Slaver's Bay Makes No Sense

[Hugorfonics]

1 minute ago, Craving Peaches said:

Point is you can still go somewhere,

Who? The Roman I don't think could. Augustus and Hadrian, regarded as the best emperors (Hadrian was a dick and a wuss imo lol) marked their boundary as saying anything past these lines as, fuck that. And these were warring emperors, crazy track records. So if they don't wanna cross the line then I don't see what chances a runaway has.

Essos folk could maybe go to the sea but they'll just get enslaved by Dothraki, or the real sea but they'll just get captured by pirates and enslaved. Plus they wear bells and shit. Like cows, so you can hear em wander off.

6 minutes ago, Craving Peaches said:

so existence of Braavos doesn't explain why there are no slave revolts in Essos

Braavos is very fun (kinda crackpot warning) one day there is the water, the next a busting city. The tale is runaways and such who were good at keeping secrets and complex economics, it's a funky story to say the least.

(Romulus sucked off a wolf, then he killed his brother (for crossing a line!) And then he created a badass city filled with warriors and foreign women and gods. This is all so fantastical. How can any word be true? It was probably a city filled with runaways and pirates and cowboys who made up a fun back story to tell their grandkids at night. I think Braavos is the opposite. A city who's lore is reasonable but in actuallity is a fairy tale)

But if we are to believe the story, what of it? A couple hundred maybe got super lucky and found a way to disappear from the slavers eye. But it's a blind spot, a tiny corner of the slavers world.

13 minutes ago, Craving Peaches said:

especially post-dragons.

Dragons should increase the level of slave revolts?

[astarkchoice]

3 minutes ago, Craving Peaches said:

The issue is people IRL faced similar difficulties and it still happened. To be clear I am talking about after the dragons died. I have not seen a convincing explanation for why there is not even a single mention of an attempted slave revolt in the whole of Essos. I think it is a wordlbuilding error.

Only 3 in rome in all its time...3 man

A lot of obstaces have to be overcome for one to get rolling.

[Hugorfonics]

5 minutes ago, Craving Peaches said:

I think it is a wordlbuilding error.

Our tour guide of Qarth is Xaro, he is the opposite of what we should trust. Our tour guide in Volantis is Jorah who's a tourist himself. In Slavers Bay we have Danys advisors who either want her to leave for Westeros or readminister slavery.

Then there are the maesters who are careless and uninterested 

[Craving Peaches]

5 minutes ago, astarkchoice said:

Only 3 in rome in all its time...3 man

I am not talking about something on the scale of the Servile Walls. Even a small local revolt that was crushed instantly, but nothing even like that has supposedly happened in thousands of years of Essos history.

[Hugorfonics]

Just now, Craving Peaches said:

I am not talking about something on the scale of the Servile Walls. Even a small local revolt that was crushed instantly, but nothing even like that has supposedly happened in thousands of years of Essos history.

Where does it say that? When, during the machinations of Dany and the the escape of Tyrion should we look at the elephant shit shoveler who swung his shovel instead of, shoveling 

[SeanF]

The difference with Rome is that at the height of slavery, slaves were never more than 30% of the total.  Free citizen soldiers would always outnumber them.

In this world, slaves are 75-80% of the total, more like the sugar colonies of the West Indies.  The slaves there were treated with extreme cruelty, but there frequently were revolts. Only one succeeded (Haiti), but thousands of slaves escaped, to become maroons.  Ironically, some maroons assisted the colonial authorities in repressing slaves, in return for recognition of their freedom.

I think the Unsullied ought, at some point, to have created their own sultanate, at Astapor, and perhaps too, the Tiger Soldiers of Volantis.. Yunkai is a joke, but Meereen does seem to have been defended by citizen soldiers, who put up a savage fight.  Meereen’s slavers, unlike those of Astapor and Yunkai, are not ridiculous.  In a state with maybe 1 m inhabitants, 200,000 freeborn could produce maybe 20,000 soldiers.  With sufficient terror (and perhaps an organisation like the Harpies already existed to cull rebellious slaves), then Meereenese slavery could be preserved.

Then there are sellswords, pirates, Dothraki to call upon.

 

 

[astarkchoice]

11 minutes ago, Craving Peaches said:

I am not talking about something on the scale of the Servile Walls. Even a small local revolt that was crushed instantly, but nothing even like that has supposedly happened in thousands of years of Essos history.

