SeanF

What put me off Prince of Thorns, early on, is the protagonist recounting raping a farmer’s daughter, before locking her in a barn with her family, and burning them alive.

It all depends how far Martin decides to go in plumbing the darkest depths of human nature. Perhaps the endgame is Dany as vicious tyrant; Arya as dead-eyed assassin; Sansa as murderous hypocrite; Bran as manipulator; Jon as undead horror.

He was very much the two D's favourite, and George Martin's too, but for different reasons. The two D's saw him as a virtual saint, one of the few good men in terrible world. George Martin loves him as a cunning villain, like Richard III or Harry Flashman. I do think that when a character is overly favoured by their creator, a lot of people will push back against that, the same way that a lot of people push back against a character being overly vilified. It's a particular issue with fanfiction, where quite often, an author will stan so hard for a character that the reader will end up hating them. I think that a lot of viewers of the series hated Tyrion by the end, because we were told how wise and humane he was, but what we were shown was that he was inept and treacherous. Tyrion in the books goes beyond being an amusing rogue, to being pretty vile in ADWD.

That makes sense. As well as suggesting it’s well past time to offer “daddy” his reward.

I think LF will put a lot of pressure on her, by arguing that :- (a) her life is on the line, for so long as she’s not the Lady of the Vale. Being wed to Harold, as Lord, will secure her future. (b) The Vale’s armies can avenge the murder of Robb, Catelyn, and her people by destroying the Twins, and the Freys. (c) Sweetrobin is a lackwit, who will never be able to rule the Vale. “The lad’s death would be a mercy.” (d) She’s already too deeply implicated in his schemes to back out, now, having lied to the Vale lords about her aunt’s death.

It’s interesting that the Gracchi were not totally devoid of aristocratic support, precisely because of the fear that Rome would run out of soldier-farmers. Of course, most were venial, selfish, and short-sighted, and by the end of the Republic, the traditional nobility had almost destroyed each other. Although the details are unclear, it does look as if the Eastern emperors deliberately redistributed land from great landlords, in the face of Arab invasions, so as to recreate that class of soldier farmers, willing to fight for their own land, rather than being indifferent to a change of masters. To round it off from my own studies, Navarrese peasants were a much tougher proposition for the French than landless labourers in the South, because they proprietors defending their farms.

France decriminalised male/male sex in 1791, and it was not generally a crime in its African colonies. It became a crime, in such places, after independence. Independent countries are responsible for their own laws in this regard. In general, the tendency has been for the laws against homosexuality to become harsher than in the colonial period, in Africa. A big justification that is given for anti-sodomy laws in Uganda (probably the harshest in any African Christian country), is the behaviour of King Mwanga II, who executed dozens of pages in 1886, because they'd converted to Catholicism, and refused to allow the king to exercise the traditional royal prerogative of penetrating them. Pre-colonial Africa was no idyll.

The last century or so of the Republic was an undoubted horror show. Generals waged wars for slaves and plunder, to pay off the costs of their political careers at home. The provinces were ruthlessly extorted by governors, and the publicani. And, ultimately, the Romans brought back to Italy, the lethal violence that they had exported to the rest of the Mediterranean, in the form of servile wars and power struggles between the dynasts. One of the very few men who saw that Rome could either be a republic, or an empire, but definitely not both, was Cato the Younger.

With that, I agree.

The Others are essentially the Norns from Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, the primary non-human antagonists. They have real grievances against humanity, but they are a real danger, and their society is pretty awful.

I think that violence will be a part of the answer, if not the entire answer. The Others are not just misunderstood, but an actual danger. Sometimes violence is necessary, as with the Eastern slavers.

Nobody likes Sweetrobin. And, following the show, quite a few people view Sansa as a kind of young Lady Macbeth.

Book Jon is ruthlessly pragmatic. He threatened to burn Gilly’s child. He's prepared to kill child hostages, if he has to. He puts his enemies in ice cells. Like any general, I can’t see him rejecting the use of fire in war, either, and I doubt if he’d have disapproved of the end of Master Kraznys. As to “types”, Ygritte was a murderer, but he remembers her fondly. What he did hate was seeing a man he came to respect (Mance), being subject to a cruel death. Would he have intervened if he knew it was Rattleshirt? That seems unlikely.

It's generally accepted that he was an officer in the KGB. His identification with the State goes a long way beyond simply supporting it at war.

A question. Paul may be considered as a villain, by some, for unleashing the Jihad. But, was he was just supposed to kill hinself, and the Fremen to accept eternal Harkonnen rule, as the alternative? And drawing parallels (as some do), with Daenerys’ anti-slavery campaign, in GOT. Is the message to oppressed peoples basically “Suck it up. You should count your blessings?”

Oh, they’re part of my faith. They just misunderstand it terribly, and/or else they make use of it as a flag of convenience. I’ll rephrase it slightly differently. Some of the wickedest people in the world are some of my co-religionists.

Nor am I. They're best described as bad Christians. Some of the wickedest people in the world can be found in the Churches.

Olives have a remarkable root structure, that enables them to regenerate very rapidly. But, it's plain that the river Skahadhazan irrigates an extensive area, and that a wide range of crops can be grown in its basin. Dany does actually promote agriculture, weaving, and building. Of course, none of those things offer the short term easy profit of buying and selling slaves. Nor can the masters just work the fieldhands to death and replace them with fresh slaves, any more.

Patriarch Kyril is one of the world's most unChristian Christians, as indeed are people like MTG and her allies.

I view him as more a fascist, running a mafia State. The completely arbitrary system of government, the absence of any real private property rights, or any limits to what the ruler and his henchmen can do to you, are things that mainstream conservatives would dislike (although, obviously, a lot of people who call themselves conservatives in the US are on board with these things).

MTG is a revolting woman. This love affair with Putin that exists on parts of the Right is just bizarre. Putin is in no sense a conservative, and he is very much a threat to US (and Western) interests.

That's a relief. 1.1 m shells will make a difference.

My impression is that there was more than one will at work, when Dany walked into the fire. She in turn, sensed that something miraculous was happening, without knowing exactly what. As to the O/P, I don’t doubt that human sacrifice was once common in the North, and likely still happens in some places. But what of it? Human sacrifice is a feature of all religions, other than the Seven.

I would like to see how the various cliffhangers in ADWD are resolved.

There are about 7,000 sellswords, serving with the Slaver coalition (of those, 2,500 switch sides, during the TWOW sample chapters). Then, there are 10,000 with the Golden Company. But, the population of Western Essos runs into many millions, so there must be thousands of sellswords still available for hire. How many men the North can field would depend in large part, on whether people are defending their home territory (in which case, a very high proportion of the adult male population will be fighting), or whether it's an expeditionary force, operating hundreds of miles away from their homes, in which case, the proportion of men who can be mobilised will be far smaller.