Alester Florent

Perfect!

There was probably a bit of a scuffle in the courtyard with the guards, but I would expect Brandon pretty quickly submitted when he realised how heavily outnumbered he was, that the guards weren't the people he was there to fight, and especially if some of his companions did submit and were effectively held hostage, and/or if crossbows and the like were in evidence, and if Brandon had already got off his horse (thus cutting off an escape route) before the guards closed in. Or the detail of Brandon's precise words and actions might have been added after the fact by a guard sergeant who was explaining his conduct, and thought he could insulate himself from any charges of overstepping the mark in arresting a great lord's heir by exaggerating somewhat. Brandon may have just yelled for him to come out and answer for himself, or something, and by the time news reached the throne room that had turned into "Brandon was waving his sword around and shouting for Rhaegar to die". Brandon was bold and impetuous etc. but he wasn't completely loopy-bananas: even through the red mist he probably knew a lost cause when he saw one, and in that context (given his status) he'd usually be better off submitting and arguing his way out of it rather than trying to fight and certainly being killed.

Nobody's going insane on this, but how am I supposed to understand the topic without descriptions of and links to to several generic third-party wikis? Be reasonable.

I mean I would have hoped the joke was obvious even without the reference. But if Spinal Tap is considered obscure now, that makes me doubly sad.

The lukewarm water/Derek Smalls thing is a joke, I would hope so obviously it wouldn't need stating, but experience has hardened me to the worst in people. I don't believe the champion will be mediocre. But I don't think being a non-extremist is equivalent to mediocrity either. I'm inclined to agree that victory will come from a union of Ice and Fire - but it follows I think that we can't just say that humans (the Starks in particular) are Fire ergo heroes.

Up to a point, yeah. But then, that only goes to prove the point that Roman historians weren't one-eyed propagandists who had no interest in barbarians and portrayed them as ugly idiots rightfully squashed, as suggested above. Well yes, Cleopatra was definitely the victim of propaganda, for obvious reasons. But she was also the sort of person the Romans were never really going to like: she didn't embody many, if any, of the virtues they valued. She was a Hellenistic despot rather than an easily-idealised barbarian; she governed through intrigue rather than honest violence; she was not a chaste matron. And the one battle she can reliably be placed at, she did a runner at the first opportunity, arguably ruining any prospect of victory for her side both immediately and long-term. And most of our Roman historians are writing well after Augustus's death, so they're free to re-examine Cleopatra if they so choose (Tacitus, for instance, certainly doesn't hold back in his criticisms of earlier emperors, albeit he doesn't cover the Augustan period in any detail). I think Cleopatra was the victim of culture clash as much as anything. Even then, though, the one thing the Romans could agree on was that Cleopatra had seduced two of the great Romans of the era and must surely have conceded that she had physical charms whatever her other defects. Calling her an ugly old troll would just make those Roman heroes look even more foolish than they already appear. Ironically, of course, more recently examined coinage portraiture suggests that Cleo wasn't actually all that to look at (notwithstanding that profile isn't always flattering, and beauty standards change) so it may well have been her winning personality that did it for Antony and Caesar after all.

I actually find it somewhat unlikely that "Fire" is the "good" faction, set against the "Evil" faction of Ice. Rather I think we will discover that, in line with GRRM's general portrayals of extremism, both Fire and Ice in their absolute form have problems and the real answer is somewhere in the middle. The hero of our story, then, will be a sort of champion of Lukewarm Water. TPTWP may yet turn out to be Derek Smalls.

I think the Romans admired Boudicca in a way. Roman historians can be surprisingly sympathetic to barbarian opponents. Tacitus writes as if he thinks she had a point (ditto Caratacus), she was fighting for freedom, a cause the Romans valued, and she chose death over submission, which they would respect. Cleopatra is a bit different.

Chroniclers do sometimes talk about people's appearance. But they're not always reliable, especially since they rarely saw their subjects in person. Comments on hair colour are more common than eyes, in my experience.

Funnily enough, I heard about it for the first time just the other day, while doing some research into the history of the Goths. White hair and purple eyes are something of a fantasy staple. Most obviously, Elric had white hair and deep crimson eyes. I haven't read any GRRM apart from ASoIaF and associated works, but i'm sure I've heard that characters with similar features appeared in his earlier work too.

Assuming it essentially follows the format of the first one, and the recipes on the website, it won't.

Honestly, if women like Bad Boys, I'm thoroughly disappointed in them. That movie was terrible.

