Who do you consider the most sympathetic Game of Thrones character?

[The Romulan Republic]

Fuck it, don't even face the dragons in the open field. Ambush them. Conceal a few ballistas in undergrowth/camouflage in areas the dragons are likely to fly over. Snipe one from ambush. Or conceal a dozen good bowmen and snipe the rider. Insurgents don't defeat airpower by fighting it in the open.

[TheFeniX]

Is it believable that in all the time since, no one has bothered to come up with credible anti-dragon tactics for the dragonless?

They didn't. The ballista design is "old tech" from what I recall being stated on screen. It's all they got: a mostly immobile turret with a 30-something second reload time. Which looks capable of killing a dragon, but still only penetrated up to the back of the arrowhead.

How accurate is dragon-strafing in the dark? What is the maximum range of their fire breath?

Who's in the dark? Camps need light and armies are big. It doesn't even matter what you hit or how valuable it was. Knowing you could be woken up in the middle of the night by dragonfire and be dead .5 seconds after is a pretty effective terror tactic.

Even if they are smart are douse all the fires at night, you either have a huge and easily noticeable army or your army is small and smashed by Dothraki and Unsullied. And this is doubly worse if Danny was willing to go all-out (which is funny that Cersei seems to take NO precautions against) and just burn the Red Keep to the ground. Middle of the night would be best from both a tactical standpoint and "holy shit the Red Keep in on fire" terror perspective.

Massed volleys of arrows. Kill the riders.

They tried that already. The dragon "reared up" and deflected every single arrow. The rider doesn't even have to expose him/herself to kill archers either way.

Maybe not, but the fact remains that they're not invulnerable. Can they realistically move fast enough and hit precisely enough from long enough ranges to shatter an army and leave it ready to be mopped up, then withdraw before they can be shot at? Even if that army is prepared and disciplined and has a competent commander?

They just did that on screen a couple episodes ago. The ONLY REASON Danny's dragon took a hit was because she was balsy enough to charge straight at Bron. Had she withdrawn after the first shot missed, her ground army would have mopped everything else up.

Plus, they have to land some time. Ambush them on the ground.

Ambush a dragon? With what? Your wagon mounted ballistas? Cavalry you can hear coming from a mile away? A one-handed blonde guy on horseback? Sneak up on it with 3-4 guys armed with?

When you have to rely on dumb-luck, overwhelming stupidity on part of your opponent, or (as you posted after I started mine) setting up ambush locations just at an attempt to harm your enemy: you're fighting a losing war. And Jamie knows what's up here. If it weren't for Iron Bank ex-machina, Cercei wouldn't even still be in this fight.

Besides, realistically the ONLY location that matters is King's Landing. Everything else is superfluous since pretty much everyone is dead (or on her side) and every other place is ransacked (HighGarden and The Rock). Danny should have been sieging King's Landing from the start but "something something something" foreigners means we need... the Dornish to do it? The Dornish that no one likes and don't like the rest of Westeros. The Dornish that are essentially foreigners in Westeros? The Dornish that murdered their king and the murderers now run things?

Great plan there Sun Tzu.

[Simon_Jester]

Edit: I'm not too surprised by the results thus far, except that I'm a bit surprised that Daenerys has yet to net a single vote. Is she really that disliked by fans? Or is it just that their are other people who are liked more?

I think she may be disliked by fans on this particular website; she has lots of fans but that doesn't mean they're here.

I think part of it is that Daenerys has been riding from success to success with relatively few serious setbacks for quite a while now. She's powerful and successful, which makes it hard to sympathize with her while there are other people who've been pounded into the dirt by circumstances.

Compared to characters that have been mutilated, kidnapped, lost their families, or persecuted just for trying to do the right thing, Daenerys has a hard time winning a competition for sympathy.

IIRC, the original Targaryans showed up in Westeros with 3 dragons and they used them. There was no response for them.

Is it believable that in all the time since, no one has bothered to come up with credible anti-dragon tactics for the dragonless?

Well, in the book canon, the Dance of the Dragons was a civil war fought among the Targaryens in which several dragons were killed by mundane weapons and attackers- it was basically all downhill from there for the Targaryen dragons.

