Why don't the Wildlings travel down the sea or over the mountains and avoid the Wall entirely? In fact...

Why don't the Wildlings travel down the sea or over the mountains and avoid the Wall entirely? In fact, it seems like they could just sail over to Skagos and take over. Also, why does anyone even tolerate the Iron Islands' bullshit?

They literally do that all the time when the season is right for raiding. That’s why in the books, Bear Island, Skagos, and the North clans all experience, and talk about said raids. That’s why out of all the 7(8) kingdoms, only the North actually acknowledges these dick bags. As to why they don’t invade Skagos? Because the last time a Wildling King did that, his entire army was crushed and hanged upon the wall. (Memory may be fuzzy here)

>Iron Islands
Honestly don’t know. I guess they give tax and man the fleets of the Iron Throne, but I imagine in-universe everyone knows that would be retarded. Plus the Reach/Arbor provide the bulk of the fleet anyhow.

Gurm can't into coherent world building.

The wildlings would need an awful lot of supplies to pull off anything like that at scale. And they would still be in the desolate north and surrounded by hostile factions

But they do, user.

Promise the Wildlings settlement rights as an allied nation (not subjects) on the Iron Islands if they take that shit over and refrain from raiding. They are then provided with boats.

Would this work?

>Also, why does anyone even tolerate the Iron Islands' bullshit?
Mostly they haven’t. Read the worldbook. The Iron Island’s entire cultural history is them rising with the help of a more progressive or ambitious and intelligent leader before going full pirate again because of their stupid religion leading the few naval forces in Westeros to devastate the Iron Fleet has enough that they take so long to rebuild that it it’s easy to forget them entirely until the process restarts in your great-grandchildren’s time when you’re long dead.
To whit; Balon Greyjoy’s dad was a fierce warrior and a progressive, intelligent leader alike and then his son pissed it all away and Robert and friend helped put their fleet away for almost 19 years straight. The only thing stopping it from happening again is the current lack of central authority in the Seven Kingdoms to organize it.

You’d need to have the boats ready, the wildlife would need to be capable of sailing, they’d need to be sophisticated enough to beat the decent mail and steel of the Ironborn, and finally you’d somehow need to find enough wildlings that met ALL of the above requirements.

The Ironborn are unironically a culture of orc-people basically, meaning that fighting them is a pain in the ass since it’s practically all they ever do anyway.

How resistant are they to smallpox?

About as resistant as the people carrying the smallpox to them would be, which has it’s own set of problems of course.
Here’s the thing about genocide; it’s actually really, really fucking hard to pull off as soon as your population gets to sustainable numbers. It took the US over a century or so of concentrated effort with early modern technology to reduce the numbers of Natives to what they are now.
The Iron Islands aren’t exactly small (there’s plenty of real-world nation’s smaller then they are given the Westeros=South America size comparison), and according to the worldbook those are just the biggest islands and there’s close to two dozen smaller ones. Genuinely eradicating all life in the Iron Islands would take centuries and centuries with the roughly late 13th century technology level the Seven Kingdoms have, and they’d suffer pretty bad losses doing it because unlike many genocided parties in history the Ironborn are actually pretty well armed and have a fairly high number of experienced fighting men compared to the rest of the Seven Kingdoms on average.

The reason that so many Westerosi lords just wanted Aegon I to scour the islands clean of life with dragonfire is because that was the ONLY way they could ever see them managing to pull it off.

Aegon made a mistake not melting the iron islands. And fucking with dorne.

Realistically speaking the process would have taken a very long time even with Egg the C’s support (the dragons were not as invincible as the show would have you believe), especially since literally one generation after he died everything he built very nearly fell apart and thus he wouldn’t have had the manpower to really do what he would need to do.

And to be fair, he learned his lesson with Dorne pretty much right away after the first disastrous attempt at occupation and after they murdered (or possibly kidnapped) his sister when he sent her to negotiate and realized fighting Dorne just wasn’t worth the bullshit, especially since the Dornish spend an equal amount of time internally feuding and thus can’t prove a nationwide threat most days.

Well then what WOULD have been the correct solution?

What he did was as close to a solution as you can ever get to that problem; beat them so bad they can’t present a unified threat, then make them pay taxes.
Here’s the thing about solutions; all of them are intrinsically temporary. Things fall apart over time. It’s literally part of the natural order of the universe, for things to fall apart given a long enough period of time. Politically speaking this time is always much shorter for human beings because we’re basically just short-lived stupid chimp people who are perpetually locked in dumb tribalthought circles. You don’t solve a problem and go live happily ever after. You just do the best you can to the problem with what you have and hope it sticks long enough for your kids and grandkids to enjoy the fruits of your labor and hope they don’t fuck up what you did too badly after you pass.

That’s a recurring thing in the setting so far, that just like in life there are no “happy endings” and the story kept going even after the five or six times all of Westeros was saved by a good and decent king. All that really changes is that it stops becoming YOUR story and ends up being someone else’s instead.

Given Martin’s professed love for bittersweet endings, my guess is that the novel series will end like;
>”And this one problem was fixed but not permanently and while nothing really ended forever and there were later problems fixing this one problem was a pretty good start and is as good a result as anyone can ever really get anyway.”

