So what are Veeky Forums thought on Game of Thrones ?

Its like if five year old made it up

...

Somebody post that map of Europe rotated 90 degrees counter clockwise

You mean something like this?

Yes except it had labels talking about how the natural geographic barriers and peninsulas were so perfect for some neck beards epik fantasy novel

Was it this one?

>literally take uk
>mirror it
>and slap it next to turkey

Ah yes perfect, thank you user

>realism ....
Most of those things aren't so glaring once you consider that the more habitable part of Westeros isn't that big.
>Westeros is like the size of north america.
Maybe that includes the northern wastes.
>history goes back thousands of years with no change in anything at all
I'm no expert, but isn't it somehow implied their old history is mostly myths and legends, and the many elements aren't ancient at all.

what was the reason for their nords not building boats and moving around the wall to "hit and run" that way again?

it's humanities

Wtf, Europe is so fucking ugly.

tolkein was shit tho

The North - Scotland
The Riverlands - Ireland
The Reach - France
The Vale - Switzerland
The Stormlands - Germany
The Iron Islands - Orkneys, Shetlands, and Mann
Dorne - Andalusian Spain

Valyrians - Romans
Valyrian colonies - Italian city states
Ghiscari colonies - Mesopotamia/Egypt
Ibb - reverse Eskimos
Sothryos and Summer Islanders - niggers
Yi Ti and Leng - Chinks

I wish I could travel back in time and kill George R R Martin before he ever had a chance to write those books and save the world from not only the books but the shitty show as well.

super mario bros. isn't humanities under the context of this board, and neither is game of thrones.

Why are the Balkans ALWAYS forgotten?

We fucking exist god damn it

>We fucking exist god damn it

Only to either get oppressed by t*rks or commit petty genocide among yourselves.

The what?

I think he is talking about the gaykans

war of Roses with tits, dragons and meme dwarf full of pandering too teens. Waste of time and paper

1. You love the show
2. You find out the books exist
3. The books make you realize that the show sucks
4. you jump the books bandwagon
5. you disdain the show more than ever
6. you realize the fat fuck will never finish the books
7. you realize the fan fic tier script of two incompetent jews will be the only canon end you'll ever get
8. you jump out of the bandwagon and fight your primal instincts to not go back aboard it.

HAHAHA

[spoiler]I invested at least 500 hours of my life into this piece of shit. Someone please tell me the fastest and least painful way to commit suicide![/spoiler]

Dude, get my level. I started the books in the 90s when the first one came out.

I've been waiting for two decades for that fat fuck to finish.

>Hes been reading trash for close to twenty years.

Your taste should get better with age not worse user.

GOD BFTO

Are you me?

Game of Thrones is hugely flawed but there are much worse things out there. Never understood the "intellectual poison" meme. I'm not reading the books looking for deep philosophical answers to the questions of life and humanity, I just wanna read about people plotting to kill and fuck their way to a meaningless title in a land that will inevitably be consumed by the evils they've forgotten.

Yes, most watchers never cared for fantasy either including myself.

Well, in fairness, it only takes a day to read a book and there's only been one in the last ten years.

on a sidenote, what effect may this have on the popular understanding of the medieval age?

>sparrows portrayed as the villains in the last season since D&D can't into grey morality
>"dude this is deep because like, it reminded me that in the Middle Ages, religion kept back progress and were bigots, so like it's really clever from the showmakers to do this"
>mfw

>He fell for the ASOIAF meme for 21 years

That's my exact age KEK

No, I am Yu.

Why is Crimea missing? Why is the Bosporus fused?

Ahhh.

You're just a little boy, cute.

Well on the one hand it shows people that the middle ages were more juicy and byzantine than people imagined before. On the other hand it makes people think that it was like this all the time with really isn't the case.

Wildlings are Scots, the North are Northern Englishmen

Wildlings and Northmen: Inspired by Picts and Celts

Andals: The Saxons

Targaryens: The Normans

The Dornish: Jews (they're even the most scheming cunts in the story).

>Who designed this, an alien

I think they tried that a few times and even got the inhabitants of Bear Island (?) to help them out. But they are not good at building boats, the troops they sent were small and the Night Guard got whiff soon enough so they could fight them off.