However, this was always an extremely risky undertaking.

A fleet of ships liberally armed with bows and ballistas could maybe shoot down a dragon, but they're on horribly flammable ships while doing it.

The Dornishmen managed to successfully stave off conquest by Aegon the Conqueror and his sisters through constant guerilla warfare... but it took a long time and a lot of fierce determination. And, again, they suffered pretty badly while doing it.

An angry mob busted into the Targaryen's main dragon aviary at King's Landing and killed multiple dragons while they were chained to the ground... and, again, hundreds if not thousands of people died doing it.

Unlike modern tech, no one has man-portable laser/radar guided SAMs. They don't even have flashlights, much less spotlights. And their ballistas can't aim up more than maybe 45 degrees.

Massed volleys of arrows. Kill the riders.

There's nothing in theory stopping the riders from wearing chain mail or something, even if Daenerys has so far not bothered to. The point is, it's not easy, there is nothing that armies in Westeros can do that lets them say "well, the enemy has dragons, but it doesn't really matter because we have XYZ." The dragons always become a huge advantage for whoever has them, and a huge disadvantage for whoever doesn't have them. You can blunt the razor-sharp edge of this advantage a bit and stop it from effortlessly slicing you to pieces, but you can only achieve so much that way... And the dragons neutralize a LOT of the usual successful military strategies. For instance, consider how easily Aegon and his sisters conquered Harrenhal and the Vale, both of which were protected by seemingly invulnerable defenses under the 'normal' rules of warfare.

[Raw Shark]

No love for Samwell Tarly? Poor kid gets shit on by his Dad for being fat and bookish. Disinherited and sent to the wall under threat of a, "hunting accident." Maybe a little naive, but good, honest, and loyal. And just for insult to injury, he's three books deep before he even gets laid, in a series with almost as much sex as Porn Hub.

[NeoGoomba]

I'm onboard with Davos. Guy lost all of his sons following Stannis at the Blackwater, had his spiritual daughter burned at the stake, and yet he still does his best to make the world a better place when that would have broken almost anyone else (myself included).

[TheFeniX]

No love for Samwell Tarly? Poor kid gets shit on by his Dad for being fat and bookish. Disinherited and sent to the wall under threat of a, "hunting accident." Maybe a little naive, but good, honest, and loyal. And just for insult to injury, he's three books deep before he even gets laid, in a series with almost as much sex as Porn Hub.

I've always taken issue with the way Sam got the way he did. He's morbidly obese, even for a noble. But then he gets to the Wall and continues to keep the weight. It's actually hard to stay fat in the conditions the Crows live and work under, unless you're just some toadie like Slynt, or sneaking food. But these guys would likely eat like slobs anyway considering how hard your body has to work to keep yourself warm in those conditions.

And the whole "I'm not good at fighting like Jon, so let me go get smart so I can help him" line of thought really eats at me. If you train enough, you will get in shape and you will become better at what you do. So many other Crows with shittier starts than Sam did it.

[FaxModem1]

No love for Samwell Tarly? Poor kid gets shit on by his Dad for being fat and bookish. Disinherited and sent to the wall under threat of a, "hunting accident." Maybe a little naive, but good, honest, and loyal. And just for insult to injury, he's three books deep before he even gets laid, in a series with almost as much sex as Porn Hub.

I've always taken issue with the way Sam got the way he did. He's morbidly obese, even for a noble. But then he gets to the Wall and continues to keep the weight. It's actually hard to stay fat in the conditions the Crows live and work under, unless you're just some toadie like Slynt, or sneaking food. But these guys would likely eat like slobs anyway considering how hard your body has to work to keep yourself warm in those conditions.

And the whole "I'm not good at fighting like Jon, so let me go get smart so I can help him" line of thought really eats at me. If you train enough, you will get in shape and you will become better at what you do. So many other Crows with shittier starts than Sam did it.

I think Sam is an insert character for George RR Martin, hence why he never loses the weight. Not based on anything, but I wouldn't be surprised.

