I’ll go first:
The folks on Game of Thrones are basically stupid. They have thousands of years of recorded history, yet, the are still riding around on horses and fighting with swords.
I still watch though. 
Why should we help you after you call us weird fanwanks?
didn’t China have thousands of years of recorded history before they industrialized?
A proper fan-wank thread includes explanations for why dumb things happen.
Just complaining about stupidity in our entertainment isn’t fan-wanking.
(Like the old Marvel No-Prize. Some editors gave them just for pointing out blunders, but others required the reader to suggest why it wasn’t “really” a blunder at all.)
I don’t know Game of Thrones, so I can’t fan-wank it.
My own favorite fan-wank is for the TV show The Prisoner, where the penultimate episode is “literally true,” but the final episode is a psychotic episode brought on by the events in the penultimate episode, and not “literally true” at all.
(This parallels reality, where filming the p.e. was so intense, it gave actor Leo McKern a nervous breakdown!)
There was another trilogy by a different author where winter basically lasted 1000 years. By the time spring came around all traces of technology had vanished.
In GOT we assume that the previous “winter” was approximately 1000 years ago. If there’s only 1000 years between winters there’s certainly not enough time to develop anything beyond midevil technology.
I believe it’s incorrect to say that the Roadrunner’s nemesis was Wile E. Coyote. The Coyote (mute, tried to catch the Roadrunner), Wile E. Coyote (speaks, tried to catch Bugs Bunny), and Ralph Wolf (punched a time clock before trying to steal sheep from Sam Sheepdog) are three different characters that just look alike because they were portrayed by the same actor. He had great range, was a gifted physical comedian, did his own stunts, and never got the respect he deserved.
Four explanations come to mind that explain the weirdness and might all be true to some extent:
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Martin just wanted to sound epic and didn’t think it through.
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The history of the world is not as long as “they” say it is, and the older history is largely an invention.
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The more mythical powers mentioned as gods are real (though whether they are technological or magical in nature is yet unknown and maybe, if we follow Clarke, the distinction is irrelevant in any case) and prefer a cyclical history of buildup and destruction instead of more continuous advancement.
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The world of Ice and Fire is post-apocalyptic.
Jack McDevitt’s “Priscilla Hutchens” series - everything is going swimmingly, but then McDevitt writes “Starhawk”, which is a prequel to other books, and completely forgets a bunch of things that happened in the previous books (that described chronologically later events), contradicting them in the prequel.
You probably need some form of strong central government in order to form a technological civilization. The world of Game of Thrones is essentially one of brutal barbarian dirtbags. Any nerd who thinks of inventing any technology in such a world is going to be lucky to get away with an epic chain-mail wedgie.
In Order of the Stick, Haley’s character is played by a man, and Elan is played by a woman. The players started dating at about the same time that the characters did. This incidentally also explains why Haley started off fanservicey and like a caricature of a woman, but eventually matured into being more respectful and respectable.
Doesn’t that pretty much describe human civilization throughout the thousands of years up until the 1800s?
- Martin decided that if the trope was good enough for Tolkien, it was good enough for him.
And I agree, actually. The lack of technological development is a key component of most classic fantasy worlds, from Robert E. Howard to E. Gary Gygax. I’m willing to accept it as a basic assumption and move on.
Probably even more so. Jericho was founded over 10,000 years ago and has been destroyed about a dozen times since then.
The Helliconia series by Brian Aldiss Helliconia - Wikipedia ?
Lily Munster is a vampire; Herman Munster is a Frankenstein’s monster. Their son, Eddie Munster is a werewolf (or werewolf/vampire hybrid). Obviously this must mean that that Herman’s testicles were harvested from a werewolf. Well, either that or Lily had an affair.
It’s perfectly reasonable if magic is involved. If you can do things with magic, why bother developing science? If you can fly on a dragon, why bother inventing a car?
Not to mention that the wizards are going to stop anyone from doing anything that might compete with them.
Not so much a strong central government to begin with–more a strong middle class. As in: make labor more valuable due to many people having died in a plague, and then the more-valuable laborers have the clout to organize into guilds, and then they start making money and have the resources to start inventing new stuff that will make them more money, and then you get banking and finance (which is where the strong central governments begin to be important). Then you’re off to the races with technology.
But then you get a lot of demands for equality of opportunity and the end of hereditary privilege, and that’s no fun. So then you start getting pro-authoritarian leaders who are backed by the wealthiest, who’d like to see a whole lot more income inequality. And the pro-authoritarian leader promises to Put Those Uppity Ones Who Are Wrecking Everything in their proper place (which is basically bowing and scraping to their Rightful Overlords), and boom, you’re back in the no-new-technology medieval era. Huzzah!
Also, going back to the Fanwank thread theme: the only way the holodeck-era Federation could have kept its citizens–let alone the starship personnel–from becoming holodeck addicts, is to give them some alternate brain-stimulating technology. And that was: the combadges. Each hit (bloop!) sends pure endorphins into the brain of the wearer. Too much holo-decking, and the badges were programmed to send pain, instead.
Yes and without the added difficulties of decades long winter seasons and virtually indestructible snow zombies, and marauding hordes who have dragons as their backup
Pulp Fiction. God shot Marvin cause Marvin ‘didn’t even have an opinion.’
He wanted to convert Vincent the disbeliever, and he made Jules the believer his missionary. But God has no time for fence straddlers.
Oh, another one: People sometimes complain that Iron Man shouldn’t be able to take so much punishment. No matter how strong his armor is, they argue, he should be chunky salsa inside of it.
And that would be true, if the Iron Man armor were merely a shell of super-strong alloy. But it’s not. You see, large accelerations aren’t actually harmful. What’s harmful is large acceleration gradients. When a non-Iron Man person falls from a great height and hits the hard ground, the portions of their body that hit the ground first accelerate immediately, but the portions of their body a few centimeters away from that don’t accelerate until they hit the ground, and so on. But if you can accelerate all of the particles of your body at once, including the portions in your innards, then there’s no problem. And the Iron Man suits use Stark’s repulsor tech to do exactly that.