SeanF

The Meereenese elite are evil and depraved, but unlike the rulers of Astapor and Meereen, they’re clever.

The masters need to be asset-stripped, Yunkai razed to the ground and ploughed with salt, and the revolution exported to Volantis (making it impossible for places like Mantarys and Tolos to continue as slave cities).

I’ve read the essays more than once. Have you?

Not that I am aware of. But, i stand by criticisms of the essays. The text does not support Feldman’s thesis, that the peace was real, the slavers are reasonable people, nor that Danaerys is choosing between good and bad sex. Nor that Ghiscari slavery is anything other than extremely evil.

Hopefully, Tyrion gets eaten by a dragon.

You don't think that Dany's dragons will defect to Jon, Sansa, and Arya for .... reasons?

Steven Attwell’s analysis is vastly superior to Adam Feldman’s.

The Slynt/Bolton/ Frey fans and the Ghiscari master fans are two cheeks of one unpleasant arse. They’re making bad faith arguments, just to wind up people who like characters who they detest.

I will always avoid any fic which is tagged “scat”, “daddy kink”, “girl penis”, “Thramsay”, or which pairs Sansa with men twice or thrice her age.

There are thousands of freedmen, however, trained as soldiers by the Unsullied. That’s in addition to the Brazen Beasts. Making use of Meereen’s walls, and letting the besiegers rot, due to disease, and drinking river water, makes sense.

Had she stayed in Astapor, she'd have faced an invasion by the slavers, but this time including the resources of Meereen. I don't think it would have ended well. Her mistake was not leaving a garrison behind. We see that some freedmen do prosper. She orders they be admitted to the guilds. She promotes agriculture, and weaving, and building, and the freedmen do now receive wages, if low ones. I'd criticise her more for not redistributing the wealth of the masters. The Great Masters had nailed up 163 slave children. That was a calculated, open, deliberate atrocity, by a ruling class that was collectively bloodying its hands. It's similar to Crassus crucifying 6,000 on the Appian Way. The entire Senate was guilty of that act, not just Crassus, for they empowered him. My criticism is not that any of the 163 masters were innocent (how could they be?). Rather, that the majority of the guilty walked free. WRT the fighting pits, what the afficionados really enjoy is seeing dwarves, children, and slaves being torn to pieces. I don't blame her for closing them. The moment she reopened them, Hizdahr was trying to feed Tyrion and Penny to lions. Her best decision in Meereen is actually recruiting a standing army, who are trained by the Unsullied. I assume that will be an important element in victory over the slavers, if we ever get TWOW.

Well, of course, Cleon is a piece of scum. Nobody who wages war, however justified, has clean hands. But, there are conflicts in which one side is plainly, a lot more in the right than the other, such as Ukraine/Russia. And, this is one of them. Daenerys' big error was trying to abort her revolution, rather than adopting Macchiavelli's maxim that if you have to harm someone, you must strike them so hard that you need never fear their revenge.

There was some piece of really bad fanfiction, a few years ago, that gave Jon the name “Aegon.”

