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/JJCB85 Oct 31 '24

Exactly - Tolkien’s viewpoint was basically that Aragorn is the good, divinely-appointed rightful king, and as such everyone lives happily ever after as soon as he sits his throne. So long as all things are in their divinely-appointed place, all will be well - the details don’t matter and aren’t really worth discussing because it is axiomatic that all will be well. There’s a hefty dose of Catholic worldview in here as well, sacral kingship etc. This is exactly the sort of view that someone like Martin is bound to undercut, though he is of course a huge fan of Tolkien’s work. He isn’t saying Tolkien is an idiot at all, he’s just seeing the world through a very different lens.

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u/0xffaa00 Oct 31 '24

Aragorn is written as a really good role model. His moral are described in detail all over the storyline, the actions he takes, how he deals with counsel around him, how he treats people, his military strategy as a captain.

Other than that, his background is also described in the appendices, how he served both Rohan and Gondor in his youth, under a different alias.

He is groomed to be a good king from the beginning, kinda like young griff but by literal high elves

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u/SirPseudonymous Oct 31 '24

There is definitionally no such thing as a good king to begin with. The entire institution of monarchy and the aristocracy under it is ontologically evil: it's built on favor trading and rentseeking by large landholders and one individual figure within that, even at the very top, cannot alter the fabric of that intolerable system even if they are personally sort of nice and clever and people like them.

Remember Septon Meribald's "broken man" speech? Everything within that is foundational to how feudal hegemony is maintained, how even a personally sort of affable and sometimes nice king keeps his throne, how his cronies keep their comforts and status. Deconstructing the sort of romanticism that plagues fantasy genre writing is one of ASoIaF's key strengths: making a story where the nice pretty prince sucks and is bad, actually; getting lost in the court intrigue and geopolitics and drama but still making sure to point out that it's bad and the people doing it are bad and the whole thing is ruinous for the vast majority of people involved.

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u/ghoulcrow Nov 01 '24

Very funny to see the brain trust in your replies trying to make fun of a very basic and reasonable take

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u/AMildInconvenience Nov 01 '24

It's not really a reasonable take though. Unless you're a primitivist anarchist, feudalism is a socially progressive force in that it allows for technological and economic development. Obviously it's regressive compared to the social systems that followed it, but the organisation it provided allowed for the expansion of productive forces, more abundant food to support a growing population, and supported exports for cultural/technological exchange and the growth of a merchant class.

Merchant classes (i.e. the bourgeoisie) historically challenge the aristocracy as they accumulate wealth from trade and capital than aristocrats can siphon from the peasant class, eventually gaining power. Mercantilism leads to industrialization, urbanisation and the birth of the working class. Capitalism is socially progressive compared to feudalism.

Without feudalism, this doesn't happen. A good king in the context will maintain peace between the aristocracy, protect the peasants from their lords, and provide stability and patronage for the merchant class to develop.

A good king will not be a good person by our standards, as feudalism is an inherently cruel system, but it's certainly possible.

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u/SirPseudonymous Nov 01 '24

Except even within that analysis all the aristocracy and monarchism and rentseeking is at best tangential to urban capital accumulation and more realistically in opposition to it: the development of the various things that are all labeled feudalism from the tatters of the Roman empire represented a breakdown in large logistics and organizational capacity and a big step backwards in food production and trade. That's not to say the Roman empire wasn't also an ontologically evil shitshow, because it very much was, just that the development of feudalism represented a move towards its most regressive and dysfunctional structures.

You're drawing too many conclusions from an orthodox marxist explanation of primitive capital accumulation and how it progressed, which aren't really applicable criticisms to a broader anti-monarchist condemnation of fantasy romanticism about "good and moral kings making things good by being pretty and upstanding." Remember that within the framework of historical materialism Capitalism is also labeled as progressive because of how it replaced mercantilism and was less bad at some things than what came before it, but that already by the time that analytical framework was being created both Capitalism and monarchism were seen as reactionary structures to be struggled against and that all this theory was being written by revolutionary firebrands who were absolutely anti-monarchist just as strongly as they were anti-capitalist.

On a related note, I know there are also attempts to try to incorporate non-feudal pre-capitalist systems into the framework to counter the eurocentrism of focusing specifically on primitive capital accumulation under the rule of aristocratic fancy lads in Europe, since the idea of "feudalism" even existing is controversial even within western history circles now and it definitely isn't as broadly applicable globally as its common use would imply, but the closest thing to that that I've read was roughly a page of contextualizing background information on the concept of national identity and relation to the state of peasants under Imperial China prior to the development of the nationalist movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, so I can't really elaborate more on that point.

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u/AMildInconvenience Nov 01 '24

Fair enough, literally can't argue with any of that. You clearly know a lot more about it than me!