Song Of Ice&Fire series, are the unsullied ever explained?

I don’t recall the show ever explaining what the point is behind the unsullied soldiers Dany frees? Is it merely to emphasize how cruel the slavers are or is there a reason behind it?

Everything I read says a man castrated before puberty is going to look odd and have serious deficits in the areas you want soldiers to have like muscle strength. So why? Seems like poking out one eye on your elite slave archers. Obviously they can’t find real castrati to play them, but some of the bit parts are played by guys that look like body builders.

Men castrated before puberty tend to be taller on average than non-castrated men, which might be seen as intimidating.

They also won’t be distracted by having families or children, and thus might be assumed more loyal to their master.

While they will probably have a lower than normal sex drive, assuming their penises are intact some, if not most, will be capable of sexual intercourse (a few of the European castrati were sluts, to be honest), but still might be less inclined towards raping. (Pillaging impulses will probably remain normal.) Without penises they probably will be minimally distracted by sex. (Not having read/watched that far into the series I’m not sure what sort of eunuchs these guys are)

So… perhaps some utility but yeah, I’m not sure there’s a great advantage over intact men.

There was a lot more to the unsullied than just cutting their balls off. What they lacked in strength they made up in discipline. They were fed a drug daily that deadens their nerves, so they feel no pain and have no fear. In an age where the winner of a battle is usually decided by which army breaks first having soldiers that keep fighting until killed to the last man makes them damn near unstoppable, even if they are physically weaker and smaller.

Eunuchs tend to be larger than intact men, even if not as brawny.

Given an active lifestyle I’m going to guess they’re in between intact men and normal women as far as strength goes.

China had a couple of eunuchs that turned out to be very capable warriors, so the condition is not incompatible with effective military service. I just don’t see where it’s an advantage in most circumstances, especially in warfare requiring brute strength.

If i remember right it was because apparently its the only way to stop conquering armies from raping the shit out of everyone. Brain washing from infancy only goes so far i guess.

But based on everything we are shown of the social norms in that universe I can’t see anyone in the market for slave soldiers caring one bit about how rapey they are.

The characters see brutal murder and rape about like we see bad weather.

They didn’t want to stop them from raping because they were against rape, but because it shows a lack of discipline.

Men who are guaranteed to incapable of fathering children would be very popular with the ladies in era where childbirth was the female equivalent combat and no reliable birth control.

It was mentioned to increase discipline, because they would fight when their masters tell them to and not waste time as a rabble sacking cities and raping. Not that their masters were morally opposed to rape, but they wanted to remove the distraction.

Don’t castrated men tend towards more fat and less muscular appearances? Granted the two aren’t mutually exclusive, and one castrati character is both.

It mentioned that some of the regions or cities in Essos have differing practices on whether castration involves a penectomy or not. For example, Varys, born in Lys and castrated in Myr, was cut “root and stem” (TV and book?) IIRC Unsullied are the same, while other eunuchs may possess a penis.

They tend to not only have a higher body fat percentage but a more feminine distribution of that fat, but it’s not a hard and fast rule. Diet and physical activity will certainly have an impact on that.

It’s important to remember that while castrati will have a much lower level of testosterone than intact men the testes are not the only source of male hormones in the body. The adrenal glands do produce some. I don’t know if it would be sufficient to keep the ratio of male:female hormones higher than in normal women or not. It may well vary between individuals.

Keep in mind that while women tend to have more fat and less muscle than men there have always been some thin, muscular women in the world. A eunuch will be a somewhat feminized male in some ways. They don’t have to turn into tubs of lard, it’s just easier for them to do so.

Yes, but the show destroyed the unsullied by showing them to be the worst most incompetent fighting force around, I think my mum could take about four of them unarmed…

Ended up being like the Westeros graduates of the stormtrooper school of shooting (didn’t anyone notice these droids missed all the time?)

English note: castrated means balls cut off. The word for dick and balls cut off is emasculated.

Yes, I know everyone uses the word castrated to mean either or both, that doesn’t make it correct.

Seriously. The Sons of the Harpy are a bunch of aristocratic fops armed with fancy masks and great-grandpa’s ceremonial dagger. I can buy them eventually figuring out how to fight a successful insurgency through ambushes, but there’s no way they could stand up to the Unsullied in a pitched battle.

In every one of those scenes, I expected the Unsullied to lose a few men in the initial ambush, but then get into formation and systematically slaughter everyone who doesn’t run away fast enough. Nope! Apparently their spears are for twirling, rather than stabbing fools waving tiny knives.

Back to the OP’s point:

From my understanding of premodern warfare, discipline is critical. The goal of an army or soldier is not to kill every last one of the other side. Rather, it is to convince the other side that it’s not worth risking their life to defeat you. Which usually means fighting until the other side runs away. (There’s a somewhat famous quote that makes this point more effectively but I can’t seem to find it…)

Most premodern societies, particularly the medieval-ish societies in ASOIAF, don’t have the resources to maintain a large professional standing army. Rather, when they need an army, they conscript as many laborers and farmers as they can spare, and give them weapons and some brief training. Maybe they can field a few regiments of veterans with some experience and training from the last war. Mercenaries will be very experienced but really uninterested in dying for your cause. The core of a feudal army are knights, which are nobles rich enough to buy good equipment and spend most of their time training.

