Five Things About "Game Of Thrones" That Couldn't Really Work, Besides The Magic

This isn't the first time I've written about my concerns with GoT. Last time, however, it was about George R.R. Martin's plotting issues and his likely inability to wind up the saga in a fashion that will satisfy anyone. This time, I just want to go through some of the biggest plot holes, logical impossibilities, and waves-of-the-hand that I've noticed in the books and HBO series so far. Apologies for the Buzzfeedy headline, but I didn't know how else to put it. Obviously, spoilers ahead, although I'll try to keep it to the space of time covered so far by HBO.

5. Everybody North Of The Wall Would Starve Immediately The Wall is solid ice. It's so cold that Jon Snow suggests just pouring water into the existing gate to freeze it solid and render it impassible for Mance's army. In other words, it's well below freezing at the Wall and north of it. Think of the Wall as a man-made glacier. Which means the North is basically the Arctic Circle. And it's been like that as long as people can remember. So the seasons don't apply that far north, either.

In other words, there's no food. The only way people survive in conditions like that is by fishing, because agriculture is not possible in conditions where the ground is permanently frozen. Nor would it be likely that conditions would be any better as you go farther north from a giant wall of permanent ice. Ask Frederick Cook about that. So basically the entire "wildlings" plotline is entirely, completely impossible. Note that both the books and movies completely ignore this, portraying normal spring weather north of the Wall. But in "reality", the wildlings would all be dead, as would the giants and all the other living creatures, the same way it is on Earth in those latitudes.

4. But It's Okay, Because Everybody Else Has Also Starved To Death If you have even a passing acquaintance with human history up to the Industrial Revolution, you'll notice that war used to be very different. It was conducted occasionally, at set times, with long bouts of farming and building and other efforts in between. Hell, the Crusaders frequently stopped for years at a time and built entire local societies before continuing down their path.

The reason for this is simple: An army travels on its stomach and it doesn't travel very far, or for very long, in an era before mechanized transport and the C-ration. Consider this: The time period between Henry V's invasion of France and the battle at Agincourt, where his men were starving and surrender seemed imminent, was seventy days. A relatively small army couldn't support itself for seventy days on its arriving rations and what it could obtain from the heretofore entirely untroubled, properly operating agricultural system of France. Henry V was on the march, by the way, because he needed to have the army settled and prepared for winter. He knew he couldn't wage war for any longer than sixty days.

Contrast this to GoT where wars rage on for years and thousands of fighting men just hang around in big castles while a completely ravaged countryside around them fails to provide any food. It's pure fantasy, and not in the dragons-and-Red-Witch sense. In real life, Robb Stark would have had to seize the throne in sixty days or call it quits.

The fighting-man-to-farming-man ratio in GoT is hugely out of whack, by a factor of ten or more. Martin assumes WWII troop muster ratios in a technological era where entire 500-person villages could often feed and support just three or four mounted knights.

3. Where Do They Get All These Wonderful Buildings? The only realistic castle or stronghold in the series is Winterfell. Everywhere else, from King's Landing to The Eyrie, is utterly impossible to build with the manpower and technology depicted in the series. The Sun King nearly bankrupted himself and all of France building Versailles, which would be the second-least-impressive palace in Westeros and a dim corner of the bizarre walled cities in Essos.

We couldn't build the Eyrie now. How'd it get built by a bunch of people who in a similar-tech Earth barely managed Windsor Castle? And don't get me started on the Colossus of Braavos or the cities in Essos that support hundreds of thousands of people with little to no farming around them.

2. The Freys Would Have Been Bypassed And The Greyjoys Couldn't Exist Much of the plotline of the early books, including the Red Wedding, centers around the Starks' need to pacify Walder Frey. But why? Julius Caesar built bigger bridges in a matter of days with no detours. Robb Stark could have crossed in similar fashion without needing the assistance of the the Freys. Again, too, Martin has his numbers screwed up. We're told that Walder Frey can muster a thousand knights and three thousand foot. In other words, this minor river lord is about half as powerful as Henry V's England.

Now for the Greyjoys. They do not sow. Yet they have an entire kingdom of pirates who happily report to a single king. That's never happened in history and the numbers can't add up. Also, there's virtually no shipping to do the piracy thing on on the west side of Westeros. In a real-life situation where there was a pirate kingdom on three impossible stone towers, the Lannisters would have long since dipped their toes in the Greyjoy blood to preserve the economy, the way the United States did with the Tripoli pirates.

1. Viserys Would Have Been King Martin continually builds up geological deus ex machina places like Dorne and all of Essos. You remember Essos, right? It's where Viserys was known as "The Beggar King" because he wandered the streets begging. Yet Essos is so much more powerful than Westeros that anybody who can buy Unsullied (and why, exactly, were eight thousand Unsullied just sitting around on a continent where bloody conflict is rare?) and a few boats can just go over there and clean house.

In other words, Essos is Europe and Westeros is Africa. You remember colonial Africa, right? Viserys' undoubted claim to the throne would have made it easy for any Essos merchant worth his salt to run Robert Baratheon and his crew into a dungeon somewhere. It works like so:

1. Hire Unsullied and ships. 2. Conquer Westeros in a month. 3. Install Viserys as puppet king. 4. Rule entire continent for virtually no investment or risk.

This is, essentially, the plot of Frederick Forsythe's "The Dogs Of War" and it would work even better in Westeros. Even the Romans took the time to bring the Egyptians under their heels, and the power gap between Rome and Egypt wasn't nearly as wide.

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Okay, okay, it's fantasy. I know that. But a major portion of the trouble that Martin is having closing up the saga is a direct consequence of his decision to leave basic reality behind a while ago. In a real-life Westeros, everybody would long ago have returned to their feudal holdings to bring the crops in, including Robb Stark.

In a future installment of this, maybe we'll consider "The Night's Watch" or The Iron Bank or Harrenhal. Maybe. Or maybe we'll just leave GoT where it is: as a fun way to spend a Sunday night.