[NeoGoomba]

Tarly is the Hurley of Game of Thrones. He must have had a huge stockpile of Dharma Initiative peanut butter stored away in the Maester's Chambers.

[Simon_Jester]

No love for Samwell Tarly? Poor kid gets shit on by his Dad for being fat and bookish. Disinherited and sent to the wall under threat of a, "hunting accident." Maybe a little naive, but good, honest, and loyal. And just for insult to injury, he's three books deep before he even gets laid, in a series with almost as much sex as Porn Hub.

I've always taken issue with the way Sam got the way he did. He's morbidly obese, even for a noble. But then he gets to the Wall and continues to keep the weight. It's actually hard to stay fat in the conditions the Crows live and work under, unless you're just some toadie like Slynt, or sneaking food. But these guys would likely eat like slobs anyway considering how hard your body has to work to keep yourself warm in those conditions.

And the whole "I'm not good at fighting like Jon, so let me go get smart so I can help him" line of thought really eats at me. If you train enough, you will get in shape and you will become better at what you do. So many other Crows with shittier starts than Sam did it.

Sam may have some kind of metabolic issue? Some people are just goddamn fat, and if you underfeed them they don't really lose weight, they just end up fat and malnourished at the same time. Like, simultaneously too fat to perform physical tasks easily, and too low-energy from lack of blood sugar to get off their butts and do anything.

Given that people on the Wall do have demanding duties in a cold climate, you can't exactly tell everyone NOT to eat heavily if they're hungry enough. Samwell eats at the same "cafeteria" as everyone else. So unless you specifically deprived Samwell of food, while working him slowly to death like a concentration camp inmate, he might just not lose the weight.

Remember, Samwell's father did everything in his power to train the shit out of Sam, in order to turn him into a physically fit badass, and it didn't work. And Randall Tarly isn't exactly ignorant or clueless of how to raise a physically fit badass. This suggests that just sending Samwell to boot camp in the Arctic isn't necessarily gonna be enough to turn him into a physically fit badass.

[TheFeniX]

Sam may have some kind of metabolic issue? Some people are just goddamn fat, and if you underfeed them they don't really lose weight, they just end up fat and malnourished at the same time. Like, simultaneously too fat to perform physical tasks easily, and too low-energy from lack of blood sugar to get off their butts and do anything.

I had considered this as it's possible. But, and I'll say I'm a layman when it comes to metabolic issues at best, Sam seems to suffer no other side-effects if he has one. He's capable of ranging with the rest of the Crows North of the Wall in a capacity of "Sam is slowing us down because he's fat" whereas every metabolic disorder I know of would make something like that damn near lethal to someone afflicted with one. Sam would be prone to just passing out in the snow during periods of heavy exertion.

Given that people on the Wall do have demanding duties in a cold climate, you can't exactly tell everyone NOT to eat heavily if they're hungry enough. Samwell eats at the same "cafeteria" as everyone else. So unless you specifically deprived Samwell of food, while working him slowly to death like a concentration camp inmate, he might just not lose the weight.

The opposite actually, their calorie intake requirements could almost quadruple for the same work done in a temperate climate. Your body has to work overtime just to keep your temp stable in that environment.

So, Sam's "spoiled noble" diet would cause him to start losing weight when forced to do labor in an area as cold as the Wall. This is what gets me: he should either be losing weight or dieing as his metabolic issues kill him due to the stress caused by the cold and hard labor.

Remember, Samwell's father did everything in his power to train the shit out of Sam, in order to turn him into a physically fit badass, and it didn't work. And Randall Tarly isn't exactly ignorant or clueless of how to raise a physically fit badass. This suggests that just sending Samwell to boot camp in the Arctic isn't necessarily gonna be enough to turn him into a physically fit badass.

I had to assume his mother babied Sam and made Lord Tarley back off enough times that Sam could do whatever. Tarly then put his eggs into the Dickon basket. How much training did Sam go through in the North before they "gave up" on him and shifted over into Maester work? Because, if it's more than a month, you would have seen significant weight loss because it's just not hard for a man to cut weight, especially in those conditions where your body is working overtime to keep warm. I cut out fries from my fast-foot lunches and got on my exercise bike for 20-40 minutes a day. I lost 20 pounds in the first month. Another 10 in the second month. And that was the bare minimum effort I could take.

That's nothing compared to sparring in armor, digging shitholes, and any of the innumerable other tasks someone as unpopular as Sam would have been forced to endure. Like I said, he'd lose weight or die.

[Simon_Jester]

A fair amount of research has gone into weight gain and loss recently.

One interesting result is that the body has kind of a "thermostat" when it comes to weight.

If your "thermostat" is set to a healthy weight, then exercising a modicum of willpower in your portion control and getting more exercise will cause you to rapidly shed surplus pounds, as your anecdote says.

If your "thermostat" is set to an unhealthily low weight, your body thinks it's supposed to weigh, say, 120 pounds (for an adult male). Then it requires zero portion control to eat minimally. It may require an effort of will just to eat enough. You'll fidget as a form of isometric exercise to burn 'excess' calories because your body thinks it's too heavy, getting exercise whether you like it or not. In severe cases, you won't feel hungry even when you're in the process of starving to death: anorexia nervosa. Yes, that mostly happens to women, but you get the point.

If your "thermostat" is set to an unhealthily high weight, you have the opposite problem. Your body thinks it's "supposed" to weigh 220 or 250 pounds. It requires unusual portion control to stop eating, because at any given meal, your body doesn't send that "I've eaten enough kthxbai" signal until you've scarfed down 1500 calories or something. When it estimates the amount of food you need, it will exaggerate. You have to consciously override that signal, constantly, to lose weight through portion control. If you are at whatever (lardass) weight your 'thermostat' says is correct, your body will acknowledge that it's got energy to do stuff, but if you start losing weight it will go "wait, we're beginning to starve, work less or eat more, dumbass!" At which point you can end up exhausted despite having like infinity calories worth of stored fat to burn, unless you eat enough to sustain that (lardass) weight.

...

We recognize anorexia for what it is because as a behavior goes, it's so goddamn weird. It's abnormal for people to undereat even when they're wasting away. We don't look at an anorexic person and go "Jesus, is that person too lazy and stupid to know they need to eat one hundred cheeseburgers or something?"

But the symptoms of having your weight 'thermostat' set to "be a lardass" are not so weird. The problem is that they act like a tax ON your weight loss. You lose less weight per unit exercise, you have to exert more willpower per unit of portion control that lets you shed weight. Aaand this is basically indistinguishable from the symptoms of being lazy and stupid and not aware that you need good diet and exercise to lose weight.

Which is why we DO look at fat people and go "Jesus, is that person too lazy and stupid to know that they need to eat negative one hundred cheeseburgers or something?" And it's kind of counterproductive.

For this very reason, a lot of work on dietary needs in the recent past has gone into asking not "how can we get people to have some fucking willpower," but rather into "how can we 'hack' the biological basis that decides what people's 'set point' is for weight, so their body will start recognizing it's too heavy and help lose the weight, rather than actively forcing them to fight their own automatic processes to make progress?"

...

In an environment where you're given hearty food and told to eat until you are full, you may not lose that much weight, even when working heavily. Because the "willpower to control portion" element is gone, you just eat until your thermostat says you've eaten "enough," the same as normal people do. For normal people that means you stay at a normal weight, for the kind of person I'm thinking of, it means they stay at a heavy weight.

The only way to control for this is to directly force them to eat less, in addition to working more.

If Samwell has this kind of shit going on, I can totally believe him retaining some degree of obesity despite undergoing a rigorous program of exercise and hard labor. Now, there'll be a lot more muscle under that fat, but the fat won't go away, unless of course you put him on very restricted rations (say, on a long march in the wilderness). And in that case it's going to cost him a lot of bodily energy because his body interprets "my weight dropped from 250 to 240 pounds" the same way a healthy man would interpret "dropped from 160 to 150." Namely, by freaking out and thinking it's in danger of starving and trying to conserve energy.

[Q99]

I thought about putting on LittleDick as a joke option (and because he actually has a disturbing number of fanboys online), but I had limited poll options. Hence the "Other" option. And no, that wasn't meant to refer to the Others. I probably should have clarified that.

The White Walkers are a pretty chill bunch...

See, chill because they live in the frozen north and have low body temperature, eh? Eh?

[Lord Revan]

A fair amount of research has gone into weight gain and loss recently.

One interesting result is that the body has kind of a "thermostat" when it comes to weight.

If your "thermostat" is set to a healthy weight, then exercising a modicum of willpower in your portion control and getting more exercise will cause you to rapidly shed surplus pounds, as your anecdote says.

If your "thermostat" is set to an unhealthily low weight, your body thinks it's supposed to weigh, say, 120 pounds (for an adult male). Then it requires zero portion control to eat minimally. It may require an effort of will just to eat enough. You'll fidget as a form of isometric exercise to burn 'excess' calories because your body thinks it's too heavy, getting exercise whether you like it or not. In severe cases, you won't feel hungry even when you're in the process of starving to death: anorexia nervosa. Yes, that mostly happens to women, but you get the point.

If your "thermostat" is set to an unhealthily high weight, you have the opposite problem. Your body thinks it's "supposed" to weigh 220 or 250 pounds. It requires unusual portion control to stop eating, because at any given meal, your body doesn't send that "I've eaten enough kthxbai" signal until you've scarfed down 1500 calories or something. When it estimates the amount of food you need, it will exaggerate. You have to consciously override that signal, constantly, to lose weight through portion control. If you are at whatever (lardass) weight your 'thermostat' says is correct, your body will acknowledge that it's got energy to do stuff, but if you start losing weight it will go "wait, we're beginning to starve, work less or eat more, dumbass!" At which point you can end up exhausted despite having like infinity calories worth of stored fat to burn, unless you eat enough to sustain that (lardass) weight.

...

We recognize anorexia for what it is because as a behavior goes, it's so goddamn weird. It's abnormal for people to undereat even when they're wasting away. We don't look at an anorexic person and go "Jesus, is that person too lazy and stupid to know they need to eat one hundred cheeseburgers or something?"

But the symptoms of having your weight 'thermostat' set to "be a lardass" are not so weird. The problem is that they act like a tax ON your weight loss. You lose less weight per unit exercise, you have to exert more willpower per unit of portion control that lets you shed weight. Aaand this is basically indistinguishable from the symptoms of being lazy and stupid and not aware that you need good diet and exercise to lose weight.

Which is why we DO look at fat people and go "Jesus, is that person too lazy and stupid to know that they need to eat negative one hundred cheeseburgers or something?" And it's kind of counterproductive.

For this very reason, a lot of work on dietary needs in the recent past has gone into asking not "how can we get people to have some fucking willpower," but rather into "how can we 'hack' the biological basis that decides what people's 'set point' is for weight, so their body will start recognizing it's too heavy and help lose the weight, rather than actively forcing them to fight their own automatic processes to make progress?"

...

In an environment where you're given hearty food and told to eat until you are full, you may not lose that much weight, even when working heavily. Because the "willpower to control portion" element is gone, you just eat until your thermostat says you've eaten "enough," the same as normal people do. For normal people that means you stay at a normal weight, for the kind of person I'm thinking of, it means they stay at a heavy weight.

The only way to control for this is to directly force them to eat less, in addition to working more.

If Samwell has this kind of shit going on, I can totally believe him retaining some degree of obesity despite undergoing a rigorous program of exercise and hard labor. Now, there'll be a lot more muscle under that fat, but the fat won't go away, unless of course you put him on very restricted rations (say, on a long march in the wilderness). And in that case it's going to cost him a lot of bodily energy because his body interprets "my weight dropped from 250 to 240 pounds" the same way a healthy man would interpret "dropped from 160 to 150." Namely, by freaking out and thinking it's in danger of starving and trying to conserve energy.