So you have one regiment of conscripts fighting another. Neither are particularly well experienced or trained, or really all that interested in dying for their cause. They fight until maybe 10% of one side are dead and wounded. The losing formation “breaks” because of the gaps left by casualties, and because the remaining conscripts are shocked to see their buddy die. A few run away or stop fighting, the formation continues to break apart, and eventually the losing side is a panicked rabble facing an enemy that can still effectively fight.

Strength is useful, but not critical. Most of your conscripts are merely the least diseased and malnourished peasants. Knights are pretty damn strong and well-trained, but depending on the culture, they might be really effective in single combat but less effective fighting in formations. Any physiological loss of strength caused by castration can be more than made up for with training to improve strength and discipline.

The reason the Unsullied are (in the books) so unstoppable is because they are trained and disciplined. Against a poorly trained opponent, they will take barely any casualties, and quickly kill enough of the other side to break them. Against a better trained opponent, the Unsullied will give and take casualties, but they’ll hold formation and keep fighting until the other side breaks. To defeat the Unsullied you’ll either need similarly high quality soldiers (perhaps your warrior nobles fight in formation), a much larger number of conscripts, or brilliant tactics.

My WAG is that the castration/emasculation is more useful during early training (and brainwashing). Testosterone-filled teenage boys are going to be hard to train to fight as a disciplined unit. They’ll generally act like any other group of idiot teenage boys, discover this “sex” thing might be worth running away and living for, etc.

The disciplined, methodical sacking of a city is just a bonus: rather than raping and looting, the Unsullied could focus on pursuing any surviving enemy.

tl;dr: Unsullied are brainwashed murder robots that keep fighting until the other side runs away.

This is a serious disappointment in the show. In the books, I only just got to the point where Dany got her army of Unsullied, and they seem much more impressive. However, having seen the show through Season 5, I wonder if the Unsullied still get beaten by the Sons of the Harpy in such disappointing ways in the books?

On the third hand, they did mention in the books that Unsullied are most effective in formation on the battle field. Perhaps they are not suited to policing a city, and in the show, their weaknesses are shown when they are ambushed in alleyways and whorehouses. Urban combat is hard, and the Sons of the Harpy are on their home turf*. So it is plausible, I just wish they spent more time explaining their shortcomings (and illustrating their strengths) in the show.

*But are they? In the book, they mention Sons of the Harpy being from Astapor, not Meereen (but Dany hasn’t gotten to Meereen yet in my reading). I’m not sure if they are a Slaver’s Bay-wide phenomenon, or if a bunch of Astapori traveled to Meereen to take revenge on Dany. In the show, it is made out like the Sons of the Harpy are from Meereen. This could all be moot, however, because I am noticing the books and show diverging as the seasons go on, and maybe the way it goes down in the books is entirely different than on the show. Similar to how the Qartheen storyline is very different in the books versus the show.

I think this is it. The Unsullied are unmatched in disciplined mass action. They don’t have much in the way of individual initiative or situational adaptation.

Right. The Unsullied, at least in the books, aren’t supposed to be bad-ass warriors. They’re supposed to be disciplined soldiers, in a place where there are no disciplined soldiers.

In the Easter Kingdoms, you have conscript rabble, you have mercenary companies, and you have aristocrats. The conscript rabble doesn’t want to be there, they’ll turn and run as soon as it’s safe, they don’t know how to fight. The mercenaries know how to fight, but they’re extremely averse to taking casualties. The aristocrats are fighting for personal profit and glory, not out of loyalty or patriotism.

And so you have a situation where a troop of soldiers who fight together and obey orders without question and don’t really care whether they live or die can have an oversized influence on a battle. Whether it would actually work to emasculate and brutalize prepubescent slaves to turn them into unfeeling terminators is another thing. In the books, it mostly works. But that doesn’t mean the Unsullied are particularly good at hand to hand combat, it just means that they will obey orders and won’t run away when they start taking casualties.

Note that in real life we have examples of classical era troops who fought as disciplined formations defeating huge numbers of poorly disciplined troops of the types mentioned above. Greek hoplites and Macedonian phalanges marched through the Persian empire, Roman legions marched through Gaul and Germany. But in real life these results weren’t by turning normal people into unfeeling murder-robots, it was by instilling esprit de corp.

Someday I’d like to see an ancient battle on TV or the movies that wasn’t a bunch of catapults firing explosives and both sides screaming and charging at each other in a wild melee. In reality there were charges, but you didn’t order a charge unless you thought the charge would break a wavering line of enemy troops. And gunpowder wasn’t invented yet. Somehow the modern brain can’t comprehend a battle without explosions, so explosions we must have no matter how little sense it makes.

Unrelated to the actual question, do people refer to the TV series as “A Song of Ice and Fire?”

No, that’s the name of the book series, the first novel of which is called “A Game of Thrones”. On TV, “Game of Thrones” is the name of the whole series.

I don’t see a lot of gunpowder in the show. There is “wildfire”, though, which seems to be some sort of magical equivalent to white phosphorus. I too am irked by the melee fighting I see in every ancient or medieval war film. They always stand in formation before the battle, and immediately break into chaos when the battle starts.

Since it’s vaguely related, and you seem to know more about medieval warfare than I do, I have a question. Someone on my facebook feed was annoyed with GRRM for writing about pouring boiling oil on the enemy during a siege, saying that in the middle ages, boiling water or rocks or arrows would be cheaper and just as effective. Was pouring boiling oil on people something that was done in medieval siege warfare or not? (I explained it away by saying that GRRM’s narrators are not necessarily reliable, and that Bran was 10 years old during that scene, and probably ignorant of the finer points of siege tactics. But I’m unsure whether or not he was correct in this case.)