide them with a service; they have in fact been paid to provide him a sexual assault service; Tyrion is not worth 210 times as much as the average Lannister guard rapist; the gold dragon is, like the silver stags, is a device intended to induce a sense of complicity. Tywin has said that what happened was that they were all serviced by a whore, and if anyone has a different recollection of events (for example, a recruiter from the Night's watch, looking for Westermen to chose between being gelded or going to the wall) that money, on the stewards ledger and in their pockets or their spending (especially Tysha's) is proof that it was what Tywin said it was. Not that anyone is likely to mention it in a place where Tywin is at the apex of all financial, legal, social, and military power.

What Tywin did was child abuse whether or not Tyrion was forced. However, it is not clear that Tyrion was forced. In the jurisdiction I live in, ten is currently the age of criminal responsibility. In the medieval, a boy or man old enough to be capable of committing a rape, was legally old enough to face full adult responsibility for it by law. We know Donel Noye has kept a boy of five at the Wall (although not as a member of the Watch), and some of the orphans travelling up with Yoren ("She was two years younger than the youngest orphan" with Hot Pie and Lommy being the main subject of Arya's meditations at the time, strongly hint that one of them is only about 12. And that Hot Pie seemed to work for his mother, had not been formally 'prenticed, which traditionally happened at 13 (although, for orphans could happen as young as seven or eight) hints that the youngest of the orphans is probably him.) (ETA: Meant to finish that thought with Dareon - who was a boy, but found guilty of rape by Westerosi law, implying that a child of thirteen could be sent to the wall for rape, although Dareon is more like fifteen)

Thing is, though, we don't know how much coersion or force Tywin employed. We do know how Tyrion performed on the night, though.

Quote

One last time, with no trace of love or tenderness remaining. “So you will remember her as she truly is,” he said, and I should have defied him, but my cock betrayed me, and I did as I was bid.

An erection is not consent, but he has a brain to think things with. From then until Jaime tells him that Tysha was not a whore, Tyrion has hated Tysha of his own accord. It might be his own self-loathing driving it, but his self-loathing seems almost an indulgence he gives himself after a hard night's whoring, the way the remorse of an alcholic or gambler, while sincere, is more part and parcel of of the problem, the deep lows that make the high seem so intense and brief and (in retrospect) glorious. Above all, it results in him abusing women more, not less, as he matures.

(ETA: as a short sharp shock, this was always doomed to failure. We know that Tyrion had spent the years since providing whores 'from Dorne to Casterley Rock' with 'his coin and his seed'. A lot of that time, Tyrion was under his father's roof at Casterley Rock, and for all of that time, the coin in his pocket was put there by his father.)

I mean, your point of view makes sense to me, in a world where women are one-dimensional disposable sex toys that can be fridged for the lulz without consequence, which certainly seems to be the case in GRRM's Planetos, although it was not the case in the European medieval.

And there is a kind of hint that he still loves Tysha in spite of all his narrative thoughts on her. When he is on the verge of death, it is her name that finally comes to him, and when he is finally becoming sapient, when the fever is breaking (note, in his delirium 'the fire had gone out') he gives us a memory of her, rather than a memory of what he thought of her, and its all about love and tenderness, and humour, and no malice. On his wedding night he tells Sansa of the pork they ate at his first wedding feast ( did it taste like triumph to him, I wonder? Or just defiance?) and when he stares sleeplessly up to the canopy of the bed in his unrequited lust, he sees Tysha smiling back. The balmy Pentos Doctor riffles his hair the way she used to during the false spring of their marriage, She managed to give him plenty of good memories in the space of a fortnight, thirteen years ago. Of course all these memories are bracketed by analogies to false springs, and other blights that seem pleasant at first. There is a lot of death in the brackets. And hands. And misogyny mindselt stuff like " Tyrion knew that she was dead; no man spoke so fondly of a woman who had abandoned him."

But, you know, Shae. Did Shae have it coming, for sleeping with his dad? or with him? For betraying him after he not only stopped paying but in fact took all her wealth away from her. Or did she have it coming for lying about being a whore? Or being a whore? Can't help thinking that if he was able to meet Tysha again 1/ She would be far too old and ugly for his taste 2/ He is just as likely to rape her and more likely to murder her now his father cannot actively manipulate him. We can't call what he did to Shae child abuse.

Being in his father's bed might have been provocation to him, but his father didn't know Tyrion was coming (unless Varys tipped him off, which is possible. And we can see clear signs that Varys is manipulating this situation even if Tywin isn't. Varys seems to have been a Lannister semi-loyalist from way back.

 

On 28/09/2017 at 2:18 PM, Wall Flower said:

I notice that you don't seem to give any weight to Tyrion's experience as a disabled person in a very ableist society that often despises him as an ugly dwarf. Tyrion's disability is very much part of his story and character.

My provocation was the excessive repetition of 'where whores go' which grated on me because it comes when Tyrion knows Tysha genuinely loved him and was never a whore. I don't think that has anything to do with his being a dwarf in an abliest society (although not as ableist as our own society - as was the case in the real medieval, too.) 

Then, I wouldn't say short stature is exactly a disability. More a condition or a state of being. However, I accept that GRRM writes it as a disability of the legs and face. The first thing we learn about him is that he is ugly, I guess GRRM does strongly hint that ugliness and achondroplasia are synonymous, with what Jon sees as "a brute's squashed in face beneath a swollen shelf of brow".