You usualy wouldnt hear of a small scale revolt crushed though 

[Craving Peaches]

Just now, astarkchoice said:

You usualy wouldnt hear of a small scale revolt crushed though 

There's just no mention of any kind of slave uprising, even a minor one, at all, which I just find completely implausible. 

[astarkchoice]

14 minutes ago, Craving Peaches said:

There's just no mention of any kind of slave uprising, even a minor one, at all, which I just find completely implausible. 

There would be low scale bloodshed in rome vs slaves we probably never heard of either

If somehow a group of slaves from their various backgrounds begin to communicate and organise its almost comicaly easy for slave soilders to be sent to crush them, or sellswords , or unsullied , or gladiators or mayve a sorroful ttman vists their leader etc

[Daeron the Daring]

I assume the more they do it, the better they get at it. And they've been doing it for millenias.

George does this all the time. There are 'natural' events that reflect a pattern drawn from reality. Planetos just does the same amount of something in 5x or 10x the time as it would be in real life. That applies to almost anything for him. (Revolts, female rulers, famines, plagues, changes of power dynamics, etc).

But still, there may had been a huge slave revolt since the fall of Valyria (especially during the Century of Blood) that we don't know of. But we also know that slavery is the biggest monopoly of Westeros, Volantis is always there to keep a tight grip on Slaver's Bay. And if there wasn't one yet, it just puts much more weight on the current one, which could be the very single reason George didn't have one in mind predating it.

Edited April 30, 2023 by Daeron the Daring

[Lord Varys]

Slaver's Bay is mainly a place where slaves are trained and sold. Most slaves aren't there to stay and they clearly have methods and procedures in place to control them.

The Astapori have drugs and conditioning to keep the future Unsullied in line, and the Yunkai'i train bed slaves ... like a business that doesn't come with a lot of dangers. The big business in Meereen are the fighting pits - and the slaves fighting there like their jobs. As might the slaves of Astapor and Yunkai to a point who are not trained and grinded down.

But there clearly are overseers aplenty in those cities. The business cannot work without them, and they do inflict terrible punishments.

We can also reasonably expect that slave uprisings are or were a thing in the region ... but one imagines that since the Doom and the Century of Blood the Ghiscari (re-)established a kind of order that profits them and their business enterprise.

[astarkchoice]

Overall it jsut seems a slave uprising getting going there is unlikely. 

You are processed brutaly from.your home.to the slaver bay area,now should you survice and begin to bond with yur fellow slaves o arrange something many of them will be shipped right out. For the ones that remain should you arrange a resistance! Now in the early stages you could sieze a building or 2 but the master will.send slave soilders, unsullied ,sellsword companies and   gangs of ex gladiators to shut it down, as leader you your self might be targetted by assasin cults  (or offers of gold to memebers of the resistance)

Should somehow.they overcome one city theres soo many hostile states and players around its gotta seem like suicide.

[Floki of the Ironborn]

On 4/30/2023 at 4:02 PM, Craving Peaches said:

Slaves could still run away actually. Yes it would be dangerous but it was technically possible to go to territories not claimed by the Romans.

Technically possible, but was it practical? I don't doubt that many slaves did break free and did find some kind of peaceful existence outside of the Roman world, especially when crowds of random peoples later returned as the Huns and nearly overran a dying empire. But that took a long time, and there was also a lot of other factors which led to Rome's collapse. A lot of those factors haven't been put into effect yet in Slaver's Bay. And as someone else said, we don't have a super-detailed history of the region. It's one of GRRM's oldest tricks. He'll be tight-lipped and vague about some era or some location until he can give it the Gyldayn/Yandel treatment.

[Aldarion]

On 5/1/2023 at 12:10 AM, Daeron the Daring said:

George does this all the time. There are 'natural' events that reflect a pattern drawn from reality. Planetos just does the same amount of something in 5x or 10x the time as it would be in real life. That applies to almost anything for him. (Revolts, female rulers, famines, plagues, changes of power dynamics, etc).

 

Problem is that you cannot just do "5x or 10x" or something and expect it to remain plausible.

With medieval technology and organization, a field army of 10 000 is plausible. A 100 000 is not so much.

