Would halfnaked raiders on Horseback really be that effective against Columns of armored spearmen supported by archers from the back heavily armored Knights on armored Horses on the flank?
Would halfnaked raiders on Horseback really be that effective against Columns of armored spearmen supported by archers from the back heavily armored K...
yes
Why are they wearing cuban heels?
to appear taller and intimidate the enemy
Are cubans intimidating?
They were back in 1962.
Not in the least. That's why they have to wear the shoes
Depends, on the dance floor not so much, on the Savanna’s of Angola a little bit
You have a point what the frick
No, and very little about the Dothraki makes sense. The Mongols won mostly because they were very good at siege warfare.
Those kinds of heeled boots were very common among cavalry soldiers. They help hold your feet more securely in the stirrups, and are especially good for horseback archery. The earliest raised-heel shoes we have seem to have been used by Persian cavalry archers.
Makes sense
>The Mongols won mostly because they were very good at siege warfare.
Didn't they stall out besieging the castles of China and have to go conquer the rest of Asia to get siege engineers to do the castle fighting for them?
Basically yes.
But note that they encountered fortresses, so then they acquired siege engineers, and then used them.
The Mongols succeeded because they adapted and adopted.
The Dothraki should never have been able to conquer Sarnor. Gurm never really thought most of his stuff through. Which would be fine if he wasn't such a pretentious douche about deep worldbuilding.
>The Dothraki should never have been able to conquer Sarnor. Gurm never really thought most of his stuff through. Which would be fine if he wasn't such a pretentious douche about deep worldbuilding.
He is a fat ex-hippie boomer who thinks society becoming a shithole is based because he won't have to live in it in 20 years when he's frickin dead.
>and adopted.
translated as genodicing everything that moved and letting a small number live that would serve them or die.
also known as orcs.
>t. butthurt mongol rape baby
Don't they talk about how the dothraki will be useless in a siege often?
Exactly.
>Fantasy Mongols will be completely useless at the thing that historically was best for the Mongols
>Fantasy Mongols will be completely useless at the thing that historically was best for the Mongols
Mongols were competent siege engineers, but lets not pretend it was playing to their strengths.
>The Mongols won mostly because they were very good at siege warfare.
They also lost a commander in sieging a literal iron age hill fort and lost twice to mountain forts held by literal slaves led by a Korean monk (with no battle experience) and never once captured the capital (which lasted 22 years and only ended after the Koreans killed their own "Daimyo") and the time a Khan died sieging Sichuan in China which also took 36 years to conquer, and that moment when they lost to Croat-Slavonia-Dalmatia because Klis had a supposed invincible citadel. Hungary's reforms placed great importance in Hilly stone fortresses.
In fact it seems they realised the futility and organised into multi pronged raiding parties to start wars of attrition.
>Mongols won mostly because they were very good at siege warfare.
they were horrible at it. They were good with their horse army with its mobility and specialized tactics.
sieges were performed by peoples they had conquered, engineers they had left live etc.
https://acoup.blog/2020/12/04/collections-that-dothraki-horde-part-i-barbarian-couture/
>read this.
>understand how much of a mental cancer Hollywood and it's tropes are on the modern man
>understand how much of a disgusting hack the fat hack is
TLDR. The Dothraki are an pastiche of indian tropes from western films that said fat hack probably loved as a kido, being all so naked and barbarian and menacing and always such a huge threat and an endless horde and some bits of the precursor of the wikipedia article in his local library, making them the most teenager, barbarian fantasy human race i have seen outside pulp
I’m not reading your blog, shill
your loss anon
Holy shit this is the most pedantic crap I have read in my entire life and I've been to philosophy forums in the mid 2000.
>The Mongols won mostly because they were very good at siege warfare.
I was under the impression that their good points were that they could out-march other armies, had access to a supply line almost as mobile as their main force and access to enough horses to switch at any point.
They were even more salty about being forced siege operations than Napoleon though.
heels are used in horseback riding to prevent the foot from slipping through stirrups and reduce the possibility of you being dragged underneath your horse at high speed
t. horsegirl
>t. horsegirl
your kind scares and disgust me
Do you ever get annoying autistic about mounts when you play rpgs?
>horsegirl
Is it true what they say?
breasts or gtfo
Doesn't really apply here, Anon. Being a 'horsegirl' is a category of person that's relevant to the thread. Good try though.
It always applies. breasts or gtfo c**t.
I'm glad you guys are happy with your good Gankerner points. Still doesn't apply tho.
>teehee I'm a gurl
Frick off.
Show us your breasts you disgusting attention whoring sow.
>troony typing patterns
YWNBAW
>breasts or gtfo
>Doesn't applies
>in Ganker
Nice Bait.
It's the rules of the internet, not just Ganker. Breaking the covenant will cause a horse you cherish to go lame. How will you get your thrills without your favorite horse?
you just know
Why did you link
when what you said had nothing to do with it, you attention-seeking fleshlight?
You ever seen those drawings with the girl strapped to the underside of the horse?
do you need a boyfriend?
Horse girls make do.
Disgusting. Please don't post any more.
You just know
H-how do you feel about fat, unattractive, middle-aged men with small penises?
...
Asking for a friend.
>he doesn't know the history of high heels
oh sweetie
Because they are trying to become presidents.
Book Dothraki at least have the excuse of being actual horse archer savages.
Still, they'd probably struggle a lot more with Westeros than the series acts like they would.
The Huns and Mongols were pretty successful, weren't they?
Both employed large contingents of heavy cavalry and footmen. Mongol and Hunnic warriors both wore full armor, often lamellar. While everyone had a bow, the real tool of the Mongol Ordu was mobility and experience, and the fact that nobody expected a giant well equipped and led army to just sort of appear out of the Steppe.
Later on when the Western powers were actually ready for them the Mongols quickly fell off, the last invasion of Hungary was almost comedic. They arrived, destroyed a field army, and waited for the surrender and tribute to pour in. It didn't, so they went around trying to dig out the nobles from their fortified castles and monasteries and keeps, and it turns out that individually killing 20,000 noblemen each of whom has a pile of rocks to hide in would take decades. Ghengis Khan died of age before they could proceed further.
If you look at a map of how far in the Mongols got, it's pretty obvious that this plan was never going to work. The Hungarian Basin couldn't be taken and it's mostly plains. Similarly the Dothraki sweeping across Westeros probably makes sense if you're looking at a map without any indication of the terrain, but realistically there is no group of people anywhere LESS suited for taking cities, as evidenced by the fact that all of the nations that the Dothraki encountered and didn't conquer were... Giant walled cities.
