Hey folks! I had planned to do a Fireside for this week with a sort of ‘year-in-review’ musing, but between the holidays and the whole pedant household coming down with a nasty cold, I’m a bit short of the time and energy to put together a full fireside with recommendations. Instead, I’ll offer this brief end-of-year reflection as the year closes and we’ll be back next week in a whole new year.
2023 was the first year that ACOUP‘s average view-count didn’t go up. As WordPress reads the statistics, ACOUP in 2023 had 3.63m page views (Google Analytics records a somewhat lower figure of 3.3m), compared to 4.12m in 2022, a modest decrease, though still higher than 2021’s 2.8m. I used to benchmark this project’s level of public engagement against that of Eidolon (2015-2020) which had a five-year run of c. 2m views, so while 3.3m views is lower than last year it is still quite high for a public scholarship project. It is also approximately 3.25m more views than I ever hoped to get when we started. In terms of readers, the average monthly reader count via WordPress is around 80,000 for 2023,1 down from almost 100,000 in 2023, but up compared to the c. 60,000 for 2021.
As for why readership was a touch lower, I have a few theories. I think the most obvious thing to fault is the continued decline of Twitter and indeed, despite my rising Twitter follower count, actual visits from Twitter have declined by about a third. I don’t think that’s the whole story though. Looking at the posts for the year, what strikes is not that the average post is less read, but the absence of really big splashes. Part of that is probably a product of Twitter’s decline too, but also the topics we discussed and the year. A lot of traffic in 2022 was driven by Ukraine-related news and the military primers, which was less pressing in the news this year (though no less pressing on the actual battlefield). At the same time, some of this year’s topics – a lot of civic governance – were clearly more niche compared to previous years.
I’d also say, looking at the statistics, I can probably blame Amazon for some of my reduced traffic, because of how disappointing Rings of Power was. While the “Nitpicks of Power” series came out this year (and was thus shiny, fresh and new) it was actually outperformed in views this year by “The Siege of Gondor” and “The Battle of Helm’s Deep,” series that are three and four years old respectively. I think that speaks to the degree to which Rings largely sunk in the Anduin of the public’s consciousness – hopefully never to be retrieved (alas, I am told a second season is in production; may it be better than the first season, it can hardly be worse) – but of course that limits interest in probing its failures for interesting historical insights.
Finally, I think another factor was simply that I had a bit less time for this project this year than in some previous years. Instead, this year was dominated by the successful effort to get my book project a book contract (which of course patrons over at Patreon got the blow-by-blow of), as well as welcoming a little human addition to our pedant family – both things which will tend to demand considerable time and attention. But that of course has an impact on the posts, which were a bit less developed this year in general, with fewer images and which tended to be more narrowly historical (e.g. the series on civic governance, which I quite like) to save time working through pop-culture parallels. I think the result was perfectly fine and serviceable, but life is a matter of tradeoffs.
That said, the modest drop in readership hasn’t been matched by a drop in support for the project. At the start of this year, ACOUP had about 800 amici over on Patreon and an appropriate c. 300 patres et matres conscripti in the ACOUP Senate; both figures are up by about a hundred now year-on-year. All told then, I think this was a year where it seems the core readership on the project was quite happy, but we didn’t reach as widely beyond them as we had in previous years, for a mix of reasons. That’s fine by me; I do not think every venture in life must be eternally in a state of growth – sometimes it is fine to simply develop a sustainable, productive and useful niche and then serve that niche.
This year did see some of my writing outside of ACOUP reach larger audiences however. In April, my essay in the New York Times, “Colleges Should Be More Than Just Vocational Schools” came out, initially online but evidently it gathered enough interest to be included in the print edition, which was a fun and unexpected treat. Then in July, my essay in Foreign Policy, the provocatively titled “Spartans Were Losers” – a compressed version of the This. Is. Not. Sparta. series – made a substantial splash as well, triggering a lot of debate on social media. My hope is that some of the points I made manage to plant themselves in the institutional culture of the U.S. military, which was the ‘target’ for the essay (thus the venue).
In any case, we’re going to keep on keeping on. My plan for the next few weeks is a few more ‘weapon studies’ in line with our treatment of the Mediterranean ‘Omni-Spear’ – in particular, I’m plotting a brief history of the gladius – probably alongside a Rogue Trader-inspired look at military adventurers, private enterprize war and charter companies. I also need to actually post the ACOUP-Senate poll I’ve been meaning to for ::checks notes:: oh, about three months. Perhaps unsurprisingly, topics picked by the ACOUP-Senate tend to be popular.
So that is it for 2023 and I will see you all in 2024.
Though it may not have been your most popular series ever, I was very thankful for the look at civic governance in the Roman Republic. Not only was it interesting and educational, but it inspired a research paper for my Alternate Dispute Resolution class comparing modern ADR to Roman jurisprudence. Your descriptions of Roman society and courts as well as the attending book recommendations were invaluable. Thank you!
Bret on the topic of your writings outside of ACOUP I quite liked this piece https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/10/13/rome-america-empire-fall/. Just checked if it was in any of the previous firesides but it doesn’t seem like it? I was sure I had seen it posted here, maybe it was actually on twitter?
For anyone that did not read it yet checking it again it was not paywalled for me but the article I clicked next was, so I’m guessing foreignpolicy allows one free article per month.
What killed my interest in running my blog wasn’t declining viewership… Because that’s not (IMO) a reasonable measure of a blog’s reach and impact. *A blog isn’t a banner ad.* A blog is a forum, a place of and for interaction between author and commenters and among commenters. What did it for me was declining *participation*, fewer and shorter comments and less interaction. (Which seems to be happening across the blogosphere in general.)
That doesn’t seem to be a problem you face. 🙂
Well, I am a new reader, even if I am in a minority 😬 And I’m here for your chats about civic governance, and of course anything you offer up about LOTR in any form 😂 Thanks for your great blog.
