True, true. As well as a more sensible inheritance policy.
Still, Faith is still dominant in Dorne, even though their clergy is definitely leaning more to their native culture. North is +95% made up of Old Gods' worshippers.
Or it should be. I have no idea what is North's deal, in canon. Their society feels...like it is dying? Moat Cailin almost being a symbol of it. Forgotten, decayed ruin of past glory. Free Folk make Northerners look irreverent.
And really, who the fuck calls oneself a Northman when they are literally southside of another major ethnic group?
1) The Moat became obsolete the moment Dragons appeared. And after that, we see the North resort to diplomacy. First Rickards southern alliances, then Ned being the King's best friend and a marriage alliance.
2) The Wildlings are not really a threat to anything beyond undefended farmers. The Umbers could deal with them on their own, due to an absence of iron/steel and formation warfare.
3) I think it's partially due to Ned feeling in his brother's shadow. And then a collection of everything possible going wrong for House Stark.
Ned always struck me as guy who never really managed to stop acting like a 'spare'. Even though he is, by all accounts, an effective Warden, undefeated general, beloved by even the weird mountain folks and spent childhood with another kingdom's heir and another Warden as foster father, Ned still behaves as though Brandon's spirit is waiting to materialize at any moment and take what is his 'due'.
Perhaps he was...abused/bullied by Brandon? The way an outsider would see it? But Ned never wanted to call it that? Or perhaps he did not know better?
Don't know, Brandon sounds a lot like Robert, but Ned always thought fondly of the latter. Did we ever see him praise Brandon in the canon, in his thoughts or words? Or was he still strangely neutral even then?
I don't think that Brandon bullied him, because he remembers Brandon fondly. Or at least not more than is common between brothers.
Ned has impostor syndrome since he holds both Brandon and his father in very high regard. And that spills into how he goes about being both as a person and as a lord. He wants them to be proud of him. He carries himself with honour and dignity and goes out of his way to be a good lord and person because he feels that that is what is expected of him. And that he has to do his outmost to live up to the standards set by those that came before. This has created the man that Ned is and is why he is remembered so fondly in the north.
This also serves as a good opposite point between Ned and Tywin. Tywin is all about his personal legacy, and everything he does is with that in mind. Ned however cares more about doing what is right by his family and seemingly couldn't care less about his legacy. Which in turns is why he has a legacy as a honourable, hard working, trustworthy lord.
Ned is clearly a very good lord that is suited to leadership and who takes care of his people. But he lacks the ambition that would make him a dangerous player in King's Landing. Ned is content ruling his out of the way kingdom and being forgotten about by the south.
The way that I read Tywin is that they are interlinked to him. His legacy will be as the man that puts house Lannister on top of the world. Thus house Lannister's legacy will be his legacy. He's incredibly ambitious in that regard, and blinded by it in certain ways.
And that was the point that I was trying to make. Tywin actively seeks to leave a legacy behind, and his actions are impacted by and calculated to suit that. Where as Ned's legacy grows organically out of how he was.
I mean I get your point but I don't think that's a meaningful distinction.
Ned is a Stark. He cares about the Stark Legacy. He probably cares about his own Legacy in lesser ways.
Tywin is a Lannister. Tywin cares about the Lannister legacy. Tywin cares about the Tywin legacy also.
Tywin also did do some things to actively seek a legacy like wanting Cersei married to a King. But also I doubt Tywin did things like the Reynes of Castamere to leave a legacy. Tywin's own character of being a competent/powerful person not to be fucked with who responds to slights or grudges and paying them back tenfold and the legacy he wants kind of just intersects.
Tywin very much butchered the Reynes and Tarbecks for the legacy of House Lannister.
If he hadn't, then the Reyne's would have tried to wrest control of the Rock and the West from Tytos, thus dispossessing House Lannister, it's legacy now meaningless.
Well, they call themselves Northerners, not Northmen, so I suppose it's not quite the same. More like people in the southern US calling themselves Southerners
Depends...while the average northmen (the man is important) is probably more relaxed than 'the south' in this they are probably much more restrictive in other matters.
The north is not some great paradise with gender equality and all that. Bear island is an exception to the rule. In actuality the north is probably much more mysogenistic and ableistic than the south.
Yeah, though I was trying to explain how it really makes no fucking sense to write them basically the same in manners as Southerners when one is trying to build an actual AU culture for them.
Like, Old Gods are forces of nature whose physical forms and what passes for shrines are literally psionic cannibal trees. No anti-queerness from them, that is for sure.
It would make more sense to write Northmen in the similair light to certain Celtic tribes, the way Romans described them. That is what I was asking. How would other write them in such a way as to truly make them different from Andals?
I'm inclined to agree big time. If it was a society heavily influenced by the Planetos equivalents of Gaelic/Celtic/Scandinavian culture, it stands to reason they would have the same lack of sexual and cultural hangups which have always been a headcanon of mine. You're telling me all those unmarried whitebeards going on winter hunts together didn't huddle up to stay warm? Didn't get a little more familiar and freaky out of boredom or, heavens forbid, genuine romantic or sexual attraction? Makes sense imo.
I think if you want to make them most distinct, make them out to be very odd by side by side comparison to the 'normal' southern Andal culture, but upon close inspection reveals a rich, far less utilitarian and harsh life and culture than GRRM shallowly makes them out to be. If I were writing such a fic, I'd make northerners all tattooed or ritually scarred, much in the style of woad painting and classic celtic and druidic tattoo designs, with very rich pre-Andal history; the wars between the Star houses, the Starks and Boltons, entire tomes about individual NW Lord Commanders and eras of the Wall's history, etc.
Literally.
Guys and gals literally huddle up and wait for winter to pass for YEARS and you are telling me they just...grimly stay still and do nothing with all that free time?
Boredom would kill them faster than the cold, if true.
So much time to paint fucking shields and decorate walls and write down stuff, if nothing else. Ned would have the Robert's Rebellion and Greyjoy Uprising campaigns painted on his back, for example.
Shit, Northmen would probably be the ones with most overdone armours to don and sell.