Tyrion waddles when he walks, his calves cramp at the slightest provocation, he needs a special saddle to ride a horse. But then, he doesn't need special help getting up onto his destrier (he has a destrier), and he is very successful as a warrior and a battle commander, a hand, a scholar, a civil engineer, a tax collector, a chessmaster, a tumbler, and a player. He gets more sex than most, and seems to be blessed with Tormund's member, which never lets him down. And could give Aeron's member a run for it's money.

His nose injuy is unrelated to his dwarfism, and happened too recently to have formed his character. We can't blame it for his attitude to women, although that hasn't improved since Ser Mandon cleared his sinuses. It doesn't seem to have  affected his sense of smell or taste. Tyrion can smell the herbs infused in the wine Ballabar uses to clean his wound, and Petyr's venture capital deals, greyscale-vinegar, slave-brothel-incense, minty drinks, Yezzan's piss. It seems to be a purely cosmetic injury: he has no difficulty breathing or sleeping, no trouble with hearing or balance, no nosebleeds, no sinus infections, facial pain, headaches.  

I have previously and could now again critique how GRRM portrays disability generally, and dwarfism in particular, but dwarfism is at most an unconvincing excuse for Tyrion's attitude towards women. Or did you think that dwarfism really was related to high sex drive and indecent treatment of sex partners?  I think GRRM makes it pretty clear that that is an unreasonable prejudice that the people of Westeros (and especially Tywin) have about dwarfs, and that is all. Although, Tyrion plays up to it, and there is that headjob prostitute in Oldtown. And his ..

Generally, I don't think there is much realism in his depictions of most conditions. Realistic depiction of disability (or anything, honestly) isn't his game. It is all about what the plot needs, and having characters with the characteristics that can drive the plot. GRRM has said he regrets the somersault off the top of the door of the great hall of Winterfell - but he has Tyrion cartwheeling along the deck of the Shy Maid and down the stairs of the slave-brothel, and (I'm guessing) it is because Tyrion needs tumbling skills for a future plot element, even if they are incompatible with achodroplasia. 

The think about Tyrion's dwarfism, like Bran's love of climbing, is that it serves as a completely arbitrary reason for feelings that drive the plot. In real life, there is no distinctive association between a love of secrecy and a love of climbing, and swinging hand over hand is not a natural choice when there is a wall (a good climbing wall, no less) limiting movement on one side. Swinging hand over hand, dropping and catching the window ledge on the way down, hanging off it one-handed, are moves that rely on having long arms and fingers, and huge bicep strength compared to bodyweight. It woudn't be unnatural in a monkey, but we don't hear of Bran having arms as long as his legs, fingers as long as his feet, biceps muscled like those of a man grown.

If we decide, well he got across the blind side of the First Keep because the gargoyles lean out quite a way, and are really close together, that creates issues about the size and strength of the First Keep's roof and foundations, and how it was constructed (even purely decorative grotesques had to be put in place by some mason/s of old, and to have remained in place in spite of Bran swinging across them previously). So rather than be a slave to the laws of physics, BRan and the first keep obey the first law of writing, which is, engage the reader. 

GRRM writes about Bran as if his climbing ability is excellent, but not supernatural. Then, while he distracts us with his not realistic performance, he gives Bran motives for climbing that are unique, and quite unlike the natural motivations of climbers/seven year olds/second sons. Bran climbs because he loves spying and secrecy; because of dark feelings he suppresses, which climbing allows him escape; because of feelings of defiance, that climbing allows him to express. 

It is the same with Tyrion's dwarfism. It does not cause him the issues that real-life dwarfism does. It is endowed with issues that people generally can relate to, rather than ones that only short-statured people can relate to. So GRRM-style dwarfism is mostly about being disabled by a hyper-sensitivity about what people think of him, about being scorned, about being unloved, about being ugly - as if short stature was a mental illness, a kind of neurosis. As if it is related to self-esteem.

Especially, I loathe the 'all dwarfs are bastards to their fathers' and 'but not all bastards are dwarfs'... in real life, in general, I would say that fathers (especially sole fathers) tend to personally invest more in their most vulnerable child, than the ones they are sure can stick up for themselves.  I can't claim to know many short statured people, but the very few I have met were far from as utterly hung up on being approved of or as unreasonably resentful as Tyrion. To the best of my knowledge, none have ever murdered anyone. (Although a/ not every person has a father like Tywin, and b/ I know a short-statured person who really might murder the next person who wants to talk to him about upskirting.)

Penny seems to have an unreasonable fear of 'big people', and apart from the stripling sellsword copping a feel, she seems to attract less sexual interest from the opposite sex than Tyrion. But then, she doesn't have Tyrion's daddy issues, or her own viewpoint, and apart from the very cursory notice Quentyn gives her, she is described by Tyrion (who also has troubles telling one dwarf from every other dwarf).  Also, dwarfism seems more common in Westeros than in the real world. At least dwarfs are unquestionably human, unlike Planetos giants (that is one he has over Tolkien's dwerrows - although Tolkien writes dwarfs in a way that is a better reflection of medieval view of dwarfs.) 

I guess, thinking about it, the thing that really gets me is that Tyrion doesn't have issues with people mistaking him for or treating him like a child, or making the usual tedious jokes (in fact, it is Tyrion that makes the short jokes. Off the top of my head, the only person I can think of that makes short jokes he finds tedious is the Hound).

