Blender
Registered User
- Dec 2, 2009
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Yes they have a horse culture, but it isn't presented in the typical way other horse cultures are known to have been. Based on what we see, a large number of people would have spent all of their time herding extra horses, since we rarely ever see any individual Dothraki with more than one. In real life steppe nomads had in some cases over 10 horses that would follow them around like dogs, so no need to herd them at all. Part of the reason they could travel huge distances at speed was that they always had remounts following them. Especially in the case of Khal Drogo, but for any of the Khalasars we've seen, the amount of wealth they have in no way reflects the reputation we are told they have. In a typical steppe conqueror way, it's fine for Khal Drogo to look poor but everyone following him should be very wealthy based on what we're told of him, but we see little in the way of wealth. They could have a cultural taboo against accumulating stuff, but than it doesn't make sense for them constantly raiding their neighbors for stuff.How so? They live and die with their horses. Their entire culture is based on that animal.
For their military capabilities, they would be awful in real life. Steppe nomads were so successful and feared for thousands of years because they were mostly horse archers and until the widespread use of firearms, the only way to deal with horse archers was to hire other horse archers to fight them. Archers seem to be a secondary thing for the Dothraki, which is a big problem for their chances against settled societies. Instead of a bow, they use that curved sword (looks like a khopesh in the show and a scimitar in the books) which is utterly stupid for cavalry while the book one is more realistic at least, but still fairly useless against armored opponents. The Dothraki wear no armor of any kind, which I could forgive a bit more if they were all horse archers, but since they are charging in with a fairly short sword, any kind of formed and armed infantry would destroy them. Horse archers are so effective because they an hit you from distance while moving the entire time until you either break and chase after them, or break and run. Either way they can then swarm your force and pick everyone off one by one over miles. They rarely ever charged head on into a formed line unless they used a small group of cataphracts (essentially an armored knight) to do so, which the Dothraki also don't have any of. I have no reason to believe from what we have seen that the Dothraki in any way deserve their reputation for great military prowess on a large scale. They are obviously great individual warriors, which is pretty much the opposite of the steppe nomad archetype who are incredible in groups but weaker individually compared to European knights who are incredible individual fighters but bad in groups.