Didn’t your own SI end up considering Ned’s parents as his own? Speaking of, when u updatin’?

As for the rec, holy hell, I lost it at penicillin. Decent, technically, as I expected from nurgle, but it’s a mess of cliches and poor plotting.

 

That fic is like a worse version of "A Black Princess"

The first chapter was charming and even clever, but from then all it's just about fucking stills and assorted other boilerplate bollocks that a SI can magically will into existence with only vague understanding of it's workings.

 

Only because it was fitting, given the situation. And you really can't compare having loving parents to having Cersei as your mother. We're talking about a psychopath who kills a little girl over a crush. We're talking about someone who has infants killed on their command. Let's not even talk about what Qyburn does to the women that Cersei keeps handing him over.

I don't think the parents of Eddard Stark could compare to that level of insanity.

If I had written a SI fic, let's say, who was born to Cersei and Robert, I would start plotting for her death as soon as possible. There is nothing redeemable about her character whatsoever. Other than the amusement factor, if you look at it from the reader perspective.

When I finish the whole thing. From where I stopped with the last chapter, I've written only another 50k since then and whenever I revisit it, it tends to be mostly to fix up dialogue or cut down on the bloat. Seriously though, best not to hope for an update, I can't promise anything.

Have you read about him inventing whiskey, binoculars and so on? The threadmarked chapters mention costs for the Westeros take on binoculars ranging in the hundreds of dragons. I'm not sure this fellow understands how much money that is in ASOIAF.

 

What "modern" inventions can be brought to the world of ASOAIF?

 

And yet Cxjenious managed an example of how just that can work, :V


This is a pretty worthless example though. What always get me is shit like:

If you were going to talk about purely utilitarian measures like this...why the fuck would you pick Cersei? When has she ever been a long-term asset to her “side”?

 

I love the guy's style and writing, love The Black Prince, but a mother telling her child "I tried to abort you, but it didn't take despite my best and repeated efforts" doesn't really endear her to me.

 

Unlike Harry (or any crossover inserted character), a SI should know all the terrible things Cersei has done and how incompetent she is. Harry doesn't have meta knowledge and is limited by his own interactions with her.

 

Honestly? Not a whole lot.

The thing with technological innovation that a lot of authors flat out don't understand is that all technology is built out of older, proven technology, and you can't jump from one to the next without all the little steps in between. For example, if you tried to introduce guns to Westeros, all that'd end with is people blowing themselves apart because they don't have the capacity to forge high-strength and purity steel that can withstand the gunpowder's explosion. The same applies to basically every element of modern technology. It's all pieces built of other pieces based on even older principles. You can't just introduce, say, an internal combustion engine and call it a day. You have to introduce all the pieces that lead to the pieces that lead to the pieces (etc) that lead to the engine, and that's easily the work of four or five lifetimes.

This isn't helped any by the social and cultural frameworks that are required for most modern technology as well. You can't have modern technology without an industrialized workforce, and you can't have an industrialized workforce in a feudal society. It's simply fundamentally incompatible, as China has proven so recently.

One man, simply put, cannot effect substantive technological change to the setting at large. At best, you could introduce the concepts behind modern hygiene and food safety, such as daily bathing, sewers and keeping them away from water supplies, and pasteurization, but even that's relatively difficult without plumbing.

 

what about Printing press? crops rotation? water powered mills ?
Better ships ?
not necessary modern but more advance than Westeros status.
Trying to figure a list of what is possible and what isn't.

 

Don't. It's a hackneyed trope and I can't remember if I've ever seen it done well. That's not just in ASOIAF, but in any fandom of lower-than-modern tech level.

 

Crop rotation has been a thing in agriculture since literally the ancient Egyptians. There's nothing new there.

As for the rest, unless you are actually a technical expert in the field and have memorized just about every fact related to the production and design of such things, you're not going to be able to do it. The "what" is easy, none of the ideas behind modern tech (or any other tech level, really) are particularly new to the human imagination. The problem is "how", and something like 99.9% of modern humanity would not be able to provide a worthwhile "how" if dropped into a different time period.

Again, modern understanding of basically everything is both specialized, to whatever particular field(s) people work and immerse themselves in, and built out of the tools and support structures endemic to modern society. Toss them back in time and those tools and support structures are either gone or are completely unrecognizable, they have to rely entirely on their own memory and limited, specialized understanding, and without a shared frame of reference to properly convey the concepts to others (let alone prove them effective and worth investing into).

Tech uplifts, simply put, are not viable for SIs. You would need an industrial base, educated workers, and all the billion other things necessary to support a given level of technology, and establishing that is the work of several generations.

 

But the inserted orphan was able to look past it, and we found that believable. So obviously it just depends on the character and circumstances.

And then, even if you had everything necessary to invent something...now comes the implementation/adoption across a continent with decentralized governing structure.

 

Nobody can read. Like nobody. Most knights can't read. Some lords can't read. It is not vital part of their life since paper doesn't exist, thus written records don't exist. It would have failed IRL as well if it wasn't for the protestant reformation and a bunch of preachers deciding that it is super important that everyone can read the bible and subsiquntly teaching everyone to read, a process which lasted into the 19th century.

Westeros has magic plants that can last through their long ass winters. Any real world knowledge in agriculture is useless.

They have those. Riverrun water wheel, it's more of a curiosity than anything. Water powered mills are a way to keep up with demand, more than anything. And with medieval population densities there just isn't any need.

Ridiculously time and effort intensive process. If you want to write a story where a SI spends decades trying to perfect their sail rigging and moving from clinker to caravel build without the ship instantly sinking, go for it. Don't know if anyone would read though.

 

So, instead of covering what isn't possible.
What is possible to make Westeros progress?

 

Convincing the nobles to increase the funds for the Maesters, and also funding people to go the Maesters to learn, then return to their homelands and share what they've learned with their fellows.

 

Are there any fics where the North and Dorne are flipped story wise? Aegon successfully conquers Dorne, but fails to do so with the North? I was thinking it would make for an interesting AU. Curious what changes would occur in such a world.

 

Despite what many are saying I tend to think that a motivated modern person with the appropriate resources could give Westeros a terrific push, but that would almost strictly be a local phenomena in the short term. Look at our world, we’ve had electricity for a hundred years and yet there’s places that are pitch black at night.

An SI could make a printing press, a steam engine or gunpowder, but you’d come out with a single library, one mine pumped dry of water, and a few castles taken by siege a little earlier. Progress takes time.

 

Diseases. Kill half the population of Westeros in plagues and the value of common folk will rise, they will be able to earn more money for their work - just like happened in Europe after the Black Death.

 

I don't actually recall, did the Great Spring Sickness result in better conditions for smallfolk?

 

Notwithstanding is the fact that a lot of the shit SIs build needs other things to build those parts. Let’s go with penicillin. Not only do you need the mold, but you need the apparatus to properly extract the compound which requires precise temperature control and purity. To compound that problem, you also need organic solvents of sufficient purity for the extraction. Yes all of this can be done with materials available, but it’s hard as fuck and requires quite the number of steps that I doubt even a professional chemist would have available or be able to reproduce from scrap. Oh you also are missing the testing equipment that is necessary to know PH, Temperature, etc.