A Song Of Ice And Fire

Not by his hare-brained battle plan he wouldn't.

Randyll Tarly: …our battles are well drawn up. Why wait for daybreak? Sound the advance.
Renly: And have it said that I won by treachery, with an unchivalrous attack? Dawn was the chosen hour.
Randyll Tarly: Chosen by Stannis...He’d have us charge into the teeth of the rising sun. We’ll be half-blind.
Renly: Only until first shock. Ser Loras will break them, and after that it will be chaos…when my brother falls, see that no insult is done to his corpse. He is my own blood, I will not have his head paraded about on a spear.'''

As Steven Attewell said, : ignoring Randyll Tarly’s advice about the terrain, gambling everything on the success of a cavalry charge by a mere portion of his army, and “chaos” is not good military tactics.

And of course Renly plans to send renowned hothead Loras Tyrell to be the guy to break the cavalry charge...what would Renly have done if Stannis captured Loras in the way that Robb captured Jaime (another Master Swordsman who went Leeroy Jenkins when he shouldn't have) and held him hostage. He would have been completely f—ked. The Tyrells would tell him to make nice with Stannis, and Renly for personal reasons would back down, and Stannis would have the Tyrells support as well, since he has Loras in custody...

edited 25th Jun '16 9:37:00 PM by JulianLapostat

What's more important to Mace though.

Loras or having a grandson on the throne

I think the Reachmen would have issues about their Lord Paramount throwing his own son under the bus just for a throne. Tywin Lannister started a war when Catelyn kidnapped his least favorite son. Loras is one of the greatest knights of Westeros.

But of course Renly, to his credit, won't allow it. A—hole though he maybe, I think he did care for Loras. I think he will surrender and make nice. Stannis will keep Loras hostage at Storm's End alongside Edric Storm. Command the Tyrells and Renly to fight beside him at Blackwater, and for the Tyrells treachery he will take some land from them and give it to the Florents but otherwise allow them to stay on as Lord Paramount.

edited 25th Jun '16 10:22:45 PM by JulianLapostat

Again, Renly is a moron. He'd have taken far more casualties than he should have in that battle. That said, the numbers were what 20 000 to 3500? No matter how bad his plan might have been, that's a hard one to lose.

Stannis would have won anyway because he's a truly just man and is totally going to abolish the monarchy.

There was no way for Renly to actually lose there. The only question was how big he was going to win. I'd accuse Stannis of being the idiot here, but then he probably had some idea that Melisandre's power would make things go his way.

There are ways for Renly to lose...As I pointed out above:

His stupid battle plan, with Loras leading the vanguard could have led to Loras being captured and made a hostage. This would force the Tyrells out. Back to neutrality or side with Stannis. With the Tyrells and the Reach out, that leaves Renly and his Stormlands contingent. The Stormlands contingent are historically prickly and tend to have a I Fight For The Strongest, so if Renly loses the Tyrells, the whole "Renly charisma" myth would have disappeared, and they might, in a homage to Argella Durandon, bound Renly and present him to Stannis.

Stannis' military goal is to sway Renly's bannerman and his support to his side. He doesn't see Renly as his mortal enemy to fight to the death. His goal is King's Landing. There are ways he can do that...like, well it's a huge d—k move, but outing Renly and Loras as gay. Now Stannis wouldn't do that because he's already accusing Cersei of being an incestuous adulterous woman...if he indulged in gay baiting his own brother, people would see him as a guy who makes spurious sounding allegations, never mind that it's actually true, and it would discredit his true argument about Cersei's issue.

When your witch can predict the future and you think she's at 100 % accuracy, you'd do things that'd seem stupid from other Po VS.

I don't think Stannis ordered Melisandre to assassinate Renly with a shadowbaby because Melisandre likely wouldn't tell him about the shadowbaby. It's in her agenda to make Stannis a believer in R'hllor not in her magic.

But I do think he's partially culpable because it seems he was trying to railroad it things to the future he wanted.

Namely "if I go here, Renly will go there and he will die somehow at dawn if he doesn't relent his treason according to Melisandre and his army will switch to me."

Melisandre told Stannis that Renly would die and that his support would move to them. Stannis was acting on his belief in what she told him.

"he also made the rather foolish mistake of taking Hizdahr and the Green Grace seriously when they started blathering about culture and Ghiscari traditions."

actually that was good idea that make her look patable in her intent and not just another conqueror, the problem is clearly she dosent give a shit about culture and traditions, which set her apart of her intent of leave peace

Saw an interesting argument on another site I was on. Don't know if it's come up here before, but essentially what one poster was suggesting was that Aegon's Conquest was responsible for the decline of the Night's Watch.

If you think about it, it makes sense. The Night's Watch was, originally, one of the few pan-Westerosi institutions that anyone could join. More importantly, it's always been a place where the losers in a war could be sent. In an era of seven feuding kingdoms, there's going to be a lot of wars, and consequently, a lot of well-trained, well-armed men being sent north to the Wall after one side or another loses. The Night's Watch would have been getting a lot of beaten generals, dispossessed nobles, and the like, in addition to the criminals that make up so much of its lower ranks.