So that it isn't just flipped Europe to a 100%

I like game of thrones but I hate it when unqualified people try to make historical connections

GRRM is very simple minded and uncreative, you're reading too much into it

The North - Northumbria, the wall is obviously Hadrian's wall
Westerlands - Lancaster is on the the west coast
The Vale - Wales
The Reach - The French
The Stormlands - Iberian Christian kingdoms, Galicia is a stormy place, he must have picked this up from somewhere
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costa_da_Morte
Dorne - Andalusia
The Iron Islands - Orkneys, Shetlands, Mann and the Hebrides (Scandinavian Scotland)
The Riverlands - Rhineland, Riverlands are between 5 kingdoms, Rhineland is between France and Germany, basically a wartorn border region
The Freys (Riverland house) - robber baron, GRRM may have read Otto of the Silver Hand

Valyrians - Romans
Valyrian colonies - Italian/Dutch renaissance city states
Ghiscari colonies - Mesopotamia/Egypt
Ibb - Icelandic/Norwegian whalers, Dwarves
Sothryos - tropical Africa
Summer Islanders - tropical island like Jamaica
Yi Ti and Leng - China

>only five cities in an entire continent, with two being no more than glorified towns
>the other continents had tons of massive cities with millions of inhabitants

I never understood this.

like medieval europe compared to medieval china and persia.

>>only five cities in an entire continent, with two being no more than glorified towns

There are a lot more than five, those five are just the most enormous. White Harbor is stated to have 50-60k iirc, making it the size of medieval London. It is the smallest. Gulltown is larger. King's Landing has half a million people making it bigger than any city in Europe for most of the medieval period. Lannisport and Oldtown are each supposed to be around half its size.

it tries to be a hardcore realistic series but instead its just filled with cliche evil knights, retarded magic shit and obnoxious characters who should have died in the first book but are saved by deus ex machina (ie: daenerys)

also the map looks fucking retarded, not to mention that westeros is just ireland on top of britian

>only five cities in an entire continent
>implying the Roman Empire wasn't exactly the same

What subject?

What was their tax policy?

Seriously, it's shitty fantasy that tries to be oh-so-realistic by smashing together some real life events GRRM read about. Tolkein is one thousand times better simply because he understood fantasy doesn't mean creating account registers for fictional countries with dragons.

>only five cities in an entire continent
>implying the Roman Empire wasn't exactly the same

Here, user, educate yourself:

pelagios.org/maps/greco-roman/

This series (both books and the show) wants to be medieval-esque without actual understanding of what Medieval age was, why was it like that and how it happened.

So it's an equivalent of a Disneyland opening a medieval theme park. GRRM however wanted it to be more "dark" and "brute", so we ended up with a Disneyland theme park filled with rapists and mass murderers.

my thought is why the fuck don't they have gun-powder. they are mid-15th century or ore advanced in most other ways, yet no gun -powder.

da fuck.

that Italy did it a lot better...

Gunpowder was sort of a mistake in our own timeline. We only got it because Chinese emperors were obsessed with immortality.

You know I'd take it all back, take it all back, take it all back
I'd take it all back just to have you
You know I'd take it all back, take it all back, take it all back
I'd take it all back just to have you

>We only got it because Chinese emperors were obsessed with immortality.
Please explain

Depends what do you mean with "history related".

This enters in the real of medievism not of medievale history, it's an interpretati on of culture, not an hystorical analysis

>implying potassium nitrate wasn't used for food preservation long before gunpowder

doesn't take a genius to spill some pickling juice onto charcoal and figure out it lights up real good. regardless the real reason is

"muh melee weapons r cooler!!!"

China had a long-standing tradition of alchemy. There are famous examples of Chinese emperors consuming, say, mercury, thinking it was an elixir for immortality.

Sometime in the tenth century, Chinese alchemists created a mixture of sulfur, charcoal, and saltpeter; yet another failed attempt at an elixir for immortality. They discovered that lighting this mixture on fire caused combustion, i.e. an immediate release of energy, and that this combustible material could eject projectiles from compacted spaces once it was lit.

That's how gunpowder was born.

If that's the case, then why were melee weapons used for the vast majority of human history?

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JUST

Retarded timeline. Dynasties and countries that go back 10 000 years is a silly idea

You guys have convinced me that ASOIAF is trash. What are some good Veeky Forumscore fantasy books?