It seems that the main problem about being a dwarf in Westeros is that you worry that people won't have sex with you because you are sooo ugly. In real life, I haven't noticed dwarfism cripples self esteem. In my admittedly limited observation, the challenges of dwarfism are not primarily internal, more about bizarre attitudes and unhelpful design standards (quite a lot of the built environment seems to be modelled on the WWII US marine average body measurements, that were used to design the Ford F-series. And short-statured people have never struck me as unusually (or usually) ugly. And they don't seem to see themselves as unusually anything...as with any congenital condition, it seems perfectly normal for them to be the size they are. Which in fact it is.

So, I don't really think GRRM makes dwarfism itself the issue. Anyway, the main reason I didn't spend a lot of time critiquing Tyrion's condition in his ablest society is that dwarfism isn't to blame for that vocal tic 'where do whores go'.

The believe that the opposite sex are revolted by him and would only sleep with him for money, and that he has every right to hit, rape, abuse, and own women, is not a natural consequence of being short. His intolerance of being made fun of, his suppressed baseless feelings of inadequacy, are the real excuses he gives himself for behaving in an appalling way, and these are not because he is a dwarf, although he sometimes claims so. Really, it is because he is like Tywin.

For example, the one time he has it within his power to do something for Jeor Mormont's Night's Watch, he gives them the gleanings of his dungeons, the least trustworthy of the old gold cloaks, and 100 spades. He treats their cause and their ambassador with contempt, mocking them in public, excusing himself with the doubtful notion that Ser Aliser, whom he has already noted as a notably humourless man, might be pranking him, and he personally dislikes him, and if he doesn't completely humiliate him, the whole of the south might laugh at him rather than with him.

There is a moment when he remembers looking over the wall to the north, but he shakes that off no trouble. Some people might claim the hundred spades and the gold cloaks are more than they would get from Tywin. Perhaps the spades. I think Tywin might have got Janos Slynt up there himself - although because Janos was the son of a butcher, and too big for his boots, rather than because he was corrupt and sent out hits of babies. Tyrion might have thought he would have future opportunities to send literate men, knights, men who could think, lead, read. Although even if he had had a future opportunity, his preoccupation with pleasing the crowd he was playing to at the time, his susceptibility to Varys's flattery and Bronn's snickers, make it inevitable that those future good intentions for the NIght's Watch and especially Jon Snow, would come to no better end.

As it was, he soon found himself back in the position of being in opposition to the hand, being able to bleat his sincere protest at his father for failing to give the Watch the men it needs, and considering an alliance with Mance Raydar.

But this, like Tyrion's preoccupation with the revulsion he has no doubt women feel for him, is nothing to do with his short stature. It is about his mental hangups. Although it is conflated, in Tyrion's mind, and in the minds of some of his other povs (esp. Sansa) as one and the same. As to his success with women - well, he gets a better relationship than his attitude earnt him from Shae,  And he managed to get himself two thirteen year old brides that did not marry him for money, or leave him because of anything he did. Although he did enough in both cases to fully justify them leaving him in revulsion (not revulsion at his being a dwarf, but revulsion at him being a rapey, gropey kind of guy - which would be revolting if he was as big as Gregor Clegane.) 

Now I'm back on Tyrion's attitude towards females, I could also add how he seems to think he deserves a medal for not sleeping with Sansa, when he had every right to, to his sins. In his mind she is clearly a child, not a woman grown, so sleeping with her is wrong. But telling her to strip, and demanding that she look at him naked and erect, and groping at her tit -when he can see she is rigid with terror, and telling her he desires her, and being bitter when she suggests, after prompting from him, that she might never want to sleep with him...like, he thinks he is being a mensch, treating a child (his pov) like that? And he gets the shits when it isn't immediately successful as a seduction technique? But he didn't rape her, and that is why he is such an amazing guy? Again, it isn't to do with how tall he is.

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1 hour ago, Ghost+Nymeria4Eva said:

Braavos gets rich by trading in secret with Westeros and some other kingdoms for reasons that are actually important to the overall plot. (Being Secret City is very important to Braavos history, and also to the overall story about the fire magic thing). Obviously, they managed to achieve this without being in the middle of a trade route. I don't have much knowledge of ancient Venice, but Braavos reminds me a bit of modern day Singapore. Sure, Singapore is in the smack middle of a major shipping route, but that's not how they got rich. (When it was a colonial outpost, the pace was a real criminal-infested dump in fact.) The city state has absolutely nothing in terms of natural or land resources, but they got rich by playing at finance. TWOIAF mentions Braavosi made a special dye, that was their first major commodity, and they expanded. The trade routes were already established by the Valyrians, so Braavosi only had to get their goods there. And then, like Singapore, they got rich using financial instruments I suppose, mainly the Iron Bank. The original escaped slaves there were also skilled apparently, so it's not hard to believe that they managed to build something out of nothing. Also, Braavosi don't make their own ships as far as I remember. The original ships they got were stolen Valyrian ones, and afterwards they probably bought ships or the wood to make them. 

I like how you detail in every way how Braavos doesn't work and is stupid, but then say "it works, somehow." 

You can't compare it to Singapore, because Singapore both is in an ideal trading position and used investment banking of the sort that doesn't exist in Planetos, and would require a certain tech level even if it did. Braavos can't sustain itself the same way.  Nor do they have any value as a trade outpost, since literally every other city on Essos's west coast is in a better position for that than they are.

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Obviously, the slave cities are based on the slave economy of America and Europe during the colonial era. The economy of the American south, for example, was entirely built on slave labor, and the south got really rich off that until the Civil War.