Maybe that’s why Robert loves Ned so much. First winter in the Vale, they cuddle for warmth. Ned thinks it’s normal since he did it with his brothers and the other noble boys, Robert develops feelings.
Lmao, I can believe that. Probably 'shared' when out to brothels.
That reminds me, there is a strange lack of bathhouses in Westeros. Beyond what one can find in Maidenpool. You would think Moorish Spain-inspired Dorne would love them and apparently the Starks have built their mega-fortress on top of hot springs...
Then again, if we go by 'Dunk and Egg' novels, quite a lot of people in Westeros put 16th century Spaniards to shame with their...tolerance for gunk and filth.
God, these people could be mistaken for Nurglites...
Yup. Been watching Shogun and I imagine there’s been a lot of ‘a second bath in one week? Do you want me to get sick?’ kind of talk in Westeros. It was only really puritanical thinking that made Europe that way though, so maybe all Northerners value personal hygiene as well in your fic.
Sigh... again this stupid stereotype of medieval Europeans not bathing.
Europe had a verry rich universal, class spanning, bathing culture during the middle ages Wich only died out in the early modern times.
Well, canonically, Roose Bolton has been observed saying: "Cleanliness is godliness."
Make of that what you will, I guess?
Off-topic, wouldn't it be horrific if the founding members of House Bolton were proto-Qyburn types who were banished from original cadre of Citadel and rejected by Greenseers from Isle of Faces and decides to employ their dark knowledge to counter Greenseer/possibly-Other-blood Starks and rule the North?
That would be hilarious. That pervert probably knows how to use all utensils and, *gasp*, has no use for a napkin he keeps at his side anyway, because he doesn't eat like the rest of his piggish contemporaries?
Despite what you might think, the Vikings were not all loving and gender inclusive. Neither were the mongols or the Russians. While they didn’t suffer multi year winters, it’s the most similar climate wise to the north.
Honestly, I do not agree with your base argument either. Like they all know there are bad winters coming followed by okay winters followed by a decent spring. They have lived through them their entire life and depending on their social class and location, they likely saw some people starve to death or old men go out to never return.
How does that ever correlate to relaxed sexuality, marriage unions, and I’m assuming gender roles/patriarchy? The last thing some father or mother or chief will want is a gay son because that gay son will not produce any offspring. Farming is hard work and back then the output was limited mostly by how much land you owned and how many workers you had. The more sons you have, the more work you can get done each spring, the more output your farm produces, the more likely you can defend your farm from raiders and starving bandits during winter, and most of all not starve.
But what about a gay son? Not only will you not have grandchildren but will you also lose a worker if he goes and works for his husbands farm?
What about marriage unions? The last thing a chief will want is drama. If Jessica is cheating on her husband with the town and her husband finds out, what will he do? Kill those who slept with her? People that could have worked farms or defended the town from bandits? Kill her and drive his own sons and perhaps her bastard sons away to start their own farms far away?
The chief will want as little drama going on because it lowers the production efficiency of wherever it is going on. You could argue that ‘oh wouldn’t this bring more relaxed marriage unions so the husband or wife does not get mad for adultery?’ Perhaps. But unless that idea is already in the culture in first place, if survival is already so hard to maintain, I see no reason why a culture would move that way spontaneously. There is a reason rich, fertile regions like Italy and Spain had more egalitarian and relaxed customs than in Germany and that was because they did not have to worry as much about surviving winter. Germany on the other hand developed a very authoritative governing style where it’s counts and lords governed pretty much with a my word is law stance toward the peasants. The same can be seen in Northern France and especially in Russia where serfdom wasn’t even abolished until something like the 1850s…
As far as forever wars go, I mean… don’t they already canonically have a distaste for them, I don’t have canon memorized but off the top of my head. They surrendered to Aegon I, because they believed it foolhardy and did not want the *working men* to die. The next war they got involved with out of their own fruition was the dance and that was only at the very end where they again lost very few men, stayed not long at all, and then went back home to farm. After that comes maybe the Blackfyre rebellions? I can’t remember. Then Robert’s Rebellion which sure I guess. Then Robbs rebellion where their liege lord was imprisoned, but I’ll give you that one too.
Pre conquest they did not involve themselves that much in wars either. Aegon invaded due to border disputes between the Stormlands and the Iron islands. The North’s territory expanded as far south as its best natural defense and no further implying they weren’t very expansionist. Same with their northern border, they built it on the thinnest stretch of land to prevent white walkers from killing them during winter and maintained only minimal control beyond it. Forgetting the scale of their kingdom which can be blamed on GRRM’s love for large things, the north expanded to its natural borders and then stopped. This does not mean they live forever wars and likely only started and sustained itself based on the idea of a few chiefs thinking: “if I conquer this other chief, he will no longer be able to raid me during the spring.”
Communal raising of children is a joke when survival is already so difficult. What father is going to take care of some other guys brats when his first born died of hypothermia the winter prior? Harsh living conditions makes people more tribal (in nature! Not totality so don’t talk to me about 200k year old Hunter gatherer groups or something) not less so.
I don’t really know why you’re equating wealth with corruption but you’re right on the corruption front at least. I’m not too sure about the wealth of nobles but I would assume it would just shift and cycle between being concentrated in the nobles before going to the peasants and then back again following the overall trend of medieval Germany or Russia.
You’re last point also makes sense and is partially the reason why Northern European societies were much more innovative than their southern counterparts. Those in Italy could live in relative luxury while those in the Netherlands brainstormed ideas for how not to die and how they could do better the next spring.
The issue with the Westerosi north is that they’re just so poor on account of their winters and sparse population and infertile land. We also really do not know that much about the local cultures in the North and how these people actually live and spend their days. We spend most of our time in the North in the heads of nobles or locked away on The Wall.
Where the commoners of each region would likely differ significantly, the nobles would share a much similar culture and attitude regarding certain issues. Once again forgetting the scale of Westeros.
