Besides the Anarchy other similar real world events include the Pragmatic Sanction of 1713 (HRE/ Hapsburg domains) and the Pragmatic Sanction of 1830 (Spain).
Part of the opposition to the idea of a ruling queen is the assumption that once she’s married her husband will just end up ruling by right of his wife; which leems to the case with Ladies Paramount or Vassal.
It is a trope and I find it just lazy and stupid writing.
Here you go: medieval stasis
I don’t like it, but I tolerate it if the rest of the work is good enough.
I notice he still has those unnaturally wet lips going on. I found it distracting all through his tenure as The Doctor and I really want to pass him a hankie or something because it’s distractingly kinda gross. The slick lips thing makes me inclined to believe him when he plays a psychopath, not sure why though.
Seeing as something like 95% of all medieval fantasy stories use this trope - including most of the classics - it’s really hard to enjoy the genre if it bothers you too much. I just accept it and get on with the story.
It can even make logical sense in high-magic settings - although that obviously doesn’t apply to GoT.
It had massive ratings, apparently. I think people are hopeful, but cautious.
I can tell you this. It was a whole lot better than the new Vikings show that dropped onto Netflix this year. Also a prequel, but it was a total snoozefest compared to the Vikings show that featured Ragnar.
May be we can blame the periodic years long winters?
This. Game of Thrones dropped you into this huge, detailed, complex world with all these various factions and conflicts. You immediately understood that there were these various houses in the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros (I misspoke before when I said five, possibly misremembering the War of the Five Kings) in a tenuous peace and that they were largely corrupt and scheming. You had the rumblings about the Dothraki threat from across the sea (which turned out to be a big nothing-sandwich). There was whatever intrigue that killed John Arynn and caused Ned Stark to replace him as Hand. Benji Stark was missing North of the Wall. You quickly learned how evil and arrogant the Lannisters were. And the entire team ominously referring to how “winter is coming”, which would probably have been problematic in and of itself, even if winter didn’t bring a supernatural nightmare with it.
But you didn’t need to know all the backstories and details about the world to understand it. Part of the enjoyment was learning about these various people and locales and events as they were revealed by the plot.
I don’t think House of Dragon is bad. It’s just that so far it doesn’t feel like you are getting immersed into this new, richly detailed world in the same way that GoT did. If it’s just another “palace intrigue” show just with the same Targaryen hairstyles and clothes from the past 200 years, I may lose interest pretty quickly.
That’s it, thanks.
Dragons, ice zombies and whatever the fuck was in Qarth?
I liked it.
It’s inevitable to compare the first episode to that of Game of Thrones, but also a bit unfair. This seems to be its own thing, with a much narrower focus, which may not be a bad thing. (I have not read the source material.)
My favorite bit was actually a small moment, when Viserys sits back on the iron throne and accidentally cuts his hand. It’s both literal - what the hell do you expect when you build a chair out of swords? - and ominously symbolic. And this was after he’d attributed the wound on his back (which I suspect we haven’t seen the last of) to the throne as well.
My hopes are high and I’ll keep watching.
I don’t understand why people need to compare this to the first episode of GOT. Why not just go and watch GOT again, it’s not the same thing? There is much more density of lords long since lost their power (Hightower, Velaryon, Beesbury), the politics of Kings Landing (which took about 4 episodes to establish, really on GOT) , importance of The Hand, Master of Coin, The watch, also there’s important subjects treated like crap during GOT (Dorne), and a little nod back to others from GOT (Stark, Baratheon, Westerling (Rob Starks wife book version)).
But this is a place not seen in GOT. A fully functioning land under control. The main lords are not in Kings Landing because they’ve got their own kingdoms to run, and nothing much to gain there in court, mostly, unless they wanted to marry into power. There are people in play which didn’t feature much in GOT, or not in a normal way (Greyjoys, for instance).
In normal Westeros the main kingdoms/lordships were ran by the main lords (Stark, Lannister, Tyrell) and they had a lot of lesser lords under them (Freys, Westerlings). This is a story of the lesser lords, or lords long since lost their power.
This is normal Westeros. The Westeros we saw was after the end of the Targaryen’s rule. (The whole concept of a Westeros was a Targaryen idea).
I said low-magic, not no-magic. Dragons aside, the supernatural is not a normal part of people’s lives in GoT - in fact, most folk don’t believe in it. High-magic means Harry Potter, or Narnia.
This version of Westeros is pretty much zero magic, isn’t it? The magic came back with the White Walkers, not the dragons, and all the resurrections and birth from dead dragon eggs came from that.
Dragons of this size and of these capabilities are inherently magical. I don’t think it’s possible for something to be that big, and alive, and fly and breathe fire, is it?
And in other news:
I suppose they are, perhaps magic does still exist. It was a theme of GOT (not sure if books or TV show) that magic had faded in the world, and perhaps that could be the reasons Dragons died. But more than just the resurrection magic which feature heavily in GOT westeros, but other stuff., the fiery swords and people doing much more magic than they used to. It appears from a quick search the dragons are gone about a century at least, perhaps 150 years from the start of GOT.
It will be interesting if this features in the show. Given the “books” are in effect a maester writing down some historical probably gathered from other old maesters.
First impressions when halfway through the first episode: Boring, primarily. Right off the bat I was annoyed by the bloated musical score. Not even sure I want to finish the episode.
One little thing I liked is that you actually saw people fighting, on foot, with shields. For whatever reason, Hollywood hates shields, and never shows people using them effectively in combat - the only ones who get to use shields in movies and TV are ancient Greeks, and them rarely.
(And Steve Rogers, I suppose).
And Starfleet. But usually you can’t see them.