Feudal kingdom the size of Great Britain is plausible. Feudal kingdom the size of South America is not.

Most medieval castle walls were some 6 to 10 feet thick. Walls 18 feet thick - such as those of Constantinople - were fundamentally impregnable to any medieval siege techniques. Thickest walls in medieval Europe were those of Chateau de Ham at 35 feet. Yet in Westeros you have walls that are regularly 40 to 80 feet thick. That is the thickness that you see in Chinese rammed earth walls - but these had to be so thick in order to be structurally plausible, and could be so thick because earth is much cheaper than carved stone.

So to me, Westeros does not look grand. It looks ridiculous. But, well, I read the books for characters, even if complaining about lack of realism is extremely fun.

[SeanF]

10 minutes ago, Aldarion said:

Problem is that you cannot just do "5x or 10x" or something and expect it to remain plausible.

With medieval technology and organization, a field army of 10 000 is plausible. A 100 000 is not so much.

Feudal kingdom the size of Great Britain is plausible. Feudal kingdom the size of South America is not.

Most medieval castle walls were some 6 to 10 feet thick. Walls 18 feet thick - such as those of Constantinople - were fundamentally impregnable to any medieval siege techniques. Thickest walls in medieval Europe were those of Chateau de Ham at 35 feet. Yet in Westeros you have walls that are regularly 40 to 80 feet thick. That is the thickness that you see in Chinese rammed earth walls - but these had to be so thick in order to be structurally plausible, and could be so thick because earth is much cheaper than carved stone.

So to me, Westeros does not look grand. It looks ridiculous. But, well, I read the books for characters, even if complaining about lack of realism is extremely fun.

Yes, even Rome could not have fielded 100,000 men (plus camp followers, plus horses, plus pack animals) in one place, save for a few days.  Because, they’d exhaust local food supplies, and then they’d starve.

 

[Hugorfonics]

2 hours ago, Aldarion said:

Problem is that you cannot just do "5x or 10x" or something and expect it to remain plausible.

With medieval technology and organization, a field army of 10 000 is plausible. A 100 000 is not so much.

Is that a thing in asoiaf? 100k manned field army?

2 hours ago, Aldarion said:

Feudal kingdom the size of Great Britain is plausible. Feudal kingdom the size of South America is not.

Is that not China?

2 hours ago, Aldarion said:

Most medieval castle walls were some 6 to 10 feet thick. Walls 18 feet thick - such as those of Constantinople - were fundamentally impregnable to any medieval siege techniques. Thickest walls in medieval Europe were those of Chateau de Ham at 35 feet. Yet in Westeros you have walls that are regularly 40 to 80 feet thick. That is the thickness that you see in Chinese rammed earth walls - but these had to be so thick in order to be structurally plausible, and could be so thick because earth is much cheaper than carved stone.

Word, but most of these castles were allegedly built by giants with magic, and the families living in them generally have been living in them since the stone age (when it was feasible to build 80ft stone walls back then, because of all the stone, which followed the ice age when they built the ice wall, because of all the ice)

Castles don't really get taken like that, and basically largely are fundamentally impregnable (cue to Lysas shrill voice *the Eyrie is impregna-") Winterfell gets taken twice in one week, no doubt, but through sneakery. Like Stormsend (both times, although further apart this time) or Harrenhal (again twice, and again basically within the same week. Although Harrenhal was not (allegedly) built by magical giants). Very Lann like behavior, but basically everywhere is Constantinople but the clever sneak will always find his way to the party

[Aldarion]

1 hour ago, Hugorfonics said:

Is that a thing in asoiaf? 100k manned field army?

I was giving that as an example. But yes, Renly's army is ~100 000, though he at least has an excuse of it being in middle of friendly territory.

1 hour ago, Hugorfonics said:

Is that not China?

China wasn't feudal. Its administration was much more akin to the Roman Empire than anything you could see in medieval Western Europe.

