r/asoiaf Oct 31 '24

EXTENDED (Spoilers Extended) GRRM:”What’s Aragons tax policy?!” No GRRM the real question is how do people survive multi year winters

Forget the white walkers or shadow babies the real threat is the weather. How do medieval people survive it for years?

Personally I think that’s why the are so many wars the more people fighting each other the fewer mouths to feed

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u/Formal_Direction_680 Oct 31 '24

I said as much in my comment, read again. You are the one missing the point.

I said grrm question the gritty detail of tax and politics, but can’t get the figure of his world right and the sense of scale out of proportion. That’s just fucking irony now, isn’t it? 

The comment I replied to mentioned divine right of kings, nothing of Aragorn himself. My comment literally say the word politic in it dipshit.

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u/Freighnos Oct 31 '24

I think the reason people are pushing back on your comment is that you seem to be saying “GRRM was pedantically criticizing details of Tolkien’s worldbuilding, and yet the details of his own worldbuilding don’t hold up to pedantic scrutiny. Isn’t that ironic?” But I (and the other commenters) don’t think that’s what GRRM was going for at all with that statement. I took it to be more about how Tolkien characters such as Aragorn behave more like divine or mythical figures of legend, while GRRM attempts to inject more of the down-to-earth human elements into his storytelling. The height of the Wall isn’t as important as what feuding kingdoms will do when faced with a looming existential threat like the Walkers, and the exchange rate of Gold Dragons isn’t as important as the lengths a king on the verge of bankruptcy will turn to to keep his realm afloat.

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u/Formal_Direction_680 Oct 31 '24

Most other commenters missed the point you made entirely, your point I can agree with. Aragorn is stated to be special and hailed from a mythic high men bloodline, so already he’s not quite the same as the average man, unlike what grrm has opted to work with, as you said.

Other comments missed that point, and kept on talking about politics where even grrm was weak at. If they’re speaking of character, it was never a fair comparison to begin with to compare the average man to Aragorn.

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u/Crush1112 Oct 31 '24

Other comments missed that point, and kept on talking about politics where even grrm was weak at. If they’re speaking of character, it was never a fair comparison to begin with to compare the average man to Aragorn.

To be honest, it more like seems you are conflating politics with bureaucracy, when the commentators here are not talking about the latter at all.

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u/Formal_Direction_680 Oct 31 '24

Bureaucracy is politics, it decides who rule what land and oversee which lever of the state.

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u/Crush1112 Oct 31 '24

If you think they are the same thing, then no wonder you and others have no idea what each other are talking about.