Congrats on another grand year!
I am very excited for more posts in the vein of “How to Shield Wall” and the Omni-Spear. I don’t know if there are any great pop-culture references to tie those sorts of articles to, but I love everything you do in the vein of the “physics” of the ancient world. Maybe someday this will seep far enough into Hollywood for a director to realize it might actually look cooler than whatever standard BS they were planning to do…
In the 50’s and 60’s, effectively everything Hollywood made had at least one veteran involved at a high level. While our host has pointed out that the experience of war changes over time, there was still a certain basic “groundedness” that I think this produced that is missing in modern Hollywood and other media.
My impression is that actual combat soldiers know that war is a group effort (and rarely a lone hero thing) and that senior officers typically really are pretty good at their jobs, and they also know that this doesn’t stop SNAFU from being what it is, because in war, “Everything in war is very simple. But the simplest thing is difficult.” (Take a drink.)
You’re less inclined to think that battles are won by clever tricks when you know that clever is a often a way to screw up even more than usual, and that the usual situation is people who are very good at what they’re doing screwing up, because it really is just that hard to get the straightforward things to work.
Replying to myself, I’ll add that I’m not sure Hollywood isn’t correct for making current movies the way that they do. They want to make money, not educate people.
Poeple LIKE nonsensical crap where the hero is always right and is a loose cannon.
To take an example: The Last Jedi had Poe blatantly and over the top wrong about almost everything from the first to the last (remove him and most of the movie disappears as Holdo’s plan works fine and saves the resistance). Yet many views appear to have decided that the problem was Holdo’s entirely justified attempt to keep her secret plan a secret, not her loose cannon subordinate’s inability to even begin to understand the concept of security.
Heck, I’ve been told in online discusions that Holdo didn’t need to keep the plan a secret, because Poe wouldn’t leak it. This despite the fact that he demonstratable DID leak it within (literally) seconds of Holdo revealing it.
I mean, the movie was profoundly stupid in a great many ways, but at the point where it made it stupidly obvious that the lone wolf hero approach was wrong, people still complain about “mistreatment” of the loose cannon. (To be clear, the only mistreatment of Poe in that movie is to total failure to have him shot for mutiny PRIOR to the point where he gets 95% of his side killed.)
I think the main problem with Holdo’s plan is that it looked to the crew like her plan was to escape at sublight, and the crew is not aware there is a planet in range to escape to. Thus, as far as the crew is concerned they’re all going to die within the day when their fuel runs out. This is not good for morale and unsurprisingly leads to desertions and mutiny.
Wasn’t the Issue is that the reason Poe goes loose canon is because Holdo doesn’t share her plan with who is in effect the second most senior officer on board. And the fact she doesn’t tell anyone is what leads to the mutiny as it leads to everyone loosing faith in her.
Not to mention the plan failed cause the imperials just thought to do a different kind of scan and then saw the transports leave. Suggesting her plan was doomed to fail anyways.
It gives the viewer the impression that Holdo indeed was incompetent and undermines whatever message the movie was trying to convey. Due to it being a shit movie.
Yeah, I didn’t see how the information leaked (that they were loading the transports but not when they were launching or where they were going) allowed them to spot the plan if they wouldn’t have been able to do that anyways, and unless Star Wars sensors are unable to detect planets at any range the possibility that they’d evacuate to the planet would’ve been pretty obvious.
Honestly I feel like the film was going for Holdo being good at strategizing but bad with managing people, since Leia actually remarks on that.
Holdo’s plan relied entirely on a “clever” trick, and so was not a good plan.
To be clear, it was not actually clever, it was the writer pulling it from thin air. Either hyperdrive doesn’t actually work that way and so the movie fails, or it does work that way and the enemy commander (forgot his name) is incompetent for not guarding against it.
Why would this not have happened several times in the battle during Return of the Jedi (they just ram instead)?
For that matter, if it works, why do you have large ships that have *any* sentients on board (as opposed to building for instance a ship with a heavily protected hyperdrive and a single suicide droid – or human – pilot)?
And her plan fails due to scanning – which is pretty common.
And her plan fails due to not consulting with her second in command; who should have said (in private), “This is a stupid plan”.
But no, it’s just a bad movie, so bad that even people who don’t know anything about the military can still see it’s bad.
Johnson was dead set on subverting everything; that’s his style and claim to fame. That’s fine when you have a small film, which can make fun of the blockbuster. It’s not so good when you’re doing a blockbuster yourself.
I came out of the Last Jedi feeling like there had been some interesting ideas but fundamentally it had misunderstood the concept of authority. The basic question that was never addressed is WHY should anyone follow Holdo after Leia dies. It was clear that a great deal of the resistance’s cohesion and structure came from personal loyalty to Leia and her vision for the future and there was no reason why that would transfer to Holdo. There was no larger state or identity holding them together to bestow that authority and Holdo’s largest error was simply acting as though people ought to follow her orders, orders which made no logical sense to them, simply because she gave them.
My impression was that the director did not like the character of Holdo, based on how she is dressed. Having the senior military commander outfitted for a formal dinner did not happen by accident. Compare to the much more practical outfits worn by Leia in both earlier Return of the Jedi and in this one.
“In the 50’s and 60’s, effectively everything Hollywood made had at least one veteran involved at a high level.”
While this may have some effect, I cannot help but think of these posts on Angry Staff Officer, one about The Wind in the Willows:
https://angrystaffofficer.com/2017/02/20/warfighter-toad-hall/
and this about Avengers: Infinity War
https://angrystaffofficer.com/2019/03/31/military-lessons-learned-from-the-battle-of-wakanda/
The Battle of Toad Hall seems to be run much better than the Battle of Wakanda. Why is that?
The writer of The Wind in the Willows had no more military experience than that of Avengers: Infinity War. So I don’t think that matters too much. The more important matter is whether the writer wants a scene that makes sense more than he wants one that looks cool.