>the Dothraki sweeping across Westeros probably makes sense if you're looking at a map
Except for that bit in the show where Jorah is discussing combat tactics with one and it's pointed out that the heavy armour and such of Westerosi would give them an advantage. Dothraki were never a threat, on a map or otherwise. Why people were worried about them is the strange part.
Just like the vikings, they're a threat but not to an army. They'll raid all the septs and villages and shit. They could fight an effective guerilla war and never engage an enemy as they ruin everything.
Still wrong, vikings despite being raiders and attacking unprotected villages and monasteries most of the time were well armed and equipped, metal helmets, mail, big shields, all good stuff used by normal armies.
They could engage enemy with similar numbers no problems.
His point still stands, viking raiders generally fled when an army arrived. They showed up, stole shit, and left.
>While everyone had a bow, the real tool of the Mongol Ordu was mobility and experience,
Mobility and experience are all well and good but if you have to charge your expensive horse cavalry into ranks of infantry you better fricking hope it is well armored, has appropriate weaponry for the task, is charging a line softened up by fire, or is willing to take heavy casualties.
A horse can hit hard and dig deep into a formation but not infinitely so.
It's also worth noting that the steppe warriors routinely got blown the frick out by China when China was strong; they only managed to start conquering shit when China was in a period of internal turmoil. Similarly they came across the Khwarezmian Empire when it was in a relatively young and poorly centralized state. Kyivan Rus' only when Rus' was in a state of terminal decline already. Etc. The Mongols were basically the steppe nomads who happened to be present when various civilized neighbours were at their weakest, and took advantage of it. When they ran into states that were in a healthier condition, such as Hungary or Dai Viet, they didn't have much success, despite having, by that time, a vast empire.
The myth of steppe nomads as invincible badasses is a myth. They're more like opportunistic vultures. Same with the Arabs - their conquest was made possible by Eastern Rome and the Sassanid Empire tearing each other apart.
Everybody that does well is a opportunistic vulture.
Mind you, I agree that Steppe Hordes are not invicible. Their main weakness is that cavalry struggles with less open terrain.
>Their main weakness is that cavalry struggles with less open terrain.
Laughs in Samurai.
What stats and abilities from which game do they have?
Because you are a gameless newbie who uses /tg/ as a replacement for actual play and is so seethingly mad about it you cry about in every single thread that doesn't cite the exact system.
The removal of Morale as a gameplay mechanic has had disastrous ramifications on the mindsets of fantasy game referees.
Historically speaking, the development of Plate armor nullified these tactics. If the mongols had arrived 100 years later and attacked Europe they would've been decimated.
Yes that and advancements in castle building that made Mongol-style sieges really hard. Mongols loved to bottle up their enemies in castles and rape the land if just raiding, or assault the walls directly if conquering. But people aren't likely to run to the castles if they can win battles (which 1400s people in situations where 1200s people couldn't), and if they do, these new castles are far more costly to attack head-on, and the Mongols were shit at drawn-out sieges which became more normal.
>Yes that and advancements in castle building that made Mongol-style sieges really hard.
In fairness to the Mongols, a lot of those advancements were made specifically to Mongol-proof them.
I think the Hungarians and poles managed to repel later mongol invasions partially because they built stone castles that the mongols couldn't breach like wooden ones.
The descendants of mongols like the timurids were pretty good at sieges, but technology made horse archers gradually obsolete. Successors of the golden horde, like the crimean khanate were still a scourge for centuries, even if they couldn't conquer territory like their ancestors did.
The Mongol invasions of Europe basically made it west until they hit the areas where there'd been a ton of castle building, and then were repulsed.
>he thinks they didn't have stone fortifications outside of Europe
moron.
What exactly changed between 1200s and 1400s castles? How were castles constructed differently?
The move away from a central keep towards multiple mutually supporting tower strong points along the walls. Also called with more than one layer of walls. Krak des Chevaliers basically doesn't even have a keep.
Looking at 15th century castles, you really see how the trace italienne fortresses are a natural evolution rather than a revolution.
Interesting. Thanks, Anon.
>Looking at 15th century castles, you really see how the trace italienne fortresses are a natural evolution rather than a revolution
You can even see it in the early bastions of the Krak des Chevaliers.
Historically speaking, hills, snow, forests, rivers, bogs, swamps, deserts, and mountains defeat horse armies. What was Westeros's predominant terrain again...?
Poor Reach ;_;
Exactly one tenth of them would have died?
The Ottomans did attack Europe 100 years later and defeated the flower of European chivalry at Nicopolis
They're supposed to be horse archers. Plus the main hope was everyone who hated Robert would flock to a Targaryen restoration if they showed up with a large army.
Is it me or Gurm doesn't like archers and crossbowmen?
Gurm definitely likes knights.
Well, the idea of knights.
No, and the Dothraki cannot exist as presented in setting. This can't be handwaved away either because Fathack explicitly set out to make a more "realistic" fantasy setting and has opened himself up to any criticism of his world building by trying to call out Tolkien for not penning out autistic nonsense like "tax policies".
First of all, a horse army is impossible to maintain outside of an expansive temperate grass Steppe with plentiful rivers. Each rider requires at least 3 horses, and even just a hundred riders will have 300 horses that will rapidly eat out acreages and turn the area in a fetid disease pit with their piss and shit so horse warriors always have to be moving. This makes keeping cohesion a near impossibility even in ideal ground, which is why the Mongols were fractured tribes of a handful of riders spread out massively over a continent spanning steppe and returned to their nomadic splintered lifestyles after the great Khans died and they reached the operational limits of the steppe. The Dothraki are thousands of men strong that move about in a great lump of horse and men and have done so for presumably hundreds of years, which is objectively impossible. They are explicitly written as landless barbarians that have to raid and pillage for supplies which would be totally unsustainable: eventually some local lord will convince his peasants to build a hill fort and then the Dothraki are fricked since they cannot lay siege and maintain their horse army, nor do they have the supplies or skills to carry out a siege even against a motte and bailey.
Add in that they are not archers or armored, meaning even a dozen militia quality spearmen will beat them since the Dothraki have no way to overcome a spear.
Additionally it would require thousands of ships and months to move all their horses across the narrow sea, costing them money they do not have and making them commit piecemeal in a foreign land that is totally unsuited to mass horse warfare.
underrated post.
I could write a 200 page essay about how dumb and illogical the Dothraki are and what a complete non-threat they were to Westeros. Even a quick glance at
show's there's literally only one place a large army can land in Westeros: Blackwater Bay. Everywhere else is too far (meaning the ships would be indefensible), has terrain that's impossible for horses to campaign through, or is in a position that can be easily bottle necked just a bit inland due to Westeros's many massive rivers.
