BloatedGuppy said:
4. Going back a bit, but what exactly was the purpose of the Jeyne/Talissa swap? What did we gain by that? Talissa was a complete anachronism, she stood out like a sore thumb. The way she was written and her personality in general actually under-wrote and diminished the challlenges other female characters faced and the ways they were restrained in this society by their gender...
While I do increasingly understand where you're coming from on a lot of things, I'd like to point something out.
Tyrion is also an anachronism. He's essentially a modern disabled person stuck in a pseudo-medieval world whose attitude is "fuck all this shit", but where exactly that attitude comes from is an utter mystery. It doesn't make sense. It gets brushed aside under the recurring theme that Tyrion is immensely socially privileged and this allows him to essentially "buy off" his disability which would otherwise doom him but that doesn't actually explain his extremely modern attitude towards it. Furthermore, in actual medieval history (at least in the Christian world) disability and disease were generally held to be literal acts of God, and thus both terrifying and awe-inspiring rather than funny or pitiable. The idea that people with dwarfism would be laughed at or used for comedy is distinctly renaissance.
Petyr Baelish is an even more extreme anachronism. He's a literal renaissance prince in a pseudo-medieval setting, and again, there's nothing about him, at least if we abide by the laws of dramatic realism, which explains why is what he is in the society he is.
Renley Baratheon is both an anachronism and a stereotype (albeit a flattering one). He's a sociable, flamboyant, fashion-conscious, exclusively gay man in a pseudo-medieval setting.
Danaerys Targaryen is an anachronism. Her reasons for disliking slavery are nonsensical without a humanist understanding of the world in which human beings are substitute for one another. People did condemn slavery before humanism, but they did so on the basis of divine law, not empathetic identification and especially not a kind of weird proto-feminist substitution of a woman's role in a patriarchal family structure with that of slavery.
..and here's why I don't care about any of this:
Anachronisms work because they are so much closer to us and to what we can comprehend than actual authentically medieval people would be, and thus they become a vehicle for us to play out our own ambivilent feelings towards the setting itself.
I've mentioned before that one of my favorite fantasy authors is Mervyn Peake. Ghormenghast has no realistic characters at all, only caricatures and anachronisms randomly thrown together for what they reprsent, not whether they are authentic. Steerpike is in my opinion one of the best anti-heroes in fiction because he is an anachronism, he is the rational, modern mind which rejects the insanity of the world he is being presented with, and that is not only a great source of dramatic and thematic conflict, it's also what makes the books relevant to a modern reader, and if books aren't relevant to their readers who are they relevant to?
I'm not necessarily defending Talissa as a character, just pointing out that calling her an anachronism isn't necessarily a criticism.