I enjoyed this series as a nipper
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlequin_(novel)

Why read fantasy? The fathers of modern western fantasy were Robert E. Howard and J.R.R. Tolkien. Howard admitted he wanted to write historical fiction but was too uneducated to write accurate books and his rural Texas libraries were pretty shit when it comes to resources. Tolkien on the other hand wrote his books to give a vessel to his lingustic autism.

Actual history will ALWAYS be better than fantasy shit.

It's shit.
It perpetuates long disproven myths about the so called """""dark ages"""""" despite supposedly being based on the war of the roses, which happened in the late medieval period, long after the actual dark ages had happened.
It's completely unrealistic down the the very premise (a soceity with less people than medival Europes lowest point on a continent the size out South America fighting over control of the entire continent when they can't even make steel? Top kek), demonstates absolutely no understanding of anything medival, esspecially combat while normalfags thinks it's awesome ("dude dis you see the battle of the bastards? So cool and realistic." I shit you not, people have said this to me), and overall is less realistic than fucking warhammer 40k.

And then the fat hack has the gall to shit on tolkein while GRRM is even worse in every single way? Fuck GOT, and fuck normalfags for letting it get popular.

And most of all, fuck the fact that Rome died for it.

I agree that GoT sucks but according to Matt Easton some of the battles and fights are good for a tv show. For example he says he enjoyed the battle of the bastards even though he pointed numerous inaccuracies. You're right though that normalfags think this was exactly how medieval battles were fought. Also are you implying that Tolkien is shit?

Boats are difficutl and time-consuming to build, and the crows have a fleet.

To be fair it's implied that the dates for ancient events are wildly inaccurate, but you're not wrong.

Yup. When reading, Sam comments that most of their history was written by meisters long after they supposedly happened.
And at the end of the day it's meant to be fantasy, not alt-reality

>this is what got fanboys actually believe
You can make a boat out of a log, even niggers are able to build one. Why does that fat fuck try to create a realistic world when he fails so miserably?

go sail the ocean in a log faggot

ITT: complaining that a fantasy novel isn't a history textbook instead

>For example he says he enjoyed the battle of the bastards even though he pointed numerous inaccuracies.
And I have no problem with people enjoying it, the issue comes when people tout it as accurate when it is most certainly not
>Also are you implying that Tolkien is shit?
not at all. GRRM shit on tolkien because he thinks tolkein is too unrealistic and doesn't talk about Aragorn's talk policy enough, which pisses me off because GRRM is a complete hack who is better than tolkein in absolutely no way except the ability to eat an entire cake in a couple of seconds.

It wouldn't be a problem if Martin didn't go about touting how accurate and realistic his books are, when it's some of the most inaccurate shit ever written. At least LoTR, 40k, star wars, the wheel of time etc. all have the excuse that it's high fantasy.
And then normalfags go about thinking that GoT depicts the medival period accurately, leading more people to think that it was a grimdark period where everybody raped and died.

If marting didn't say his books were accurate there would be no issue, but he does, and so I'll call him a liar, a charlatan and a fat fuck

Not him, but ironically, Tolkien is probably enormously more realistic, even with elves and dragons and whatnot, because his book isn't fictional history, but fictional mythology. You're not being told "what happened", you're being given an English translation of however many translations of what a trio of hobbits wrote and were edited by Gondorian scribes, along with a bit of Bilbo's poetry.

It has a meta-narrative that's pretty true to document transmission of the middle ages.

As someone who hasn't read past the second book, I can't quite name specific examples of ASoIaF inaccuracy. Can someone fill a fellow Veeky Forumstorian in on GRRM's fuckupery?

Though, ASoIaF is technically high fantasy. It has dragons and elves and magic and shit. If you want to see actual low fantasy, see Conan the Barbarian, the First Law trilogy, and Mount and Blade.

the obvious answer to this is that it is a medieval style fantasy book based on a vague understanding of historical themes

Take what I'm about to say with a grain of salt: I have read the books, but it was a long time ago, and I've never enjoyed any of them to re-read them.

1) GRRM has no sense of scale.

Westeros is roughly the size of North America. If trouble of some sort broke out in Dorne, it would take a bit less than 100 days for a rider averaging 31 miles an hour to get the news to the northern reaches of the country, assuming he stops for nothing and can consistently achieve a speed that modern endurance riders can get. A country that large can't even really manage itself in a feudal style of development. It's just too big, crises would come and go before the "central authority" even found out about them.