I think part of that issue is that for the human body to a degree the more fat you have the better as our biology is largely stuck at the time when getting food wasn't certain so having reserves is a good thing and such our old instincts find people who are fatter then average more "natural" (for a lack of a better term) then people who are nothing then skin and bones, thus it's easier for us (humankin collectively that is) to recognize the difference between "healthy and slim" and "way too skinny" then it is for us to recognize the difference between "slightly chubby but still healthy" and "too fat" unless "too fat" is in the "beached whale" category.

[Raw Shark]

It's noted in AFFC that Sam has seen some measure of improvement in his fat to muscle ratio and general stamina since they sent him ranging, and has become not-hopeless in a fight; he's just really slow at it. A long voyage with nothing to eat but fish probably didn't hurt. Speaking as a former obese and involuntarily-celibate nerd who slowly got more healthy but stayed (by some definitions) intelligent, that's where my sympathy goes.

Also, the Watch is pretty much always begging for food donations. It's not the kind of environment where a glutton could just go nuts without being detected. ADWD has a scene in which Jon inspects the wall's winter stockpile and determines that they're more-or-less fucked within two years unless they work something else out.

[Simon_Jester]

What I'm getting at is, the Watch may be constantly begging for food, but they can't go on short rations easily. They perform constant physically demanding labor in a cold climate; they're going to be eating pretty heavily as it is.

Sure, people are keeping track of food consumption and someone who ate twice as much as a normal person would be noticed and derided for it. Someone who eats 25% more, and if you try to feed them the normal amount they collapse from low blood sugar the next day before their shift is over? That's a harder question. I mean sure, you can argue "the Watch wouldn't want to keep someone like that around," but they don't really have a choice; that's why they keep around some of the fuckups and lunatics who get sent to them as it stands. That's why they have to settle for a one-armed blacksmith. And so on.

None of this is to say that Sam (in the novels) isn't improving his physical condition and getting stronger and all. It's simply that the most probable answer to "why is Sam still fat at all" is that not everyone who works hard loses all their fat.

[Q99]

It should also be noted people can be fat and have *lots* of muscle under the fat, the two are not mutually exclusive. Fat-Watch member could be one of their stronger warriors who carries more than the normal load.

[TheFeniX]

Sure, people are keeping track of food consumption and someone who ate twice as much as a normal person would be noticed and derided for it. Someone who eats 25% more, and if you try to feed them the normal amount they collapse from low blood sugar the next day before their shift is over? That's a harder question. I mean sure, you can argue "the Watch wouldn't want to keep someone like that around," but they don't really have a choice; that's why they keep around some of the fuckups and lunatics who get sent to them as it stands. That's why they have to settle for a one-armed blacksmith. And so on.

Sam seems more than capable of ranging for weeks at a time without any issues dealing with the side-effects of high-activity and irregular eating schedules (or just no food) that a person suffering from metabolic issues would deal with. He'd have to be incredibly careful to manage his condition, with no modern medical technology, to not die in the conditions his body is subjected to.

None of this is mentioned in the show and I doubt Mormont is irresponsible enough to take a diabetic (or whatever) with him North of the wall since that person would be a huge liability as they could just up and lapse into a coma.

None of this is to say that Sam (in the novels) isn't improving his physical condition and getting stronger and all. It's simply that the most probable answer to "why is Sam still fat at all" is that not everyone who works hard loses all their fat.

It's not even about losing "all their fat." Even Sam being moderately overweight would pass. But one of the unfortunate implications of the actor's build staying near completely the same before being moved over to "Master Lite" duties makes me lump Sam into the "Gomer Pyle from Full Metal Jacket" group: sneaking food and not trying. So, it's hard to sympathize with him when he's eating enough food to maintain his physical appearance and not doing enough physical labor (which means other people have to do it for him) to burn the excess calories off.

If he does suffer from some kind of metabolic issue, then it's both a failing of the writer(s) for not mentioning it and for them having some kind of magical medical condition that only makes someone fat.

[Simon_Jester]

Fenix, I think you fundamentally misunderstood what I was getting at if you're still looking at "diabetes" as the type of explanation I'm talking about for Sam's weight. Right this minute I'm just too damn tired to try to explain again, after obviously having done it badly the first time. Maybe I'd be better off just letting it drop.

[sighs]