You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. The American South and European colonial powers got "rich" off of buying slaves from elsewhere and making them harvest cash crops. Slaver's Bay does not do this. What Slaver's Bay does is buy slaves from the Dothraki, train them, and then sell them. This is a completely nonviable economic model. It is impossible to turn a profit this way.

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Also, how can slave soldiers not be profitable? Maintaining an army is expensive when you have to actually pay the soldiers. But when you can just own the soldiers, like the arrows and the swords, you only have to pay for food, clothing, etc, and not a salary. The money and resources spent on training the slaves would be similar to training a non-slave army.

No, it absolutely would not, because states in this period did not kill 3/4 of their soldiers during training nor did they raise every soldier from childhood for that purpose and effectively have them be economically non-productive for their whole lives. For selling Unsullied to be profitable, each one would have to be worth considerably more than the value of ~20 years of provisions and intense training for four people. That is quite frankly impossible. 

Slave soldiers existed in real history, but they were absolutely nothing like the Unsullied. They weren't sold nor were they treated like crap. In fact they often founded their own dynasties.

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I highly doubt the gold mines Casterly Rock produces "unlimited amounts of gold." It doesn't get devalued because the demand across the world is bigger than the supply from this one place. Remember, The Lannisters sell gold in Essos as well. Also, Lannisters are rich because they control Lannisport, the main trade connection between the east and the west.  As for the point you make about winter, the people are obviously not preparing for it. No one is storing food, the opposite is happening where farming land is destroyed by war. 

Spain did the same thing, yet in the 17th century they still went bankrupt after inflating the value of gold and silver after just 150 years of mining the stuff in relative modest quantities. The Lannisters have been pumping out near unlimited amounts of gold without pause as their main economic backbone for literally thousands of years with no repercussions. Again, impossible. Worse, it seems they can convert it directly into cash as if Tywin is able to mint his own coins. Again, without devaluing the coins.

Lannisport also doesn't help. It's on the wrong side of the continent for trade with Essos, and the Westerlands' hilly terrain makes significant overland trade a non-starter compared to its neighbors. Even White Harbor should dwarf it (especially if Braavos really is supposed to be an improbably wealthy trade state).

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The Hound wins only 40,000 as the champion. Nearly 90,000 is spent on all the winners of various competitions. Well, if the Lannisters managed to give the crown 3 million gold dragons, 40, 000 is not enough to become the wealthiest man in Westeros overnight. Also, land ownership is the real marker of wealth in the realm, not currency. I don't remember the time period where these people spent the money. But if someone has cash on hand, it will definitely get spent, especially when they are aimlessly wandering. There are no banks in Westeros or a concept of saving cash. So the natural instinct would be to spend cash without risking it getting stolen (especially for a traveller). It's really easy to spend money at bars, even in ancient ones, because these places are just giant traps that get drunk men to spend money mindlessly. So it's not completely unbelievable that happens. Even the good majority of people who win lotteries today don't manage to keep their money. 

100,000 or even 40,000 gold dragons would make the Hound the owner of currency equivalent to a significant chunk of the debt of a continent. Enough to pay 3,000 mercenaries and operate 30 war galleys for over a month. 

People who blow lottery money are both nowhere near as proportionally rich as the Hound would be and tend to buy tons of expensive goods like expensive houses and cars. The Hound, for spending a non-negligible portion of a continent's income, gets nothing. Just booze and whores. This is the same universe where a full suit of plate armor costs 800 silver stags, equivalent to four golden dragons; he should be able to buy the whole damn tavern and the brothel next to it and have tens of thousands to spare. Anguy spends 9,000 on a few weeks of whoring and a dagger. Again, bullshit. 

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And the fact that Robert bankrupted the realm thanks to his negligence and ignorance about basic economy is not an in-story perception. We are told how much debt Robert puts the realm in so we are the ones making that connection. 

Actually, Ned makes that connection, and it's clearly used to paint Robert as an incompetent ruler. Only, realistically, Robert was 100% right and Ned is a moron.

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GRRM is not giving us a highly detailed account of the economic system in Westeros and Essos to draw definitive conclusions clearly. It's based on how economics were conducted in the medieval and colonial periods.

It's based on GRRM's ass. Nothing in his world even resembles a plausible medieval economic system.

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24 minutes ago, Ghost+Nymeria4Eva said:

Also, Braavosi don't make their own ships as far as I remember. The original ships they got were stolen Valyrian ones, and afterwards they probably bought ships or the wood to make them. 

Their Arsenal is the greatest shipyard in the known world, and can turn out a war galley every day.*

They do buy the wood to make them (because there's no wood in Braavos itself, and it's forbidden to cut down the trees on the surrounding islands because those trees provide the windbreak for the harbor), but we know that costs them a tremendous amount of money—that's why firewood is so expensive that only the rich can afford it even in winter.

24 minutes ago, Ghost+Nymeria4Eva said:

Obviously, the slave cities are based on the slave economy of America and Europe during the colonial era. The economy of the American south, for example, was entirely built on slave labor, and the south got really rich off that until the Civil War.

