The Ravenry: Week of 10/26/2015

Hello seekers,

As you may or may not know, Wars and Politics of Ice and Fire has its own Tumblr page (as well as its own Twitter and Facebook pages).  Even more excitingly,  we here at the blog have partnered with ASOIAF University to answer questions about A Song of Ice and Fire.  We – that is, NFriel and I – take the text-based questions submitted to us, write up thoughtful text-based answers, and publish these answers on the Tumblr.

So every Monday we present to you The Ravenry.  We collect the questions we’ve answered during the previous week over on the Tumblr in post form, with a brief description of each, and publish it here, and link that post on Twitter and Facebook as well. The Queen Regent wrote a very good post on the gulf between the legal technicalities and political realities of women and marriage and goes into some leadership and commandership questions of some of Westeros’s most notable figures.

So, without further ado, here’s The Ravenry for the week of October 26:

The Ravenry: Week of 10/19/2015

Hello, lovelies!

As you may or may not know, Wars and Politics of Ice and Fire has its own Tumblr page (as well as its own Twitter and Facebook pages).  Even more excitingly,  we here at the blog have partnered with ASOIAF University to answer questions about A Song of Ice and Fire.  We – that is, SomethingLikeaLawyer and I – take the text-based questions submitted to us, write up thoughtful text-based answers, and publish these answers on the Tumblr.

So every Monday we present to you The Ravenry.  We collect the questions we’ve answered during the previous week over on the Tumblr in post form, with a brief description of each, and publish it here, and link that post on Twitter and Facebook as well. This was another productive week for the Lord Hand and me, including several long analysis pieces on Renly, Rhaenyra, and Robert’s Rebellion (alliteration is amazingly addictive). There were also a few meta questions, from answering questions to modernizing the series.

Before we start, I want to speak a little about question-asking. This is something the Hand talked about last week, but I wanted to bring it up again. “What if” questions are very difficult for us to answer, particularly the broader these questions get. We only have access to the same materials as the rest of the fandom; some of the hypothetical questions we get involve rewriting entire storylines, including a great many jumps and guesses. As much as we can, we like to stick to what we can pull out of the materials, so as much as you can, we ask that you narrow your hypos as much as possible. Asking who Robb might have betrothed Sansa to had she been returned according to his terms is fine. Asking how a living Laena Velaryon would have affected the entire Dance of the Dragons is too difficult to us for answer without essentially writing an entirely new story.

So, without further ado, here’s The Ravenry for the week of October 19: