30 miles a day would be more like walking speed. Horses are like 30 miles an hour, though of course they couldn’t go all day.
30-40 miles a day. Horses can’t do much more than a human’s march speed in the long run. They can do short bursts, but unless you have a few spare horses to change out and leave behind, you aren’t going to go that fast for long.
Also, I believe the march from Winterfell to King’s Landing with the large caravan in the first book was said to have taken over a month.
Reemul
6283
Just finished season 1, really enjoyed it just started season 2. TYrian Lannister is just great so far, love the accent he uses as well.
Razgon
6284
You have 3 excellent seasons ahead of you - Enjoy!
habibi
6285
I’m still unsure how I feel about Season 5. In the other seasons, I was at the edge of my seat in each episode, not knowing what to expect (book reader here). But with Season 5, when I really do not know what to expect, I am actually bored watching each episode. Jaded? I am not sure.
Razgon
6286
Aye, thats why I wrote 3 excellent seasons - I find season 5 exceedingly boring, and thats rather sad. All I see is some setpieces with some actors standing around, sprouting lines - there is no excitement or feeling in it anymore (for me).
Teiman
6287
Maybe westeros have a system where Lords and rich people can pick a new fresh horse every few miles.
Pod
6288
They flay their enemies, not their wives.
I’d place money on there being no maybe about it! The real world has had express relay systems for messengers and passengers since the medieval times, I don’t see why Westeros wouldn’t.
In the first season, didn’t they make a big deal out of how far the ride was from Winterfel to Kings Landing?
I think that’s as people have discussed above - the earlier seasons, while they do invent stuff for the sake of tv ease and tv tropes, the core of it is GRRM’s story, which he obviously spent years thinking about, so the characters and stories have a meaty coherence and depth even just from some of the classic lines lifted from GRRM’s writing for them. They feel like real people.
The less they have of GRRM to work with (and now they only have the barebones story and resolutions), the more they have to make stuff up, and their only guidelines is standard tv writing. So it’s kind of falling apart - the characters are getting incoherent, situations cheesily convenient. Yes, there was always some of that throughout the show, but just because they had more core GRRM to work from, that kept them “on the rails” so to speak. Now, they don’t have that constraint any more.
Thinking of it in Bayesian terms: before, they had a large chunk of GRRM, and a smaller chunk of stuff they had to write. The large chunk of GRRM they had to work with is “solid” (feels real). The smaller chunk they wrote - sometimes it was “solid”, more often it was “soft”, but the “soft” didn’t stand out so much because they had such a large chunk of “solid” (GRRM’s plus theirs) by comparison. Now that they’re responsible for all of it, the proportion of “solid” is only as big as they themselves can make it, and the “soft” is proportionately bigger over the whole show.
I still enjoy it, I still think it’s one of the best shows on tv, with great acting and super production values, but it’s definitely losing some of the magic that initially captivated people.
They flay their enemies, not their wives.
In Westeros, I’m not sure there’s a difference.
I think it’s pretty much the opposite of the above. Cersei thinks she is in a great position: she’s removed the head of the Tyrell household, she’s neutralized that house’s best fighter, and she has removed Margery from the picture so she now has unfettered access to Tommen and is now the de facto power in Westros.
But in fact she’s wrong on all counts. By removing the ineffectual Mase Tyrell she has to deal directly with the Queen of Thornes. To remove Loras and Margery she has given away the very power that the Throne commands - the power to impose judgement and use force. And though she will no doubt soon regret all that, burning bridges with the Tyrells will be the biggest blunder for her House, long-term: without their money and food the Lannisters will be hard-pressed to hold onto Kings Landing, much less any other principality other than Casterly Rock during the winter. Cersei’s problem is that she only thinks about how to make things better for herself and solve her immediate problems – she can’t see far enough down the like to anticipate the long-term effects.
And on the Tyrell’s part, it’s not that they underestimated Cersei, it’s that they overestimated her. Olenna expects Cersei to be duplicitous and bitchy, but she expects the Lannisters in general to be rational and pragmatic about the future. I don’t think she saw the imprisonment coming because she doesn’t understand how much Cersei is deluding herself about her own situation.
To be fair, that was with a huge land carriage, which is bound to be slower than riders alone.
I must admit, though I’ve always been aware of the asynchrony (e.g. between raven messages and people turning up, bits of story happening), I always just accepted it as necessary. To have realistic timing would have made the show far too unweildy.
That’s interesting. Maybe you just don’t like the show’s direction, or maybe knowing where it was going allowed you to watch differently? There was a study done on spoilers and how they affect enjoyment – turns out people don’t mind, or even like spoilers. (Small sample is the criticism I’ve heard of that study.) From a writer’s perspective, managing the reader’s certainties (and therefore their surprise) is such a big deal. My theory is that a lot of writers don’t do enough signposting. I feel that way a lot with bad webcomics in particular – you drop into a random page and you have no idea what the scene is about, nobody is communicating (explicitly or otherwise) what they want to do or what’s going to happen.
People probably think of Martin as a twists n’ turns writer, but in between those there is a lot of conferring and plotting, which lets the reader know what’s coming up. Or feel that they do. As a reader, once you have the destination locked in, I think you can relax and start enjoying the story as it unfolds, rather than think about where it’s going. I know with the Red Wedding, I got to really savor the ominous details as they came in.
Ahem – I appreciate the use of your post as a springboard for my tangent.
yeah.
I took Littlefingers fast speed as just moving the plot along.
Me too. It’s like hyperdrive in Star Wars. The trip from Tatooine to Alderaan takes as long as the script needs the trip to take.
Unfortunately, that conceit breaks down when the conversation in question is about the distance between the two points that the show just shorted.
“No one has ever marched an army from King’s Landing so far north as Winterfell.”
“Why not? It only took me a day to get here. LOL.”
Catching up on thread, I think you mean Mr Adebisi.
Did everybody miss Arya’s “but I’ve been here for WEEKS” statement? Evidently, some significant time has passed between the last two episodes. Not a lot of effort gone into actually letting us know that, though.
I wasn’t thinking about it during the show, but I was trying to remember if anything happened this week that couldn’t have conceivably been a month after last week’s episode. Would the wedding have moved faster than that? Nothing else seems like it had to have been mere days later.
Looking back, even the Tyrion/Jorah scene implied they’d been on bunny food for a while.