Maybe I’m the weird one here but while I do like Bret’s work on that it’s more so I like thinking about how various fantastical or sci fi assumptions could break or alter them.
Ooooh, I don’t know if we should wish to consign Rings of Power into the Anduin. All sorts of nasty things have a habit of being dredged up from that watercourse. Maybe we should try to get it into the Bay of Forochel. Nobody ever found those seeing stones again.
Nice cat pic.
Like all of the really good pictures, it was taken by my wife.
“sunk in the Anduin of the public’s consciousness – hopefully never to be retrieved”
There are many things in the deep waters; and seas and lands may change. And it is not our part here to take thought only for a season, or for a few lives of Men, or for a passing age of the world. We should seek a final end of this menace, even if we do not hope to make one. We must send the Rings of Power to the Fire.
Ladies and Gentleman, it cannot be denied: This comment thread has been conclusively won.
Sorry to hear that the Pedant household is sick – mine too, although it’s probably not the same thing because we live on opposite coasts. The addition of the Junior Pedant is definitely a good reason to drop back a bit on the blog posts, and I hope things are going well with/for them! The series on Roman civic governance was actually very interesting to me from a fantasy-writer perspective, though. Yes, the stuff I’m writing adds dragons and wizards, but the general issue of “how did governments even work back then?” is still pretty similar.
It actually inspired me to have directly elected magistrates with limited terms on a Hive World in my WH40k fanfic.
Tzeenchian cultists murdered all of them except agriculture. Which is, uh, not the most important of Hive World ministries
Quick note about the view count. I generally read your post directly in the email. Not sure who else does this but that may drive down the number.
I wonder if that’s why WordPress view counts are lower than Google counts.
Count me as the kind of reader not mentioned in your lists of common reasons people read your blog. I’m not on Twitter, and never have been, though I am experimenting with Bluesky. I don’t follow movies to speak of, though I’ve enjoyed some of your critiques of the realism in movies and other fiction. I’ve subscribed to receive your new posts by email, but also enjoy reading your older posts. And I follow up with books when I can get them, ideally from a library.
Thank you for all your work here, and may your 2024 be even better than your 2023.
The thing I remember most wasn’t on the blog, it was the podcasts about Punic war + other pre cannon focused navies. I’d never really heard an in depth description of what these types of navies were doing beyond the basic “ram other ships and some sort of ocean control something or other.”, getting those details filled in was nice.
Looking forward to that patreon question post, the last thread had a lot of questions it should b fun to see answers to.
For what it’s worth (probably not much!) I first came across this blog as a reference on Twitter to your series on textile production. I am still astounded by the amount of effort that went into spinning. I no longer visit Twitter but I follow you on Mastodon.
I followed up with your series on farming, then went on to read everything from the start.
The articles that interest me most are the ones on everyday life, although I can understand that the elite sources have a limited amount to say on the matter. I also like your analysis of films and games. I’ve never been interested in military strategy or tactics (or logistics) before but I’ve found your articles on them fascinating.
Governance in Ancient Rome, ho hum, but obviously I’m in the minority here, and it’s of passing interest.
From Scotland, I wish you and yours a happy new year when it comes, and please keep on doing what you’re doing.
For what it’s worth, this year is the year I started really waiting for your posts week by week, mostly because I run out of the archive. Most of the time the post ends before the week ends and I have to ensure some days without ACOUP! What a nightmare!
Keep up the good work!
Congratulations, get well soon, and thanks for the great year of interesting posts!
I’ve really loved your “civic governance” posts, how cities and countryside are arranged, demography, etc. I feel like I’ve taken a college level survey class on life in the ancient world.
I also really enjoyed the civic governance posts.
I get here either via RSS or just entering ‘acoup.blog’ in the URL bar and clicking through.
I seem to have first gotten here in 2019 via the Westeros elective monarchy post, followed by Siege of Minas Tirith, and catching up on older post series.
Of the various categories of posts, I’m generally interested, but least interested in most of the computer game ones.
Tolkien, cloth, iron, Roman governance, Sparta, those are great.
I wanted to point out that lately your Twitter (like everyone else’s) is impossible to read without making an account, which I refuse to do especially now since it feels like giving in to blackmail. I’ve enjoyed reading what you wrote there so I’d love it if you started posting somewhere more accessible! I hear Tumblr is nice this time of year 😛
nitter.net is my go to for reading twitter without account and while it kind of sucks it can work if you just want to follow one person’s output.
Better than nothing, thanks!
Obviously it’s Prof. Devereaux’s blog, and he can write what you want, but some things that would interest me and I think would drive pageviews (assuming either of those is anyone’s goal) are:
1. An analysis of the military situation in Ukraine, and why neither side appears capable of waging the “modern system” effectively (or maybe it doesn’t work anymore?).
2. Some comments on the situation in the universities today. I thought this (very brief) essay was particularly good, and wonder what others think. I’ll be happy to report (in comments) what I think is happening at Columbia, where I am currently enrolled. https://www.realclearpolitics.com/2023/12/28/rise_of_the_sectarian_university_614795.html
3. Granular analyses of strategy and tactics in some other popular fantasies. I don’t have any particular suggestions, since this isn’t the kind of thing I read regularly (I only read GoT because my daughter did), but I’m sure there are some.
I continue to think that Prof. Devereaux would make more money writing popular books along the lines of “A Military Historian Looks at Game of Thrones” than being an adjunct professor in an unpopular field (take a look at how few, and how undersubscribed, are the Classics courses at Columbia), but that is his choice, obviously.
I thought Columbia was the one that was suspending SJP and JVP operations? Rashid Khalidi is pissed off at it.
