 Time to barbecue a sacred cow. Okay, as the title might suggest, I have mixed thoughts on a song of ice and fire. And at some point I'll talk about all that, but right now I'm here to talk about the series' worldbuilding. It's actually head and shoulders above most of its competition. Of course, this is mostly because of the variety of disparate cultures that exist within it and the hazy mythical nature of the lands far beyond Westeros. Certain other aspects are... weaker. And I'm going to complain about them in exacting, long-winded detail, because that's just what I do. So beware of spoilers for the show up through Season 7 and the books up through A Dance With Dragons. Also, if there's any information where the books and the show contradict one another, I'll be sure to mention it. But before all that, let's have a word from this video's sponsor. Yeah, I have a sponsor now. It's pretty sweet. Writers, are you tired of having to put all of your ideas down on paper? 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And cleaning up that mess in your final draft takes a lot of time that you could better spend binge-watching my YouTube videos. So whether you're writing a short story about teenage vampires falling in love or a 300,000-word epic fantasy about knights and dragons, Campfire will help you make your story everything it's meant to be. Click on the link below for a free trial today. At a glance, the Iron Throne is a valuable prize worth fighting for. If you become king, you get to have absolute power over the largest country in the known world, right? Well, it's clear from both the events of the book and the history of the realm after Aegon's conquest that the King of the Seven Kingdoms doesn't have much actual power. When Aegon conquered Westeros, he had a pretty small army. He only took control because he had dragons. There was really no counter for them, so most of the kings and lords eventually just gave in and submitted in fear. According to The World of Ice and Fire, Aegon respected the different beliefs and customs that the Westerosi held, but that's pretty vague. Based on the way that things are run during the events of the story, it seems like every local lord has some level of autonomy with how he runs things, but they're all subservient to the king or to another lord. So rather than an absolute monarchy, the Seven Kingdoms operate in more of a feudal system. Feudalism can get really complicated, I'm looking at you, Holy Roman Empire, but the gist of it is that the king doesn't actually have that much power. Things are very decentralized. This... kind of makes sense? We might not know the exact size, but Westeros is really big. The biggest problem that large countries have, even in the modern day, are communication and transportation. The more time it takes to get news of a rebellion, disaster, or invasion to the king, the harder it is to properly respond. Historically, countries where communication was slow were more decentralized since it was almost impossible to hold local rulers under the power of the central authority. It was easier to just let them do their own thing for the most part. The problem is that Westeros actually has a really good communication network. Ravens sent from King's Landing can carry messages to just about every lord in the country in a matter of days, meaning they can mobilize support almost immediately. Their transportation is pretty fast by pre-modern standards, too. In A Feast for Crows, Sam travels from Eastwatch to Braavos in only 10 days, meaning that sailing can probably get you from one tip of Westeros to the other in only a month or two. And when you consider how much of the south is criss-crossed with rivers, you can get pretty far inland on a ship, too. Traveling shouldn't be too much of a deterrent to the king consolidating power. This means the Targaryens had the ability to direct the control all, or at least most, of the seven kingdoms once they conquered it. And considering that the 300-year history of their dynasty is basically just one failed rebellion after another, why didn't they? If I were the king, I'd probably strip the lords of some of their power after the third or fourth time one of them rebelled against me. Take away their ability to raise their own armies, or maybe have all their taxes go directly to me before I distribute it to them, or something. Even a halfway competent or power-hungry king would have done something to consolidate his power. Basically, the feudal system in this world is just kind of off. The groundwork is laid for a centralized state, and instead every province is halfway to independence before the plot even starts. It's no wonder things fell apart less than 20 years after the Targaryens were overthrown. And however the story ends, I'd have a hard time believing anyone could hold the kingdoms together for more than a couple of decades without radically changing the way they're governed. The size of this world is harder to pin down than you might think, which is a problem. The wall is said to be around 300 miles long, which means we can use it as a measuring stick to determine that the distance from the wall to Dorne is around 3,000 miles. However, George W.R. Martin has been wary about pinning down the exact size of landmasses on planetose, so when asked he just said that Westeros was about the size of South America, and Essos is about the size of Eurasia. He's specifically said that the maps in the books are not to scale because he doesn't want nerds with too much time on their hands to go through and point out mistakes he's made. Well, George, I got nothing else to do until the Winds of Winter comes out. And he eventually walked back on that anyway, so I'm now justified in overanalyzing things. But then there's also