But Alicent’s servant girl is also working for the White Worm. It’s still unknown what her interest in all of this is. The Plan B tea could have been swapped with regular tea and the White Worm will have her “little birds” keeping an eye on Dyana in case a bastard is born.
The treatment of race/culture in the story is a little curious though. On the one hand the Valyrians seem to value their bloodlines and language a good deal, on the other they seem perfectly open to non-Valyrians in the highest positions without too much fuss.
For example in the last episode Otto and Alicent are practically ruling the kingdom but the Valyrians don’t seem to be too bothered on racial grounds but just calculating how it will serve their interests. My sense is that the historical parallels to the Valyrians like the Ptolemaics were rather more insular. For example Cleopatra was the first Ptolemaic ruler to learn the Egyptian language and she was 250 years after the dynasty was created.
Perhaps the Valyrians were just too small in number compared to the Greeks in Egypt or the Normans and had to be more open to the original aristocracy. Or from a storytelling perspective if the Valyrians had been written as too racist, the story would have revolved around that one issue and the writers wanted to focus on a range of other issues around the dynastic succession.
Well, they actually never conquer the entire continent, they marry Dorne in 
.
You answered your own question. It’s just two small families. And you can see that they have to a great extent assimilated into Andal culture and society. Most of them have to intermarry with locals, for one thing. By the time of Robert’s rebelllion, 300 years after Argon’s conquest, most of the most powerful highborn nobles have Targaryens in their own ancestries.
In fact, that’s officially why they made Robert king - because the Baratheons had more Targaryen ancestry than any of the other great houses.
The Baratheons were descended from one of Aegons generals.
She did. Slapped him and then ignored him.
Alicent has also accepted the marriage of her daughter to her son. Since her daughter Helaena said something about children - Dyanna was supposed to be dressing them or something - these would be children of Aegon and Helaena, who are full siblings.
That’s… somewhat normal in that particular family, but even so.
She is telling off her son-in-law and then comforting her daughter-in-law who are married to each other. Before she goes to greet her bother-in-law and her stepdaughter. Who are married to each other.
Lets just say Alicent takes things in her stride.
Much as I enjoy this series as well as Game Of Thrones, Martin doesn’t really have a background in history, nor a fantastic understanding of it. Westeros is more Medieval Flavored than actually being set in a Medieval society. Hence, the role of things like ethnic divisions* or religion in society** is greatly reduced.
Between the size of the armies, their destructiveness, the modest religious influence in society, and many other factors, it has often been pointed out that the story of Game of Thrones would fit better in the Early Modern period than the Medieval. Even Martin seems to acknowledge this, since he claims that GoTis based on the War of the Roses - a war that is either Early Modern, or as late as you can possibly get in the Middle Ages without quite being out of them, depending on who you ask.
*I don’t know that I’d call the Ptolemies and the relationship between Greeks and Egyptians “racist”, because that term has a lot of colonial baggage attached to it. The whole modern conception of race and racism was developed once Europeans were ruling over other groups and needed a way to justify it to themselves. That’s not to say that ethnic divisions weren’t important in many times and places before then, but the more modern conception, of a sort of grand unified theory of race hierarchy? Super Colonial thinking that would feel anachronistic in a Medieval setting. That’s not to say that you couldn’t have media that shows Normans or Greeks, convinced of their own superiority and lording over Anglo-Saxons or Egyptians, but it SHOULD look very different from modern racism.
**The Church, too, is neutered by Martin. The Seven are basically a big joke, with very few of the noble class believing in them or following the path they laid out. When kings in Medieval Europe wanted to get a divorce, they had immense power struggles with the Church, power struggles that shook Europe to the core and eventually eroded the power of both King and Pope. In Westeros, on the other hand, the Targaryen kings can apparently reshape the Sept through the mere threat of dragonfire. Fine for Martin’s story, but yet another way his setting differs heavily from the real European middle ages.
Yeah, religion barely features at all, it was pretty much the fracture across western europe in the middle ages. Scotland vs England vs France, ties were often via Catholic vs Protestant, wars were fought on that, alliances bound together, the Gunpowder plot to blow up English Parliament was a Catholic attack, the Catholic monarch of England was deposed for that reason in 1688. It is striking now that it is pointed out that it barely features apart from background.
