Chateau Lloyd

Last week I expressed sympathy for George R.R. Martin and the turmoil he must certainly be feeling as the tries to conclude his magnum opus.

Today I'm going to hurl a few bricks at the television production of the same, which has apparently now outrun the course of the books.  Which is another way of saying I can't blame Martin, and hopefully he'll fix this in the print version.

Before I go one, I should repeat that I no longer follow the show, by my lovely wife prevailed upon me to watch this one episode.  So I'm only partly familiar with the cast of sadists, brutes, thugs and noble but stupid victims that populate Westeros.

I assume that everyone reading this already watched the episode, but if you didn't, beware:  HERE THERE BE SPOILERS.

For convenience, I'll split my critiques into two categories: stupid tactics vs just plain unrealism.

Stupid Tactics

Okay, so the situation is that the enemy army has a two-to-one numerical advantage, his troops feature more cavalry, more archers and the infantry has both heavier armor, better shields and spears, making it ideal for a narrow front engagement.

The enemy also is basically sitting on a supply depot, so it can hold out indefinitely.

The friendly forces are weak in all categories, but it has two things that are key:  skilled irregular infantry and a giant.  In addition, his troops enjoy a fanatical recklessness.

Based on these forces, General Snow comes up with the worst possible plan short of just lying on the ground and waiting to be killed:  He voluntarily pins his lightly armored troops into a narrow front, so that the opposing force can advance with locked shields and grind them into paste while arrows rain down on them and the cavalry waits for its chance to ride down and kill the survivors.

Let me put that another way:  Even if the plan was executed as designed, Snow's force would have been wiped out.

I'm not going to dispute that Snow shouldn't have accepted battle, but he should have done it on his own terms.  Consider the following three tactics:

1.  Night attack on Winterfell.  Why not?  You know all the weak points.  Your troops are unarmored and irregular and if the giant gets at close quarters, it's all over.  It's hard to shoot in the dark and the enemy the cavalry will be useless.   Hit them at midnight for maximum effect.

2.  Use flanking skirmishers to keep the enemy disordered while you taunt their general.  Why keep your own archers back when you can send them forward in open formation to torment the enemy and provoke an uncoordinated cavalry charge?   At long range archery is an area effect weapon, not a point one (that is, you can't engage individual or "point" targets).  So if your archers are spread out and mobile, perhaps with some swordsmen mixed, you can torment the enemy into making a mistake.  That nice neat line of archers is very vulnerable to missile fire.   So are the unarmored horses.

Oh, and send Snow up with them, repeating his taunts.   Taking the fight to the enemy feeds the aggressiveness of your troops and hurts the enemy's morale. 

3.  Form up a decoy force in the self-made death trap while sending a strike force to seize Winterfell when it is undermanned.  Again, every fortress has weaknesses and Snow knows them all.

Okay, I can come up with more, but that's enough for now.  You get the point.  Now let's get into the awful, horrendous crimes against reality we just had to sit through.

That battle broke just about every rule of military reality

1.  Bows do not work like that.  There's this weird Hollywood thing where bows (and crossbows) are treated like modern rifles.  Hint:  They aren't even close.  For one thing (and this is REALLY important), arrows have a much longer travel time than bullets.  I mean you can see them coming and, if the range is long enough, actually step aside.

Oh, and the farther away the target, the more of an arc you have to use.  This means it is devilishly difficult to hit a point target at any kind of range.

Now I know Hollywood loves the "amazing super-long-range-bowshot" thing, but it's STUPID.  All the kid had to do to avoid being hit was to zig-zag as he ran, or even just changed up his pace.  After the initial sprint put a 100 yards in between them, he could basically stand there and play dodgeball.  Just sayin'.

2.  Where did that massive body pile come from?  Seriously, was there a front-end loader stacking them in the background?  Yes, dead bodies do accumulate, but for them to get that high, someone had to keep climbing up the kill and dying on top.  History records hills of the slain, but only when space is constrained, like in the breach of a city walls or where the last enemy are hemmed in and cut down.  Oh, and all these fallen generally screw up the attackers who have to climb over them to keep coming.  How did they keep getting moved out of the way of the phalanx?

3.  Armies don't fight to death.  Really, they don't.  Yes, yes, we all get excited about the Three Hundred Spartans because they died to man, but that's because it is so rare.    After a unit loses 10 percent, it starts to come apart.  In the pre-gunpowder era it wasn't uncommon for armies to break even before the impact.  So this notion that they all stood their and hacked each other to pieces is crap.

4.  It's hard to kill people with swords.  Believe it or not, swords are hard to use.  In most battles the number of wounded exceed the dead by a factor of three or more.  This is because once someone has been hurt, they try to get the hell out of there.  Conversely, once you see the guy you hit turn and run away, you concentrate on that other guy who is still trying to kill you. 

5.  Nobody gets like being shot by their own side.  Okay, this really got to me.  When the cavalry started taking fire from their own archers, the proper, actual response would have been to charge those archers.  I am not kidding about this.   When troops take friendly fire, they tend to dish it back in kind.  If they don't, it's because they've channeled their inner Cartman:  Screw this, we're going home.

I could go on, but I'm getting tired.  Basically it was a mess.  Readers are encouraged to add their own gripes.