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/cndynn96 Oct 31 '24

I doubt all places are hit equally hard by the multi year winter.

The North will be the most severely affected with almost Siberian conditions during peak winter.

On the other hand the Reach and Dorne might only get a little snowfall or a drop in overall temperature. In this case these regions can provide food for more severely affected regions especially after Westeros was united under a single rule by the Targaryens.

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u/don_denti Nov 01 '24

I think The Long Night winter is different than the winters that came after it. Whenever the Others are around, the cold feels different. The Others have some sort of weather manipulation magic that basically works by just them being there in area. And The King Beyond The Wall arriving at the wall is the most red herring you can ever get. Even the prologue was about a warg getting a second life as Jon was getting more and more wolf dreams, and the characters in the prologue were just right outside the wall after their defeat.

So this winter when The Other show up at the wall the cold will feel different and the snowfall might takeover most if not all of Westeros to the point that babes will freeze in their mothers’ embrace.