Yes, that is the situation at Columbia. I didn’t say I would issue a positive report. I think that the suspension of those organizations, for failing to give the required notice of planned demonstrations, was obviously pretextual. The university regulations supposedly require 10 days’ notice for demonstrations, which is ridiculous and unnecessary. It might make sense to require 10 days’ notice to reserve a classroom, but these have been outdoor demonstrations in the main plaza. Furthermore, the administration certainly had at least a day’s notice each time, which enabled then to close the campus to outsiders (which I think is a good idea, since it effectively ensures that the demonstration will be peaceful, Columbia students generally not being street fighters).
Suspending the organizations hasn’t stopped demonstrations; it just means that the organizations don’t get university funding and some other benefits. OTOH, exams and then Christmas vacation certainly stopped the demonstrations. We’ll see what happens in a few weeks. I should be clear that I don’t support the pro-Palestinian demonstrations at all: there are always a few pro-Israel counterdemonstrators and I always give them the thumbs-up when I pass. I wouldn’t dream of taking a course from Khalidi, and I consider the sudden commitment to free expression by his comrades on the faculty to be dishonest and hypocritical.
That’s my “Columbia Letter.” Not quite in the George Orwell league, I’m afraid.
Since others are saying how they found this blog: I found it via another military history blog (that I have since stopped reading). I stayed because as a Tolkien nerd I deeply enjoyed the analysis of those battles, and as something of a world builder (DMing and some stories I’m writing for fun) the dives into the fiddly details of ancient cultures is fascinating.
As for what I want to see, I’d like to see some “What would work” takes. A lot of this blog has focused on “Given X technology, does Y battle make sense?” Like, “Given the technology presented does the battle of the Loot Train make sense?” I’d like to see this reversed. Take, for example, dragons. Assume you live in a world where facing dragons is something that is a real possibility in a military setting. How would you go about it? The old Norse sagas discuss this to some extent (one hero hid in a ditch and slit the dragon’s belly open), as does Tolkien (Smaug had a scale missing, Ancalagon was stabbed by a ship with a Silmaril), but I’d like to see a military historian’s take on what a standardized combat doctrine against dragons would be.
I’d also like to see some commentary on the war in Ukraine. I can get news elsewhere, but I’d like to see a historian’s perspective. A basic truism in geology is “The present is the key to the past, and the past is the key to the future.” In other words, we don’t study the past merely because we’re curious about it; we study it because knowing what happened before allows us to make predictions about what will happen in the future. Someone steeped in the past has a unique and valuable perspective on what is shaping up to be a defining conflict for this decade, if not this generation (I REALLY hope it’s limited to this decade….).
Finally, I’d like to see Bret collaborate with some folks like Brandon F and the guy who makes Modern History TV on YouTube. The popular perspective on history seems to be shifting towards the every day, the mundane–the lived experiences of the average person (for a given value of “average”). Questions like “What role did smoke play in a battle?” and “How did a household provide light for themselves?” seem like minor, even trivial questions compared to the dynastic wars of Rome and China, but in reality how cloth and ink were made were probably of more actual value to the society–in terms of long-term impact–than the Great Men were. I’d like to see more interplay in those exploring these ideas. I’d LOVE for Bret to go to Pensic, but…the SCA doesn’t make any claims that Pensic is historic, only that everyone’s trying to live the Dream.
I’d like to see some dragon analysis too. It’s possible that I mentioned this before, but my thought is that, despite Bret’s criticism of many aspects of the Gold Road battle, Daenerys’s use of dragons made sense. The dragons were used to open holes in the close infantry formation into which cavalry could penetrate, which is similar to my understanding of the way artillery was used in the black powder era.
yes, but she could ALSO make a far wider hole in the line by breathing fire down it instead of through it, which would, again, make a bigger hole, greatly reduce the numbers of enemies her cavalry would have to face, and demoralize the enemy to an incredible extent. What she did is like sieging a castle with a gunpowder cannon, knocking down one single section of the wall, and then resting on your laurels while you order your men to charge the gap instead of just leveling the castle.
At a certain point continued fire would result in loss of your own troops–once they’ve closed with the enemy they’re within the area of effect, essentially. You CAN still pour fire on them, but friendly forces tend to object to being roasted. And unlike artillery (especially black powder artillery) dragonfire typically is portrayed as sticking around for a while. You’d block your troops from accessing that area as well as anyone else’s.
Further, this is a world where dragons existed not that long ago. I’d expect there to be some anti-dragon tactics available–even if they don’t have technical manuals, passing stories down from soldier to soldier (“My Seargent told of a time he had to face off against a dragon–no I’m serious–and this is how it went” would be a fine story to tell!). And there’s a group dedicated to knowledge in Westros (not a FRIENDLY group, but it exists). And the Wall should absolutely have kept records of this, given that it’s their job.
I’d imagine that we’d see one of two methods for countering dragons.
First, the thing is in the air, so get weapons in the air, either to deny air space or to take it out. Legolas was not an exceptional elf in regards to archery–he was good, but nowhere is it stated that he was great, much less uniquely skilled. Get a few dozen elven archers together and just pepper the dragon with arrows. Eventually one will find a gap in the scales. Or at the very least you’ll annoy the dragon enough to attack the archers instead of the target, or leave that area alone. “Race to the Edge” actually does this pretty well. The Dragon Hunters have a variety of ways of bringing down dragons, from poison arrows to nets to bolos. And the heroes are shown getting caught a few times, and learning from their mistakes, which is nice–they don’t start out superpowered, but have to figure out anti-anti-dragon tactics.
Second, distract the dragon and let some suicidal hero take it out. Fafner was taken out that way–it crawled over a trench to get at someone, and the hero gutted him. Suicidal, because if it doesn’t work the hero is dead, and they really only get one shot at it. Given that you rarely read of dragons having a society (The Enchanted Forest Chronicles aside), it’s unlikely that this tactic would be countered quickly–each dragon would have to learn it for themselves. Unless they have human handlers (a notion I dislike, but that’s entirely personal, it’s common enough in literature), in which case the human is the most vulnerable part. To again reference “Race to the Edge”, a BIG part of the combat is psychological between the various leaders. The battles are important, but the leaders attack each other in psychological weak points, rather than the story being about weapons systems countering one another (though that does happen).
