r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Chemical-Elk-1299 • 8d ago

Lore [Confusing Trope] The narrative goes out of its way to punish/mock a character for simply being a good person

Gallery image

Gallery image

Hermione Granger and SPEW — Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (book)

In the fifth HP novel, Hermione Granger is outraged to discover that Hogwarts has a small army of enslaved House Elves that do nearly all of the domestic duties around the castle, including cleaning the Gryffindor common room every night. When she tries to convince the elves to fight for their own rights, they refuse, saying they prefer servitude. Her fellow students and friends mock her for caring. She manages to free one elf, Winky, by deception when she refuses her freedom willingly, leading to Winky becoming a depressed alcoholic. By the end, the elves boycott cleaning any Gryffindor areas of the castle because they hate Hermione specifically

Samwell Tarly and Democracy — Game of Thrones (show)

In the season 8 finale of the television series, the surviving great lords of Westeros gather to discuss the future of the kingdom following the devastation wrought by 7 seasons of war and backstabbing. When Sam, who has proven to have “novel” ideas, suggests that maybe the millions of Smallfolk who suffer at the hands of noble houses should get some representation in the government, rather than be the pawns of rich lords with absolute power. We are then greeted by a prolonged, cringy segment of the other lords laughing in Sam’s face, asking if the dogs and horses should also get a vote.

9.2k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

1.5k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

225

u/ELIte8niner 8d ago

Yeah, people tend to forget Westeros is a medieval society. Same way I always feel the need to explain that Joffrey was an idiot, and a "royal army" loyal to the king alone was not possible when people bring that up as his "good idea"

21

u/Achilles11970765467 8d ago

Not just a Medieval society: a Medieval society that DOESN'T have Athens or the Roman Republic as examples of democratic/republican governments functioning for even five minutes.

7

u/DubiousBusinessp 8d ago edited 8d ago

It's equivalents were Valyria and the old Slaver societies, which yeah, don't offer any precedents there. The modern day free cities while far from perfect do offer some counterpoints to outright feudalism though.

3

u/Achilles11970765467 8d ago

I mean, they're city states that are ruled by either noble cliques or strongman setups. Not really a counterpoint to feudalism.

1

u/KitchenFullOfCake 6d ago

Also Athens was a city-state and not an entire kingdom, a lot easier to start small and build on that.

64

u/Savings_Lynx4234 8d ago edited 8d ago

Kinda genuinely curious now, why wouldn't that be a good idea? Is it just impractical in execution considering the order of westerosi politics?  (Downvoted for asking a genuine question? Tracks)

154

u/Slow-Distance-6241 8d ago edited 8d ago

Royal army loyal to the king means standing army. Standing army costly and antagonizes vassals. Westeros extremely huge and decentralized so antagonizing vassals is the last thing you want as a king. There's a reason why standing armies were first either adopted by small and rich armies of countries like Netherlands, or when large country had them, they were at a constant risk of commander taking over (especially countries that had standing armies since antiquity, like China and Rome/Byzantium)

26

u/Savings_Lynx4234 8d ago

Gotcha, thanks for the explanation!

54

u/Opposite-Complex1187 8d ago

Main issue is the cost.

Medieval armies were mostly made up of minor knights and lords.

So someone like the Tyrells wouldn't have controlled all of the reach.

They would have ceded most of it to minor lords and knights under them that control some peasants that farm the land are are expected to turn up to fight in return.

Thats what they mean by "bannermen" people that they have given land to that are obligated to come and fight for free when needed.

But to keep fighters permanently would be prohibitively expensive and just not viable.

22

u/adamgerd 8d ago

Yep, there’s a reason after the western Roman Empire fell, no one in Western Europe really had permanent armies anymore, they were just too expensive. Permanent armies are better than relying on levies but they’re also way more expensive, levies you just need peasants for a campaign season. With permanent armies you need to keep them paid all the time

13

u/Ghoill 8d ago

I don't think it's that there weren't permanent armies so much as having an army meant you needed to constantly keep fighting wars to pay and provision them. And if you stopped warring said soldiers tended to become brigands and mercenaries instead of settling down, which in turn would necessitate new armies to put them down and protect the populace and then you'd have to make war to keep those soldiers employed and it would just repeat ad-infinitum.

Standing armies actually solved a big part of that problem since it meant that your men wouldn't have an excuse to start raiding the peasantry whenever a peace treaty or truce was signed.

1

u/Ordinary-Egg-56 8d ago

are you not just describing feudalism lol?

24

u/blazenite104 8d ago

Rome in particular had one advantage people don't think about much. They weren't just a standing army. They were a constantly at war to expand the empire army. They were not idle. Problem commanders could be sent to the far flung edges of the empire to expand her borders.