So a Dothraki fleet would have to force it's way into Blackwater Bay, which would likely be impossible since it has a narrow opening that can be easily blockaded. Even if they land, since King's Landing is the seat of power there's presumably tons of forts in the region and even if there isn't the Westerosi can rapidly counter attack since the infrastructure on the bay region will be the most developed and they'll already know the Dothraki have to land there so they'll be ready to smash the piecemeal landing parties at their leisure. During the Roman invasion of Britain the Brits shadowed the Roman fleet and forced them to fight their way ashore once they found a suitable lansing spot and the Romans were a well trained infantry army with superior numbers and training and it was still a crapshoot. In the theoretical invasion of Japan during WW2 (Operation Downfall) even with modern technology and an overwhelming naval and air presence to protect them the allies only had two plausible points to land on the main island because they were the only beaches that could handle such a large force and the supplies they would need to move inland.
Westeros is impossible for an outsider to invade, and a rootless stateless barbarian horse army sure as frick wouldn't be able to do anything more than blunder around for a few weeks before getting annihilated, if they even made it ashore.
The Dothraki threat is typical fantasyslop.
Thanks for your cultivated reply, logistic anon.
>Even a quick glance at
Historically speaking, hills, snow, forests, rivers, bogs, swamps, deserts, and mountains defeat horse armies. What was Westeros's predominant terrain again...? show's there's literally only one place a large army can land in Westeros: Blackwater Bay.
They'd be coming from the south; they might want to land at Oldtown to avoid crossing the Stepstones.
>The Dothraki threat is typical fantasyslop.
Aha! But that was the point, and it was subverted by the existence of (f?)Aegon so you see the blah blah FINISH THE BOOKS YOU FAT FRICK!
>First of all, a horse army is impossible to maintain outside of an expansive temperate grass Steppe with plentiful rivers.
Makes me wonder how the Parthians managed it after they conquered Iran considering that's mostly mountains, drylands and desert.
The Parthian military was mostly Persian dudes. The horse archers were a small, elite portion.
Well I mean the Persians were also adept cavalrymen (ride, shoot straight and speak the truth and all that), but the Parthians deployed an entirely cavalry based force at Carrhae and the account of their tactics were far too familiar and rehearsed to have been a one off thing, and they'd controlled Iran for nearly a century at that point.
Carrhae was a relatively small force deployed far from the heartland for a very specific strategic and tactical purpose. It wasn't representative of the entire army.
You can easily find grazing land in Iran for 10,000 cavalry.
The dothraki live in a giant steppe full of grass that sustains their nomadic way of life dipshit, they also frequently trade with their neighbours for supplies and engage in a manner of politics with them.
>but what about westeros
The place they arent, havent ever been and will almost certainly never be in any great number? That place? The place where they are nothing but a name and a reputation twisted by half a world of hearsay and chinese whispers?
Also, regarding the
>but they cant take castles
This is most relevant in the context of westeros, where this was brought up by king robert (who mind you doesent know much about them beyond reputation). This was aknowledged.
They dont need to take castles to cause significant harm to the land by simply attacking the places that arent castles, you dont need to besiege storms end to burn down every village and farmstead and kill a lot of civilians and cause economic harm
>but they would lose in a full on war
Maybe, probably, almost certainly. If the westerosi houses would unite into a singular army, which was roberts concern, that internal political divisions would see everyone just fend for themselves and defend their little bit of land, allowing the dothraki to cause significant harm by simply leveraging greater numbers.
The dothraki arent and werent presented as the unstoppable ultimate military power, theyre a regional threat with clearly established limits and some very prominent defeats.
They talk a very big game, but there's no reason to believe they can pull off the 'complete annihilation' that Drogo Baggins claims before his dumbass death.
The dragons are an 'I win' cheat button.
Technically, even the show portrays them that way, but the show is too stupid to realize that's what it's doing.
>They talk a very big game, but there's no reason to believe they can pull off the 'complete annihilation' that Drogo Baggins claims before his dumbass death.
Probably not, but they also dont really need to. Khal drogo has a big army and a big reputation, exactly the sort of image and assistance that helps you rally any potentially loyal houses to your cause and lets you usurp robert baratheon (in theory).
The dothraki cant roflstomp westeros, no one in universe has the big picture view of things to reasonably know this for certain. The dothraki also dont need to roflstomp westeros to be a credible issue or threat.
>The dothraki also dont need to roflstomp westeros to be a credible issue or threat.
Yeah, I should have added this point to what I was saying.
Dothraki claim that they'll role in, burn everything to the ground with no effort, and rule the world; Westeros people aren't worried about that, because a big army showing up is going to be a problem even if it isn't an apocalyptic event.
The dragons could, theoretically, make it an apocalyptic event, but even that becomes complicated.
Honestly, the griping about perceived Dothraki invincibility really shouldn't be aimed at Gurm, or even at the show; it feels like it's more about geeks over-simplifying anything, regardless of whether or not the media they're consuming does.
The fact it took this long for someone like
to point out that the Dothraki live in the fricking Dothraki Sea which is a large continuous steppe is amazing. Holy shit rope
>First of all, a horse army is impossible to maintain outside of an expansive temperate grass Steppe with plentiful rivers
Which is exactly where they live.
>This makes keeping cohesion a near impossibility even in ideal ground, which is why the Mongols were fractured tribes of a handful of riders
This is the only thing here close to a good point. The Dothraki ARE presented as spread out for the most part though: they just tend to move with some level of cohesion behind a respect warlord, and gather together when he wants to go annihilate something. It's true that this level of cohesion between mobile groups would be hard, but the acknowledgement that such societies have to be spread out is present.
>They are explicitly written as landless barbarians that have to raid and pillage for supplies which would be totally unsustainable
Raider societies have existed anon.
>Add in that they are not archers
They are though. In fact, second to horseriding, that's the thing they're famous for.
GRRM's writing ain't perfect or even amazing, but these criticisms are dumb as hell.
>It's true that this level of cohesion between mobile groups would be hard,
which is why Khal Drogos horde fell apart the second he wasnt able to actively keep it together due to sickness and later death
It doesn't matter how much grass they got, 50,000 or whatever ridiculous number GRRM gives of horsemen couldn't live together as a tribe. Again, a horse warrior needs 3+ horses to survive. That's minimum 150,000 horses. Horses consume on average 1.5 pounds of grass PER HOUR. A Dothraki army consumes 5,400,000 pounds of grass PER DAY.
