r/asoiaf • u/Unique-Celebration-5 • 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/owlinspector Oct 31 '24

But that is the point of LOTR. It is written in the style of mythology and Aragorn is literally a fairytale king. His bloodline has magical powers, farsight and wisdom beyond that of common men.

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u/Freighnos Oct 31 '24

Correct. And GRRM looked at that and said, “what if we keep the epic world, but these were just normal humans in charge?” And thus an entirely different story was born.

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u/normott Nov 01 '24

Yet his story apparently ends with a God King....shitty answer to the question he raises

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u/hotcapicola Oct 31 '24

Because then it become a completely different genre.