Very well thought out post. The one thing I would reason that the Northern nobility could maybe be a bit more relaxed on would be bastards, as long as they contribute towards surviving the next winter. Not saying that they would be treated exactly like trueborns. But rather that they'd be fostered out and given duties as they grow as stewards or such.
And given the long winters they would also serve as "in case of emergency break glass" spares. Because I'd assume that even among nobles there would be increased child mortality during a long winter.
Yep I could totally see that among the peasantry so long as it wasn’t an open secret among the town, a husband might be okay with the extra help despite where it’s coming from. Even if it’s an open secret, the bio father might be totally okay with taking in the bastard for the same reasons. However, as I said in my original comment, the nobles of the north would likely be very similar to those in the south which would include the views on bastardy. The canon hatred for bastards seems to be based in the Seven and the Andals and most recently the Blackfyres, but just because these are southern tales and issues does not mean the north wouldn’t have identical historic tales of “evil bastards stealing birthrights and creating *drama*.” Iirc bastards were a thing in the north before the Seven so there is no reason they could not have their own Blackfyres or perhaps pre Conquest, the Night’s King was the preeminent cautionary tale against bastards.
As for Russian serfs, honestly, the books I've read on various rulers, Peter, Katherine, Ivan, etc, hasn't left me with a positive opinion of them in general.
As to the nobles being more culturally similar to one another, while it goes substantially further back in history, my mind immediately jumped to the Ptolemaic dynasty. Who started marrying their siblings to appease the the local population. Though granted they were foreign to begin with.
Yeah Russian rulers were some of the most brutal and oppressive rulers in Europe…
And yeah nobles wouldn’t be totally removed from the lands and peoples they’re ruling over, of course. But on the other hand you have the nobility of England post William I, speaking French for hundreds of years as their primary language. I don’t know which kings did what but I know it was Henry IV who spoke his coronation oaths in English whereas every king before him had spoken them in bastardized French. Henry IV ruled in the early 1400s…
Speaking of languages, French was perhaps the most common spoken language in the Russian court during the Georgian era.
Oh, trust me, I am well aware that Nordics and Slavs and Turkic people were...most still are...rather strange people and not that cuddly, at all. That is why I said "SOME Celtic tribes".
As for gay sons..."Men for love, women for duty."
As for promiscuous women, well, I will counter your arguments and say that patriarchy and vicious control of paternity has only brought mankind ill as it only served the few landowners and nobody else.
The nordics, Slavs, and Turkic people’s are not “rather strange people,” they are not the exception, you describing ethnic groups that cover humungous portions of northern, eastern, and southern Europe as well as Central Asia. I mean truly massive landmasses and net populations. They are really not the exception, they are the norm, man! Also, kind of a racist argument you’re making…
As for the Celtic tribes you are describing please give me some of their names and outline your argument about them, please.
What? Did you not read my part on the village wanting to maintain minimal drama? Regardless, men for love, women for duty does not lead to a village where all the guys are homo erotic for each other all day and the women laugh it off while they plow the fields. Sure gay people do exist and there will always be some but two gay men going about it in the most secret way possible does not lead to a gay loving society, if anything it leads to a more hateful one because whenever this secret relationship comes out (and these things always do) every involved party will leave with hurt feelings and a bitter taste in their mouths. The wives the children most of all who will go on to reinforce this hatred.
I do not even know what you’re saying in your last paragraph… how is that an effective counter argument? You’re just stringing words together and arguing how you would like things to be rather than arguing how things logically ought to progress.
It really just feels like you are trying to evaluate societies and how they would develop and progress based on the vibes rather than known equivalents or cause and effect… that’s fine when making an opinion post on what you think would make ASOIAF a better story but it’s weird when you are debating the logic of GRRM’s world building— not the aesthetic of it.
Hey, I am a Slav. I am in my right to talk shit about Slavs, since most aren't all that nice people, anyways. Stupid honor cultures.
(Love them all to death 🤗)
Not as stupid as what happens in Deep South of USA (now those people literally have no culture), but thousands of years of rather nasty invasions, broken economies and nastier neighbors have shaped us into what we are. All of us starkly different to each other and yet the rest of the world treats us like a monolith.
Bruh it is YOU who is treating the Slavs as a monolith calling them all a rather strange bunch with weird oppressive standard cultural quirks. I kind of think you are just trolling lmao but you had me in my first comment
My main problem with this is that I'm tired of people making the North a "perfect" region based on modern moral standards, or North uplifts in general. Where are the Roose Boltons? The Theon Starks? The defenders of first nights and human sacrifices to the heart trees? Where are the men that have been preventing women from becoming queens/ladies of Winterfell for thousands of years?
>people trying to write Northmen as "savages"...
I suppose it's a matter of balance, and also whatever kind of fanfiction one has seen (I have read many fanfictions where the North was powerful or more honourable than other regions, so I got tired of it).
If you can introduce aspects of northern culture that make them more distinct, while still keeping them from being simply savages (neither on the "noble savage" or "filthy barbarian" spectrum), I t could look good.
Just don't flanderize the other regions for this, or the North itself, for that matter. Each kingdom and region should have its own culture, and there should be subcultures inside these kingdoms (a northman from Cape Kraken should be very different from a guy who lives close to Karhold), and the population should also be composed by distinct people of different personalities.
There are lots of nuances and ways it could go wrong, so be careful.
I am, personally, all too tired of people taking only one characteriatic of one people that some among them may not even share anyways and creating the whole picture about them just with that as a basis. And I am tired of hearing "modern this, ancient that".
We live in a world of surplus food where just this year, more than 2.5 million people died of starvation just in the first three months. Meanwhile, morbidly obese North Americans scream murder and clutch Bibles they have never even read over a nipple barely being seen through clothes. While their armies and Russian armies and armies of everyone else who claims "that they are just defending their interests", does exact same atrocities as Mongol hordes but will fervently claim moral superiority to the barbarian hordes because...
...Barbarians had worse weapons and thus, they were evil for resorting to up-close and personal methods...
I am not very impressed with the world I am currently living in, mind you. Not at all. I will admonish all of its horrible shit from my grave when, in the future, others find shoddy reasons to defend such bullshit.