Untangling the Meereenese Knot, Part I: Who Poisoned the Locusts? Meereen. The mere word probably makes you groan. It’s considered to be the weakest, most frustrating plotline in ADWD, and perhaps in in the whole series. It’s thought to be where GRRM … https://meereeneseblot.wordpress.com/2013/09/27/untangling-the-meereenese-knot-part-i-who-poisoned-the-locusts/ This was a series of essays published by Adam Feldman, almost ten years ago, which have subsequently had a great deal of influence, when discussing Daenerys' Meereenese storyline. What do I disagree with? Almost everything, really. The essays come close to being an apologetic for slavery. The author considers that the Sons of the Harpy have legitimate grievances, after having seen their slaves freed, the slave trade disrupted, and 163 of their number put to death, following the city's fall. In his words, they have “seen their way of life destroyed.” The author sees it as a positive development that slavery is restored, outside Meereenese territory, in return for a precarious peace in Meereen. A big strength of the essays is that Feldman has great empathy towards the slavers, enabling us to understand their motives. A big weakness is that he has very little for the slaves and freedmen. It’s rather like reading a very old-fashioned historian of the Roman Empire, imagining himself as a senator, while ignoring the plight of the typical imperial inhabitant. The author sees Hizdahr and the Green Grace as honest brokers, rather than the leaders of a vicious terrorist movement. One thing worth noting is that a cousin of hers tries to claim a share of the earnings of a group of weavers that he used to own, on the ground that he trained them. Daenerys rightly dismisses the claim, but we learn later that weavers are targeted for murder by the Harpies. The implication is that she directed this as spiteful piece of retaliation. Feldman thinks the Green Grace speaks for the author, in advocating peace with Yunkai as “the pearl beyond price”, and that we’d be very sympathetic to her, if we had her POV. But, the Harpies are really the equivalent of the original Ku Klux Klan. They murder not just soldiers, but also any freedman who prospers. In no sense, should they be viewed as a sympathetic movement. The author almost ignores the Volantene invasion. Volantis is the regional Big Brother to the slavers. It’s also on the brink of revolution by the slaves. Their leaders see free Mereen as an existential threat, emboldening their own slaves. Meereen has to be destroyed. And Yunkai sent envoys to Volantis to negotiate for them to destroy Meereen, something mentioned both at the end of A Storm of Swords, and in Tyrion's chapters in Volantis. Grazdan Mo Eraz travelled to Volantis, offering lavish bribes of money and prostitutes, to persuade them to attack. Yet, at no point during their negotiations with Daenerys do they mention their double-dealing, nor is there any suggestion that any envoys were sent subsequently to Volantis, to advise that there was now a peace treaty in place. This destroys Feldman’s claim that the peace with Yunkai was genuine. Tyrion notes that the Yunkish lords are waiting for the Volantenes’ arrival, before joining the assault. In the final essay, sees Dany’s choice as being between violence and good sex with Dasrio, or peace and bad sex with Hizdahr. Set aside the sexism with which this chapter is framed. Hizdahr represents a different type of violence to Dasrio. Dario’s violence is that of the soldier, who slays in battle. Hizdahr represents the violence of the refined sadist, who gets aroused by seeing dwarves torn apart by lions.

Revenge was one part of Jon's motivation for killing Slynt (he remarks internally about parting his greasy head from his shoulders). But, Slynt's execution was still entirely justified. He's one of those people who simply has no redeeming features, that I can see.

It looks as if human sacrifices were being performed at Whitetree. I guess they take place on Skaggs, too.

Everyone except the Seven seems quite keen on human sacrifice. And, perhaps human sacrifice was part of the Faith at some point.

Power can collapse very suddenly, in the kind of tyranny where a tyrant depends, largely, upon threats and bribes to keep control. Beria and Ceaucescu found that out.

I’ve begun Tasha Suri’s, The Jasmine Throne, set in a fantasy version of medieval India. It’s very good, reminiscent of Guy Gavriel Kay’s mix of poetry and realism. I laughed at the blurb describing Suri as Imperial librarian, which makes her sound like a character in Dune.

Charlie Graddick, former Attorney General, who promised to "fry them until their eyeballs pop out and smoke comes out of their ears" was actually the left wing challenger to Moore in the primary.

Well, they voted in Roy Moore - twice.

I also think that the two D’s saw cruelty and duplicity as legitimate, when practised by, or on behalf of, House Stark or House Lannister, but not otherwise. That’s why the argument “you should have seen it coming” fails, in relation to Daenerys. If putting people to death, often very brutally, is justified to exact revenge on those who have wronged your family, or to advance your family’s interests, it is certainly justified in the cause of liberating slaves.

It seems to go hand in hand with his pieces on Sparta. Granted, Sparta was not terrible at war, simply distinctly average. But like fascists, they had great PR. Fascists believe that wars are won by will, racial superiority, and unrestrained violence, rather than by making sure that your soldiers get food, petrol, and ammunition in the quantities they need. It’s similar to Rhett Butler, commenting about the North’s technological advantage over the South, but “we’ve got cotton, and slaves ….and arrogance.”

Probably the rubbish spouted by Yandel, that Elia was so maddened by grief that she took her childrens' lives and her own.

Most of the time, I don't think archery was - on its own - all that lethal. What archers could do, firing in volleys, very effectively, was to ruin the momentum of an infantry advance or cavalry charge, and to just demoralise the enemy (getting struck repeatedly by arrows is painful and unpleasant, even if few can penetrate armour). You may have got more people being injured by splinters, as the arrows shattered on impact, than by the arrowheads themselves.