I have a tiny fraction of the historical expertise of the author, but it has always been clear to me that Martin's books were a sad amalgam of utter misconceptions and stereotypes: around politics, religion, love, family...<p>Which is fine! Except that it was marketed as "reality based", with "a dash of fantasy". It was irresponsible to say the least, and it's quite sad to see its effects.<p>The author raises an interesting point: how to overcome the hundreds of millions of dollars that back these false depictions, so that truth can have its fair chance of being heard and known?<p>In theory, this is what school is for...
So if anyone wants to see a more respectful counterpart culture to the Mongols, I'd recommend looking into the Xaela from Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood.<p>They've never claimed in the slightest to be historically accurate, but their cultural practices are surprisingly well-researched, and more importantly the Xaela are written as fundamentally decent people and not a vicious unrelenting horde of uncivilized barbarians.<p>I found an excellent twitter thread on this a while back... unfortunately it appears to be gone, but I was able to find some of it in the Wayback Machine...<p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20200715161430/https://twitter.com/doritolizards/status/1283413649755963395" rel="nofollow">http://web.archive.org/web/20200715161430/https://twitter.co...</a> [make sure to scroll both up and down, this is the archive link I found that had the most of the original thread, and it's kind of in the middle]
>The position of ‘Indians’ as particularly ‘rapey’ is also explicit in Stagecoach,<p>I think historically, invading/raiding soldiers were always ‘rapey’. One only needs to look at the Romans, the Vikings, the French in Spain, and more recently the Japanese, Germans, and Soviets in WWII.<p>Being on the losing side in a battle or war sucked, even if you were a civilian.
Not exactly related, but the recent Amazon Prime series "El Cid" is surprisingly good, especially if you thought that GoT lacked development of themes on how religion played such a major role in medieval politics.