You have things like The Wall. It's 700 feet high, in the books. For comparison, the Washington Monument is about 555 feet high, meaning The Wall is quite a bit higher still. In the books, when the wildlings attack the Wall, men from the bottom can shoot and kill sentries on the parapets with stone to bronze age bows that wouldn't be able to even shoot that high, let alone with enough force to hit and kill an armored man. (Dubious in the best of conditions)

1/2

2/3 (didn't quite slice it evenly)
2) GRRM has no sense of sociology.

We're told that Westeros a kingdom with a feudal warrior aristocracy much akin to a stereotypical medieval Europe. Its military is a bunch of heavily trained and armed knights, supplemented by an enormous horde of peasants whose main job seems to be to die in a disgusting manner, and the occasional mercenary that gets hired. A lot of this has issues, his "knights" are equipped in full plate armor that would only come into being in the 15th century, but weapons technology doesn't seem to have made it that far, swords are still enormously popular as main weapons. The "Peasant mob" isn't 100% myth, as it happened on occasion, but it didn't happen very often at all, and was often a sign of desperation, like that second army the Bohemians raised against the Mongols after their real army got curbstomped.

As for mercenaries, in real life, most mercs in medieval Europe were drawn from semi-professional levies who served out a campaign, and decided to go into business for themselves. They weren't usually the landed knights, who had estates to go back to, or the peasants, who rarely actually existed and wouldn't want to fight anyway. They were usually made out of the more prosperous non-nobility, or the more impoverished noblemen, who had gear and probably some sort of military training, and who are pretty absent from ASOIF.

3/3/

Then we have just the interactions between people, which is at least to me, by far the worst part of GRRM's worldbuilding. Feudal systems depended enormously on personal trust. You set up Baron so and so to manage this area, and you need people who can pay their taxes/rents on time, support you if you get into trouble, and won't backstab you the second it's advantageous for him. Treachery in ASOIF is ongoing and endemic, and seems to have been as long as anyone can remember. Bizarrely, their culture does not reflect this; people still by and large believe tales of chivalry, very few precautions are actually taken against treachery, and nobody seems to distrust treachers on a large scale; even the worst Jaime Lannister gets is how everyone calls him mean names. A world which is that brutal and bloody and dangerous wouldn't have people like Sansa Stark, the eldest daughter of a major house who is appallingly naive. But GRRM wants to get his cackles in about watching people get sold out, so unless you're one of the betrayers, you're a dumb dunce who falls for it.

The biggest problem in the political system isn't that it broke down and lead to the drama of the books, it's that it didn't break down a hundred years ago. A world this based on short term personal interest would never have the Targaryens maintaining power after their dragons died and their magic failed (about 150 years before the books started), when their individual bannermen can pull together larger armies than they can.

Pretty much none of his world actually 'works'. It's purely a vehicle to have the latest backstab of the week.

What strange criticism.
Just because the nobles that the story focuses on often betray each other doesn't mean that literally everyone does that.
You extrapolate the behavior of the main characters and the political elite upon the whole society which seems weird as hell.
And it would be useless to describe the lives and deeds of some "good" and lawful, but inconsequential characters that aren't involved in any intrigue, just to explain the obvious fact that such people exist.
This is the kind of thing that is assumed to exists in the background and usually doesn't necessitate explanation.

Tell that the vikings

It's a pulp, VERY pulp version of the middle ages. Nothing but rape, war, oppression, filth, hunger, rape, intrigues, murder, rape, sadism, diseases, rape, slavery, rape and more rape.

Literally fucking Voltaire wouldn't write a better demonizing piece about le dark ages.

Thanks, user.

The wall is seriously 700 feet high? I realize the long walls of Athens were much taller, but they also weren't stretched across an entire continent.

Most of the betrayals in this show involve houses that are basically rival dukes and even past kings. Most of the feudal structure under them are much more stable.

this, but it's basically a poor deconstruction of the fantasy literature genre and should be understood as such. I think that Martin's comments on Tolkien (baby orcs, tax policy, etc.) reflect elements of how he actually evaluates the genre, and honestly believes ASOIAF to be *more* realistic. The deconstructive elements are the continual usage of red herrings in the plot, that are ultimately averted in favor of a seemingly less expected direction