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I could see a decent story coming from it if the author did a careful job writing it but it would take effort to make a fantasy tax policy story interesting. Certainly it's an odd nitpick, especially since Aragorn shouldn't really have a tax policy, Gondor was clearly operating well already and...

I think the funniest bits are that Martin likes to take potshots at Tolkien and claim to be on that level. At the same time not only does he never answer the questions he belittles Tolkien for not answering, he comes up with ludicrously silly things as well. Martin: "But Tolkien doesn’t ask...

I think we're about done with this discussion then. You're literally so bent on trying to prove whatever point you've moved to at this point that you're actively contradicting your own quotes. He says he has twice forty thousand and that's only part of his strength, and when we get to your...

Your arguments that Reach was bigger than any two other players combined are based on a Roleplaying game that was explicitly wrong, and saying "It make sense" (You're right about that) in a setting where things rarely make sense. Mine are based on the fact that they are treated as second banana...

Okay but you're moving the goalposts again. My point has always been that Renly had an obscenely large army, enough to challenge most pre-modern European Nations by himself, and that his army wasn't all from Reach nor all of Reach's forces but people loyal to him, Renly. What you're arguing...

Well the losses certainly were since we're told they were mostly Florents, ie. Tyrell. The actual army makeup isn't perfectly specified but I've already proven that at least half the lords following Renly were from the Stormlands. The percentage of individual foot soldiers on the ground isn't...

Now you're moving the goalposts. You alleged that Renly's personal army was on loan from Mace Tyrell in the Reach, I proved this wasn't so because a significant chunk of his lords were from the Stormlands, hence they were Renly's personal dudes, not Reach's army on loan to Renly from Mace...

I think I need to quote myself here: The books are entirely what I've based my opinions off of aside from one episode and a clip here and there in the show. And I got a very different impression from ya'll. You can say the books imply X but I disagree, because I'm looking more at the...

Was a Tyrell made Queen or a Lannister? Did house Tyrell sack Casterly Rock or did house Lannister sack Highgarden? Did Robb Stark lose in battle or was he only beaten because he was betrayed at the Red Wedding? If house Tyrell was actually more powerful, wealthy, and had larger armed forces...

Now you're splitting hairs about definitions, and actually making your own position worse. Renly is a bit player in the story and yet still has an army available that would be the match of most empires in Europe. He's married into Tyrell? But he's not head of the family, that's Mace. Which...

The big difference you're missing here is that you're comparing entire empires to Renly on his own. Renly isn't a nation, he's not the holder of his own kingdom, he's not even treated as super-wealthy in-setting. Renly's just this one guy and not even considered a major player compared to...

Naw. The Ottoman Empire as of 1572 had about 18,000 full-time soldiers and 90,000 auxiliaries (Timariots), about on par with Renly by himself, much less the eight dozen other lords with similar forces. The Ottomans also had vastly superior logistics to GoT and still couldn't deploy their whole...

Agreed, Westerosi armies don't appear to be armed peasants. If anything it errs on the opposite side with it's absurdly large armies of professional soldiers, such as the aforementioned Renly having 100,000 men hanging around on standby during peacetime. The actual response to real-world...

Unsurprisingly, Tolkien researched the heck out of his worlds including his battles. His orcs really weren't prone to human wave tactics in the books and were disciplined and efficient fighting machines. Tolkien drew on his own war experience as well and he concentrates far more on things like...

Yeah, I think I'm not going to bite anymore, this is turning into too much a derail. Start a new thread if you want to continue.

Always possible. I'm not entirely sure the Golden Horde could win though. I mean given the tactics and such it's obvious they would win every fight (The Dothraki are some of the worse horse-warriors I've ever seen and horribly equipped for their jobs) but armies in GoT get to do things like...

But you did say that their being virgins is specifically what you felt disqualified them, and there's not a whole massive wide range of jobs that "doesn't have sex" disqualifies you from understanding. Again, you clearly have no idea what a Vestal Virgin was. For starters, counseling wives was...

Two things: 1: You have no idea what the Vestal Virgins had as duties and what their function was, obviously. It did, coincidentally, not involve sex nor advising anyone on how to have sex, the temple to Venus was available if you needed such advice. 2: Your notion of the Roman Calendar is...

Priests weren't just preachers, they were wise men. They were the advisors, the councilors, the people you went to for healing, for blessings, and for advice. No farmer is going to respect the priest of a god of agriculture who doesn't know barley from millet, and clay from loam soil, and who...

Newer discoveries can happen but they're often heavily distorted through the lens of current popular thinking. It's always worth looking at the older histories where they were closer to the subject and don't have the same biases we do today, not that they don't have their own.