After Aegon's Conquest though, things change. With the Seven Kingdoms become one, the near-constant warfare that provided the Watch with so many of its better recruits, are gone. Sure there's still the occasional revolt or rebellion, and a couple of large scale civil wars, but the former are small scale, the latter once every generation or so. Worse still, since almost any violence from small revolts on up to continent-dividing civil wars can now be characterized as treason to the Iron Throne, a lot of the losers in those conflicts are simply going to get executed after it's all over. Not exactly a recipe for a steady supply of noble recruits, is it?

Once that starts happening, decline is inevitable. No amount of emptying of prisons is going to make up for the loss of well-trained soldiers. Worse still, the fact that the criminals now outnumber the POWs is going to impact the reputation of the Watch, which means that the number of men volunteering to join up is going to drop too as the prestige of serving in its ranks fades. The number of volunteers was likely never high, but we know that they were at least a notable presence once upon a time. In the current period they are almost non-existent because who volunteers to serve alongside street thugs and rapists? Answer—nobody who has any other options available to them.

The lack of volunteers and of nobility to act as leaders will of course then have an effect on morale, which will in turn make the Watch seem even less appealing as an option to those who are presented with it. Which will further reduce the number of volunteers, and even the number of criminals who take the Watch over losing a finger or hand as its reputation worsens. Slowly but surely you've got the Watch entering a period of institutional decay, with problems snowballing until you get to where we are now—an undermanned, under-performing Night's Watch made up almost entirely of men who had no military training before reaching the Wall. A Night's Watch that looks at the likes of Rorge and Biter and goes, "yeah, we might be able to use that" (nothing, I think, shows how badly off the Watch is like the fact that Yoren considered Biter worth recruiting).

I'd say it's one of the better theories I've seen in a while. Thoughts?

I think that is a good theory and it makes sense. However, I still think the overall decline has to do with the fact that The Magic Goes Away.

It's easy after all this time to simply believe that the Others are simply fairy tales. And this period of internecine and intra-kingdom warfare would hardly have given them good recruits either.

The Night's Watch suffer from an inversion of Mission Creep. In Mission Creep, an organization's scope and ambit expands after achievement of original goal...in the case of the Night's Watch, the organization simply stagnates.

Very interesting idea, and I haven't seen it before.

That certainly won't have helped either, but the Others vanished literally thousands of years ago, without having an overly negative impact on the Watch. The Watch managed to hang on despite that, which makes me think that the problems have to be more recent.

Then again, while the armies of Others haven't been seen in millennia, maybe sightings of wights and individual Others were once more common.

I wonder too if large scale Wildling attacks were once more common. Obviously Kings-Beyond-The-Wall are rare, but you could still get larger scale alliances or confederations without them, and they're a nice physical threat to keep everyone's attention rooted on.

Kings-beyond-the-walls are rare, but probably in a 'once every few generations' kind of way. I wouldn't be surprised if there something in the neighbourhood of 100 of them over the course of the Wall's history. So frequent enough to maintain a physical threat.

I also don't know if Aegon's conquest quite makes sense as a cause of decline. POWs and disgraced nobles are still allowed to take the Black instead of facing execution a lot of the time. Sure, that gets overruled sometimes, but surely that was always the case; you'll always get the occasional Joffery in a position of power.

edited 28th Jun '16 10:33:40 AM by Gilphon

And you know there was a King-Beyond-The-Wall 100 years back during the Skagosi rebellion and Queen Alysanne Targaryen gave the Night Watch some Land and doubled the Gift which probably made them self-sufficient. And apparently this decision was not popular with some of the Stark Lords (who surprisingly also opposed Aly's ban on Droit du Seigneur).

So I don't think the Targaryens are necessarily responsible for this decline...that smacks of the kind of anti-Valyrian backlash you see in some fans who readily buy into Westerosi regionalism.

I think the decline of the Night's Watch is more recent. And I bet you can trace it Tywin's handship, I am sure that must be when the idea of using the Watch as a gulag for rapists, criminals and convicts set in. He was a guy who cut back on Aegon V's pro-smallfolk reforms and pan-Westerosi support (he sent food to the North during a harsh winter and earned enemies for that) and I can't imagine him having anything but contempt for the Night's Watch even if he did in fact send pro-Targaryen loyalists, like Alliser Thorne, to the Night's Watch after taking over King's Landing.

I didn't say they weren't. What changed with Aegon's Conquest is that there are fewer wars. Instead of numerous ongoing conflicts between kingdoms which would provide a steady stream of recruits to the Watch, you have a civil war or a major rebellion once a generation. That's not exactly a reliable way of getting recruits.

Don't see how you can posit that as a case of anti-Valyrian backlash. I mean, I loathe the Targaryens intensely, but it's not as if Aegon deliberately gutted the Night's Watch. Rather he put an end to most of the intrarealm warfare, and that in turn hurts the Watch's ability to gain recruits. And if an institution like the Night's Watch cannot easily survive the end of constant warfare the problem is not with those who ended the wars, the problem is with the institution itself.