The duchy of Normandy was a vassal of the French Crown, but England never was. Normandy also had some special privileges within France. This dual status could and did cause a lot of issues, as the French king could impose penalties on the English king's French possessions but had no say in England itself. The French kings were also personally weaker within France than the English kings were in England, thanks to the subdivision into quasi-independent duchies and counties. Feudalism is complicated. From 927 to about 1200, the king of England was almost always, almost certainly, more personally powerful than the French king, even if the kingdom was smaller and less prestigious. Several English kings (Athelstan, Edmund, Cnut, William II, possibly others) could make a credible claim to be the most personally powerful man in Europe, certainly western Europe.

They were still sufficiently distinct that they had their own laws, though, and could be identified and indeed targeted for massacre by Ethelred in 1002, by which point they'd been established for 150 years or so. There were probably still linguistic differences, too. The distinction seems to have largely stopped mattering after Cnut's conquest, although the Danelaw seems to have retained some legal importance for a bit. Presumably William's razing of Anglo-Danish power structures rendered it functionally irrelevant after the Conquest. I suspect that it's a question of identity as much as anything. Although it had a nationalist bent, early England clearly retained a degree of multiculturalism, allowing descendants of Danish settlers to continue to think of themselves as Danes (or Anglo-Danes, when threatened by Norse) despite in other ways being heavily Anglicised.

I can imagine a northern lord not having any time for southron silliness and wearing golden spurs because he's just as good a horseman/fighter as them and what are they going to do about it? And we never know, he might have been knighted even if he's not a Sevener. Is Rodrik Cassel a follower of the Seven? Is Harras Harlaw?

The Angles came from what is now Denmark, as did the Jutes (Jutland); I think the Saxons were from further south. But the Danes who started arriving in the late 8th century are a distinct people again: they speak a different language (from a different branch of Germanic, albeit still not too dissimilar), they have different customs, and they're, at least initially, pagan, while by that time the Anglo-Saxons were wholly Christian. But the Danes in general got on a bit better with the English than the Norse did: There are a number of occasions on which Danes and English joined together to drive out Norse "foreigners". That William brought England back into Euorope is an argument I've heard before and there is something in it, even if it's perhaps a bit more complicated than that. England had turned away a bit from the continent after the Danish conquests in the 800s, but had a close relationship with Scandinavia, and the Norman connexion wasn't new: Edward the Confessor had been largely raised there (hence his apparent preference for Wiliam as successor: he never seems to have felt quite a home in England). And Edgar, the atheling, had been born in Hungary of all places. And, of course, English mercenaries were always welcome additions to the Byzantine imperial (Varangian) guard, so much so that Constantinople was a popular destination for discontented huscarls after the Conquest.

I don't know where you've been getting your history, but... no. Firstly, and this is important, Great Britain is the entire island, not just England. (Spoilered for length) So in summary, William didn't create or unify anything. England had been a unified kingdom for over a hundred years before he arrived (apart from a very brief period of partition in 1016). What William did do was: (a)bring over a bunch of Normans to completely replace the English aristocracy and senior clergy, and change the language of government to French; (b) make a bunch of legal changes to land ownership and government systems which in due course made the kingdom (and the army) less centralised and more at the mercy of local lords, (c) lay waste to a huge area of northern England following a rebellion, which some estimate killed or permanently displaced around 75% of the population; and (d) by uniting England and Normandy under his rule, directly embroil England in the political situation in mainland France, which would have lasting consequences for both countries. He also didn't conquer, or rule over, Scotland or Wales. While the English kings claimed suzerainty over both, this was largely on paper, especially in the case of Scotland, and the Norman kings were generally less successful at asserting their overlordship than the Saxon kings had been. Neither was politically unified with England until centuries after William's death.

Do unicorns exist in ASoIaF?

No he didn't. William was, more or less, the 15th king of England (it's possible to debate who the first one was, and there's one who often isn't counted). The centralised English government was established right from the start (indeed, across everywhere except Northumbria, before that), and was what helped to make the king of England unusually powerful among European kings, notwithstanding the small size of the kingdom. The ordered administration set up by the Saxon and Danish kings was one of the reasons England was such an attractive prize for William in the first place, and he did relatively little to bolster it. But this government only extended across England. The king of Scots nominally owed fealty to the English king, but was de facto independent, and the king of Scots didn't control the whole of what is now Scotland: the western isles were independent and Moray may have been too. The situation in Wales varied but there was never direct control over all of Wales, and by 1066 most of Wales was functionally independent. In no way did William unify Great Britain: indeed arguably the island was more unified before the Norman Conquest than after it.