Well, assuming he doesn’t die of a heart attack first the fat bastard.

>Why don't the Wildlings travel down the sea or over the mountains and avoid the Wall entirely
They do. Wildlings raid the south all the time.

>why does anyone even tolerate the Iron Islands' bullshit
They don't. Which is why Balon was so mad all the time, and wanted to make the Iron Islands great again.

This handsome motherfucker is one of the only people in the series, who managed to do nothing wrong both in the books and the show.
Say something nice about him!

If by tolerate, OP is asking why doesn't the throne send the entire royal navy against the Greyjoy fleet, defeat them and settle their shitty lands with migrants who are more loyal to the throne, all to avoid Greyjoy raidfuckery, it's because (a) a naval total war would weaken the throne to the point that a Braavosi (or Babylonian) naval incursion becomes a new threat and (b) after a few generations, those more loyal settlers will come to know how shitty their new land is and will come to the natural conclusion that reaving is the only lot left to advance their lives, resulting in the same Greyjoy raidfuckery, only different surnames. Maybe turn into full-fledged slavetraders instead of the relatively milder practice of taking thralls and saltmates. The throne chooses the devil they already know.

He poisoned the locusts

I thought it was the Shavepate or perhaps one of the Yunkish.

No, he didn't. Why would he do it? What could he possibly accomplish by that?

>Showfags in charge of trying to criticise the source material

“Those bearers were slaves before I came. I made them free. Yet that palanquin is no lighter.” “True,” said Hizdahr, “but those men are paid to bear its weight now. Before you came, that man who fell would have an overseer standing over him, stripping the skin off his back with a whip. Instead he is being given aid.”
It was true. A Brazen Beast in a boar mask had offered the litter bearer a skin of water. “I suppose I must be thankful for small victories,” the queen said.

>Wildings travelling by sea down?
Not enough industry to make a proper invasion fleet. The best that can be managed is small raids. The larger raids come from climbing over the wall.

>Iron Islands
Under the Dragon Riding Targaryeans, the Ironborn did not raid Westeros, unless it was under orders as part of a civil war (Dance of the Dragons). Then, they never really had a chance to exploit vulnerability, till after Roberts Rebellion under the most Old Way King they have ever had in Balon.

>It took the US over a century or so of concentrated effort with early modern technology to reduce the numbers of Natives to what they are now.

ie. more than when we got here

>why does anyone tolerate the Iron Islands' bullshit.

The last two times they've done any bullshit on a noteworthy scale the King on the Iron Throne 1) fucking wrecked their shit with a royal army or 2) was dead and thus unable to wreck their shit, but absolutely would have if he was around. The Iron Islands are like Littlefinger: they're only successful because everyone around them has more immediate concerns.

Dorne would've been fucking toast if Martin hadn't just bullshitted a reason that they somehow couldn't be taken over.

>Oh! You burned all of our population centers and control all the places we can actually live in but its okay since we can apparently survive in a totally inhospitable desert!

Dorne is the fucking special snowflake of Westeros.

>sent her to negotiate

Yes, Danaerys, flying down on a dragon to burn anyone who disagrees with you is "negotiating"

>ending

It sokay to dream, I guess.

Even if he did, attempting to murder Danaerys still counts as the right thing.

Westeros ITSELF is the special snowflake of Westeros, and pretty much every major part of it’s at least major aspect that makes zero fucking sense unless you choose to suspend your disbelief.
This was Rhaenys Targaryen, who was famed for her diplomatic approach to things and actually requested to go alone to find some political compromise rather then just go to war over Aegon’s best friend (and likely his half-brother) Orys Baratheon loosing his hand like Aegon’s first impulse actually was.

Also the dragons only work that effectively alone and unsupported if you’re a showatching fucktard. They actually gave fairly detailed tactics in how the dragons were used and they were not automatic “I win” buttons by any means for a number of reasons.
Yeah, I’m not counting on it either honestly.

>They actually gave fairly detailed tactics in how the dragons were used and they were not automatic “I win” buttons by any means for a number of reasons.
I still don’t understand exactly how that works though. What weapons does anyone have that could kill a dragon?

In the books, Dorne built a giant ballista and hit a dragon with it.

A siege ballista, but you have to be real lucky and hit the dragon in the voonerables.

Not many, though also very few dragons in Westerosi history have reached the size of Belarion the Black Dread.
The real issue is the vulnerability of the rider himself or herself; even if a cloud of arrows or crossbow bolts hurts the dragon the way wasp stings do to us (though a lucky shot into it’s eye would cripple it basically) the likelihood of the rider taking a hit in a mass of archer fire is actually pretty good, and that one hit would both likely kill them (and given their individual importance killing them would have significant long-term political consequences) and render the dragon completely useless for the rest of the war since most of the time it’s one rider for one dragon, period, which is a why every Targ who rode one only ever rode one on a regular basis.

Of the two whom we know tried to ride dragons that WEREN’T originally theirs, one of them died horribly and the other had a notably hard time actually controlling his dragon and never brought it into actual combat.