I’ve mostly managed to steer clear of GOT drama, thank god. But one thing really does annoy the crap out of me, and that’s when I see people talking about pairing Jon with one of his female relatives (usually Sansa in this case, but sometimes Daenerys) and claiming that, since GOT is based on medieval Europe, it’s culturally acceptable.
It’s particularly annoying because it’s clear that the people saying this haven’t actually done the research.
Now, granted, we’re talking about the real world here, not a fantasy world with different rules and different genetics. (In our world, it is actually possible for a dark haired man like Robert to have blond children, for example.)
But anyway, Game of Thrones is pretty openly and blatantly inspired by the War of the Roses. The Starks are Yorks, the Lannisters are Lancasters. The ending is different, and certainly there weren’t incestuous dragon riders or zombies mucking things up in the real world. But we have an approximate time frame that allows us to look this shit up.
Now the War of the Roses ended when Henry Tudor (Henry VII) took the throne of England. At this time, England was a Catholic country, as was most of Europe. And as of 1059, quite a few hundred years BEFORE the War of the Roses,, the Catholic Church had prohibited marriages up to the 4th degree of consanguinity. That’s first cousins. (Aunt-nephew or avuncular marriage was 3rd degree, also prohibited.)
That’s not to say it didn’t historically happen, but it required special permission from the Pope (a papal dispensation), which generally required money and political pressure. It definitely wasn’t a normal or generally acceptable thing. (And I think you’d be hard pressed to find a real world political justification that would apply to the unique scenarios presented in Game of Thrones.)
Now obviously, Game of Thrones is its own setting with a very different history involving generations of Ptolemic conquerors so that may make things more acceptable (or less, since the backlash against the Targaryens may make the Westerosi more antagonistic to the idea of anything resembling Targaryen practice), and a fanfic writer can go in many different directions. It does seem like some degree of cousin marriage happened in the past, and while I think it’s VERY unlikely that the books are going to take that direction, I’m not going to tell people what to ‘ship.
I just really get aggravated when people make easily disproven arguments about the real world to justify it. It’s sloppy.
