And then there are some things that are just
don’t square with history. In some sense I’m trying to respond to that.
[For example] the arranged marriage, which you see constantly in the
historical fiction and television show, almost always when there’s an
arranged marriage, the girl doesn’t want it and rejects it and she runs
off with the stable boy instead. This never fucking happened. It just
didn’t. There were thousands, tens of thousand, perhaps hundreds of
thousands of arranged marriages in the nobility through the thousand
years of Middle Ages and people went through with them. That’s how you
did it. It wasn’t questioned. Yeah, occasionally you would want someone
else, but you wouldn’t run off with the stable boy.
And
that’s another of my pet peeves about fantasies. The bad authors adopt
the class structures of the Middle Ages; where you had the royalty and
then you had the nobility and you had the merchant class and then you
have the peasants and so forth. But they don’t’ seem to realize what it
actually meant. They have scenes where the spunky peasant girl tells off
the pretty prince. The pretty prince would have raped the spunky
peasant girl. He would have put her in the stocks and then had garbage
thrown at her. You know.
I mean,
the class structures in places like this had teeth. They had
consequences. And people were brought up from their childhood to know
their place and to know that duties of their class and the privileges of
their class. It was always a source of friction when someone got
outside of that thing. And I tried to reflect that.
- George R.R. Martin
