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I mean, Martin puts a humongous, very rich and prosperous city literally in the middle of a lifeless desert. And also has a society where only 1% of the males are allowed to marry, and everybody else gets castrated. Not to mention the army of shirtless eunuchs who are the world's most formidable...

Yeah, especially given that the religion he most evidently approves of has no tenets other than "do important things in your life in front of weirwood trees".

Essos is particularly hilarious, because its geography is perfectly set up for kingdoms and empires (pro-tip, city-states pop up in places like Italy and Greece where the terrain is rugged and there are lots of natural barriers, making it hard to expand). Instead we have city-states surrounded...

Also none of the FOT7 followers care that their holy land is in the control of religious enemies, at all. Not even the Targ king who was obsessively religious cared. Never mind a crusade (which given his pop-history take I've no idea why Martin didn't include), there are no Westerosi pilgrims...

Essos takes this to the max, with city-states controlling vast stretches of uninhabited wasteland between them which basically only exist as an arena for mercenary armies to fight in, when historical ones generally only had the immediate area around the cities themselves. And ofc. these cities...

I mean, any real medieval force would beat Westeros' "hordes of peasants literally armed with sharp sticks".

I mean, the image of societal elites as decadent, parasitic, useless and evil is way older than QAnon - that conspiracy theory's just invoking cultural ideas that already exist. If anything, I would put it as starting around the French revolution and then getting spread around a lot more by Marx...

Not to mention how Edmure letting the peasants shelter inside Riverrun is portrayed as a great aberration when half the point of castles was as shelters for peasantry in time of war.

Knights even existed as far back as the Roman Republic, where they formed a second-tier aristocracy below the Senatorial class.

And they've supposedly all lasted for ten thousand years ...

The majority of which are one-line mentions in the books for worldbuilding flavour purposes. Red Priests resurrecting the dead and literally casting fireball spells isn't ambiguous, and neither are what the Faceless Men do. In Westeros, you have: It's heavily implied that there is something...

On another note, look at holidays in ASOIAF - medieval Europe was awash with Saint's days and feasts. No parallel to this exists in ASOIAF. There's not even a bloody harvest festival, i.e. a human universal. Come to think of it, the only religious myth in the story is the legend of Azor Ahai in...

Even if you're not going to reach that far, it's telling that it's the one major religion in the setting that lacks any supernatural power.

The worldbook and some stuff in the main text implies that they're a fake religion invented by the White Walkers.

IIRC Martin specified it as "15th century minus gunpowder". Because according to him the elements that make up gunpowder don't exist on Planetos ...

Westeros also has a significant lack of institutions that the RL Middle Ages had.