That's why before and after the Khan the Mongols were scattered across the entirely of the steppe, because even a 10,000 strong horse army needs to find a million pounds of grass per day to keep going. It doesn't matter that the Dothraki live on a steppe, there's no way they could live so densely on one. They would eat out square miles of pasture per day, and even if they constantly moved the back of the column would always be coming to a halt at night on the same pasture the front of the column had ate out the night before. The Dothraki would have to live in bands with only a few hundred men at best scattered across the entire steppe, and they would spend most of their time killing each other over prime grazing grounds (like the Mongols did) than marching around setting up orgies and feasts every night and bullying locals into giving them supplies.
Westeros has winters that last literal years. For how fat he is, I don’t think even once GRRM thought about what people eat, much less horses.
>Westeros has winters that last literal years
No it doesent, it has periods of colder years and periods of warmer years. Any reference to some mystical 500 years of winter is either A: literally magic or B: purely apocryphal
Yea youre right, no nomadic pastoralists have ever had large numbers of horses right? Its why the 800,000 mongols mongolia into a fricking desert right? They were like locusts and shit
Anon, Current westeros summer last for more than 10 years, previous known winter lasted 2 full years.
Westeros have seasons that last more than a year and long summer mean long and cold winter. Westeros geography, seasons and everything don't make sense.
>Anon, Current westeros summer last for more than 10 years
And yet there are clearly seasons within that "summer".
"summer" and "winter" within the ASOIAF context clearly just mean "period of colder years" and "period of hotter years"
Nope, summer means fricking summer but instead of 3 months it last years, winter means fricking winter with snow and all but instead of 3 months it last years.
Also current day winter you have days with - temperatures and snow and 10 degree celcius with no snow next week in same place and you don't call it autumn when it get's less cold it's still winter.
Summer, winter, autumn and spring aren't cooler or warmer years, they are season stretched to last entire year, during war of five kings there was no snow or chill despite it lasting 2 full years.
Yeah, people say ASoIaF has little magic, but I always got the impression there's tons of magic, it's just that most of it is fairly subtle. Summer and winter are periods of magical flux where one of those two opposing elements has gained the upper hand. The Dothraki are nigh invincible because they believe their gods protect them, and they do. Shit like that seems to be all over if you look at it.
They are very explicit about the food requirements. Jon Snow had to pull all kinds of strings and take out a huge debt from the Iron Bank to purchase enough food for the Night's Watch. Explicitly because they cannot grow food in the winter. Now it depends on geography, of course. In the Reach and Dorne the winters aren't so bad, but the north has full-on snowdrifts for years at a time.
They mention winter wheat at some point, so some of the locales must have been warm enough to take in a harvest during the cold years.
Really this raises a lot more questions about the ecology of the world than anything, IRL a 5 year winter would be an extinction level event.
Likewise a 5 year summer probably would cause an ecological disaster as well.
That's why you dance the dark morris.
>5 year winter would be an extinction level event
Earth went through many ice ages. The latest one lasted thousands of years, not 5. The world was cold, even though not all of it was covered in ice and snow. Diet shifted manly to meat and animals specialized for that. Those who did not didn't die out either, rather adapting to the small amounts of vegetation left, mainly trees. When the ice age ended, animals and plants diversified again, taking up evolutionary niches within only a few generations. Yes. A lot went extinct. But much more survived, and much more diversified. Even on an unpredictable, far shorter cycle, plants and animals would be fine. Humans probably couldn't build huge civilizations, though if they were built they would need to stockpile massive amounts of food to not fall apart into more tribal hunter gathered communities. Which we've been doing as is since before civilization began. Also green houses exist in ASoIaF, and have IRL since the Bronze Age.
The question isn't if it's an extinction level event, it isn't. The question only becomes how much CAN they stockpile. And also how big is their planet? Martin said Westeros was the size of South America. Essos and Westeros seem to be about the same size. The issue is, we don't know anything more East nor if there's more things to the West or South. Just myths and speculation. For all we know the South would stay relatively warm, like it did IRL during the last Ice Age.
I think you've put more thought into than GRRM did and you should stop giving him such a free pass.
's no good answer to this question, so GURM is a bad writer!
>>Here's a good answer to it
>No, I don't want a good answer, I want GURM to be a bad writer!
okay
I remember them wanting to build greenhouses to produce food during winter, it was main thing Jon took loans for, buy slave who know how to do it and buy glass.
As for seasons duration it's just fatty not knowing anything about ecology or tax systems, common occurence.
>ASoIaF has a little magic
There's a huge difference for people who watched the show versus people who read the book. It's funny because my wife only watched the show, and I've only read the book, and I'm surprised by how often she has no idea what I'm talking about.
The books are full of magical bullshit. It's just that most of the magic feels common place to everyone so they don't call things like a 10 year winter "magic" - that's just seasons. Having a psychic link to your dog is magic, because they don't understand it. Giving birth to a shadow Stannis to murder the castellan is magic because nobody understands it. There's a whole scene where literal warlocks try to suck the life out of Danaerys with magic and I don't know if that's in the show.
But what really gets me is the show doesn't have Varys dress up in silly disguises. The guy does it every chance he gets in the books, he has some sort of complex.
The show seems like it was trying to be more grounded. The book describes Tywin as wearing a bright red suit of armor with a heavy gold cape, with runes and lions gilded all over it. Sounds like a fricking 40k character. Then the show puts him in a black cuirass with an understated lion crest and no protective runes.
Honestly, the one point where the story does lose me a bit is the fact that people refuse to believe the Walkers are real, despite a giant fricking ice wall.
If you have a Hadrian's Wall ten times the normal size, that implies that you have Picts ten times the normal size.
Though, that also can be explained by how you phrase it - because it's just there, nobody thinks of it as magic.
(Plus, given what somebody said upthread, George might not have realized just how big he made the wall.)
I think the issue is that people DO believe in them, but it's viewed as a fish wife's myth because they hadn't been seen for thousands of years. Giants were also a myth because they hadn't been seen for as long. The huge, frick-off wall kept them on the other side.
It's never said the Night's Watch doesn't believe in them. In fact, when they're first attacked by the dead, Mormont mostly yells about how shamed he is that the Watch forgot almost all the know of them. It's not, "They can't be real!" He rants, "How could we have forgotten, even in all the time? This is one of our most imperative foes!"
The nobility are dismissive of it because they don't want to be viewed as superstitious peasants believing in storybooks. They're focused on the realistic here and now issues, such as making enough magical green alchemy fire to immolate a naval fleet.
Thing is, Tolkien wrote a book after dealing with just that. Aragorn and his having to deal with all that mundane shit. Saw that it was boring and depressing and scrapped it. So the strawman GURM is tilting at was already discarded by a better man.
Get wrecked, you fat homosexual hack.