I don't want to get into a long discussion on the economics of slavery, but just consider a few things: Slavery was only profitable in the colonies that ran massive monoculture plantations for things like sugar, tobacco, and (after the development of the cotton gin) cotton. Owning human beings is expensive, and owning highly-trained human beings who can't just be used disposably and interchangeably even more so. There's a reason economies built on finished goods or agrarian production (like Europe, the American Northeast, and even the American Midwest) the way the Free Cities do all abolished slavery early—because there was no powerful economic interest to fight against people's consciences. Meanwhile, even the slave-based colonies didn't use slave-based armies. And finally, look at slave factor towns like Elmina and tell me how Meereen is even remotely similar.

GRRM is trying to invent a system that parallels Roman-era slavery as much as it does colonial-era slavery. In just the same way that Braavos is a city that parallels renaissance Venice as well as golden-age Amsterdam. The fact that both Venice and Amsterdam were real, successful cities with economies that made sense doesn't mean that Braavos as a hybrid of the two automatically has sensible economics, and, in fact, it doesn't. The fact that Roman slavery and chattel slavery both powered economies that made sense doesn't mean that Essosi slavery as a hybrid of the two is sensible either, and, in fact, it isn't.

And that's actually fine. GRRM isn't writing a novel about Essosi economics, he's writing a story about Westerosi politics and the Others, so he's allowed to do a lot of hand-waving here. He also waves his hands at all kinds of other things—the grammar of the various languages, the evolution of plants in a world with those weird seasons, the way phenotypes follow surnames, etc. Trying to argue that his economics actually make sense is like trying to argue that his linguistics make sense—not only wrong, but misguided in the first place.

It's only a problem when those things get dangerously close to the plot and starts to call attention to the hand-waving. Which does happen sometimes,** but those mistakes are rare enough and minor enough that they don't come anywhere near ruining the story for the vast majority of readers.

But that doesn't mean we can't have fun digging beneath the surface and poking holes in his world.

---

* This is one of the ways that Braavos is Venice, not Amsterdam, by the way. 

** The prime example is of course Baratheon black hair. Nobody would have cared that GRRM's genetics were both oversimplified and inconsistent if he hadn't made a major plot point out of it in the first novel. Which he regrets doing.

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6 minutes ago, Nihlus said:

The Hound, for spending a non-negligible portion of a continent's income, gets nothing.

Ah, but you're forgetting something. In the real world, if someone handed you thousands of pounds worth of gold, you'd just call up Brinks and they'd transport it for you at a pretty reasonable cost. But he lives in a world where security services, internal combustion engines, armor-plated vehicles, roads that can carry them, insurance, phones to call them in the first place—none of that exists. And the cost of creating all those things for the first time would be astronomical. No wonder he went broke.

Plus, his DM probably uses the optional rules to make him pay for leveling up.

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22 hours ago, Nihlus said:

I like how you detail in every way how Braavos doesn't work and is stupid, but then say "it works, somehow." 

You can't compare it to Singapore, because Singapore both is in an ideal trading position and used investment banking of the sort that doesn't exist in Planetos, and would require a certain tech level even if it did. Braavos can't sustain itself the same way.  Nor do they have any value as a trade outpost, since literally every other city on Essos's west coast is in a better position for that than they are.

Yes, Braavos has no value as a trading outpost, and it's not like the they don't know it. A country or a place doesn't have to have value as a trading port to get rich in the real world or in ASOIAF world (Highgarden, Casterly Rock, etc). The comparison I made with Singapore was to illustrate that point. Obviously, a medieval made-up world doesn't have the same tech as in the real world. As I mentioned, Singapore didn't make its money being a trading post, it did so using financial instruments like investment banking you mention. Braavos tries a medieval fantasy world equivalent of this. That's how they got rich. You wondered why Braavos is rich when they don't have any natural resources and is located so far off the main trading routes, and that's the likely reason. Braavos does have other valuable commodities, like the purple dye that gets so famous. Also I forgot to mention Faceless Men. I know they are only one group, but we know they are world famous assassins that cost a lot of money to hire. The FM would be another major commodity Braavos has, like Swiss mercenaries in the middle ages. 

22 hours ago, Nihlus said:

You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. The American South and European colonial powers got "rich" off of buying slaves from elsewhere and making them harvest cash crops. Slaver's Bay does not do this. What Slaver's Bay does is buy slaves from the Dothraki, train them, and then sell them. This is a completely nonviable economic model. It is impossible to turn a profit this way.

The slaves are their valuable commodity. It's like buying raw metal and turning it into a value-added commodity like steel pipes. I know it's a crude comparison but this is the basic economic model that sustains this region. Salver's Bay is like the middle man between the plantation owner and the African warlord. There's apparently high demand for the slaves in Essos, so how can they not profit? The slaves also provide unpaid labor to the slavers, that's more money saved. Can you maybe specify how this model is nonviable? 

22 hours ago, Nihlus said:

No, it absolutely would not, because states in this period did not kill 3/4 of their soldiers during training nor did they raise every soldier from childhood for that purpose and effectively have them be economically non-productive for their whole lives. For selling Unsullied to be profitable, each one would have to be worth considerably more than the value of ~20 years of provisions and intense training for four people. That is quite frankly impossible. 

Slave soldiers existed in real history, but they were absolutely nothing like the Unsullied. They weren't sold nor were they treated like crap. In fact they often founded their own dynasties.