Barristan's chapter is definitely a great schematic in how to pull off a coup. Who knew the old man had it in him?

I agree that 45-year-olds shouldn't be dating 14-year-olds. But I do balk at calling 45-year-olds "old people". I think it must be a Korean thing. Well, I know it's also a Japanese thing. I wouldn't start calling people "old people" until they start to suffer from actual decrepitude - these days, pretty much anyone under the age of 60 is exempt.

Like the multiple rebellions that broke out almost immediately on Aegon's death? Arguably, the Targs only achieved the conquest and then survived those first 50 years thanks to their dragons and their apparent willingness to use them - an advantage no medieval conqueror IRL has had.

Daario is probably pretty sexy and Dany is a horny teenager so I don't really blame her for wanting to bone him, even if Daario with his naked-women-daggers and his gold teeth does give off (to me) the vibe of a guy who has "douchebag" written through him like a stick of Brighton rock. But that doesn't make shagging him a good decision. Even Daenerys recognises that it's a bad idea. Jorah's about 45... is that "old man" now?

It's curious that "colonisation" is a charge felt necessary to defend the Targaryens against, given what they indisputable actually did. I think trying to defend the Targs against charges of colonisation is pointless where it is indisputable that their takeover of Westeros was a violent conquest. This as much as anything reflects current, i.e. largely post-2010, socio-political concerns, where "colonisation" is a bugaboo and "coloniser" is a filthy insult to sling around, because the aftereffects of colonisation are something which a lot of people in agenda-setting countries feels affects them directly, whereas conquest is something that doesn't really happen any more, at least not to anyone we know (cue side-eye at Ukraine). I would note too that if Aegon was indeed motivated by prophecy, well, that's not all that different from the manifest destiny and "white man's burden" arguments used to justify imperial expansion IRL in the 19th century. Does being a colonisation or not somehow make this conquest worse? I don't think so. It seems like a nothing question. I'm not sure about this either. Now, admittedly, ASoIaF has problems with scale, especially timescale, in a way which is common to much of fantasy: things which IRL would normally take decades or centuries in fact take millennia. But in any case, 300 years is a long time. Great empires have risen and fallen in much shorter periods. If a central government has been in place for that long, you can't just remove it and expect everything to snap back to the way it was. Take the Westerlands for instance. Nobody alive remembers an independent Westerlands. Nobody alive has spoken to anyone who remembers an independent Westerlands, and nobody anyone alive has spoken to will themselves have spoken to anyone who remembers an independent Westerlands. The cultural, linguistic, religious and legal differences between the Westerlands, Reach, Riverlands, Stormlands, Vale and mainland Crownlands are negligible. So where's the real driving force for an independent Westerlands? Or more particularly, where's the driving force for an independent Westerlands qua "Westerlands", rather than "Westerlands plus whatever bits of the Riverlands and Reach they can conquer"? So even if the centralised kingdom split up, there's no particular reason it should go back to the way it was. And if we need a reason to keep the Iron Throne beyond simple inertia, then that surely highlights one of the reasons, which is that splitting up into independent kingdoms would surely immediately result in war, if nowhere else than over the Crownlands which both the Riverlands and Stormlands would want and say they have the right to. The North, Dorne and the Iron Islands may be exceptions to this: they retain enough cultural independence I think, even if somewhat oddly in the North's case, that it's feasible to see them declaring independence and doing their own thing: indeed both the North and Iron Islands already have. But the Dornish marches remain a hotspot and the Iron Islands' being independent isn't really good for anyone else.

Not being a Yankee type, I don't celebrate Thanksgiving. But I do like eating, so I'll pick some recipes from the Feast of Ice and Fire that I might serve at a Thanksgiving-type dinner. To start: Fingerfish Sweet pumpkin soup (OK, so I'm not sure how well these would go together. But I can't leave out the one pumpkin recipe, and the fingerfish - the OG fingerfish, at least, not the modern fishfingers, are too delicious to ignore; if necessary, I'll serve them in separate remove) Black bread Main: Honeyed chicken Onions in gravy Buttered beets (for Tommen) Buttered carrots Beans and bacon Sansa salad Pudding: Cream swans (turkeys?) Wintercake To drink: Mulled wine Lemonsweet Pear brandy While on the website to get the available links, I found that the IatC ladies came up with their own Westerosi Thanksgiving menu in 2012, which you can see here. There's a bit of overlap with mine (my inclusion of fingerfish is vindicated)!