But that’s just me speculating. I’d love to see a real military historian’s take!
“At a certain point continued fire would result in loss of your own troops–once they’ve closed with the enemy they’re within the area of effect, essentially.”
Okay, so literally just don’t breathe fire down while your troops are near. Hold off the Dothraki charge for a minutes, scorch the enemy lines, and then charge.
“And unlike artillery (especially black powder artillery) dragonfire typically is portrayed as sticking around for a while. You’d block your troops from accessing that area as well as anyone else’s.”
How is that any different from what she did in the real battle? she made a tiny hole WITH DRAGON FIRE that killed like 30 guys. She could’ve made a GIGANTIC HOLE with dragon fire that the enemy lines would have a large issue trying to defend, especially considering how stretched thin they are. She could also just order the Dothraki to wait to charge until the dragon fire dissipates.
“Further, this is a world where dragons existed not that long ago. I’d expect there to be some anti-dragon tactics available”
Really? Are you really sure about that? Because theres not a lot of ways to resist a giant fire breathing monster that can kill you from like 100 feet in the air.
“Get a few dozen elven archers together and just pepper the dragon with arrows. Eventually one will find a gap in the scales. Or at the very least you’ll annoy the dragon enough to attack the archers instead of the target, or leave that area alone.”
I’m sorry, but
1. are you perhaps trying to tell me that theres elves in GoT and that there were multiple of them in the Lannister army?
2. Good luck organizing an anti dragon taskforce when Daenerys literally just annihilated the line for a few hundred meters in like, a minute. Especially good luck considering your army is spread out so thin over the entire course of like a mile long loot train.
3. Lets say this plan does work, the archers don’t run away when they see a dragon destroying the entire line coming towards them, and they’re accurate enough to annoy the dragon (because there is no way you’re “finding a gap in it’s scales” with a dozen archers) to make it attack the archers.
What’s the plan then? The dragon breathes fire over your group of archers for 2 seconds and then goes back to destroying the Lannister line? Great distraction, you’ve saved the battle.
“Second, distract the dragon and let some suicidal hero take it out. Fafner was taken out that way–it crawled over a trench to get at someone, and the hero gutted him.”
Okay, so like, see above, but also, how the hell would anybody trick the dragon? we are on a hilly plain, and the dragon is in the air breathing fire. Unless someone pulled the dragon to the ground like Scorpion, this can only end in the guy annoying the dragon and then immediately getting roasted.
“How is that any different from what she did in the real battle?”
I want to clarify a point that seems to be confusing you: I was thinking more in general terms. That’s why I referenced a number of other stories that include fights with dragons. (As an aside, while I appreciate what Martin was trying to do, I am not a SOIAF or GoT fan, and have zero interest in watching the show. The books rapidly became mere exercises in gratuitous torture for no purpose.)
“Really? Are you really sure about that?”
Let’s try to be civil, shall we?
Yes, I’m absolutely certain that humans will come up with some method for dealing with dragons. They aren’t simply goin to go “Well, nothing we can do, guess we’ll just die.” That’s not how humans work. And it’s not like we haven’t come up with ways to defeat aerial opponents. (And before you say “But those require guns”, remember that guns arose far earlier than most people think, around the 1300s in the Iberian Peninsula.) To be fair, I’m not saying it’s easy–I firmly believe that dragons should be powerful enough that sending a legion against a dragon should be a suicide mission. But it’s not going to be impossible.
In fact, one story I referenced provides not one but multiple ways to combat dragons–Race to the Edge. They can poison dragons, use bolos and nets to incapacitate them, there are techniques developed for direct combat, etc. One of the running themes is the arms race that develops between the Riders and the Hunters, both sides using and countering dragons and anti-dragon tactics to gain an advantage. It’s a kid’s show, and there’s a lot of “Rule of Funny” going on, but the show runners put some real thought into this question.
“I’m sorry, but….”
Again, you’re limiting this discussion far more than I intended. I’m not asking how GoT dragons would be defeated, much less how to do so in one battle in that one fictional universe, but rather how dragons as such would be defeated. That’s why I referenced multiple other stories that include dragons–LOTR, Race to the Edge, and others.
The issue with the Loot Train is that the folks facing the dragon hadn’t done so before. If this war had gone on for much longer, anti-dragon weapons and tactics would absolutely have been developed–just like people developed anti-artillery weapons and tactics, or anti-aircraft weapons and tactics, or anti-tank weapons and tactics. Dragons, as much as I love them, are not gods; they can be defeated, in every story they appear in. Not if one is unprepared or doesn’t even realize they’re a possibility, but given time to prepare, they can be taken down.
“What’s the plan then? The dragon breathes fire over your group of archers for 2 seconds and then goes back to destroying the Lannister line?”
Let’s generously assume that generals are not lobotomized morons. As a general facing an army that includes dragons I know that any archers I put against the dragon are going to be horrifically vulnerable. I do have a few options, however. Shields can be of some use (see Beowulf), so a shieldman-and-archer setup could be effective (expensive, since the shields will need to be built for this purpose, but possible). So could mobile cover–remember, generals are used to dealing with hot stuff being poured on their soldiers; these tactics and tools are already part of my toolbox. Another option is to have scattered groups of archers, such that when one is under fire the rest are free to engage. Dragons are typically depicted as soaring, not flapping, and can be assumed to have fantastically strong flight muscles, but eventually WILL tire. And a dragon on the ground is significantly less threatening.
For that matter, you don’t necessarily need to fight the dragon on this battlefield. If the dragon’s off somewhere else, it’s not fighting you. Small-scale raids could effectively pin down the dragon in a small area at fairly low cost (compared to whole armies, anyway; the cost per person would be huge). Such forces are commonplace in fiction that includes dragons (St. George, Turin, Earendil, the knights from The Enchanted Forest Chronicles….). So if I plan to go to war against you, and you have dragons, I’m going to task specially-trained units to harass the dragons’ food supplies, caves, hoards, or whatever it takes to keep those dragons at home, if not kill the dragon outright. Then I’m going to deal with your soldiers in a more traditional manner.