It doesn't matter if the some of the boys die during training, because their lives are worth nothing financially to the trainers. They can always get more. The boys are only worth once they become fully trained Unsullied. What do you mean "economically unproductive"? They provide much needed protection to the highlords and rich states like Pentos. Threats like the Dothraki makes the Unsullied another invaluable commodity. The rich pay a lot to hire or buy the Unsullied. Also, the Unsullied provide protection to the slavers, so this is their army too. And it's an army they don't have to pay for. They only have to pay for the training, and selling and renting the Unsullied covers that cost. This again reminds me of the Swiss mercenaries (in the way of profit, not the training and the enslavement). I'm not sure about which slave soldiers you are talking about. I'm talking about the salve soldiers of colonial Portuguese. The Portuguese sent enslaved men to fight their colonial wars in places like South Asia. These slave soldiers were not paid, and certainly didn't get any benefits. They were not highly trained like the Unsullied, but they did get basic training. The Unsullied serves a similar purpose, where the slavers can own a deadly army without the typical costs associated with one. 

22 hours ago, Nihlus said:

Spain did the same thing, yet in the 17th century they still went bankrupt after inflating the value of gold and silver after just 150 years of mining the stuff in relative modest quantities. The Lannisters have been pumping out near unlimited amounts of gold without pause as their main economic backbone for literally thousands of years with no repercussions. Again, impossible. Worse, it seems they can convert it directly into cash as if Tywin is able to mint his own coins. Again, without devaluing the coins.

Lannisport also doesn't help. It's on the wrong side of the continent for trade with Essos, and the Westerlands' hilly terrain makes significant overland trade a non-starter compared to its neighbors. Even White Harbor should dwarf it (especially if Braavos really is supposed to be an improbably wealthy trade state).

Are you talking about the price revolution? It was caused by several factors from what I remember. There was an oversupply of gold and silver, because Spain was mining the stuff in the Americas and sending them over to native land where the demand didn't match the supply. That is definitely not what is happening at Casterly Rock. What makes you think the Lannisters are mining "unlimited" amounts of gold? They have gold rich land and they sell this gold everywhere in the world. The worldwide demand clearly outweighs the supply so the metal remains precious. In addition to raw gold, they make stuff with gold, so value added commodities.That's why the Lannisters are filthy rich. By cash do you mean gold dragons?

Lannisport trades with Essos and it is mentioned in the books. GoT even has a gold trader from Lannisport trading in the Dothraki western market. The Essoi ships have to go to Lannisport to get their gold. Being on the other side doesn't matter here apparently. Places like White Harbor are closer, but the trade there flows from east to the west where eastern goods are purchased by the Westerosi. So they don't get rich like Lannisport, where the ships come to buy Lannister gold. 

23 hours ago, Nihlus said:

100,000 or even 40,000 gold dragons would make the Hound the owner of currency equivalent to a significant chunk of the debt of a continent. Enough to pay 3,000 mercenaries and operate 30 war galleys for over a month. 

People who blow lottery money are both nowhere near as proportionally rich as the Hound would be and tend to buy tons of expensive goods like expensive houses and cars. The Hound, for spending a non-negligible portion of a continent's income, gets nothing. Just booze and whores. This is the same universe where a full suit of plate armor costs 800 silver stags, equivalent to four golden dragons; he should be able to buy the whole damn tavern and the brothel next to it and have tens of thousands to spare. Anguy spends 9,000 on a few weeks of whoring and a dagger. Again, bullshit. 

Maybe you are right, but I don't get how you are making these calculations. How do we know how much money partying costs in Westeros?

23 hours ago, Nihlus said:

Actually, Ned makes that connection, and it's clearly used to paint Robert as an incompetent ruler. Only, realistically, Robert was 100% right and Ned is a moron.

Ned shows shock when he realizes Robert has put the realm in millions of debt. He clearly is an incompetent ruler. He doesn't even attend the finance meetings. Robert is negligent, ignorant and should never have been on the throne. Even he realizes it in the end. Ned's fault is his inability to stand up to his friend (and also underestimating political opponents. How could he seriously think that Cersei would tuck her tail and flee to Essos if her kids were in danger? She is the richest daughter in Westeros!)

23 hours ago, Nihlus said:

It's based on GRRM's ass. Nothing in his world even resembles a plausible medieval economic system.

Lol. GRRM doesn't specifically detail the how the lord system works in Westeros either, but we do understand it to be a feudal system with landowning lords. He is not explicitly describing the economy in a similar manner, so why would it somehow not resemble a plausible historical economic system? I don't see any glaring plot holes here or even minor ones that are inexplicable. 

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23 hours ago, falcotron said:

I don't want to get into a long discussion on the economics of slavery, but just consider a few things: Slavery was only profitable in the colonies that ran massive monoculture plantations for things like sugar, tobacco, and (after the development of the cotton gin) cotton. Owning human beings is expensive, and owning highly-trained human beings who can't just be used disposably and interchangeably even more so. There's a reason economies built on finished goods or agrarian production (like Europe, the American Northeast, and even the American Midwest) the way the Free Cities do all abolished slavery early—because there was no powerful economic interest to fight against people's consciences. Meanwhile, even the slave-based colonies didn't use slave-based armies. And finally, look at slave factor towns like Elmina and tell me how Meereen is even remotely similar.

GRRM is trying to invent a system that parallels Roman-era slavery as much as it does colonial-era slavery. In just the same way that Braavos is a city that parallels renaissance Venice as well as golden-age Amsterdam. The fact that both Venice and Amsterdam were real, successful cities with economies that made sense doesn't mean that Braavos as a hybrid of the two automatically has sensible economics, and, in fact, it doesn't. The fact that Roman slavery and chattel slavery both powered economies that made sense doesn't mean that Essosi slavery as a hybrid of the two is sensible either, and, in fact, it isn't.

