Aside from being a migration nerd, I’m also a general-purpose nerd nerd, and a hobbyist world-builder. Yes, hobbyist world-building is a thing. But because I’m both kinds of nerd here, I’m the guy who reads Lord of the Rings and is perpetually bothered by the ridiculous economic models being presented. Like, really? Everything between the Shire and Rohan is depopulated save for a few ruins here and there? Did the land just up and stop yielding harvests or something? Sure. Okay. That’s some plausible economic geography.
But in most cases, the obvious demographic and economic illiteracy of an author is totally forgivable because they’re not making any claims to realism. I don’t trouble over the absurdly small scale of warfare in Star Wars compared to the size of the galactic population and economy because, um, if I wanted realism I wouldn’t be watching Star Wars.
There is an exception to my forgiveness: Game of Thrones, or, if you prefer, A Song of Ice and Fire. This setting is often held up for its “gritty realism.” Now of course there is magic at work here; you don’t get dragons and a gazillion-foot-tall wall of ice without some kind of breach of realism. And I’m fine with all of that.
But what I’m not fine with is the ridiculous demographic illiteracy of Westeros.
From: Westeros is Poorly Designed — In a State of Migration — Medium
La la la la la la la la la la la I don’t care I’m enjoying it too much don’t talk to me about realism Varys got from Meereen to Dorne and back again in two days but so what and all the armies seem to have lots of guys with lots of swords and stuff that Stone says they just wouldn’t have that much of or as many guys anyway but I don’t care because it’s fun and it looks great on TV damnit.Report
Allegedly, a true Asimov anecdote:
“Professor Asimov, what do you think about Superman supposedly flying faster than the speed of light? Isn’t that against Einstein’s Relativity Theory?”
“Einstein’s Relativity is just a theory, but the speed of Superman is based on actual measurements”Report
This reminds me of this. Despite white HBO viewers’ beliefs, the Wire is not that accurate.Report
To be fair, Season 5 is the weakest and most ridiculous season.Report
Yes, of course it’s poorly designed. I doubt Martin ever considered the full implictions when he laid it out. Hell, the entire dynamic of the irregular winter/summer cycle alone is brain melting. What kind of ecology would be needed to deal with a potentially decades long winter? Westeros shouldn’t be medieval, it should be flat out alien.
But none of that really matters.Report
My theory on that is that “Winter” isn’t so much a season as the ramification of a periodic climate shifts. So “the winter” lasts years, and actually has summers within it (and maybe vice-versa), it’s just that the summers are cold. They’ve sort of incorporated this into their terminology.
That was how I made sense of it.
Most of the problems that Lyman describes can be handled by assuming that some of the measurements got lost in translation. Westeros is actually a size somewhere in between Great Britain and Baffin Island.Report
Yes, I agree. On reading the entire article I shrugged and was like “Okay so most of the nerd protests fizzle if you just assume it’s smaller”. Considering how the characters bounce around that makes more sense as well.Report
So “the winter” lasts years, and actually has summers within it (and maybe vice-versa), it’s just that the summers are cold.
But then you’ve got periodic crop failures and resulting famines. We have instances within recorded history. 1816, popularly known as “The Year Without a Summer”. Widespread crop failures. We know that in parts of North America, grain prices increased five-fold relative to a year earlier. Or the portion of The Little Ice Age in the early 1300s, which produced the Great Famine of 1315-17. Historians put the urban death toll in Europe north of the Alps in the 10-25% range.Report
This is sort of why I wonder why everyone is so worried about the north. For stretches that last years or decades, it’s basically Nanuvut. Shouldn’t The Wall basically be at the Twins?Report
But, if the North is really Scotland, then people to its south are justified in caring a great deal about it. Plenty of people, plenty of economic activity. And tolerating an autonomous king up there turns out to be risky, especially if that king gets support and alliances with other powers located to the south or just across a narrow sea.Report
The winters make it not-Scotland.Report
Bear in mind they have stores of food for these Winters, or at least they’re supposed to. They’re in IceboxVille, where they CAN store meat and not have it rot, alongside grain.Report
If you’re going to try to draw analogues out of European history and/or geography, a better model might be the Viking Age. Sustained warmer climate — the Medieval Warm Period — made grain farming much more productive, the population boomed, population pressure led to expansion (and conflict). If there were a long-term climate cycle a la Will, people to the south will have experienced a periodic expansionary North, which collapses when the climate cycle turns.Report
Right. So my thought is that if you’re the Lannisters, you basically focus almost all of your attention outside the North. The North isn’t going to be worth having for some time. Let the North suffer through the Winter, and then as the weather starts to let up, invade their starving, untrained arses. Then you get the North back and have a better chance on holding it. Who really wants it in the meantime? It’s basically the North of the Wall without the supernatural activity.