Well some fans honestly think that Westeros was suffering under some Valyrian yoke or something and since the Night's Watch decline is a tragedy, it being blamed on them smacks on that.

I think ultimately the Night's Watch have only themselves to blame, on that we agree. Their original purpose was manning a Wall to keep out White Walkers, then it became about keeping the Wildlings out. When that stopped happening regularly, they inevitably stagnated. They should have tried to do what The Knights Templar did: go into banking, education and trade. It's what Jon Snow tries to do at the Watch, teach people skills, learn and apprentice with Myrish lensmakers, make glass gardens, start trading with the Iron Bank of Braavos. The Watch also have their own huge library and archives, they could have made say their own research centre and built a kind of NW-university.

It's basically an inversion of Mission Creep.

Why? I mean some Targaryens are worse than others, but I can't think of a single one that was boring. And the Targaryens made Westeros into a far better place.

The Night's Watch's decline is a byproduct of the one decent thing that came out of Targaryen rule, namely the cessation of constant warfare. It's a tragedy, sure, but what makes it a tragedy is that it stems from something that benefited literally everyone else on the continent.

Again, the Night's Watch's issues stem from institutional problems, namely that they lack a means to recruit people who are neither criminal nor POW. Once upon a time they managed to keep up the image of being an honourable group to join, but the ban on marriage, the ban on personal wealth, the bans on pretty much everything, are a serious handicap to recruitment. It's why they would have been dependent on a state of near-constant war in Westeros—they need losers to recruit. In the absence of that, the Watch has no real way to solve its manpower problem, and it's all downhill from there. That the Watch failed to adapt to the new situation and failed to find some new means of recruitment (which could have been anything from investing in businesses like you said so that they could pay new recruits well, to requesting that all criminals be sent to the Wall) is an internal failure, and one that can't be traced back to Aegon and his successors, regardless of how hard one might try (that's okay—they've got more than enough screw-ups of their own). As I said previously, when you've reached the point where Rorge and Biter look like potential recruits, you've got to ask yourself—what are we doing wrong? Seriously, was Yoren's plan to find out if the White Walkers were edible?

As for the Targaryens we've discussed this at length in the thread. Leaving aside the problems with their rulership, I loathe them from a storytelling standpoint. The oh-so special purple-eyed, silver haired survivors of a lost world spanning empire who are the only people who can tame dragons? Excuse me while I vomit.

Haven't you read Elric Saga? I just find the idea of incestuous heavy metal rejects being The High King interesting.

I actually don't like or dislike any house or region more than others...well I do find the Iron Islands irritating and the Dornish to be a bit of a snooze, and I don't care for the Vale a great deal...but the Targaryens are generally my favorite family, especially in the backstory.

I actually like the Targaryens too and their distinctive look that kinda looks inspired by Elric.

I just prefer the Baratheons though. They all look like Conan the Barbarian and they're all badasses.

In contrast to the Starks who all look like Aragorn.

edited 28th Jun '16 12:27:48 PM by MadSkillz

@Ambar For reference here's Elric.◊

He sounds like BR but anyways Elric is also the last of his race which is similar to the Targs in that they're the last of their family.

Yes, I've read Elric. Not Moorcock's best work in my opinion (blasphemy, I know). Vastly preferred the Corum books. And don't insult heavy metal by connecting the Targaryens to it.

In any case, obnoxious tropes aside, the Targaryens were pretty mediocre kings at their best, and utter lunatics at worst. There's three of them who were decent people, and the rest were a mixed back of incompetency and rampant madness.

Among Baratheons, I like Orys, Lyonel the Laughing Storm and Stannis. But the others in the backstory don't seem to stand out, they seem to be generic aristocratic lords. And Robert and Renly are just a—holes. I think Donal Noye is my favourite Stormlander on the whole, and Brienne the Beauty of course. The historical Starks seem to be a wild bunch: you have Theon the Hungry Wolf, Cregan Stark and Brandon Ice Eyes Stark.

My favorite Targaryens: Aegon and his sisters, Prince Daemon, Aegon III, Baelor the Blessed, Daena the Defiant, Baelor Breakspear, Maekar, Daeron the Drunken, Maester Aemon and Egg. And of course you have Bloodraven and Bittersteel. There's not any material on Rhaegar for us to like or dislike him unfortunately.

I like the Blackwoods a great deal. Actually the Riverlands is my favorite region of all 7 Kingdoms. It seems to be haunted and poetic you know. I am still waiting to go to that one part of Riverlands (where the bulk of chapters in Books 2-3-4 are set) has not yet visited - God's Eye and the Isle of Faces. And of course one of the futre Dunk and Egg stories will go there. Among the cities, Braavos is my favorite.

@Ambar That's really underselling them. There were more than 3 decent Targs unless you meant decent Targ kings in which case I'd say there was 4 good Targ kings. The rest were meh to bad.

Those 4 being Aegon I, Jahaerys I, Viserys II, and Aegon V