When I read the Slaver's Bay parts in the books, it reminded me most of the factors of the transatlantic slave trade from the school history books. I'm not actually making an highly educated historical comparison here. I'm sure there are similar to Roman and Arab slavery here as well. But people getting nabbed from here and there for the sole purpose of becoming slaves strongly apparels the transatlantic slave trade.

Owning a human is expensive, but not if that human can be turned into a commodity that generates revenue that exceeds that cost. The Essoi slavers are doing that buy training slaves into being servants, farmers, or soldiers. Then they buy or rent them, making these slaves their main source of income. The slaves are their finished goods. American South shows that slavery is a highly viable and lucrative enterprise when you take the out the human factor of it all. The African slaves in history did serve as foot soldiers to British and Portuguese quite prominently as I remember. I have no idea about Elmina so I don't get the point here. 

I think GRRM is getting inspiration from many places from early to very late medieval periods. I didn't say hybrid economies, but I'm not sure what you are trying to say here. I know GRRM is heavily basing this on medieval European history, but when I read about Braavos, the state founded by slaves, the first thing that came to my mind was Haiti, not a medieval European city. 

23 hours ago, falcotron said:

And that's actually fine. GRRM isn't writing a novel about Essosi economics, he's writing a story about Westerosi politics and the Others, so he's allowed to do a lot of hand-waving here. He also waves his hands at all kinds of other things—the grammar of the various languages, the evolution of plants in a world with those weird seasons, the way phenotypes follow surnames, etc. Trying to argue that his economics actually make sense is like trying to argue that his linguistics make sense—not only wrong, but misguided in the first place.

GRRM is a shower, not teller, so I think that allows him not to detail every single thing. We are to discern how things are. I mean, we know Ned was the lord of Winterfell, but do we really need to know how he collected taxes?  I agree that nitpicking over some things is kind of senseless. 

What do you mean about the "way phenotypes follow surnames" or evolution of plants? Totally at a loss here. 

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21 minutes ago, Ghost+Nymeria4Eva said:

When I read the Slaver's Bay parts in the books, it reminded me most of the factors of the transatlantic slave trade from the school history books.

Seriously? The factors didn't do years of expensive specialized training, they just bought slaves from the allied tribes, warehoused them as cheaply as possible, then sold them to shippers who expected a large fraction of their cargo to die along the way.

And they didn't build fabulously wealth gigantic cities like those of Slaver's Bay. Again, look at Elmina. That's the largest slave factor town, on top of being a major gold (and ivory and spice) port, and the most important reprovisioning point for Cape travel, and Portugal's main defensive colony for a couple centuries, and that's after it was massively improved by the 18th century Dutch. That's as rich as those places got in real life. Now compare it to the cities of Slaver's Bay and tell me they're even remotely similar. 

21 minutes ago, Ghost+Nymeria4Eva said:

Owning a human is expensive, but not if that human can be turned into a commodity that generates revenue that exceeds that cost. The Essoi slavers are doing that buy training slaves into being servants, farmers, or soldiers. Then they buy or rent them, making these slaves their main source of income. The slaves are their finished goods. American South shows that slavery is a highly viable and lucrative enterprise when you take the out the human factor of it all. 

The American South shows that slavery is viable and lucrative for a plantation economy, where you need large numbers of completely unskilled and interchangeable labor (and where your slaves are living out in the middle of nowhere with little communication with the outside world). Slavery was not viable in the agrarian American Midwest (even with a few slavers spending huge amounts of money trying to subsidize some of the farmers so they'd vote pro-slavery), or in the industrial American North. And that's what Essos looks like.

Slaves as finished goods just doesn't make sense. If your slaves need 15 years of expensive education before they're useful, they're going to cost a whole lot more than anyone is going to pay for them. And it's even worse if you're going to kill the majority of them along the way, after having sunk years into training them.

21 minutes ago, Ghost+Nymeria4Eva said:

What do you mean about the "way phenotypes follow surnames" or evolution of plants? Totally at a loss here. 

Phenotypes are the observable manifestation of inherited traits. Like the "Stark look" that's been consistent for thousands of years, even though Arya has only about 0.1% of her ancestry even just from Torrhen, and half of the other nobles in the North have about as much as she does. And the same is true for all the other major families. And you can't even argue that this distinctive look for each family happens to pass down the Y chromosome, because the names sometime pass through a daughter and the looks apparently go with them anyway. If GRRM tried to explain this, it would probably be horribly implausible and break immersion in the books. But the sprinkling of ancient Starks and whatnot are just there for a bit of occasional background color, just like the occasional bits of Ghiscari language are, so it's fine.

For plants: How do you end up with deciduous oak trees in the North (and, even if they did, how have they survived the last 8 millennia of years-long seasons)? How did western Essos ended up with all of the western European staple crops, and also hot peppers? These would be hard questions to answer, and if GRRM tried to answer them, the results probably wouldn't be very good. But he doesn't answer them, and he doesn't do anything to call our attention to the fact that they're unanswered, so that's fine.

54 minutes ago, Ghost+Nymeria4Eva said:

GRRM is a shower, not teller,

No, he's definitely a teller. ASoIaF is famous for its exposition, to the point where that's one of the reasons people thought it would be challenging to adapt. (Until someone figured out that you can do exposition on TV as long as there are boobs at the same time.) He's quoted Kim Stanley Robinson calling "show don't tell" a zombie idea that deserves to die. Especially in the first three novels, half the stuff we know, we know it because of someone either saying or thinking it. And not just worldbuilding and character backgrounds, he even does that for plot, including big moments like battles. We hear about all of Robb's battles from people talking about them third-hand after the fact, and even Blackwater, where we have two PoVs, we only hear how it ended from people talking about it later. He even uses the POVs' thoughts to sneak exposition into his descriptive paragraphs.