Tolkien never wrote New Shadow, he never started it or even sketched it out, he said "This is naturally what happens after the 3rd age and I don't want to write it because it's depressing and there are no elves".
The 4th age would have been more political if it had been written, and would have delt more with how the sausage is made and how good people are supposed to remain in power. 2nd age also deals a little with that (but with idealized 400-year-old supermen on an island paradise).
Aragorn totally had a standing army, and the rangers are shown to help with natural disasters in the past, and it's conformed that he does a ton of orc genocide after the war of the ring (to be fair, GRR probably knew about this and was just asking you to ask yourself how far the genocide went). "What is Aragorn's tax policy" is still a great question by any metric. It's not what the story is about but it's still a great question. He probably collected a tribute of fine goods because that was a tradition, but he also probably picked some natural resource in his area and decided that this belonged exclusively to him, then he would have traded that with his neighbors and distant lands to build the fortune of his reuinited kingdom. Lots of good-aligned kingdoms in middle earth have acquired huge frickin piles of gold but they didn't generally do it by sending tax collectors through their lands, it was implied to come from trade and from their own handiwork, because the most powerful city was always the one with the elfiest people.
>"What is Aragorn's tax policy" is still a great question by any metric. It's not what the story is about but it's still a great question.
Yes, "I freed all the slaves. All of them. The main problem faced by this nation now is that my dragons ate two of them. The horrors. The inescapable conundrum, the unsolvable gordian knot that will strangle the life out of me." is a writer who cares about how the sausage is made and stored before at least half a decade of winter and war hits the land.
Yes? I'm not sure what you want from me here.
Tolkien imagines an idyllic past where inherently noble people wield essentially-unlimited power and everything works out, he frames modern politics as a corrupted version of this natural state. It's a powerful and beautiful vision but it's also a bit of a cop-out.
Danny's dragons eating the peasants was a big deal to her, and that makes sense, she's only a human and she doesn't have the guidance of elves or Valar. In Tolkien's world it would be a much simpler situation: she would have known all along that dragons were an evil tool, and she might have chosen to use them anyway (because Tolkien's goodguys often do the wrong thing), but then when they started eating people she would feel the judgmental eyes of Varda upon her and would feel the weight of her own sin. Tolkien's heroes can rest assured that there *is* a right answer even if it isn't the one they picked.
Also it's a parable, about how you accept warlike means in the name of peace, but then your warlike means turn out to be incompatible with peace. Dumbass.
I would also remind you of all the generic fantasy novels that GRRM read which copied Tolkien's christian sensibilities in a half-assed sort of way, they borrowed the plot device of the morally-correct chosen ones without doing justice to the premise, I've enjoyed a lot of those books myself but the genre was going nowhere and ASoIaF was a breath of fresh air.
Honestly, I don't think you've read a lot of fantasy, I think this is more of a culture war sportsteaming sort of thing that you're doing.
>I don't think you've read a lot of fantasy
Me again, I'm going to out myself as a hypocrite by asking, does the dragon eat the peasants in the books? Does that actually happen? I didn't get that far in the books, I read a little and then binged the whole HBO series with my mom and never got back to the books (I thought I'd wait for the last book lmao).
People told me to read ASoIaF back in the 90s, and in hindsight I wish I had, it was better than what I was reading at the time.
Yes. It's a child too. Danny is a big dumb tyrannical tard with weaponized pets she treats like her children.
Anon, she rode that nation straight into a Cultural Revolution by completely abolishing its mode of production and demolishing the pillars of its society. They're all going to die without her getting any taxes, yet her overaching obsession is that her two dangerous pets ate some people she didn't explicitly point them at.
Clearly this author cares about taxation or good people being forced to kill babies to stop the timer on the bomb.
Húrin's actions damned everyone and everything that he ever cared about, and yet his overaching obsession is to bring the Nauglamir to Thingol.
moron.
>realistic king, allegeldy what Martin is aiming for.
"Oh well, the dragon ate some kids. Very sorry, here's the standard wehrgeld rate for dead kids."
>Salomonic wise king, exactly like the ancient good kings of olde yore, just like in Tolkien.
"The dragon ate your son, so the dragon is your son now. I am smart."
>Martin, what he actually wrote
"Oh no, a dangerous animal I keep to kill people...killed people! Oh woe is me, I will be depressed here while people eat their children to get themselves through the famine I caused by casually destroying their economy!"
>depressed here while people eat their children to get themselves through the famine I caused by casually destroying their economy!
Sounds like women alright..
You aren't even criticizing GRRM here, you're criticizing Danny, which is what you're supposed to do.
It's the author who decides on what to focus on, with Martin clearly not giving a damn about the compromises and policies required to produce enough sauerkraut to get enough people through multi-year winters.
Again, are you criticizing an author, or are you criticizing a regime? You directly compared one of GRRM's characters to Chairman Mao while arguing that Martin's world wasn't realistic. The 5-year winters were glazed over, you can call that unrealistic if you want, but Danny's frickups were totally realistic. You aren't making sense. I don't think that you actually read a lot of fantasy, I think that this is more of a culture war sportsteam thing for you.
Stop deflecting for the fat hack. He writes like shit, is obsessed with food porn and misery porn, he doesnt know what to do with his characters and he pretends his setting is kinda historical when it is as historical as the medieval (and other ) hollywood epics he grew up watching.
And worse of all, millions of literal morons that watched the series actually believe that this is how it was in the middle ages
>millions of literal morons that watched the series
My condolences.
>believe that this is how it was in the middle ages
Natural selection.
I'm saying that somebody who claims to differentiate themselves through their focus on hard decisions being forced on good people oddly pulls eyes away from total societal collapse in order to depict somebody's personal grief over their cow kicking somebody to death in a barnyard accident.
Such as things stand, people will end up praising the Netflix ending.
Again, I haven't gotten that far in the books, but in the show it was pretty clear that she had written herself a moral blank check to cause misery in the short term (which is totally realistic) and that the dead child (killed by her children) was a personal experience that got through to her (also totally realistic). But also the dead kid was a metaphor for the whole situation, it put a face on the situation, it put a face on all the harm that Danny had caused in the name of doing good. I don't think that you're actually as stupid as you're pretending to be.
>Stop deflecting for the fat hack.
He's good. Cry harder. Personally, I think it's been a long time since the word "hack" was actually a negative. GRRM doesn't deserve to be called a hack until he finishes his last book, right now he's not hacking it.
>millions of literal morons that watched the series actually believe that this is how it was in the middle ages
lmao
See, I think you're different from the other guy, in that you really are as stupid as you sound.
The show isn't the books you fricking homosexual. How can you even pretend to have a say when you haven't even read the fricking books.