the fact that in the show Sam once said that the wall was 500 miles long. South America is shaped differently than Westeros though. It gets really fat in the middle, which means that in order for them to be the same size, Westeros would need to be a lot longer from north to south. And since South America is 4,700 miles long in its longest, that means Westeros would have to be a hell of a lot longer than 3,000 miles. And Essos has the same problem. If it's the same size as Eurasia, then it would need to be a lot wider than Eurasia. Of course, we've never seen the eastern edge of it, so that might very well be the case. The problem with that being that if planetose is the size of Earth, the edge would be right off the western coast of Westeros and... And it's also worth noting that we don't know how big the circumference of planetose is or where the equator is. So it's basically impossible to determine the size of the whole planet without making a couple of big assumptions. I'm far from the first person to examine this subject, and I've seen people do things like put the equator through Dorn or assume that Westeros hits the North Pole, and that's just not something that we can say with any degree of certainty. So we basically have the same problem here that we have with the Westlands in Wheel of Time, in that multiple sources give conflicting answers about land mass size. And while that does help to give the world a feeling of mystery and wonder, it also pulls it down a few notches when it comes to realism and depth. This leads to problems with population, too. How many people live in Westeros? I don't know. This article from Atlas of Ice and Fire claims that it's around 40 million people south of the wall, which seems reasonable at a glance. The problem is that this number is extrapolated from the size of armies, which is not very accurate. For starters, the size of armies given in both the show and the books is usually a rough estimate. And for another, the article specifically mentions that the armies could be anywhere from 0.5% to 2% of the total population, which means that, based on their estimates, the population is somewhere between 20 and 80 million. Normally, I would calculate based on land area, but there are too many inconsistencies for me to do that confidently. The population is probably close to the higher end of that estimate, since feudal societies aren't good at getting big percentages of their population into the fight, but that's more of a gut feeling than something based on factual evidence. Also, there's a scene in season 7 where John says that the North has less than a million people living in it. In the show, it's confirmed that Robb Stark took a 20,000 strong army south and left more men in the North to garrison it, so the full strength was probably around 25,000. If we're just basing estimates on Atlas of Ice and Fire's percentages, then the North's population should be somewhere between 1.25 million and 5 million. And that's still too low, honestly. Even when a bunch of the soldiers were killed, there were still enough fighting-age men left in the North to build up more armies for the Battle of Winterfell and the Battle of the Bastards. So while I can't say how big the population of Westeros or its component kingdoms is, I can say it's higher than what John claimed. Other places have the exact opposite problem, though. Namely, the Dothraki. The Dothraki are an enormous group of nomadic horsemen who live in a grassland in central Essos called the Dothraki Sea. There are an absolute shitload of them, and it seems like the only reason they haven't conquered their neighbors is that they're divided into dozens of different clans, called Calisars. The thing about nomadic people is that they can't sustain high population densities, so there can't be all that many Dothraki. Drogo's Calisar has 40,000 warriors in it, but that doesn't include those who can't fight. So that means women, children, and others. Altogether, I'd estimate that his Calisar was around 80 to 90,000 strong. That's a lot of people, a large city by medieval standards, and since they're nomadic pastoralists, it's difficult to get enough food to keep them from starving. According to Jura Mormons, the Dothraki diet is mostly horse meat, which makes sense since they've got a lot of horses and not much else. War horses were usually bigger than other types, up to 2,000 pounds, since they were bred to carry heavy loads like knights wearing armor. However, the Dothraki don't wear armor when they fight, so they probably use more medium-sized horses of around 1,200 pounds, meaning that they each have around 720 pounds of meat on them. So if we run some numbers based on that, then that means Drogo's Calisar alone would be eating between 279 and 315 horses every day. That's over 100,000 each year, and that's just not sustainable. And that's just from one calisar. There are plenty of others all over the Dothraki Sea. Now, it's made clear that this calisar is particularly large, so most of the others aren't eating quite as much, but the entire Dothraki horde must be going through millions of horses every year just to avoid starving, and that's not at all sustainable. The Dothraki do raid outside of their territory, and outsiders do trade with them, so they have access to more food, but not nearly enough. What I'm getting at is that there are too many Dothraki. Way too many. The rest of Planetos doesn't really have enough info to even give an estimate on size or population, so I'll just segue into part 3 now. I'll start this part off by saying that the Seven Kingdoms is kind of a stupid name. It's one kingdom under one king, and all the component kingdoms are run by lords. When Aegon the Conqueror united Westeros, he should have given his