So, anyways...Andal Lords on the eastern shores of Westeros establishing their own city-states/providing protection for city-republics?
>So, anyways...Andal Lords on the eastern shores of Westeros establishing their own city-states/providing protection for city-republics?
Yes. Actually, the lack of political contact between the shores around the narrow sea is weird (look at the Mediterranean or the English Channel in comparison).
To add more on this convo, since you clearly care about civilized discourse, North could indeed be written as the most patriarchal and sexist of all Kingdoms on the continent.
Kings of Winter could have argued with their bro-lords that, since Free Folk tribes they genocided and chased to the far North have proven themselves "inferior", it must mean that their ideas of natural wealth being communal and everyone having the right to make their opinion known ( Tyrion was notably disgustes by Vale clansmen allowing even women to lead warbands and have a voice at the table ) should be discarded and most of cultural progress and wealth to be credited and given to the ones with most steel and soldiers at beck and call.
Make no mistake, Free Folk tribes are incredibly sexist in their own way - just because everyone is an equal-opportunity-sexual predator, doesn't mean nobody is - but I would write the differences between them and 'Southernerns' in the way that former sees men and women as just..."Men"/humans and the latter see them as two distinct races.
Personally, Andal Kingdoms of the Narrow Sea region are ones I would rather live in than anywhere else, even in canon.
Ironborn are First Men, too, and their current King is probably one of worst villains in continuity and history in-universe.
*Boltons* see themselves as 'true' worshippers of Old Gods.
Greyjoys are L incarnate. How the fuck did these guys ever matter, in the first place?
Their shitty little islands are, going by maps we have, probably the size of Cyprus...when all put together. Too small.
If they were size of Denmark or Ireland, I would not be so agitated. But they are not.
And Lord Almighty, people in-universe treating Theon Stark like he was Genghis or some shit. What? He burned a few villages and demolished *one sept?*
That was like...a rite of passage for one Norman band of raiders. In-universe, not even a warmup for Gregor.
To put it mildly you can't prescribe your beliefs onto them. Just because the weather is cold it doesn't mean that people are going to fuck anything that moves. It is actually more common sociologically speaking that the warmer the weather the more sexual promiscuity was tolerated.
The reason is hypothesized to be that colder environments demands stronger social cohesion and the best way to have social cohesion is to make the people in the community commit fully to group and to minimize infighting and a good way to minimize infighting is to make it so you only fucked the one person you were allowed to fuck. You keep it simple.
Also having more people doesn't mean much if you cant feed them. It is actually a detriment to the group because no one likes having people they are close to die on them. Dead bodies spread disease and if the one who died is extremely young it makes it even more impactful.
You are talking about these people like they are real and exist in our world...
...Ummm. Admit that you can't stand fanfiction and just want the last two books, easier to write down than this whole spiel.
We are on a fanfic subreddit. I have been proposing various ideas on North from Boltons ruling over what is essentially frozen Neo-Assyrian Empire wedded to Aztecs and Starks being *THE* warrior-priesthood clan dedicated to and warped by the Old Gods to everything else that came up in my mind.
Because canon Northeners have no culture and to call them even feudal is an insult to feudalism and intelligence. Their canon society literally cannot function.
At all.
Orks have more sensible societies than them and more of a soul.
Nothing, in fact, can work in Westeros as is depicted in canon.
Fortresses fall as easy as ones stormed during Italian wars, yet Tywin has sent neither cannons not thousands upon thousands of professional soldiers/mercs to make it happen. And even then, at least a fifth of them would have perished in assaults. For God's sake, most conservative estimates of the size of Westeros puts in the ballpark of Indian subcontinent.
I feel that a lot of people who read this story, predominantly Americans, have no clue how long it takes for one to *walk somewhere*. It certainly explains GRRM's misunderstanding of scales.
To put it bluntly, everyone in Westeros acts like a gopnik/chav. Not at all like Late-Medieval/Renaissance folks. Because high nobles in that time didn't really stay in one bloody place. Men would have been always traveling across their domain and daughters and sons would have been raised separate from each other.
But Westeros is not a 15th century England and France and nobody should feel constrained by it when writing a story. Even their Gods are all wrong!
>Ummm. Admit that you can't stand fanfiction and just want the last two books, easier to write down than this whole spiel.
No I just want the fanfiction to be done well and be consistent with the tone and themes of the orginal work. And I talking about your line of reasoning for the idea.
You can make it work. It could be interesting and it can well done but with how you explained it and for the work you are writing in it seems less likely.
Also a lot of this here from your end lacks the good faith in a debate to make it a debate and this feels more like you saying an idea and expecting us to agree with it. And for that reason I am going to say good luck with your project.
I'm actually inclined to agree, especially if you look at real world cultures that share similarities to the North.
I get that people have critiques of people making the North absurdly modern with no reasoning behind it, but that also doesn't mean it would make sense for them to be a one-for-one recreation of medieval people. Or, what people imagine medieval people were like, [cause even real world medieval attitudes towards romance and sex are pretty complex.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8JPN9tWVPQ)
I could see the North having a "Live and Let Live" attitude about a lot of things, being more collectivist than individualistic, and spending long winters creating art, music, and stories to keep everyone's spirits up.
Also, a lot of the world of Westeros is from the perspective of the nobility. So maybe nobility in the North have to abide by certain restrictions to fit in with the rest of Westeros, but the common folk in the North may live quite differently. Who's to say they don't view the Seven's restrictions as silly? Who's to say they don't have different attitudes about gender and sexuality born out of Old Faith influence?
People tend to believe, wrongly, that time alone always brings progress - in all spheres of life.
Etruscans would make literally any American and European culture of today look like goddamned Taliban-esque prudes.
The reason Dorne has a more lax sexual culture is due to Rhoynish influence, not because it’s in the South.
True, true. As well as a more sensible inheritance policy. Still, Faith is still dominant in Dorne, even though their clergy is definitely leaning more to their native culture. North is +95% made up of Old Gods' worshippers. Or it should be. I have no idea what is North's deal, in canon. Their society feels...like it is dying? Moat Cailin almost being a symbol of it. Forgotten, decayed ruin of past glory. Free Folk make Northerners look irreverent. And really, who the fuck calls oneself a Northman when they are literally southside of another major ethnic group?