And by what metric is he good exactly?
Of course he deserves to be called a hack and it's obviously negative. It means someone who is faking it and cant maintain the facade forever. He winged it copying from english history almost verbatim to the point that it's embarrassing and when he outgrew the story that he originally mogged, he started bumbling along and floundering around, making books 4 and 5 progressively worse. Now he cant write the books for shit, so we will never get the rest while he lives, because his reputation is more important to him.
This is the fricking guy that is so uninspired that took character theories from forums and put then into the books because he didn't know what to do.
He is the very definition of a hack. The only other person as much of a hack was Terry Goodkind.
Goodkind is a political writer. Though, considering that many of his readers grow out of his politics, he obviously is at best third to the OG gangsta that was Any Rand.
>The show isn't the books you fricking homosexual. How can you even pretend to have a say when you haven't even read the fricking books
lol, try reading the thread, dumbass.
>It means someone who is faking it and cant maintain the facade forever.
So you think he has a ghostwriter? That is the only context in which your statement would be even remotely coherent. Also that's not what "hack" means, or has ever meant, but that's beside the point.
>He winged it copying from english history almost verbatim
Yes, I know, he's a good lad.
>to the point that it's embarrassing
lmao
>This is the fricking guy that is so uninspired that took character theories from forums and put then into the books
Based.
>the very definition of a hack
(disapproving) a writer, especially of newspaper articles, who does a lot of low quality work and does not get paid much. It came from there into pulp fiction, to describe someone who 'keeps on hacking', it's rooted in the idea that a talented author will produce one or two masterpieces while a talentless writer will produce lots of lesser works. And of course it doesn't really work like that, people who finish more books and stories are generally more talented (and certainly more skilled) than those who write less.
>the definition
There's a vague implication there that someone who just writes the same - or a very similar - story over and over isn't bothering to learn the craft of storytelling.
Best metaphor I can think of would be someone who works with five pound hand weights every day for five years, wanting to be considered a power lifter.
You can endlessly debate whether that would apply to a lot of the pulp-era writers churning out content. But I would definitely say it doesn't really apply to a guy who is famous for not ever getting around to actually finishing his books.
Good job arguing semantics. Let's say "hack" as i used means someone who can't actually write competently, but has somehow managed to be published/known.
No he doesn't have a ghost writer. He just sucks at writing and every book he writes is worse than the previous one, to the point where he stopped writing altogether.
None of the things he did are cool or based. He managed to scramble together a couple of books with a semi-coherent plot, stealing as much as he could from anywhere he could find, which would not be a crime in itself, but he has proven that this is the true extent of his abilities with the rest of his books being of increasingly lower quality.
Add to that, the all so famous Aragorn's tax policy, when nothing in his setting has any modicum of realism and he doesn't address these things either. He merely pretends to do so, good enough for colossal homosexuals like yourself to be satisfied.
This makes him a very disliked figure in the minds of a lot of people and he is personally responsible for some of the worst trends in fantasy in modern times.
He writes bad. He can't write plots for shit. He is uninspired. He is the atheist *tips fedora* meme of fantasy, that thinks he is writing something more serious and grounded when he isn't.
All in all a complete fricking homosexual.
Eitherway, i'm half convinced you are replying for the sake of having an argument, so here is your *you* but i won't bother replying to you again.
>Let's say "hack" as i used means someone who can't actually write competently, but has somehow managed to be published/known.
Yes, that's the conventional usage, it means that other people like him but you don't. Or, more often, it means that you're a culture warrior and that you're trying way too hard to frame him as a bad author because you don't like his worldview. I have found that actual readers are slow to use the word "hack", because it doesn't tell you anything about the quality of the work itself (readers are more likely to describe something as "unfocused" or "simplistic" or "convoluted" or "uninspired" or whatever, words that say something about the work itself).
To be clear, it makes no sense to accuse GRRM of any sort of pretense, pretentiousness or fakery unless you are accusing him of having a ghost righter. Conversely, it makes perfect sense to accuse you of being pretentious. This corner of the internet is full of pretentious culture warriors who don't read, and who pretend that they do, because they want to vilify the people who make 'bad' culture.
>the all so famous Aragorn's tax policy
I don't think you've even read the quote. GRRM's rulers worry about money, and sometimes they run out, but that's not the entire point. The point is that all of his rulers worry about where their power comes from and why, every inch of Game of Thrones is about that, you can't possibly be too stupid to see that. Middle Earth is completely different, it's a world where noble benevolent men just show up and order things to their liking and people go along with it because they know it's for their own good (and then, if it was Turin, they realize that they were wrong and that it wasn't for their own good. But he's the exception that defines the rule).
>He is the atheist *tips fedora* meme of fantasy
lmao
GRRM's fatal flaw is he can't do math. When shown how the Ice Wall would look, he realized he made it too big.
>trying to call out Tolkien for not penning out autistic nonsense like "tax policies".
>call out
moron take, what fatguy was saying was "I wondered about how these guys paid for shit" not "tolkien didn't write about taxes therefore he's shiiiit"
No, he was critiquing the premise of a good heroic character inherently being a good ruler. Or more broadly the poopooing on the premise of the "good king" entirely which brings him into conflict with Tolkien's worldviews.
How come nobody in the North necked Ned? He ruled for awhile, presumably being an honourable idiot. And it's not the North was some kind of good heroic character land, either. There's a house up in the North whose whole gimmick is that they torture people for fun.
He always seemed pretty hands off with his banners.
Pretty weird how he's selective like that. Fricking fat hack.
Why didn't his bannermen neck him and become the new . . . Warden of the North or whatever stupid title Ned had? Why were they so loyal to him if honour was dumb?
The only reason Robert was still on the throne was because the Lannisters and Little Finger profited from the situation and it suited them to have an easily pliable oaf on the throne. And people were still trying to neck him - it's just they were counter-intrigued.
Ned can't intrigue. None of the Starks can (cf. red wedding). And they've got no one who can on their behalf.
My understanding of it is that the Starks had enough people in the North who were loyal that anybody who would be opportunistic about it knew to keep their mouths shut and walk small.
Ned can't intrigue, but that's also because he was mostly a second son who wasn't particularly involved in Great House business, unlike his brother Brandon. And we know that his father Rickard Stark, as well as Brandon, were very invested in alliances and forming them, there's a long theory that discusses essentially the nature of the Southron Ambitions alliance being engineered to politically dispose of the Mad King, hence why Rickard fostered his sons at the Vale, was arranging marriages with southern Lords, and the big tourney at Harrenhal with all its intrigue (and possibly the intent to push Ned and Ashara into another marriage alliance) followed by Rhaegar rebuffing the alliance via Lyanna's crowning as Queen of Love and Beauty.
