I believe when referring to females, it’s “blonde”.
The Iron Bank imposes receivership and institutes an efficient profit-driven system of management of Westeros. “Westeros goes corporate” might be the bleakest of all endings!
In a universe where there’s magic and dragons and seasons that last for years, that was the very first thing that made me say “what the fuck?” The Iron Islands don’t have the people or resources to do that. It’s just totally beyond any sort of logic that these windswept, smelly idiots are a military power on par with the Lannisters or the North.
It makes sense that there would be a maritime people who look down on more land-based peoples and engage in a little piracy, but pirates do not generally instantly put together massive armadas of hundreds of ships in a couple of months. The Ironborn could have been an interesting group if they’d been DIFFERENT, like actually kind of like real pirates, and historically real pirates have been hit-and-run artists who don’t like pitched battles.
The Ironborn have never really added anything to the series. They’re hideously boring. Their contributions are Theon, and the ability to magically provide a massive fleet to whomever the story needs to have a fleet (a fleet made of ships that seem to move as fast as a modern-day missile cruiser.) The claims that this season is worse than the perfect seasons that came before ignores the fact that there have been lots of things you could criticize about the other seasons and the Greyjoy nonsense is a big example of that. (Or the Sand Snakes, anyone?)
I’m not saying Season 8 is perfect, but it is imperfect in part for exactly the same reason GRRM never finished the series; ending this story is a hell of a lot harder than starting it. I am absolutely, one hundred percent certain Martin may have known in general where the story was going to end up but wasn’t super clear on how he was going to arrive there or, for that matter, how many of the supporting storylines would play out or the fate of many supporting characters. There is, in my honest opinion, no answer to that. There is no way any human could have told the end of the story in roughly 10-11 hours of screen time that everyone would have liked and that would not have pissed a lot of people off.
This, from someone who clearly has me confused with another poster.
Don’t forget that the Ironborn also have that really annoying what is dead may never die catchphrase. I won’t miss hearing that or the equally banal for the night is dark and full of terrors once the series is over.
The Ironborn are more like Vikings than a nation of pirates, although they engage in piracy I’m sure. I’m not sure what’s so implausible about them. Is it because you don’t feel like the scale of their society is big enough from what we’ve seen? The show necessarily doesn’t show us the full scale of the world for practical reasons. Sure, we only see maybe 30 iron islanders at a time, but obviously we’re not meant to believe that this is a significant fraction of their population. The timing and strength of the iron fleet is probably implausible, but there are historically a lot of nations that were very effective sea powers disproportionate to their economic/land resources. Britain being the obvious example, but there are plenty. I don’t find the Ironborn being a powerful naval force all that implausible.
It’s actually more implausible that they were allowed to exist indefinitely as a reaving nation while the kingdoms were at peace - the idea that they rebelled, and the rebellion was crushed, but somehow they’re still acting like raiders is pretty implausible. At that point if they couldn’t do anything else because their land was so useless then the rest of the seven kingdoms would’ve probably just wiped them out rather than continue to tolerate their ways.
So you agree it’s implausible for a country that has to steal because it doesn’t have much domestic industry, to build the world’s largest fleet in like 3 weeks.
Isn’t it also implausible for a county that was utterly decimated in a naval war 9 years ago, to split allegiances among itself, and then have one portion of that country be utterly unstoppable against all comers?
Has a small country, with a bad economy, small population, and limited natural resources ever routinely dominated foes that are an order of magnitude more wealthy and populous?
The iron fleet isn’t a thousand ships, I’m assuming that’s an exaggeration. And I don’t think we’re talking about three weeks either - is there any indication that it’s not months or even over a year? I’d have to go back and look.
I get the impression that the allegiances aren’t very split on the Iron Islands. Euron seems to have clear control of the islands and their resources and their main fleet - Yara has a small splinter faction under her control.
As to your third question - I think the answer is yes but I don’t have any examples handy. Naval warfare is kind of an odd duck that doesn’t always go the way you think it will. There are sea faring peoples that are disproportionately good at naval warfare beyond what you’d expect based on the resources available, and leadership plays an outsize role in pre-modern militaries in general.
We’ve been told the Ironborn are basically only good at one thing, and their way of life and economy is set up to do this one thing - and so I don’t really have a problem buying that they’re very good at it. It doesn’t seem like Westeros has any other major powers that are heavily invested in their navy. This isn’t portrayed well, but it’s not completely implausible. More implausible is that a nation with enough unity and government to have a feudal hierarchy covering the whole continent wouldn’t have simply destroyed and killed everyone on the Iron Islands after their failed rebellion. The idea that they’d tolerate a nation of pirates when they clearly had the chance to wipe them out is more implausible than showing us that the ironborn are good at the only thing they’re good at.