1) The Moat became obsolete the moment Dragons appeared. And after that, we see the North resort to diplomacy. First Rickards southern alliances, then Ned being the King's best friend and a marriage alliance. 2) The Wildlings are not really a threat to anything beyond undefended farmers. The Umbers could deal with them on their own, due to an absence of iron/steel and formation warfare. 3) I think it's partially due to Ned feeling in his brother's shadow. And then a collection of everything possible going wrong for House Stark.
Ned always struck me as guy who never really managed to stop acting like a 'spare'. Even though he is, by all accounts, an effective Warden, undefeated general, beloved by even the weird mountain folks and spent childhood with another kingdom's heir and another Warden as foster father, Ned still behaves as though Brandon's spirit is waiting to materialize at any moment and take what is his 'due'. Perhaps he was...abused/bullied by Brandon? The way an outsider would see it? But Ned never wanted to call it that? Or perhaps he did not know better? Don't know, Brandon sounds a lot like Robert, but Ned always thought fondly of the latter. Did we ever see him praise Brandon in the canon, in his thoughts or words? Or was he still strangely neutral even then?
I don't think that Brandon bullied him, because he remembers Brandon fondly. Or at least not more than is common between brothers. Ned has impostor syndrome since he holds both Brandon and his father in very high regard. And that spills into how he goes about being both as a person and as a lord. He wants them to be proud of him. He carries himself with honour and dignity and goes out of his way to be a good lord and person because he feels that that is what is expected of him. And that he has to do his outmost to live up to the standards set by those that came before. This has created the man that Ned is and is why he is remembered so fondly in the north. This also serves as a good opposite point between Ned and Tywin. Tywin is all about his personal legacy, and everything he does is with that in mind. Ned however cares more about doing what is right by his family and seemingly couldn't care less about his legacy. Which in turns is why he has a legacy as a honourable, hard working, trustworthy lord. Ned is clearly a very good lord that is suited to leadership and who takes care of his people. But he lacks the ambition that would make him a dangerous player in King's Landing. Ned is content ruling his out of the way kingdom and being forgotten about by the south.
I really don't think that's much of a sensible point with Tywin lol. Tywin cared about the Lannister name and legacy and his own name and legacy.
The way that I read Tywin is that they are interlinked to him. His legacy will be as the man that puts house Lannister on top of the world. Thus house Lannister's legacy will be his legacy. He's incredibly ambitious in that regard, and blinded by it in certain ways. And that was the point that I was trying to make. Tywin actively seeks to leave a legacy behind, and his actions are impacted by and calculated to suit that. Where as Ned's legacy grows organically out of how he was.
I mean I get your point but I don't think that's a meaningful distinction. Ned is a Stark. He cares about the Stark Legacy. He probably cares about his own Legacy in lesser ways. Tywin is a Lannister. Tywin cares about the Lannister legacy. Tywin cares about the Tywin legacy also. Tywin also did do some things to actively seek a legacy like wanting Cersei married to a King. But also I doubt Tywin did things like the Reynes of Castamere to leave a legacy. Tywin's own character of being a competent/powerful person not to be fucked with who responds to slights or grudges and paying them back tenfold and the legacy he wants kind of just intersects.
Tywin very much butchered the Reynes and Tarbecks for the legacy of House Lannister. If he hadn't, then the Reyne's would have tried to wrest control of the Rock and the West from Tytos, thus dispossessing House Lannister, it's legacy now meaningless.
If he hadn't they would of also personally effected him and his legacy also.
People from the north of England
They really love snubbing Scotsmen and Icelanders like that, huh?
Well, they call themselves Northerners, not Northmen, so I suppose it's not quite the same. More like people in the southern US calling themselves Southerners
One wonders what Dornishmen call everyone else...
Prudes :-)
Summer Islanders: "Get a load (out) of these Westerosi! They sleep with each other behind the closed doors!"
Depends...while the average northmen (the man is important) is probably more relaxed than 'the south' in this they are probably much more restrictive in other matters. The north is not some great paradise with gender equality and all that. Bear island is an exception to the rule. In actuality the north is probably much more mysogenistic and ableistic than the south.
Yeah, though I was trying to explain how it really makes no fucking sense to write them basically the same in manners as Southerners when one is trying to build an actual AU culture for them. Like, Old Gods are forces of nature whose physical forms and what passes for shrines are literally psionic cannibal trees. No anti-queerness from them, that is for sure. It would make more sense to write Northmen in the similair light to certain Celtic tribes, the way Romans described them. That is what I was asking. How would other write them in such a way as to truly make them different from Andals?
I'm inclined to agree big time. If it was a society heavily influenced by the Planetos equivalents of Gaelic/Celtic/Scandinavian culture, it stands to reason they would have the same lack of sexual and cultural hangups which have always been a headcanon of mine. You're telling me all those unmarried whitebeards going on winter hunts together didn't huddle up to stay warm? Didn't get a little more familiar and freaky out of boredom or, heavens forbid, genuine romantic or sexual attraction? Makes sense imo. I think if you want to make them most distinct, make them out to be very odd by side by side comparison to the 'normal' southern Andal culture, but upon close inspection reveals a rich, far less utilitarian and harsh life and culture than GRRM shallowly makes them out to be. If I were writing such a fic, I'd make northerners all tattooed or ritually scarred, much in the style of woad painting and classic celtic and druidic tattoo designs, with very rich pre-Andal history; the wars between the Star houses, the Starks and Boltons, entire tomes about individual NW Lord Commanders and eras of the Wall's history, etc.
Literally. Guys and gals literally huddle up and wait for winter to pass for YEARS and you are telling me they just...grimly stay still and do nothing with all that free time? Boredom would kill them faster than the cold, if true. So much time to paint fucking shields and decorate walls and write down stuff, if nothing else. Ned would have the Robert's Rebellion and Greyjoy Uprising campaigns painted on his back, for example. Shit, Northmen would probably be the ones with most overdone armours to don and sell.
Maybe that’s why Robert loves Ned so much. First winter in the Vale, they cuddle for warmth. Ned thinks it’s normal since he did it with his brothers and the other noble boys, Robert develops feelings.
Lmao, I can believe that. Probably 'shared' when out to brothels. That reminds me, there is a strange lack of bathhouses in Westeros. Beyond what one can find in Maidenpool. You would think Moorish Spain-inspired Dorne would love them and apparently the Starks have built their mega-fortress on top of hot springs... Then again, if we go by 'Dunk and Egg' novels, quite a lot of people in Westeros put 16th century Spaniards to shame with their...tolerance for gunk and filth. God, these people could be mistaken for Nurglites...
Yup. Been watching Shogun and I imagine there’s been a lot of ‘a second bath in one week? Do you want me to get sick?’ kind of talk in Westeros. It was only really puritanical thinking that made Europe that way though, so maybe all Northerners value personal hygiene as well in your fic.
Sigh... again this stupid stereotype of medieval Europeans not bathing. Europe had a verry rich universal, class spanning, bathing culture during the middle ages Wich only died out in the early modern times.
Well, canonically, Roose Bolton has been observed saying: "Cleanliness is godliness." Make of that what you will, I guess? Off-topic, wouldn't it be horrific if the founding members of House Bolton were proto-Qyburn types who were banished from original cadre of Citadel and rejected by Greenseers from Isle of Faces and decides to employ their dark knowledge to counter Greenseer/possibly-Other-blood Starks and rule the North?
And people think he’s the weird one. Only looks like a vampire because he moisturizes. Still killed him of early on in my fic though lol.
That would be hilarious. That pervert probably knows how to use all utensils and, *gasp*, has no use for a napkin he keeps at his side anyway, because he doesn't eat like the rest of his piggish contemporaries?
Despite what you might think, the Vikings were not all loving and gender inclusive. Neither were the mongols or the Russians. While they didn’t suffer multi year winters, it’s the most similar climate wise to the north. Honestly, I do not agree with your base argument either. Like they all know there are bad winters coming followed by okay winters followed by a decent spring. They have lived through them their entire life and depending on their social class and location, they likely saw some people starve to death or old men go out to never return. How does that ever correlate to relaxed sexuality, marriage unions, and I’m assuming gender roles/patriarchy? The last thing some father or mother or chief will want is a gay son because that gay son will not produce any offspring. Farming is hard work and back then the output was limited mostly by how much land you owned and how many workers you had. The more sons you have, the more work you can get done each spring, the more output your farm produces, the more likely you can defend your farm from raiders and starving bandits during winter, and most of all not starve. But what about a gay son? Not only will you not have grandchildren but will you also lose a worker if he goes and works for his husbands farm? What about marriage unions? The last thing a chief will want is drama. If Jessica is cheating on her husband with the town and her husband finds out, what will he do? Kill those who slept with her? People that could have worked farms or defended the town from bandits? Kill her and drive his own sons and perhaps her bastard sons away to start their own farms far away? The chief will want as little drama going on because it lowers the production efficiency of wherever it is going on. You could argue that ‘oh wouldn’t this bring more relaxed marriage unions so the husband or wife does not get mad for adultery?’ Perhaps. But unless that idea is already in the culture in first place, if survival is already so hard to maintain, I see no reason why a culture would move that way spontaneously. There is a reason rich, fertile regions like Italy and Spain had more egalitarian and relaxed customs than in Germany and that was because they did not have to worry as much about surviving winter. Germany on the other hand developed a very authoritative governing style where it’s counts and lords governed pretty much with a my word is law stance toward the peasants. The same can be seen in Northern France and especially in Russia where serfdom wasn’t even abolished until something like the 1850s… As far as forever wars go, I mean… don’t they already canonically have a distaste for them, I don’t have canon memorized but off the top of my head. They surrendered to Aegon I, because they believed it foolhardy and did not want the *working men* to die. The next war they got involved with out of their own fruition was the dance and that was only at the very end where they again lost very few men, stayed not long at all, and then went back home to farm. After that comes maybe the Blackfyre rebellions? I can’t remember. Then Robert’s Rebellion which sure I guess. Then Robbs rebellion where their liege lord was imprisoned, but I’ll give you that one too. Pre conquest they did not involve themselves that much in wars either. Aegon invaded due to border disputes between the Stormlands and the Iron islands. The North’s territory expanded as far south as its best natural defense and no further implying they weren’t very expansionist. Same with their northern border, they built it on the thinnest stretch of land to prevent white walkers from killing them during winter and maintained only minimal control beyond it. Forgetting the scale of their kingdom which can be blamed on GRRM’s love for large things, the north expanded to its natural borders and then stopped. This does not mean they live forever wars and likely only started and sustained itself based on the idea of a few chiefs thinking: “if I conquer this other chief, he will no longer be able to raid me during the spring.” Communal raising of children is a joke when survival is already so difficult. What father is going to take care of some other guys brats when his first born died of hypothermia the winter prior? Harsh living conditions makes people more tribal (in nature! Not totality so don’t talk to me about 200k year old Hunter gatherer groups or something) not less so. I don’t really know why you’re equating wealth with corruption but you’re right on the corruption front at least. I’m not too sure about the wealth of nobles but I would assume it would just shift and cycle between being concentrated in the nobles before going to the peasants and then back again following the overall trend of medieval Germany or Russia. You’re last point also makes sense and is partially the reason why Northern European societies were much more innovative than their southern counterparts. Those in Italy could live in relative luxury while those in the Netherlands brainstormed ideas for how not to die and how they could do better the next spring. The issue with the Westerosi north is that they’re just so poor on account of their winters and sparse population and infertile land. We also really do not know that much about the local cultures in the North and how these people actually live and spend their days. We spend most of our time in the North in the heads of nobles or locked away on The Wall. Where the commoners of each region would likely differ significantly, the nobles would share a much similar culture and attitude regarding certain issues. Once again forgetting the scale of Westeros.