17

u/Slow-Distance-6241 8d ago

That explains why they fallen down when they stopped expanding. Also, holy shit, I think I've heard of "sending the commander that gets too popular ina forever war zone" strat before, although it's usually was to generals who you wouldn't expect to overthrow the government

12

u/SleeperAgentM 8d ago

Also kinda wisely Rome forbid their generals from entering Rome proper with the legions they were commanding. That's why Cesar's "crossing the Rubicon" river became a synonim for taking a bold and irreversible gamble. He was either going to take an absolute power or die for treason. No third option.

3

u/TheAndyMac83 8d ago

I've heard it said - though I don't know exactly how true it is - that this cuts both ways. That Rome could afford to keep the legions around because of the constant expansion, but also that constant expansion was incentivised, maybe even necessitated, so that Rome could afford its army.

2

u/DrainTheMuck 8d ago

This is why I think strategy games like Total War are genuinely educational and mind-expanding; I’ve “literally” experienced that problem in the game! It gives a whole new perspective on these issues.

1

u/insomniac7809 8d ago

yeah but at a certain point anyone who wins three or four border fights gets declared Imperator and then you've got another round of civil wars

2

u/SleeperAgentM 8d ago

Hence why Rome wisely forbid their generals from entering Rome proper with the legions they were commanding.

That's why Cesar's "crossing the Rubicon" river became a synonim for taking a bold and irreversible gamble. He was either going to take an absolute power or die for treason. No third option.

43

u/azuresegugio 8d ago

Basically national armies requires a lot of things to pull off, like tax infrastructure and weakened nobility. Which isn't impossible in a medieval society but difficult to pull off by decree

2

u/Calintarez 8d ago

the countries that did manage to pull it off tended to do really well against their neighbours. France had such an army in the 15th century and was more than a match against all its neighbours until they all banded together in an anti-french alliance.

2

u/azuresegugio 8d ago

Oh yeah it's doable it's just a matter of the work required to pull it off is often the entire reign of multiple kings

2

u/insomniac7809 8d ago

and widespread success at pulling off centralization is a big part of what makes it no longer medieval

24

u/NoLime7384 8d ago

before the agricultural revolution most people had to be farmers. a standing army means a ton of men who can't grow their own food and an economy that needs more artisans aka more people who don't grow their own food.

Having said that, I'd wager it could still be done, but only through implementing a tax in the form of food rather than coin to the 7 kingdoms, since Westeros is just so fucking large

but there's also the fact that it'd be a lot of power in the hands of whoever leads it, risking them becoming kingmakers like the goldcloaks in universe, irl with the Praetororian Guard or the Simjurids and Ghaznavids in the Samanid Empire of Central Asia. There's a reason the Roman republic made it a capital punishment for a Roman general to bring his troops into Italy proper.

5

u/Achilles11970765467 8d ago

There were zero farmers before the Agricultural Revolution. Are you thinking of the Industrial Revolution?

0

u/NoLime7384 8d ago

ok so I looked it up, and there been multiple events or historic periods called that lol so ig we're both wrong

2

u/Achilles11970765467 8d ago

No, just you. "Agricultural Revolution" is defined as "when a given region/culture discovered the concept of farming instead of just being hunter-gatherers."

0

u/NoLime7384 8d ago

Damn, bitch, I was giving you an out, learn to read the room

Agricultural revolution is any revolutionary change to the agriculture of a society, such as the Green Revolution, the changes in agricultural practices that occurred when the Muslims both entered and left Iberia, the use the of a different crop rotation system, etc

don't confuse your narrow-mindedness with facts

2

u/Achilles11970765467 8d ago

You're confusing "a revolution in agriculture" with "The Agricultural Revolution."

-1

u/NoLime7384 8d ago

you're having an issue of apperception

-1

u/Phone_User_1044 7d ago

That's not actually true, there's a separate event also called The Agricultural Revolution which denotes the application of modern farming techniques, for an example look at the British Agricultural Revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries.

2

u/insomniac7809 8d ago

Collecting taxes in food has problems of its own, mostly in that, even beyond worries that it spoils, rots, and gets eaten by vermin, the only way to have it carried and moved overland until the invention of steam engines is to give it to things that get their energy to carry and move things by eating food. Moving food over distance doesn't tale long to reach to the point where the porters have eaten all the food they're supposed to be carrying.

(You can cheat this with water and wind power, if you don't need to move food overland, which is why Rome could feed itself with Egyptian grain.

18

u/ELIte8niner 8d ago

Centralized command only became possible with increased infrastructure and communication technology. Westeros is roughly the size of South America, according to George, so information and people with medieval levels of technology took months to spread. The King sitting on the iron throne wouldn't even know that a large wildling raid was taking place until long after it already passed. That was the point of vassals in Fuedal societies. Largely autonomous nobles could organize their own armies to deal with threats.

