fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #4695 ]

[ SECRET POST #4695 ]

⌈ Secret Post #4695 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 14 secrets from Secret Submission Post #672.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

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WHERE! IS! THE! PICKLING! INDUSTRY!

also "It's been summer for seven years" HOW THE FUCK DO THEY MEASURE A YEAR, THEN

In daylight? In sunsets? In midnights? In cups of coffee...

IT'S NOT A MEANINGFUL UNIT!!!! THERE IS NO REASON FOR ANYONE ON THIS PLANET TO MEASURE TIME IN INCREMENTS OF 365 DAYS!

What about love?

Seasons of love!

This is a legitimate criticism. But was there a time when the seasons were cyclical in their world? Because if the whole perma-winter state is relatively recent, then it makes sense that they've maintained their way of measuring time, despite it now being far more arbitrary.

If there was such a time, presumably it was before the Long Night, and I would have expected the ages which turned the LN to myth should also have seen the measures of timekeeping evolve. And given how central the myth of the LN is to the series overall, I'd expect "good worldbuilding" to involve some textual suggestion that this was the case, rather than you or I spackling over the plot hole ourselves.

And on the other hand, if the magically variable seasons WERE a recent development, I'd expect a lot more...historical legacy of the change. There's SO much history and heritage in GoT but no "AND WHEN THE SEASONS CHANGED, SUCH AND SUCH HOUSE WITH GOOD SILOS GAINED ASCENDANCY, AND THESE OTHER DYNASTIES CRUMBLED, AND THESE ARE THE ONGOING CONSEQUENCES OF THAT BREAK."

Like, I'm not a hater, I think there's some fun stuff in there. But this one thing really ruins the sense of an organic world for me. Everyone seems to act BOTH as if the variable seasons are normal and NBD, and also like regular earth medieval people who have not adapted their entire survival rhythm to this situation. Even the Starks, and it's supposed to be their whole thing. But saying "winter is coming" over and over again is no substitute for touring the smokehouses and making sure they're stockpiling for years in advance, yknow?

OR LIKE. Maybe a year is 12 lunar months. Or 14, thanks to the faith of the seven. Or maybe a "year" is the time it takes a human child to gestate, which would be a natural longer measure than days/weeks. But Martin doesn't tell us any of these things. He doesn't appear to have thought about it at all, as far as I know.

Don't expect such logic. The series exists for rape fantasies & bloodbaths.

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2019-11-14 05:39 (UTC) - Expand

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(Anonymous) - 2019-11-14 10:44 (UTC) - Expand

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(Anonymous) - 2019-11-14 15:13 (UTC) - Expand

+9084392850385283052348 internet points for making me laugh super hard - this was awesome!

+525600

If the seasons are not changing regularly (and have no defined length), it doesn't make sense to use them as a marker for years either.

I would think Westeros uses lunar years as units.

This, and also this

They measure months by the moon.

IS IT 12 MONTHS A YEAR

IF YES WHY 12

months make sense to me. just not years.

Movements of stars?

You do realize that not all places on Earth have 4 distinct seasons, right?

I mean a year on earth is still the same year.

But maybe Westeros has a more dramatic tilt, then? It makes a rotation of the sun but the season doesn't change as much, so not noticeably.

If it were a more dramatic tilt or a different orbit, it would still be regular - 42 (earth) years of winter, 42 (earth) years of summer, then the same again. Mars has a "wobbly" tilt that changes it's year length, but planets are super big and move super slowly. The change would only be noticeable on the scale of millennia, not from one orbit to the next.

Yeah, but most of those places DO have dry seasons vs monsoons that also run on the cycle of solar revolutions, or in the tropics, a few months of the year that regularly have the worst storms. There's a way to tell that a full and regular year-long pattern has repeated. And anywhere that absolutely 100% isn't the case has had ongoing cultural contact with most of the rest of the planet, via trade/colonialism/whatever.

Dude, is this necessary? Like... Everyone is about suspension if disbelief for good storytelling until they aren't?

I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed

is anything on this comm necessary?

Nope, but I guess some literary criticisms are more relevant than others. Though I guess you don't take it as seriously as I thought at a first read

Given we don't see any indication whatsoever that anyone in Essos is concerned about the possibility of a years-long winter to come, it seems likely that the fucked up seasons are a Westerosi issue. It's entirely possible that they measure a year based on a system imposed after the Targaryen conquest, whether that's lunar-based or based on Essosi seasons.

Crop harvests. They would always be a need to measure how long it takes for crops to grow and be harvested before they're lost.

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