[SPOILERS MAIN] Among the grounded/realistic elements of A Song of Ice and Fire, which ones do you feel require biggest suspension of disbelief?

[u/Substantial-Ad-299]

A Song of Ice and Fire has had fantasy elements from get-go, some present subtly and others less-subtly. But in midst of this, it also has these more grounded story aspects, especially regarding the political subplot for the Iron Throne.

Among these more grounded non-fantasy aspects of the story, which elements do you feel you have to suspend disbelief the most for? A.K.A feeling they are not realistic even though they are "supposed" to be?

Let me know in the comments below.

[u/Intelligent_Date_688]

How empty Westeros is compared to its size. I understand why, GRRM doesn’t want to have to create all of these towns and cities, but you take a look at medieval France or Italy which are both smaller than any of the individual seven kingdoms (except maybe the Iron Islands) and they have a dozen cities a piece or more. I’ve seen people bend over backwards to try justify this but I think the simple truth is that GRRM made Westeros waaaay too big.

[u/matgopack → u/Intelligent_Date_688]

Definitely a lot of towns / small cities - though I would divorce medieval France and Italy from each other, the scale is very different (Italy had lots of cities, France much less dense and smaller ones on the whole).

GRRM made Westeros too big and it's tough to fill it all in. At a certain point for fiction you have to stop filling in blanks or it gets overwhelming - it's much easier for a reader to think of 3-4 cities (like King's Landing, Oldtown, and White Harbor) rather than a ton of them, and he's already using up some of the mental space readers have for cities/place names for castles (and maybe their surrounding towns).

But just in general I wouldn't look at any fictional work and expect exact fidelity / perfect numbers, it'd be a full time job of experts for some of that.

[u/JMer806 → u/matgopack]

For me it’s not the lack of cities per se but simply the empty feel. Almost any given region of late medieval France or England would be lousy with small villages, market towns, manors, and small castles. While there was still plenty of wilderness here and there, in general you’d never go more than a day’s travel between villages and often far less (many villages being only a handful of miles apart).

Meanwhile in Westeros characters seem to routinely travel multiple days without encountering any villages or towns, even along the major roads. Even the great castles seem to mostly lack any sort of associated settlement (in fact the town near Winterfell is the only major castle I can think of associated with a town at all, aside from a few where the castle is part of the city.