Just spoil this one thing fully please.
Do the books or show ever explain exactly what winter is going to be like? I get that the one coming is going to be BAD, even by normal in world standards, but what is it going to mean?
Is all of Westeroes and Essoes going to be a frozen snow covered wasteland?
Yes, with ice zombies killing everyone. Maybe the South regions will be spared.
It doesn’t particularly spoil what it exactly means, but that’s the jist.
The folk wisdom in Westeros says that the longer the Summer, the longer and colder the following Winter will be…and apparently the Summer that is now ending was historically long. And with White Walkers, and direwolves, and dragons, and other things that haven’t been seen in living memory, it seems pretty clear that whatever is coming, it’s going to be like no one alive has ever seen.
Quite a lot of Winterfell (and, I think, other holdings in the North) is dedicated to graineries and greenhouses intended to last through years-long Winters; there’s no growing seasons during the Winter. Cat at one point is fretting about how her Summer-born youngest sons have never had to deal with the snowfall deeper than men are tall or somesuch. By A Dance With Dragons the Winter’s snowfall has begun in the North, and snowdrifts up the walls of Winterfell are multiple manheights tall.
However, that’s in the North. In the south, it’s not normally as severe. Dorn is hardly affected, and even as far up as King’s Landing I don’t think it’s as bad as what Boston got this year, even.
Thanks, watching the show I was trying to get my head around exactly what the characters are expecting and therefore how dumb or smart they were.
Like a winter where they can still trade with the south or Essoes for food and such for years is one thing, a winter where the entire world won’t see a crop harvested in years is a whole different deal.
I think the implication that Suburban Plankton is talking about is that while the southern regions aren’t normally greatly affected, this Winter may well be bad enough that they will be. And since the heart of the Seven Kingdoms is war-torn and suffering famine already… not so good.
The North will be really bad, since Winterfell (and other holdings) has no stockpiles of food to draw upon for survival.
The southern regions are affected to the extent that they can’t farm during the winter. There’s a whole thing in the books how the war has totally screwed everything up, and King’s Landing won’t have enough food in stock to keep the peasantry alive if the winter does go on longer than normal. Also, trading with Essos would be quite difficult seeing how the kingdom is bankrupt.
Well, the last time the Others/White Walkers came out in full force during The Long Night was supposedly around ~8000 years before the current time, so, a lot of it is just left up to legend/myth.
In the World of Ice and Fire book there’s reference that the Rhoynar have a legend that during The Long Night, the waters of the Rhonye river (in Essos) were frozen all the way down to where they join the Selhoru. Latitude-wise, this is roughly equal to Oldtown and the northern portion of Dorne - and Dorne is known for being a desert!
So, it’s not just that “winter is coming”, but there’s obvious reason (as a reader/viewer) to think that this is going to be another Long Night, where the freezing cold reaches all the way down to the desert lands.
I know aside from Jon and Bran no one else knows the white walkers are back, but they are still aware there is a bad winter coming right? This seems to go beyond short sighted and more into suicidal insanity then, I mean we see no one really cares about the peasants but you’d think the nobles would at least talk more about the looming food disaster. Or have debated if it was a good moment for a power grabbing war, not much use gaining a castle if you’re going to be dismembered and cannibalized by a mob of starving peasants in a year.
Essoes is different since there it was basically Dany deciding on her own to mess stuff up, they would be happily slaving along if not for one person basically.
I almost wondered if the motivation for the timing of the civil wars that the show focused on was characters thinking most of them would not survive the winter anyway, so might as well try to grab as much power as possible before it hits.
The Maesters of the Citadel are almost alone in having realized that a long Winter is coming. And mostly no one listens to them. By and large, everyone else in Westeros is content to believe/pretend that their unprecedented long Summer will continue.
That’s because the people in power are all pawns of Voldemort.
The Night Watch have been warning King’s Landing that the White Walkers are walking again. King’s Landing refuses to believe it.
Even if people realized the trouble they were in all the main players are still going to feel the best way to end the war is by winning it.
The Wall will crumble, the White Walkers will ride south on giant spiders, and a second Long Night will fall.
At least, that’s my guess.
Yes, I think the least likely element of *A Song of Fire and Ice *is that, faced by an oncoming climactic disaster, the people with power would react by denying the reality of the threat and jockeying for power instead of preparing to mitigate the disaster as much as possible.
[Rimshot]
Temperature isn’t solely a function of latitude, it’s also effected by water currents, the proximity of bodies of water, altitude and mountain ranges, etc… (And I guess in a world where magic is real, that too). Dorne is surrounded by water, inland Essos isn’t, so you would expect Dorne to be somewhat buffered against temperature extremes (i.e. having a maritime rather than continental climate).
But “long night” hints at some sort of “nuclear winter”, which influences the entire world equally.
I expect it’s more like Polar winters where the sun doesn’t rise for six months. Or maybe longer than that, it’s pretty hard to tell how Westerosi climate works.