1 hour ago, Hugorfonics said:

Word, but most of these castles were allegedly built by giants with magic, and the families living in them generally have been living in them since the stone age (when it was feasible to build 80ft stone walls back then, because of all the stone, which followed the ice age when they built the ice wall, because of all the ice)

Castles don't really get taken like that, and basically largely are fundamentally impregnable (cue to Lysas shrill voice *the Eyrie is impregna-") Winterfell gets taken twice in one week, no doubt, but through sneakery. Like Stormsend (both times, although further apart this time) or Harrenhal (again twice, and again basically within the same week. Although Harrenhal was not (allegedly) built by magical giants). Very Lann like behavior, but basically everywhere is Constantinople but the clever sneak will always find his way to the party

That is true, but again, doesn't really mesh with the society Martin is allegedly describing. Though to be fair, as you point out most of really large castles had been built before arrival of the Andals and their feudalism, and we don't really know what was the system of governance of the First Men.

4 hours ago, SeanF said:

Yes, even Rome could not have fielded 100,000 men (plus camp followers, plus horses, plus pack animals) in one place, save for a few days.  Because, they’d exhaust local food supplies, and then they’d starve.

 

They actually occasionally weaponized that... I believe one of rebellions in Illyricum was put down by simply plopping a massive army (~100 000 men) into the province and letting it eat the rebellion into submission.

[Hugorfonics]

7 minutes ago, Aldarion said:

I was giving that as an example. But yes, Renly's army is ~100 000, 

Probably just bullshitting though, right? Looking big in front of Cat? Scaring Tyrion? 

10 minutes ago, Aldarion said:

though he at least has an excuse of it being in middle of friendly territory.

For sure, also the excuse of him being an idiot who didn't listen to military advice plays nicely here 

11 minutes ago, Aldarion said:

China wasn't feudal. Its administration was much more akin to the Roman Empire than anything you could see in medieval Western Europe.

Paperwork and redtape? Oh yeah.

But, it's still warlords living in a castle ruling over a land of serfs who owe taxes and soldiers to the throne. Seems feudal to me.

15 minutes ago, Aldarion said:

That is true, but again, doesn't really mesh with the society Martin is allegedly describing. Though to be fair, as you point out most of really large castles had been built before arrival of the Andals and their feudalism, and we don't really know what was the system of governance of the First Men.

Yea it's like a ghost town from Scooby Doo. The whole continent. We see that clearly in Winterfell and the Wall, and obviously Harrenhal, but yea, I do think the first men were mad feudal (because like Imperial China, I don't understand how castle doesn't equal feudal) but I also think they put up way more numbers then what Westeros produces now

[Craving Peaches]

3 hours ago, Hugorfonics said:

But, it's still warlords living in a castle ruling over a land of serfs who owe taxes and soldiers to the throne. Seems feudal to me.

China was more feudal before Qin Shi Huang unified the country. Before that, rather than an emperor and governors there was a king and vassal lords with varying ranks who swore fealty to them and it was more like Western Europe style feudalism, more decentralised.

[Daeron the Daring]

8 hours ago, Aldarion said:

With medieval technology and organization, a field army of 10 000 is plausible. A 100 000 is not so much.

Feudal kingdom the size of Great Britain is plausible. Feudal kingdom the size of South America is not.

Most medieval castle walls were some 6 to 10 feet thick. Walls 18 feet thick - such as those of Constantinople - were fundamentally impregnable to any medieval siege techniques. Thickest walls in medieval Europe were those of Chateau de Ham at 35 feet. Yet in Westeros you have walls that are regularly 40 to 80 feet thick. That is the thickness that you see in Chinese rammed earth walls - but these had to be so thick in order to be structurally plausible, and could be so thick because earth is much cheaper than carved stone.

So to me, Westeros does not look grand. It looks ridiculous. But, well, I read the books for characters, even if complaining about lack of realism is extremely fun.

I was rather talking about the structural buildup of the whole timeframe, and even then, I wasn't try to convince anyone of how plausible and realistic anything is, just rather reflect on the fact that George does it this way. And that's true. Unrealistic from every possible angle, but that's the way he does it. 

Maybe the story is too good for me to care, maybe I don't care about it anyway (altough I am fascinated about these thing), but I like it the way it is, I like that he doesn't try to retcon his mistakes (the many he personally admitted to), and it has a unique feel to it. Sure, economy, warfare economy, architecture, heraldry, and long standing dynasties make no sense. Do I care? No, I enjoy the Wall being as big as it is, I enjoy how small or grandiouse the story can be, I enjoy the stupidly basic heraldry, and the millenia old history.