Game of Thrones: Why Dragons Halt Progress

You used a song called white privilege?

Moral: The easier a goal is to achieve, the less a civilisation will develop in attaining it. The growth is in the striving.

*What about gunpowder?*

This doesn't mean anything.

I think after the Rebellion, The Baratheon's Dynasty had a motivation to build a "National Army" in order to prevent betrayals, rebellions and to enforce a unique agenda in the realm. In fact, Joeffry mentioned that idea before he was poisoned by his fake allies.

I'm only halfway through the video and already my breath has been taken away. You've just provided the missing piece of my worldbuilding!

I'm planning to write a high fantasy novel set in a medieval-ish world with nation states and most of its technology based on magic. I felt for a while that something was missing from this, but I didn't realise gunpowder was the sea change allowed nation states to come into being.

The solution is therefore to add guns to my story. Lots and lots of magical guns and cannons!

Are there any spoilers from the 6th season?

Thanks a lot cannons. -_-

i want to see a game of thrones where all the dragons die and cannons are invented, thus creating centralized governments and nation-states which would then lead the word through the renaissance to modern times

Maesters. Maesters stop progress.

This is very interesting, thought provoking point!! Great video! But i think keeping dragons are as much expensive as keeping cannons. Keeping horses were also very expensive and push centralization

Dude, you're hella smart

I'd like to see your take on the scorpion bolt from season 7. Could that human innovation lead to the same progress with time?

Mmm well in the books spoiler alert found out that the maesters work in secret to finnish all magic in the world, so the progress arrive. We don't know many details about yet but I think it will related with you main point in the video and GG Martin will expose some great things about the economic in his world.

You need to write about Avatar: the Last Airbender and the character development that takes place over the course of 3 seasons and how it is perfectly depicted.

no they dont , as you know dragons were intoduced to westeros just some 300 years ago but has been in essos for past millenia , but still is far more advanced than westeros

I don't buy it. We have nukes today. Did we stop discovering new tech after that? No… people are curious even without needing to be to win wars. They would still be advancing. I think a MUCH more significant barrier is 10 year long winters… in terms of not freeing up enough luxury time for researchers or cushion room for innovative risks in food.

About the entire dragon stick: It isn't dragons, guns would have probably been invented by the time dragons showed up in westeros if that was the problem. I mean, the Valyrians probably bread dragons to be what we picture ar least 6000 years after the mideavel times started if the histories given are to be believed. Plenty of time to invent gunpowder. What might hold them back technologigly though is that they are in a constant state of regression. It is pretty clear that westeros couldn't build things like the wall, the Eirie storms end, dragobstone or the ship of sunspear in the time we observe, and it is also clear that cirtain other abilitys have been lost in the years, nobody can read the runes of the first men, the ironborn somehow didn't spread Iron through westeros despite having it in the age of heroes, and actions like these make it seem like the story we hear of the past are at least somewhat false.

you are forgetting about the irregular weather which makes it difficult for them grow enough food, which means more people spend time farming, to grow as much as food as possible. That leads to less people working on other stuff like technology.

I wish a modern jet or helicopter came and destroyed all the dragons.

Get to the dragons already

Magic halts progress, but okay.

Brilliant video!

You make a valid point, which is well known, and that is that cannons remove castle culture and give rise to centralized governments. But dragons have nothing to do with this, apart from the fact that dragons are sorta equivalent to cannons apart from that they don't fundamentally change society since only one party has them for a short time. The only valid conclusion is: the absence of cannons halts progress.

This isn't completely correct. We know that Game of thrones is~ 300 years after the conquest of westeros by the Targarians, and before this was a set of squabbling kingdoms.
we don't know how long the fuedal society has existed before, but that humans have been in westeros for ~8000 years.
So compared to real life they are not behind at all, pre enlightenment societies developed very slowly in real life too, with massive sudden changes since.

It took thousands of years to evolve irl.
Why would the world of ice and fire evolve in a few years? The story takes place in those few years, maybe in hundreds of years we'll have laser mounted dragons in westeros.

I don't think Dragon's halt progress at all. When all of the Dragon's went extinct after the Dance of Dragons, there wasn't much progress back then compared to the progress as of before, during the first men the region progressed to the medieval ages, so I'm sure there's no halt in progress. Dragons are the ones that push progress if you consider the city of Old Valyria.