“Okay, so like, see above, but also, how the hell would anybody trick the dragon?”
I specifically referenced a dragon that was so tricked. “Children of Hurin” presents another. So it’s not impossible, just not easy–which I acknowledged, calling it suicidal (given the heroes in question, they were okay with either victory or death). The specifics are going to depend on the story and, as I said, on the dragon–dragons are not typically depicted as acting in concert, they are typically shown as intensely individualistic, so you’ll have to learn what drives each dragon.
Some of you don’t play fantasy computer games and it shows. Plenty of ways to kill a dragon if you’re creative and have an NPC to distract/sacrifice 😉
Forcing a dragon to land is usually a good tactic in popular games (e.g. Skyrim). You can use bait or violence to achieve that (or magic but let’s assume in this imaginary scenario that magic doesn’t exist). Once the dragon is down, some stabbing with a large weapon should do the trick, but realistically if you had an army you could just swarm the beast.
It is a historical fact in Song of Ice and Fire that anti-dragon tactics are not very effective. The Valyrian dragonlords ruled a large area with little opposition (other than other Valyrian dragonlords, and maybe some late-stage magical assassins) for thousands of years. Just 3 of them sufficed to subdue the Seven Kingdoms, unifying them for the first time after even more thousands of years.
I would find it more useful, instead of insisting that plucky prepared humans can always curb dragons, to look at what properties of dragons (and the target society) justify such feats. Speed, armor, intelligence (provided by a human rider in the Westerosi case), breath range, etc.
Wiki of Ice and Fire says that young dragons could be vulnerable to arrows, with one being killed by dozens of arrows. OTOH you have to be able to hit a 50 MPH dragon with dozens of arrows as it flies overhead and burns you. By implication, older dragons like Aegon the Conqueror’s wouldn’t have that vulnerability.
Smaug was arrow-proof apart from the gap on his chest. RuneQuest III dragons had tons of armor and were basically immune to anything you could inflict without lots of magic help.
Old Westerosi dragons can “melt stone” with their fire, so your shields won’t be doing you much good; if you’re hit you die. Even if you hide behind a large asbestos or tungsten pavise, there’s all the heat wrapping around the edges…
The Seven Kingdoms were very feudal, so conquest via threatening the lives of the rulers (or the heir of the late rulers) seems pretty plausible. I’ve never gotten how Dorne, an open desert, supposedly held out; the Stormlands seem a more plausible refuge from flying fire lizards to me.
Conversely, I have daydreamed about a fantasy “Rome” subduing a sapient dragon at great expense… and then the victorious consul granting it citizenship and maybe a Senate seat if it would agree to join Rome’s forces. “You can keep your hoard, if you help us get even more.”
“The Valyrian dragonlords ruled a large area with little opposition (other than other Valyrian dragonlords, and maybe some late-stage magical assassins) for thousands of years.”
The idea that this is due primarily to the dragons is the part that I don’t buy. I consider it a major failure of Martin’s world-building. Humans simply do not work that way. There are millions of people in Westros, over thousands of years; the idea that no one could come up with a way to mitigate dragons on the battlefield defies reason.
A thousand years is a long, long time for humans (if we were discussing, say, elves, the situation would be different). The English of a thousand years ago is incomprehensible to modern speakers. Even assuming a much lower-technology state a thousand years is a long time. The difference in lifestyle between Augustus’ reign and 1100 CE is not insignificant. If Valentinian the Great had had dragons, a thousand years later they’d have have been shot out of the sky with Iberian cannons.
And it’s not like they didn’t have viable tactical options. Again, blocking hot things from above is standard procedure for sieges throughout history, and even fire hot enough to melt rock takes some time to cause damage (there’s a video of a banana being swallowed by lava–not comfortable for the banana, but not instant death either, especially for the human that tossed it). Further, starving people out is always an option. It’ll take a while, since dragons can fly and we can presume they’ll get preferential food allowances, but eventually it will work. Arrow-proof armor doesn’t necessarily mean impervious, either, it just means you can’t shoot it with arrows. Ballista, crossbows, and other means to increase power to the projectile were available in the Middle Ages (Rome had a repeating ballista, so rapid fire was possible). And that’s just the existing weapons and tactics in our world that could easily be modified to combat dragons. In a world with dragons, more effective means are inevitable given time. (The reason the three “modern” dragons work is that Westros doesn’t have that time. They attacked too fast.)
To clarify: There could be other considerations preventing people from attacking dragons. Religious prohibitions, for example (though Martin’s characters notoriously do not take their religion seriously). It may also be that they consider having the Valyrians ruling was better than the alternatives–England is not spending a great deal of time figuring out how to attack the United States. Or they decided to fight in other ways–China doesn’t often directly attack USA military hardware. And if Martin wanted to go that route, that’d be fine; culture is significant. It’s the idea that dragons are too powerful to counter that I object to.
The key weakness of dragons is greed. So a cow laced with a draconicide, or a pile of gold at the end of a tunnel rigged to collapse. Maybe high-angle artillery (torsion or tension, take your pick), but really without being able to contest the air pre-gunpowder troops are helpless. You have to look elsewhere than direct counters.
On the ‘what would work, you might be interested in the Traitor Son series by Miles Cameron. The author is a re-enactor, and the books feature more thought on the question of how a man at arms in full harness should fight a wyvern than I have seen elsewhere.
> The old Norse sagas discuss this to some extent (one hero hid in a ditch and slit the dragon’s belly open), as does Tolkien (Smaug had a scale missing, Ancalagon was stabbed by a ship with a Silmaril)[…]
Túrin Turambar almost does the Norse saga thing verbatim with Glaurung the first dragon, though in a precipitous gorge rather than a ditch.