Or, uhhh… with the supernatural activity depending on how other plotlines go. Can the undead traverse water?
(As an aside, I’m a bit confused about something from the last episode. What was with Benjen not being able to go south? If he can’t go south, how can the White Walkers? Did that whole thing get resolved with a plot revelation? Haha, just kidding, no White Walkers.)Report
There’s the whole Horn of Winter sub-sub-plot. Was it found, was it burned, was it real, was if fake is it still out there? Probably now part of Bran’s plot.
Personally I think Martin’s real objective was to create a subversive theology…but he’s so lost the plot on that he can’t wind his way back – at least not in a way that will rival the nuance of his political work. So, when the final answer comes regarding the White Walkers, the Lord of Light, the Old Gods, the Faceless One, and the Seven, it will either be terribly disappointing, or the biggest Deus Ex trope you’ve ever seen.Report
Da. This was obvious if you’d read any of his other work.
My friend finds it hilarious that of all the magazine writers he ever worked with, it’s GRRM who got to be this famous.
GRRM lost the wheels after the first three books (which have a nice cool arc).Report
GRRM was a wonderful, multiple award-winning short-story writer. Not necessarily credentials for writing a multi-volume epic.Report
*shrugs* if you want high quality worldbuilding, go buy Kulthea.Report
1) We’re clearly dealing with early Renaissance, not actual medieval period. You’ve got your city states and way too much communication to really support anything else.
2) Tolkien wrote medieval — if you had a forested region that was depopulated, that meant the Black Forest (with soils too heavy to plough).
3) High urban and low density rural is easy — that’s Carthage. Plenty of game theory where water is scarce says urbanize urbanize urbanize.Report
Westeros is clearly not similar to North Africa though. The climate, beyond the funky seasonsal issues, is clearly temperate zone and wet.
The primary issue with Westeros is it is clearly meant to be Britan scaled up. The thing is many things about human geography are scale dependant. The forces change with size, so the morphology has to change to reflect that (much like an ant can’t scale up to the size of even a mouse, let alone an elephant)Report
While that is true, I kind of object to the disuse of the Chinese (or Japanese) as a metaphor in the cited article.
What made China (or Japan) so different from India or Europe? Hey, let’s play the muslim angle if we want to get the nice language — doesn’t nearly everyone who’s muslim learn arabic? (granted, then you have more of a “everyone knows english in india” paradigm).Report
China (and India) are basically geographically united. Europe is laced through with mountains and natural barriers. This led to a lot of politicall uniformity in China and diversity in Europe.Report
India was fragmented for most of its existence. China… really wasn’t. India has dozens of languages (at least), China has one with significant differences (linguist joke)Report
China isn’t different. There are a number of different dialects that are not mutually intelligible. As for Arabic, despite all of the dialects being called Arabic, the North African, Gulf, Levant, etc. are all very different from each other and all quite different from MSA. The difference between Algerian Arabic and Iraqi Arabic are as wide as Portuguese and Italian. And MSA largely only exists in a unitary form because it is a literary language (similar to Latin in medieval times) and modern communication and transportation makes it easier to keep largely unitary.Report
Mo,
China is a hell of a lot different from Britain — yes, you do have mutually unintelligible dialects, but they cover a LOT of ground. Britain, from one village to the next might be difficult to understand (this is pretty much a Britain thing, it wasn’t true anywhere else — Britain had a hell of a lot of asocial people there, including the elves).
So, I guess what we’re getting is “the more trade you’ve got, the more you develop good trading languages, ” with a side of “literary languages occupy their own world”Report
Nerding out is fun.
Anyway, it always seemed preposterously implausible and silly that Westeros should be that large, given that he was going for a War of the Roses analog. Great Britain is small. Why should Westeros not be small?
Anyway, @burt-likko is correct. Who cares, so long as you are enjoying the drama.
But nerds shall nerd nerdily. And nerding out is fun. And there is a texture to realism, that — when you “see the strings” it diminishes the thing. It’s like, watching a thing where everything is slightly the wrong color. You can see it is “off.”
Doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy a thing for what it is.Report
Have sympathy on R.R. Martin my dear. You must have had that game master or been that game master? A wall of ice stretching across a narrow part of a country the size of Britain? That’s cool sure but a wall stretching across North America? That’s super cool! Lord (Lady?) knows I have been that Game Master.
Martin couldn’t have known how popular his world was going to become (for one thing I don’t think he had the ego to think as much). I mean Martin was just building himself a sandbox to write some medieval fantasy intrigue stories in.Report
Honestly though, I wasn’t that game master, at least not anytime after middle school.
I’m not slagging GRRM. I like his books fine. But still, I always shot for the subtle, the “small stories,” rather than the big globe-spanning things.
I hit my sweet spot with early Ars Magica. It was “low key” in a certain way. We generally used the British Isles as our setting, just cuz I had a lot of good gaming material for that time-and-place. We’d pick a bit part of Devonshire (or whatever). Set up a “Covenant” (which was kinda of a wizards community), always located in an out-of-the-way place — cuz they had to fly beneath the radar of the church.
Of course, maybe the local priest knew about them and was cool. It was complicated. You could have rich particulars instead of overbearing everthings.
We seldom involved the affairs of kings. But the local baron, he would play a role.
Plus there were other wizards in other covenants, but small number, and whatever fairy politics was going down, and whatever else I dreamed up. But always local.
It was a fun way to do things. To us it felt real.
After all, how do you now there weren’t small hidden communities of wizards in 12th century England? It ain’t like they would go out of their way to get noticed.
Anyway, as they developed the setting in the published material, things got “big” — big organizations of wizards playing bigger roles in the politics of kingdoms and Christendom. I get it. Some people think in those terms.
I preferred my “little stories.” We stayed away from grand designs.Report
Well you were wise beyond your years then. I look back on some of the stuff I wrote and invented during my “Big is cool!” years and cringe. Thank God(ess?) the internet was too nascent for me to have put it up somewhere where people could see it.Report
Ha!
Well I mean, when I was a teen I tried to write a terribly long and sprawling Silmarillion ripoff with giant elf armies and demon hoards, so I’m not immune.
It’s just — I dunno.
Honestly — not to throw out a hand grenade — but I think it was a gender thing. (#notallmen, #notallwomen, #notallenbies, etc.) It’s like, all the “big stories” were dudely things, and it was — just that stuff felt unsatisfying. By that time I was discovering “girl books,” and they tended to be the “small stories” stuff —
— which look, I don’t know if this is “baked into the brain” or “socialization” or “veronica making up bullshit theories.”
Whatever. Something something blah blah. It’s just feels “gendery” to me. Two of my most loyal players were — unknown to any of us at the time — transgender. Like, a gaming group of five folks, and three of us are in-the-closet trans folks, who somehow accidentally end up friends.
Gender gender gender.
(One of them was a trans man — like we thought he was a girl but he wasn’t. This means whatever it means. He married the other trans gal, cuz of course. They both came out and transitioned after they married, cuz of course.)
Gender is weird.Report
v,
Sorkin getting things wrong, badly wrong, is a lot more headache inducing than Grrm having scale issues.
OTOH, when Bob’s Burgers gets something right — that’s actually satisfying.Report
Theon Greyjoy is what happens when you cut your interns too much slack.Report
Being much more a Tolkien geek than a Martin geek, I will go after this:
Plausible economic geography is Missing The Point. This is mythic geography. Arnor is without a king. The fertility of the land is tied to this. No king, no fertility. QED. I don’t recall Tolkien explicitly making the connection, but this is bog standard stuff.Report
heheh. This is the just sort of thing that a friend of mine doesn’t get. He often says he doesn’t get abstractions and metaphors. I say he just doesn’t get illogical ones. Ya know, like the idea that because it’s raining outside, the house is going to be troubled inside.Report
His histories say all that and add on plague, banditry, orcs, barbarians and easterlings all as additional reasons for the land being by and large bereft and empty of peoples.Report
The fertility of the land is tied to the health of the king? That makes no fishing sense.Report
I’m not saying that is how it works in real life. Here’s another one: the king’s touch does not in real life heal scrofula. Yet they tried, in France, into the 19th century.Report
That makes no fishing, I say, no fishing sense. That’s a joke, son.Report
Zip! Right past me…Report
Also, orcs.Report