If they’re so amazingly good at naval combat why was their navy destroyed by Stannis during their rebellion. They go from getting the shit kicked out of them to being invincible without any new technology or massive increase in population or economic output. I maintain this is quite implausible. The only change is Euron shows up.
Looking back at the scene where Euron is elected and Theon and Yara flee… they take ~50 ships with them. Dunno how many people it would take to sail them, but it’s not nothing. A lot more ships that just beat Dany’s fleet.
Stannis was supposed to be a fantastic military mind, so his defeat of the Iron Islands on the water (and Robert putting him charge of the war there) was intended to show that impressiveness.
I think the story there is that Stannis hit them by surprise and burned their fleet in harbor.
I’m not strongly disagreeing with you. You might be right. I just don’t really have a problem with the idea of a predominantly sea people having disproportionate prowess on the sea. The writers didn’t do a great job of showing that to us, but sometimes I try to be charitable and say that just because they didn’t do a good job of showing it doesn’t mean it’s not plausible.
The Vikings farmed, traded, and colonized as well as just raiding. I don’t know that we have a historical precedent for a society of any size that only subsisted by raiding and disdained any other activities.
Agreed.
Okay, the Iron Fleet might not be a hundred ships. Such images as we’ve seen suggest at least 100-200, and each one has a crew of at least sixty or seventy men. I mean, we’re digging a little harder into this than we need to, but even just the images of Pyke do not suggest a country that’s in a position to pump out a huge fleet. The comparison to Great Britain’s naval power… I mean, Great Britain might look small on a map to an American or a Canadian, but Britain is a BIG country with a lot of people, resources, and it’s excellent farmland and so capable of feeding a reasonably large population and at the height of its powers was drawing resources, even fully built ships, from colonies. Even then, 100+ ships would have been totally impossible to create in that short a period of time; there weren’t a hundred ships on BOTH sides at Trafalgar. The entire Royal Navy, covering pretty much the world, was less than 300 vessels, not all of them first rate. I am happy to accept the Ironborn can win naval battles out of proportion to their size, based on skill and tech; that makes a lot of sense. Canonically, the Summer Islanders are at least as advanced and as skilled a bunch of mariners, but they’re not players in the civil war.
I mean, we can just fanwank that one of the Iron Islands is big with a lot of trees, that’s fine. It’s just that the Ironborn and their comical bad guy leader are a constant deux ex machina, not really an interesting part of this world.
Right, I think it’s fine that they’re better than average. However, the extent to which they’re better at both building ships and sailing them seems to break the suspension us disbelief for the majority of watchers. Certainly for me.
As for how long it took them to build the fleet, of course it’s hard to know, but it was less time than it took Yara to sail to Mereen and return to Dragon Stone. Something like 3-4 months seems likely given a 4 knot average speed and some loiter time in Mereen. According to this site, they probably couldn’t have built 1 ship in that time span even ignoring the rest of the impossibilities: https://mashable.com/2017/07/22/euron-greyjoy-1000-ships-game-of-thrones-plot-hole/
I mean, it doesn’t really matter. Probably no dumber than the tactics in episode 3, but it’s a ready example of the show abandoning some logic in the name of spectacle and plot.
Well, yeah. Swiss pikemen were thought to be essentially unbeatable, which is why they still guard the Vatican.
That’s how they conquered the vast Swiss Empire!
Swiss pikemen may have been good, but they were basically so in defending their homeland, not in dominating or invading other countries.
Sure, but have you met their neighbours? Keeping peace in the neighbourhood with that bunch around has to count for something.
Not that it matters too much in terms of how the show wishes to portray the Ironborn, but it is quite possible that when the Boltons took the North they weren’t all that interested in reclaiming the coast from the Iron Islanders. Yara indicated to Theon that Balon wasn’t interested in keeping Winterfell, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t that into keeping the coastal areas they invaded (which has plenty of wood).
Of course building all those ships that fast is a minor miracle, but since when has the show cared about timing issues.
The original question was whether the Iron Islands, being small and with few resources, could deploy several vast armadas (at least vast in terms of their world). No matter how good the Swiss were defending themselves against their neighbors, they would not have had the resources to conquer them.
That’s a good explanation for lumber. Still have to account for skilled craftsment, nails, cloth, tar, new shipbuilding facilities, ports, rope, and the time to do the above.
And it’s true that, especially in recent seasons, the show has been fast and loose with timing issues, but people complained about that in other contexts too.