Well, clearly, Martin is writing fantasy in a world of his own creation. He isn’t trying to recreate the actual, historical Mediaeval era. And that really shouldn’t be a basis for criticism. This is a made-up world very loosely based on our history. And it has dragons, zombies, and magic. A sentence like “better set in the early modern age rather than the mediaeval era” kind of misses the point. This is not meant to be historical fiction. He gets to so whatever pleases him.
Martin is a 21st century educated western man, it is hard for him to place himself into the mindset of a Medieval lord.
There’s a concept in experimental psychology called WEIRD - Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic. Basically, these five traits describe almost every single person we run psychological experiments on (most of them even have a 6th trait, that they’re Psych Grad or Undergrad students…). Well, Martin is WEIRD, and almost everyone he has ever met is WEIRD, and he is writing for a WEIRD audience - about non-WEIRD characters in a very different world.
Instead of thinking about Game of Thrones as the story of a bunch of lords and ladies in the Middle Ages, who think like lorda and ladies of the era - think of it as the story of a bunch of WEIRDos, playing out a WEIRD drama on a decidedly non-WEIRD stage - and it makes a lot more sense.
And all that is totally fine, for a story meant for entertainment. As a WEIRDo myself, I probably wouldn’t fine the adventures of a bunch of medieval-thinking people very relatable. The only danger is in people watching GoT and thinking “Wow, this is what the Middle Ages were actually like!”
The role of religion is somewhat interesting, particularly in Game of Thrones. Several religions do play roles in the story and their interplay has consequences. By the end there is even something akin to a Reformation movement, which has a very heavy consequence for Cersei Lannister.
Of course, the religious themes don’t follow the patterns of actual European history, because this isn’t meant to be actual European history.
Certainly! If everyone is on the same page, that’s no problem. But GoT gives the impression that the Middle Ages were a time of realpolitik, where power wielded by secular authorities was all that mattered, where lip service to the religious doctrine of the day was sufficent to give a ruler a blank check for whatever else they were doing, and where the smallfolk matter not at all.
For many people, GoT is pretty much the only exposure to medieval history and culture. It has become a cultural titan, and with that comes a certain sense of responsibility. Especially when Martin and HBO repeatedly emphasize how “authentic” GOT is.
This is more relevant to the original show than HotD, but take the Dothraki as an example. What percent of GOT fans have the Dothraki as their main source of info about what steppe nomads like the Mongols were like? And GOT portrays them as they were portrayed by Medieval Europeans - as a massive unstoppable horde of brutes. In actuality, the Mongols were almost always outnumbered, sometimes as much as 10 to 1, but their superior mobility - both at a tactical and strategic level - gave them such an overwhelming advantage. The myth of the Mongol Horde comes from Europeans getting smashed by a Mongol force on one end of the frontier, then immediately having another army smashed many miles away. The only explanation the Europeans, with their slow baggae trains, could come up with is that there were huge numbers of Mongols all across the frontier, pouring over like a innumerable horde. But in fact, they simply had much more sophisticated systems of supply and logistics to the Europeans.
I’m curious; can you point to some statements by George Martin or the network suggesting the show is authentic. or that it has some bearing on real-world history? I can’t remember ever hearing them say that.
I’m sorry, but this is n eminently silly thing to say. Martin is a fantasy fiction writer. He has zero responsibility of any kind, other than to write what pleases him and what entertains his audience. Indeed, Martin does explore some serious social issues, but they are ones he has chosen to address. He is obligated to be authentic only to the extent that he wants to be. He doesn’t use real people, real places, or even real physics or geology.
Neither Martin nor any fiction writer is responsible for addressing the poor education and brain skills of “many people.”
A lot of my info is coming from this blog, which has a number of articles about GoT (both in general and about the Dothraki), and where the author dismantles specific claims by Martin (such as the idea that GoT accurately portrays war and violence in the Middle Ages [it does not, the scale and violence of war would fit either the ancient era or the early modern era but not the medieval era] or that the Dothraki are based on traits pulled from Mongols and American Plains Indians [in fact Dothraki traits are mostly based on 1960s Western portrayals of Native Americans])
Like I said, I enjoy GoT and this new HotD show, and I’m not aaying Martin is a bad person, author, or world builder by any means. I don’t think he should be prevented from writing his books, making them into shows, or anything else.
I DO think, though, that there is value in pointing out inaccuracies, especially when the marketing machine that pushes GoT stresses its “authenticity”; and if HBO or Martin chose to address these issues, I’d applaud them for it, and it would make me, personally, more likely to buy their products or recommend them to others.