The problem with applying fantastical solutions to problems is that you have to spend so much time defining and nailing down how the fantastical works. Are your dragons Tolkien-style dragons, which are hideously dangerous in their immediate area but can be killed by an arrow or spear? Are these D&D style elder dragons, effectively impervious to mundane weaponry and capable of unleashing all manner of other magic on an opponent? Are these Christian folklore dragons, which usually are stopped with prayer or martyrdom?
A magical solution needs to be so well-defined that it becomes physics, unless the takeaway from the discussion becomes “this fantastical element has effectively no impact because of this other, rarely-discussed mundane element.”
I hope your cats could resist all the shiny toys in the tree!
Hey! I’ve just recently discovered your blog and just want to say I find it very fun and informative. I’ve cought myself waiting on fridays for new posts. So thank you, and I hope you continue for a (very) long time!
“I do not think every venture in life must be eternally in a state of growth – sometimes it is fine to simply develop a sustainable, productive and useful niche and then serve that niche.”
Hear, hear!
I wish you a happy & healthy new year 2024 – and am excited for whichever posts come up!
As someone interested in RPG worldbuilding, the civic governance stuff was really useful – there’s not much of a reason for a tabletop group to ever encounter a full scale army, but I regularly run people through encounters with pre-modern systems of government, and taking inspiration from Rome or Greece for city states and so on helps me add more variety than the standard fantasy ‘council of important dudes for some reason’ or ‘feudal, but with some sort of justiciary equivalent’ models so common to fantasy worlds. Especially given, with the depth to which these went, it let me grasp a bit more of the thinking behind systems of government that actually have defined thinking behind them – I’m English, so our government is largely layer upon layer of minor changes to a feudal system applied over the course of a good 800 years. Which is not a good way to make a system that actually has goals/themes, and certainly not a feasible way to make one over the course of a Sunday afternoon.
I get here by RSS; I was originally linked to the Helm’s Deep analysis on another blog, then read the entire archive in short order.
I rather like the civic governance posts as well.
Brief pedantry moment: it would actually be very easy for RoP to get worse, all they have to do is botch the Moria storyline and make the Harfoot storyline even more of a cliche storm.
Thanks for these reflections!
I’d noticed that the posts this year tended to be “a bit less developed” and “more narrowly historical”; I’m glad to hear that it’s because of such exciting things going on in the rest of your life! Congratulations on the baby, and on the book!
But that doesn’t mean they were bad; I was fascinated by your series on the Roman Republic. And, I’m looking forward to that military adventurers post you mention.
What needs to plant itself in the institutional culture of the U.S. military is Kipling’s Arithmetic on the Frontier.
“Strike hard who cares – shoot straight who can
The odds are on the cheaper man.”
A skirmish at a border station, a canter down a dark defile
A thousand pounds of education falls to a ten-rupee jezail.
Looking ahead, I like the plan to “look at military adventurers, private enterprize war and charter companies…” The whole idea of “letters of marque”, where state governments authorized citizen shipowners to go out and be pirates as long as the state got its cut, deserves a look. Multiple states did this, including the North African ones like Tripoli which produced the notorious “Barbary Pirates” — they weren’t pirates, they had licenses! (Recent “In Our Time” podcast).
When you put it that way, the rhetorical shell game around the term “pirate” comes across as strikingly similar to the more recent usage of the term “terrorist” — a nebulously-defined epithet with which to hypocritically demonize enemy proxies for behaving in more or less the exact same way as one’s own allies/proxies, yet somehow simultaneously also a legal term of art for an entire special class of lawbreaking for which the punishment can arbitrarily bypass any remotely fair system of criminal proceedings, jumping straight to indefinite detention and/or summary execution.
Speaking as someone who did read and love all of this year’s post, I definitely got the vibe that the blog has recently been leaning stronger in the direction of more dense scholarship and fewer nerd pop culture posts that might have been more audience friendly.
This year it was really only the Rings of Power posts, that were like you say, fundametally about a ‘meh’ series, and the Baldurs Gate armor post, that was obviously not that much *about* BG3, just an excuse to write about historical armor (as opposed to something like the old AC: Valhalla post that was a right and proper gamer rant that happened to be making a well-researched point about history).
For sure. Part of this is I haven’t had so many pop-culture experiences that made me want to make a big historical point lately. I suspect some of that is that I’ve been working more and playing/watching things less as I work on getting my book done.
While your series Roman civic government might not have attracted as much attention as your Lord of the Rings series, I found it to be very interesting and enjoyed it very much.
I hope you’ll have a great 2024 and good luck finishing your book.
A challenge to historians…
Establishing that Spartans were overhyped (that was established by Epameinondas) and concentrating on Romans, but how about Macedonians? Has anyone looked at what exactly made the Macedonians badasses compared to Spartans? They eventually did lose to Romans – but something they achieved, and Romans never managed to repeat despite example and trying, was capture Persia and hold it for two centuries!
Happy New Year to all!
I can’t recall how long I’ve been following this blog; a year or two at least. I also don’t recall exactly how I found it, but I think it was a link from TV Tropes. I’ve always been a history buff, but what really drew me into ACOUP was exploring the ways in which history interacts with popular culture. Of late, there has been plenty of history, but not so much pop culture, or at least so it seems to me.
However, I am looking forward to the topics you have planned for the near future. “a Rogue Trader-inspired look at military adventurers, private enterprize war and charter companies” is a rather broad subject that will probably have to be either narrowed down or divided into at least two or three separate posts. For military adventurers, Spanish conquistadors like Hernan Cortez and Francisco Pizarro, and privateers like Sir Francis Drake and Henry Morgan are what come to my mind. I’m not quite sure what you mean by “private enterprise war”, but perhaps you could do a piece on mercenaries in general, why, when, and how they were used, etc. For example, if I wanted to hire a company of Swiss pikemen, how exactly would I go about doing so? And as for charter companies, you might want to focus on the British and Dutch East India Companies. Both governed a large amount of territory and people in their heyday (India and Indonesia respectively), thus necessitating a large and complex military and governing apparatus, which I think would be most appropriate given your specialties as a historian. Regardless of how you choose to approach it though, I look forward to seeing what you come up with in the new year.