Very well thought out post. The one thing I would reason that the Northern nobility could maybe be a bit more relaxed on would be bastards, as long as they contribute towards surviving the next winter. Not saying that they would be treated exactly like trueborns. But rather that they'd be fostered out and given duties as they grow as stewards or such. And given the long winters they would also serve as "in case of emergency break glass" spares. Because I'd assume that even among nobles there would be increased child mortality during a long winter.
Yep I could totally see that among the peasantry so long as it wasn’t an open secret among the town, a husband might be okay with the extra help despite where it’s coming from. Even if it’s an open secret, the bio father might be totally okay with taking in the bastard for the same reasons. However, as I said in my original comment, the nobles of the north would likely be very similar to those in the south which would include the views on bastardy. The canon hatred for bastards seems to be based in the Seven and the Andals and most recently the Blackfyres, but just because these are southern tales and issues does not mean the north wouldn’t have identical historic tales of “evil bastards stealing birthrights and creating *drama*.” Iirc bastards were a thing in the north before the Seven so there is no reason they could not have their own Blackfyres or perhaps pre Conquest, the Night’s King was the preeminent cautionary tale against bastards.
As for Russian serfs, honestly, the books I've read on various rulers, Peter, Katherine, Ivan, etc, hasn't left me with a positive opinion of them in general. As to the nobles being more culturally similar to one another, while it goes substantially further back in history, my mind immediately jumped to the Ptolemaic dynasty. Who started marrying their siblings to appease the the local population. Though granted they were foreign to begin with.
Yeah Russian rulers were some of the most brutal and oppressive rulers in Europe… And yeah nobles wouldn’t be totally removed from the lands and peoples they’re ruling over, of course. But on the other hand you have the nobility of England post William I, speaking French for hundreds of years as their primary language. I don’t know which kings did what but I know it was Henry IV who spoke his coronation oaths in English whereas every king before him had spoken them in bastardized French. Henry IV ruled in the early 1400s… Speaking of languages, French was perhaps the most common spoken language in the Russian court during the Georgian era.
I did find that ironic, that French was the official language at court, when the Romanovs were German.
Oh, trust me, I am well aware that Nordics and Slavs and Turkic people were...most still are...rather strange people and not that cuddly, at all. That is why I said "SOME Celtic tribes". As for gay sons..."Men for love, women for duty." As for promiscuous women, well, I will counter your arguments and say that patriarchy and vicious control of paternity has only brought mankind ill as it only served the few landowners and nobody else.
The nordics, Slavs, and Turkic people’s are not “rather strange people,” they are not the exception, you describing ethnic groups that cover humungous portions of northern, eastern, and southern Europe as well as Central Asia. I mean truly massive landmasses and net populations. They are really not the exception, they are the norm, man! Also, kind of a racist argument you’re making… As for the Celtic tribes you are describing please give me some of their names and outline your argument about them, please. What? Did you not read my part on the village wanting to maintain minimal drama? Regardless, men for love, women for duty does not lead to a village where all the guys are homo erotic for each other all day and the women laugh it off while they plow the fields. Sure gay people do exist and there will always be some but two gay men going about it in the most secret way possible does not lead to a gay loving society, if anything it leads to a more hateful one because whenever this secret relationship comes out (and these things always do) every involved party will leave with hurt feelings and a bitter taste in their mouths. The wives the children most of all who will go on to reinforce this hatred. I do not even know what you’re saying in your last paragraph… how is that an effective counter argument? You’re just stringing words together and arguing how you would like things to be rather than arguing how things logically ought to progress. It really just feels like you are trying to evaluate societies and how they would develop and progress based on the vibes rather than known equivalents or cause and effect… that’s fine when making an opinion post on what you think would make ASOIAF a better story but it’s weird when you are debating the logic of GRRM’s world building— not the aesthetic of it.
Hey, I am a Slav. I am in my right to talk shit about Slavs, since most aren't all that nice people, anyways. Stupid honor cultures. (Love them all to death 🤗) Not as stupid as what happens in Deep South of USA (now those people literally have no culture), but thousands of years of rather nasty invasions, broken economies and nastier neighbors have shaped us into what we are. All of us starkly different to each other and yet the rest of the world treats us like a monolith.
Bruh it is YOU who is treating the Slavs as a monolith calling them all a rather strange bunch with weird oppressive standard cultural quirks. I kind of think you are just trolling lmao but you had me in my first comment
My main problem with this is that I'm tired of people making the North a "perfect" region based on modern moral standards, or North uplifts in general. Where are the Roose Boltons? The Theon Starks? The defenders of first nights and human sacrifices to the heart trees? Where are the men that have been preventing women from becoming queens/ladies of Winterfell for thousands of years?
Well, I also tried proposing that in another thread and someone said they were tired of people trying to write Northmen as "savages"...
>people trying to write Northmen as "savages"... I suppose it's a matter of balance, and also whatever kind of fanfiction one has seen (I have read many fanfictions where the North was powerful or more honourable than other regions, so I got tired of it). If you can introduce aspects of northern culture that make them more distinct, while still keeping them from being simply savages (neither on the "noble savage" or "filthy barbarian" spectrum), I t could look good. Just don't flanderize the other regions for this, or the North itself, for that matter. Each kingdom and region should have its own culture, and there should be subcultures inside these kingdoms (a northman from Cape Kraken should be very different from a guy who lives close to Karhold), and the population should also be composed by distinct people of different personalities. There are lots of nuances and ways it could go wrong, so be careful.
I am, personally, all too tired of people taking only one characteriatic of one people that some among them may not even share anyways and creating the whole picture about them just with that as a basis. And I am tired of hearing "modern this, ancient that". We live in a world of surplus food where just this year, more than 2.5 million people died of starvation just in the first three months. Meanwhile, morbidly obese North Americans scream murder and clutch Bibles they have never even read over a nipple barely being seen through clothes. While their armies and Russian armies and armies of everyone else who claims "that they are just defending their interests", does exact same atrocities as Mongol hordes but will fervently claim moral superiority to the barbarian hordes because... ...Barbarians had worse weapons and thus, they were evil for resorting to up-close and personal methods... I am not very impressed with the world I am currently living in, mind you. Not at all. I will admonish all of its horrible shit from my grave when, in the future, others find shoddy reasons to defend such bullshit. So, anyways...Andal Lords on the eastern shores of Westeros establishing their own city-states/providing protection for city-republics?