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On 9/30/2017 at 3:43 AM, falcotron said:

Seriously? The factors didn't do years of expensive specialized training, they just bought slaves from the allied tribes, warehoused them as cheaply as possible, then sold them to shippers who expected a large fraction of their cargo to die along the way.

And they didn't build fabulously wealth gigantic cities like those of Slaver's Bay. Again, look at Elmina. That's the largest slave factor town, on top of being a major gold (and ivory and spice) port, and the most important reprovisioning point for Cape travel, and Portugal's main defensive colony for a couple centuries, and that's after it was massively improved by the 18th century Dutch. That's as rich as those places got in real life. Now compare it to the cities of Slaver's Bay and tell me they're even remotely similar. 

I'm not sure I get your point about Elmina. If you are referring to the fact that it is really poor today (no grand structures) considering that it was a major trading port centuries ago? That's because it's was a colony. The cities in Slaver's Bay are not colonies. The Portuguese, Dutch, and later British used places like Elmina for trade, but never intended to settle. So they never invested in the cities themselves. I made the same point about Singapore before. Back in the day, Singapore was a major trading port for all the European trading companies. But that didn't result in Singapore seeing development parallel to, say, Lisbon. It was much later, following independence, that Singapore got rich. The case is different for Slaver's Bay, where the slavers trade slave in their native lands (they are not simultaneously colonists as well). So there's an incentive to build grand cities because that's their homeland. 

On 9/30/2017 at 3:43 AM, falcotron said:

The American South shows that slavery is viable and lucrative for a plantation economy, where you need large numbers of completely unskilled and interchangeable labor (and where your slaves are living out in the middle of nowhere with little communication with the outside world). Slavery was not viable in the agrarian American Midwest (even with a few slavers spending huge amounts of money trying to subsidize some of the farmers so they'd vote pro-slavery), or in the industrial American North. And that's what Essos looks like.

Slaves as finished goods just doesn't make sense. If your slaves need 15 years of expensive education before they're useful, they're going to cost a whole lot more than anyone is going to pay for them. And it's even worse if you're going to kill the majority of them along the way, after having sunk years into training them.

Well, slavery is always viable in an agrarian economy. Look at agriculture in general today. It's notably more advanced with machinery and whatnot, but who picks the strawberries? The agriculture sector in the U.S. is still heavily dependent on underpaid labor. Even in Latin America, parts of Asia, and elsewhere, farming is lucrative, but the laborers get paid pretty much nothing. The industrial north switched to machines replacing most of the unskilled labor. Would you say that the years and money spent researching these machines and building them are not worth the returns? The machines can work 24/7 and don't demand salaries. Companies save tons of money replacing people with machines. Likewise, having unpaid workers, whether skilled or not, who work all day is far more cost efficient than having paid workers who work shifts. 

If you are referring to the Unsullied, the super commando soldiers, of course they are worth the price that costs to train them, house them and feed them. They are trained soldiers. The cities and merchants in Essos are super rich, and they face serious threats like the Dothraki. They are not miserly when it comes to defense. In fact, it seems an area they tend to splurge in. Even today, rich countries and people spend freely for security and defense tech, and also soldiers. In GoT, Dany describes how Pentos spends on sellswords and Unsullied guards when the Dothraki turns up. Imagine how much more the sellswords would cost if they were as skilled, loyal and disciplined as the Unsullied. That's why the slavers bother to train the Unsullied. The ones they lose are considered weak and the stronger the bunch is, the more they are worth. 

On 9/30/2017 at 3:43 AM, falcotron said:

For plants: How do you end up with deciduous oak trees in the North (and, even if they did, how have they survived the last 8 millennia of years-long seasons)? How did western Essos ended up with all of the western European staple crops, and also hot peppers? These would be hard questions to answer, and if GRRM tried to answer them, the results probably wouldn't be very good. But he doesn't answer them, and he doesn't do anything to call our attention to the fact that they're unanswered, so that's fine.

I have zero knowledge of botany, but I do get what you are trying to say. I remember in ACoK, Arya eats corn on her way to the north. If Westeros is based on medieval Britain then where did the corn come from? How do they even grow it there? Details like that definitely raise eyebrows. GRRM probably didn't spend that much attention when he wrote some of the stuff. So we shouldn't either, I think. 

On 9/30/2017 at 3:43 AM, falcotron said:

No, he's definitely a teller. ASoIaF is famous for its exposition, to the point where that's one of the reasons people thought it would be challenging to adapt. (Until someone figured out that you can do exposition on TV as long as there are boobs at the same time.) He's quoted Kim Stanley Robinson calling "show don't tell" a zombie idea that deserves to die. Especially in the first three novels, half the stuff we know, we know it because of someone either saying or thinking it.

It's exactly the POV structure that made me think that he's showing not telling. There's no third-person omnipresent narrator, which would have sent the books spiraling into the telling category. In fact, the author's voice is totally absent. We see what the characters see, and we know what the characters think. We are supposed to put two and two together based on all that. That, for me, is showing not telling. And that's also what makes the books so immersive and feel so real. 

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