I think Branderson is big enough that a post on Shardplate and shardblades could do numbers. It’d fit nicely with a broader look at how to fit super powered people into a battle.
While I’d personally enjoy such a series, I wonder if it wouldn’t be better when/if there’s a movie/TV adaptation. I quite enjoyed the Lord of the Rings series (my first introduction to this site) in part because of the contrast between book and movie, showing what was done well and what less so. (Plus having movie stills to break up walls of text and give a visual of what’s being discussed is nice.)
Thanks for another year of blogging, Bret! I’m especially looking forward to the next iteration of Teaching Paradox, whatever it may be (I guess HOI4 is the obvious contender?)
I loved the civic governance/how to polis posts!
“alongside a Rogue Trader-inspired look at military adventurers, private enterprize war and charter companies.”
I am literally salivating in anticipation of this one! It’s a pirates life for me!
If you are looking for pop culture topics, then how about the Wheel of Time series? The recent remake might elevate public interest, and the setting is uniquely different from your typical Tolkienesque remake. In particular, the demographics and the technology are handled in a way that seems more realistic, but I would like a professional’s perspective.
I’m a regular reader and always appreciate the effort you put in, Bret. Personally, I find the historical ones very interesting, as an amateur military historian and professional game designer, developer, and publisher. Basically, keep going, please!
Happy New Year from Cambridgeshire in the UK!
If this would be an appropriate place to suggest topics, I was intrigued by the reference to the different ‘theor[ies] of victory’ of ancient militaries in the post on spears and pila. I for one would be interested to see an expansion of this kind of comparison to consider what the major approaches were.
I can definitely say that the last year of posts has been a treat for me. I especially love your basic conceptual primers and to a lesser extent the pop culture analysis. I really enjoyed things like your premodern logistics primer last year and the Status Quo Coalition explainer this year.
In the age of the internet, there is a lot of scholarly research that is freely available to any interested readers. But every field or sub-field, including history, has its own “common sense” – some basic knowledge, rules of thumb, ways of thinking, that sort of thing – without which it is easy to be baffled or misled by researchers producing scholarship for an audience that already knows the basics. I find that this “common sense” is often not communicated anywhere in a form that the general public finds helpful. It might be a bit presumptuous for me to suggest this, but I think the true value of your blog lies in letting us pick up at least some of these basics in less time and effort than a college survey course would require. This means that when we do our own research (I do internet roleplaying in my free time, which means a little bit of amateur historical research) or read about current events we can at least vaguely put what we see *into context*.
If I might leave a suggestion for a topic as a couple other commentators seem to have, I remember your conclusion that “[if] we lose sight of the foundations of our most cherished ideals, we damage our ability both to understand them and (perhaps more importantly) to defend them” in your post about Cicero and natural law. Perhaps something of that vein? There are a lot of norms and values that define modern democratic society and the relations between such societies. It would make me happy to read about the historical development of some of them. How did we go from Cicero to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, what key intellectual milestones mark the way, and what material circumstances or historical events shaped them? Are there values that we take for granted that are actually very new, or ones that we consider specific to our time that are actually very old?
In any case, a belated Happy New Year from this regular reader in Korea! Whatever you choose to write about in 2024, I’m sure I will enjoy reading about them. I definitely look forward to your post(s) on military adventurers, private enterprise war, and charter companies.
“the idea that no one could come up with a way to mitigate dragons on the battlefield defies reason.”
I don’t see how, and I feel like you have a case of “Humanity F- Yeah!” that doesn’t want to admit insurmountable threats. For fantasy in general, one could easily design a dragon that had no feasible mitigations, and certainly no mitigations reachable by gradual development. Even if modern artillery could threaten a dragon, who says you’ll ever get the chance to develop it?
(Analogy: supposedly, standard Chinese city walls, made of rammed earth many meters thick, were so impregnable that cannon never seemed worth developing there, unlike Europe with its fragile stone castles.)
(Analogy: while there are various asymmetric mitigations one can make to American air superiority, they don’t come close to neutralizing the fact of that air superiority and destructive power.)
Furthermore, the dragons in this case are not on their own, but operated by humans who can adapt to whatever mitigations you come up with. It’s human vs. human, except that one side has a monopoly on flight and extreme firepower, along with (for the full Valyrians) apparently more general magic than anyone west of Asshai, plus Rome-analogous road building and social organization.
“starving people out” requires that you can besiege dragonlords. The threat isn’t them flying in food, the threat is them killing your besiegers and burning or melting your siege towers and supply wagons. And if you’re dug in enough to avoid fire, what will you do against their infantry? Soon they’re besieging _you_.
Ballistas are not very aimable or maneuverable. I’m not sure they’re very useful against a mobile dragon. And even if you can threaten a sphere, how big is it, and can your soldiers do anything beyond it without getting burned?
I would agree on that post going overboard on the “Humanity F*** yeah”. It’s also worth noting that while that focuses on ASOIF dragons other dragons in other media are often stronger in this regard. See for example D&D where older dragons can wind up with superhuman mental ability scores and innate magical powers as one example that comes to mind. In such a case it would not suprise me if humans or similar humanoids would just simply wind up outright losing sovereignty in some areas.
Bret, I’m sorry I missed your aside about a new family member—many congratulations!
I originally came because someone (on TORn, I believe) recommended the Helm’s Deep posts, then I worked my way backwards into the Siege of Gondor, and then gradually read everything up to date. I haven’t been quite as faithful this year, but it was more because of too much going on in my personal life. Maybe I’ll provide a few more hits for you in 2024!