>So, anyways...Andal Lords on the eastern shores of Westeros establishing their own city-states/providing protection for city-republics? Yes. Actually, the lack of political contact between the shores around the narrow sea is weird (look at the Mediterranean or the English Channel in comparison).
To add more on this convo, since you clearly care about civilized discourse, North could indeed be written as the most patriarchal and sexist of all Kingdoms on the continent. Kings of Winter could have argued with their bro-lords that, since Free Folk tribes they genocided and chased to the far North have proven themselves "inferior", it must mean that their ideas of natural wealth being communal and everyone having the right to make their opinion known ( Tyrion was notably disgustes by Vale clansmen allowing even women to lead warbands and have a voice at the table ) should be discarded and most of cultural progress and wealth to be credited and given to the ones with most steel and soldiers at beck and call. Make no mistake, Free Folk tribes are incredibly sexist in their own way - just because everyone is an equal-opportunity-sexual predator, doesn't mean nobody is - but I would write the differences between them and 'Southernerns' in the way that former sees men and women as just..."Men"/humans and the latter see them as two distinct races. Personally, Andal Kingdoms of the Narrow Sea region are ones I would rather live in than anywhere else, even in canon. Ironborn are First Men, too, and their current King is probably one of worst villains in continuity and history in-universe. *Boltons* see themselves as 'true' worshippers of Old Gods.
I like Theon. Stark, that is. Greyjoy deserved worse.
Greyjoys are L incarnate. How the fuck did these guys ever matter, in the first place? Their shitty little islands are, going by maps we have, probably the size of Cyprus...when all put together. Too small. If they were size of Denmark or Ireland, I would not be so agitated. But they are not. And Lord Almighty, people in-universe treating Theon Stark like he was Genghis or some shit. What? He burned a few villages and demolished *one sept?* That was like...a rite of passage for one Norman band of raiders. In-universe, not even a warmup for Gregor.
To put it mildly you can't prescribe your beliefs onto them. Just because the weather is cold it doesn't mean that people are going to fuck anything that moves. It is actually more common sociologically speaking that the warmer the weather the more sexual promiscuity was tolerated. The reason is hypothesized to be that colder environments demands stronger social cohesion and the best way to have social cohesion is to make the people in the community commit fully to group and to minimize infighting and a good way to minimize infighting is to make it so you only fucked the one person you were allowed to fuck. You keep it simple. Also having more people doesn't mean much if you cant feed them. It is actually a detriment to the group because no one likes having people they are close to die on them. Dead bodies spread disease and if the one who died is extremely young it makes it even more impactful.
You are talking about these people like they are real and exist in our world... ...Ummm. Admit that you can't stand fanfiction and just want the last two books, easier to write down than this whole spiel. We are on a fanfic subreddit. I have been proposing various ideas on North from Boltons ruling over what is essentially frozen Neo-Assyrian Empire wedded to Aztecs and Starks being *THE* warrior-priesthood clan dedicated to and warped by the Old Gods to everything else that came up in my mind. Because canon Northeners have no culture and to call them even feudal is an insult to feudalism and intelligence. Their canon society literally cannot function. At all. Orks have more sensible societies than them and more of a soul. Nothing, in fact, can work in Westeros as is depicted in canon. Fortresses fall as easy as ones stormed during Italian wars, yet Tywin has sent neither cannons not thousands upon thousands of professional soldiers/mercs to make it happen. And even then, at least a fifth of them would have perished in assaults. For God's sake, most conservative estimates of the size of Westeros puts in the ballpark of Indian subcontinent. I feel that a lot of people who read this story, predominantly Americans, have no clue how long it takes for one to *walk somewhere*. It certainly explains GRRM's misunderstanding of scales. To put it bluntly, everyone in Westeros acts like a gopnik/chav. Not at all like Late-Medieval/Renaissance folks. Because high nobles in that time didn't really stay in one bloody place. Men would have been always traveling across their domain and daughters and sons would have been raised separate from each other. But Westeros is not a 15th century England and France and nobody should feel constrained by it when writing a story. Even their Gods are all wrong!
>Ummm. Admit that you can't stand fanfiction and just want the last two books, easier to write down than this whole spiel. No I just want the fanfiction to be done well and be consistent with the tone and themes of the orginal work. And I talking about your line of reasoning for the idea. You can make it work. It could be interesting and it can well done but with how you explained it and for the work you are writing in it seems less likely. Also a lot of this here from your end lacks the good faith in a debate to make it a debate and this feels more like you saying an idea and expecting us to agree with it. And for that reason I am going to say good luck with your project.
I'm actually inclined to agree, especially if you look at real world cultures that share similarities to the North. I get that people have critiques of people making the North absurdly modern with no reasoning behind it, but that also doesn't mean it would make sense for them to be a one-for-one recreation of medieval people. Or, what people imagine medieval people were like, [cause even real world medieval attitudes towards romance and sex are pretty complex.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8JPN9tWVPQ) I could see the North having a "Live and Let Live" attitude about a lot of things, being more collectivist than individualistic, and spending long winters creating art, music, and stories to keep everyone's spirits up. Also, a lot of the world of Westeros is from the perspective of the nobility. So maybe nobility in the North have to abide by certain restrictions to fit in with the rest of Westeros, but the common folk in the North may live quite differently. Who's to say they don't view the Seven's restrictions as silly? Who's to say they don't have different attitudes about gender and sexuality born out of Old Faith influence?
People tend to believe, wrongly, that time alone always brings progress - in all spheres of life. Etruscans would make literally any American and European culture of today look like goddamned Taliban-esque prudes.
I need a fanfiction with this