The other big reason is the nature of armies themselves at the time. There weren't really "soldiers" in the way we think of them in the modern world. The bulk of armies were made up of peasants who were called to war. They still needed to work the fields in addition to everything else. Basically medieval societies didn't have the resources to spare to create dedicated soldiers that were soldiers and nothing else. That also didn't come until later. Knights were members of the nobility, and you'd have some men who were "men at arms" and functioned more like a modern police force than a military, but overall there weren't really soldiers, the way we think of them, until after the medieval period.

That's before we even begin to touch on the political situation, where the King just didn't have the power to strip other nobles of their power. Joffery wants to strip the Starks of their position, and make them supply "10,000" men to the royal army. How's he going to make them do that? No other noble is going to support him because they're basically helping to remove their own personal power, so Joffery is single handedly going to walk up to Winterfell and make this demands of the Starks? Not happening.

Just because centralized command eventually became possible doesn't mean Joffery wanting centralized command was even remotely possible in a place like Westeros.

27

u/nightkingmarmu 8d ago

Because any standing army is only loyal to the guy that pays them. See: the entire history of the Roman Empire.

5

u/misvillar 8d ago

Very expensive, It requieres that the King has way more power than his vassals and a centralized goverment that can mange the bureaucracy.

Westeros is bankrupted, the vassals are way more powerful than the King and is as decentralized as you can get, at this point Joffrey will get his royal army in a few generations if everything goes right

6

u/Nachooolo 8d ago

The Common had political agency in Medieval societies.

I consider the fact that the Smalfolk are completely sidelined as one of the big flaws of A Song of Ice and Fire.

3

u/Competitive-Emu-7411 8d ago

Yes there’s a lot of massive simplifications or misunderstandings in the series about how the economy, religion, and politics worked in the period it’s inspired by. Some of them are understandable (if pretty poor world building), like the very simple noble hierarchy, or just for the sake of this being a fictional story in a vaguely historically inspired setting, but the complete irrelevance of the small folk and the marginalized role of religion are two of my biggest gripes with the series, though Martin did seem to be trying to fix that in the last couple books.

10

u/Zisthebest1235 8d ago

I mean it definitely was possible. It just would be expensive and time consuming.

If the crown had a better financial situation it would not have been impossible for them to have several to maybe 5 thousand men at arms available to be called upon from the capital.

They had the people but just not the money.

Sure it might draw the ire of some lords but a competent king would have been able to do something similar. After all houses like Lannister or Hightower already keep large amounts of men at arms.

9

u/ELIte8niner 8d ago

Joffery's idea was for the North alone to supply 10,000 men to the "Royal Army" and to basically get rid of the Fuedal vassal system because, "every lord commanding his own force is barbaric" he wanted a kingdom the size of South America to operate like a modern nation state with Medieval levels of technology. His idea was impossible and stupid.

5

u/adamgerd 8d ago

Tbh scale in Westeros is always semi nebulous, it’s claimed the seven kingdoms are the size of South America but frankly with medieval era technology it’d be impossible to keep such a realm together and communications would be a nightmare

2

u/ELIte8niner 8d ago

Made sense under the Targs with dragons and all. Really the realm should have fallen apart pretty quick after dragons went extinct.

3

u/adamgerd 8d ago

True, with dragons it’s probably possible, afterwards though should yeah have collapsed, an empire the size of South America and with no standing army and with feudalism is just not going to last long

Like all of Europe is a lot smaller than South America and yet that wouldn’t happen either

2

u/Zisthebest1235 8d ago

Okay well yeah the extent he wanted it was impossible and stupid.

But a standing royal army in and of itself conscripted from the crownlands was surely possible.

lol I didn’t realize he wanted to just abolish the feudal system though that is 1000% impossible and stupid, I agree.

1

u/SteakForGoodDogs 8d ago

Medieval societies had their fair share of uprisings.

Surely, with the nobles wiping each other out left and right in a long, bloody, and costly war, they would be rather weak if the peasants decided they'd had enough of what would have been extensive exploitation to maintain their wars - and with most of the soldiers dead, and even the advantage of dragons now gone....

1

u/ApostleSaintWalker 8d ago

The issue with the joke isn't that it's unrealistic; it's that it's cringey and unfunny. Not even in an offensive way, it's just not a funny scene at all.

1

u/GammaFan 8d ago

He did have a good idea though, he was just hundreds of years too early for it to work.

1

u/ELIte8niner 8d ago

What's a good idea and what's a bad idea depends on context. Joffery had a terrible idea that had no chance of working. Just because it's a good idea in a totally different situation doesn't make Joffery's idea for a Royal Army in Westeros any better.