new land an actual name. The Targaryen Kingdom, or the Empire of Westeros, or something, anything that'll give off the impression that it's one country, not to mention that there are actually nine provinces which confuses things more. That out of the way. For those unfamiliar with the history of Westeros, let me give a quick rundown. Around 12,000 years before the main story takes place, the first humans came to Westeros, and they were cleverly called the First Men. They spoke a language cleverly called the Old Tongue, and later converted to worship deities cleverly called the Old Gods. You know, I'm starting to think that George W.R. Martin isn't great at coming up with names. The First Men set up dozens of tiny kingdoms all over Westeros and erected the wall around 8,000 years ago. Then, 6,000 years ago, a new ethnic group called the Andals came from Essos and they promptly took over most of the south. They brought with them the common tongue and the faith of the Seven that most modern Westerosi follow. The only area that remained mostly under the sway of the First Men was in the north and beyond the wall. And even then, there was so much influence from the Andals that the Old Tongue gradually died out. This was the time when the many kingdoms of the First Men started to consolidate into the Seven Kingdoms that we all know. And finally, around a thousand years ago, a group known as the Rhoynar came to Westeros, mostly landing in Dorn. But they were smaller in number, and so the majority of them assimilated into the local culture. Side note, this is why whoever sits the Iron Throne is called King of the Andals, the Rhoynar, and the First Men. Here's the thing about all of that. If the Seven Kingdoms were separate for thousands of years, they should have had some cultural and linguistic differences that are much more stark than we see. Dorn should have way more Rhoynar influence than it does, and all the kingdoms should have pretty distinct dialects at the very least. The East Coast should have more influence from the Valyrian-speaking lands across the sea since they would have had more contact with them. The North should have more influence from the Old Tongue, etc. Think about it. How much of a difference is there between the Westerlands and the Riverlands? Other than the people that rule it? Not much. How about differences between the Reach and the Stormlands, or the Vale and the Crownlands? The only kingdoms that feel somewhat distinct are the North, Dorn, and the Iron Islands. Not to mention that 8,000 years ago, Proto-Indo-Europeans still existed. There's no way languages would have remained unchanged for that long. The simple fact is that the people of modern Westeros seem to identify with their home kingdom pretty strongly, and if there's not much difference between them, then that doesn't make much sense. If you go to the East, things are a little better, though. Each of the three cities has its own language derived from High Valyrian, but they've diverged so much that they aren't mutually intelligible, so they're essentially separate languages. Tyrion speaks High Valyrian, but when he visits a whorehouse in Volantis in A Dance with Dragons, it's stated that he can only understand a couple of words of the local language. Think of the Valyrian offshoots like real-world romance languages. Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese are all descended from Latin, so they're all pretty similar to each other, though they're certainly distinct. This makes perfect sense. I have nothing to complain about here. The Free Folk have their own various languages, which come from the Old Tongue of the First Men. Mans Rader at one point says that there are seven different languages in his army. That makes sense too. After 12,000 years, the Old Tongue would have started to break up and evolve just like Valyrian, and with around 90 different clans that all hate each other, it makes sense that they'd be somewhat isolated and their languages would evolve on their own. It's kind of weird that the Common Tongue is so widely spoken among the Free Folk, but whatever, I'll leave that one alone. So in conclusion, the Seven Kingdoms aren't distinct enough considering the different influences they've all had. Can't believe I have to talk about this, but here we go. The Targaryens had sex with their siblings for at least 300 years in order to keep their bloodline pure. If you do that, then you're going to have some problems, namely horribly deformed and mentally deficient offspring. Like Daenerys, your parents were siblings, and their parents were siblings too. You ain't gonna look like Amelia Clark after that. And if you have kids with your brother's son... Ew. That's it. So that's me getting all of my complaints about this off my chest. A Song of Ice and Fire does a lot right, and I really enjoy it, but it isn't perfect. There's always room to improve, even if most of the problems aren't really that bad. Not to mention that dissecting things in this sort of exacting detail is just part of the enjoyment process of consuming media for me and for people like me. When you're watching Season 8, or when you're pretending that one day you'll get to read The Winds of Winter, just remember that even something this great isn't perfect, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't enjoy it. See you soon for more videos on some of my other thoughts on A Game of Thrones. Believe me, I've got plenty. Thanks again to all my patrons who made this possible, and to all my subs who give me reason to get out of bed in the morning. If you aren't subbed, you should do that. If you are subbed, then go back and watch all my stuff over and over again so that YouTube's algorithm will remember that I exist. And check out Campfire. Bye.