>Why didn't his bannermen neck him and become the new . . . Warden of the North
Because his BFF was king and would kill them? Because Ned had powerful bannermen who were loyal and would kill them? Because neutral bannermen in the north would probably not want to serve under a guy who betrays people?
What's his face only betrays rob because the war and robs moronation present the perfect opportunity to do so.
>Because his BFF was king and would kill them?
Maybe at first, while Robert was still frick-off strong and could wreck anybody with his fricking hammer Ned couldn't even lift, but by the time of the books he's at the ass-end of a sharp decline.
Did that answer actually come from GRRM?
>Did that answer actually come from GRRM?
way to prove me right
Ah, so you're one of those gays who say that because you can houserule away anything you don't like shit systems aren't shit.
1) He personally led his rebellion, didn't he? His brothers personally led their armies when they were vying for the throne.
By the time he can't personally lead an army anymore I doubt he'd have the will to make it happen. He doesn't even have the money to really support his hedonistic lifestyle; all those tournaments and all that wine comes because Littlefinger's israeliteing out the kingdom to line his coffers and getting the crown hard into debt it can't pay its way out of.
2) Ned fricks his own shit up pretty quickly. Seriously, how long is he in King's Landing before he runs afoul of people who want to neck him for rocking the boat and Ilyn Payne cuts his head off, setting a spiral of events that lead to the downfall of House Stark? I'm meant to believe this guy is so politically inept but can manage to rule the North just fine? Doesn't add up to me, anon.
>he personally would kill them.
He's king. He'd call just raise an army and crush the guy. Of course he'd personally lead the army.
Stop being moronic on purpose. The books are not masterpieces by any measure but don't pretend like it's not logical that Ned would have stayed in power in the north.
Presumably it's because the majority of his bannermen were kinda like him and Ned had sons. Any coup attempt would have to remove his entire family, mainly his sons, and than they'd have to contend with Ned's loyal bannermen.
#
>How come nobody in the North necked Ned? He ruled for awhile, presumably being an honourable idiot.
Most of the characters still believe in honour, even if the narrative doesn’t.
Also starting rebellion is a risky business, the Starks have a ton of soldiers, a great castle, plenty of well-treated bannermen, and further out allies (the Vale and the Riverlands are both immediate allies for Ned, even if you leave the king out if it, and Robert has every reason to want stability as well as help his friend)
Don't bother. The dude is deliberately being obtuse as some sort of le ebic trollz.
>proven general and leader
>strong but fair sense of justice
>embodies values ideal to Northern culture
>has the largest personal levy and rules from the North's largest fortress.
>Very good relationship with key bannermen like the Reeds and Manderlys (who also control access to and from the North), family ties to the Karstarks etc
>Strong ties with the King, and Lords Paramount of the Vale and Riverlands
Any family that tried to rebel would get fricked under ordinary circumstances
>How come nobody in the North necked Ned?
Because that's the kind of moron shit that ends up with you getting necked in turn. Ned was too inflexible to understand when he should have been shrewd while in kings landing but his way is a good way to rule and cultivate loyalty. In the books the major commupenence is that ruthless Lansisters end up burning all their bridges and end up without allies while friends of the Starks end up helping them pull through in the end because trustworthiness actually means something to do those that ally or serve under you.
>tldr
Pic related
This.
Ned was good ruler, this is why when Joffrey executed him, Rob just send out call to arms and entire fricking north rallied instantly, because they were loyal to house Stark, house that treated them well and rebelion only occured when 1 Rob did collosal frickup with Freys, 2 Lannisters won war by getting Tyrells, 3 Bolton got enough of Rob's bullshit. Starks were winning war untill Rob fricked up lost Freys, made Bolton plot and caused Red Wedding by being moronic.
Ned was good ruler that no one had reason to plot against, entire north was loyal to him, then he jumped shark by going to King's Landing and deciding to play game with expirienced players while he had 0 expirience in plotting.
Constant plotting also fricked Lannisters, because they got 1 competent dude who was old and moment he died his dumb daughter(Jaime got smarter after losign hand) ruined everything, feuding with Tyrells, getting herself arrested by speton and overall their plotting bite them in the ass hard.
Backstabbing everyone to gain more power is bad for forming goverment.
It's a moron meme, it's not his take, he heard it from another moron.
A lot of fantasy authors have clashed with Tolkien on that point, which is perfectly reasonable, history tells us that people raised from birth to be kings often turn out to be bad kings. But GRRM wasn't even saying "this is bad", GRRM was saying "this is the opposite of what I'm trying to do".
Lord of the Rings isn't generally about politics, but when it is it's about wartime politics, "Can we get these guys to fight with us" and "will these guys betray us". The goodguys and the badguys are really obvious which is cool and fun and unrealistic.
A lot of the setting even before the war exists in a weird sort of idyllic libertarian fairy-world, defined by extremely powerful rulers who rule as little as possible, partially because it represents a nobler time but also because it represents a slow recovery after a series of major depopulation events.
What people don't understand is that the fattie operates in a libertarian mindset where taxes are edgy, killing-babies-to-stop-the-bomb-timer necessary evil things that a "good king" would not engage in.
Would a tiger flee a wasp nest?
It should be noted that the Mongols became a mighty force because Genghis Khan, an unorthodox, radical revolutionary, took over and completely changed the way the Mongols were organized into a meritocratic modern army.
If there was a lot more of them, yes. Numbers is a quality of it's own.
Guys, stop taking the bait. Yes, it's noble that you remember the ancient ways and the demand made of femanons, but if you've been here as long as that phrase implies, you know to stop biting once it becomes clear you've been trolled.
>Would halfnaked raiders on Horseback really be that effective against
anyone? no they would all die and be considered a joke by everyone on that planet. As shown in the series the dothraki are cretins.
If they were accompanied by their own heavily armoured lancers and they where decent shoots with a bow, and had decent systemizations maybe.
There's a really good and tl;dr blogpost criticizing Gurm's characterization of the Dothraki. I first saw it here, I'll look for it.
https://acoup.blog/category/collections/that-dothraki-horde/
No, they would not be effective.
Real life horsemen hordes used heavy armor and clever tactics.
And to be fair dothraki aren't effective either, they live on empty steppes with no civilisation, bully and enslave some poor border villages and sell them to slavers, but once horde grow big enough that khal decide to attack one of free cities they get rekt or just paid to frick off because city 1 need to fight against city 2 and they don't have time for horsefrickers bullshit.
They weren't really expecting any knock-down drag-out fights with the ruling caste. Raiding local villages and slaughtering trade caravans was more than enough to starve out the crown.
Now, how good they would be at disappearing into the wind after every attack in new lands is questionable, but that depends on whether Daenarys could convince locals to betray the crown by covering their trail every now and then. Considering that getting local support was her gimmick, and betraying the crown was Westeros's...
No. They're way of warfare is completely unsuited for Westeros. They'd flail and die in massive numbers. They'd devastate the local area just through numbers and looting as that happens, though.
They'd be a permanent band of adapted nomad bandits after te initial clusterfrick though, just because there's so many and some would survive long enough. But besides cultural trappings, they'd fight like any Westerosi bandits, using the same gear and tactics.
People take that one stupid meme about 'tax policies' and assume that the Ice Song is a response to Tolkien.
If anything - and I doubt even this - it was a response to the plague of 'doorstop' fantasy series that were everywhere in the 80s and 90s.
He's 'responding' to guys like Goodkind and Brooks and Jordan and Feist.
And the books do hold up pretty well under their own premises; lots of people claim things, in character, that they might really believe, but just aren't true. Dothraki invulnerability being one of them. (A huge underswell of Targaryen support is another that springs to mind.)
The only real problem is that there's not really a satisfying way to end it, which is probably one of the major reasons it will never be finished.
>If anything - and I doubt even this - it was a response to the plague of 'doorstop' fantasy series that were everywhere in the 80s and 90s.
I know city slickers don't get it, but manure is required to raise good crops.
I will always have a soft spot for Eddings, particularly the Elenium and Tamuli trilogies, since I feel like he knew he was writing generic fantasy and just leaned into it and embraced it instead of trying to deconstruct it.
Also, he wasn't *as* ambitious as guys like Jordan. The stories have a big scope at times, but they still feel somehow streamlined (or at least, not bloated).
Ya, I think that is why I like those two triliogies so much, they felt like refined versions of the Belgariad.
Eddings knew full well he was writing generic fantasy. He has a long discussion on it in the Rivan Codex, where he explains the choices he made and why he made them. He even made it a plot point how the Malloreon felt like a retread of Belgariad, because the story was actively repeating until it could resolve and something new could happen.
The oft memed "tax policies" question is probably indeed quite central to the books and in that sense they are a response to tolkien. People just either dont understand that bit or choose to take it out of context.
The books are a response to Tolkien/"the tax policy question" not because the fat man doesent realize Tolkien wrote "aragorn ruled wisely and justly" or because he actually cares about taxes - but because GRRM wanted to look at things without the very romantic lens Tolkien had where a good and just man who takes the crown in war is necessarily suited to rule.
Thats sort of the backdrop of the whole series, that the charismatic and beloved warrior-king Robert usurps the cartoonishly vile targariens, a quintessential "happily ever after" ending but then the camera keeps rolling, and it turned out things didnt just work out and robert didnt make for a very good king despite being a great guy by all accounts.
This doesent mean the whole series of books are some sort of anti-tolkien, with John Snow as the nega-aragorn or tyrion as an evil halfling, but you can clearly see that the dude wanted to explore that topic because he found the way Tolkien handled it unsatisfying.
THIS thread is THE thread to confirm that every critic of GGRM on /tg/ has not even read ASoIaF, and go off of Reddit shitposts blindly.
It's annoying, because there's legit critique, and critique in good amount, to be made of GRRM's works, but you frickers are straight up taking shots at a strawman without even realizing it's a strawman.
You know a seige tactic is to set up straw soldiers to make the assaulting army look much bigger than it actually is. There was also a tale of the reverse, where the castle, undermanned, managed to defend for much longer, because straw men were stood up to appear as archers on the walls.
And for the love of GOD, the TV show does not do the book justice, not even the "good" seasons do. Erroneously conflating the material from the show with material from the books makes you look stupid.
Straw soldiers reminded me about battle on wall where night watch set up strawman on wall and somehow wildlings shoot them up on 700 feet tall wall all the time.
Most important part of book tho was when Daenerys had diarrhea, it was quite a scene.
But yeah books got way better plots than tv, dorne and ironborn plots were completly butchered and no Daenerys diarrhea kino moment on screen.
While literal shit posting is very funny, there probably isn't a better way of writing it from the perspective character who doesn't know what's happening than that.
And yes I chose the word 'probably'...
Even in their own universe they weren't, there is story of one free cities panic buying castrated slave spearmen, marching them and stopping dothraki horde outside the walls of city despite being badly outnumbered.
This is why dothraki usually just raid some remote villages instead of going after one of free cities, if enemy fights back they get rekt.
Ironically kinda. The Arabs who defeated the Byzantines and Iranians had a complex military system and while it relied on a core of infantry the decisive factor was their light melee cavalry (granted they were lancers). The difficulty in defeating such light cavalry is a combination of shock and mobility, knights don't flank, heavy cavalry would struggle to flank, but light cavalry is sort of like battlecruisers, able to outrun anything they can't outfight. The end result is the light cavalry would generally outmaneuver or draw out the heavier enemy cavalry who become overextended and lose the ability to effectively defend the infantry or if they peel off can be continually harassed by lighter enemies until attrition causes the collapse of discipline leading to a rout or an uncontrolled pursuit (in which case they can't support the infantry who can be defeated piecemeal).
The Muslims did eventually migrate away from the primacy of light cavalry, adopting heavier Jund cavalry drawn from a new upper class of Arab colonists throughout the conquests of the caliphate but even then they still relied heavily on light cavalry who offer flexibility. Many armies adopt melee light cavalry to lethal effect, Alexander had his Prodromoi, the French army of the Renaissance had their Ordonnance Archers (who after about 1480 were light lancers). Ultimately beyond their tactical effectiveness light cavalry able to fight in melee offers strategic superiority over heavy cavalry or light cavalry who can't effectively fight in melee as the former are cumbersome and require more support while the latter can't recon in force and can be scattered or destroyed by more aggressive enemy light cavalry.
Surprisingly yes. In theory, combined arms easily wins out, and has in numerous occasions throughout history. But executing combined arms tactics requires a lot more coordination to work. If one element moves out of place, suddenly the whole system can collapse. Said halfnaked raiders are probably nomadic, and accustomed to not only moving and working in the saddle for a young age, but doing so in groups. The combined arms force, if it's from settled people, typically has to overcome this inherent organizational disadvantage through training and discipline, something that isn't always achieved. Specifically for aSoIaF/GoT, this is especially true for Westeros forces who are mix of semi-professional troops and levies who never train or drill at anything approaching a regimental level. GRRM isn't a huge fan of military history, and I think his portrayal of military tactics and strategy lack nuance, but he's not inherently wrong about this one.