Another interesting series of essays with lots of useful information for speculative fiction writers from Brett Devereaux! Copying and pasting from some comments I left about that essay over there (disclaimer that I haven’t watched GoT or read ASoIaF, I’m just going by that essay):
Really, the impression I get from this essay is Dothraki culture as written would make more sense if you crossed out every reference to horses and replaced it with some sort of fantasy animal. It would have to be something fast-breeding and fast-growing that can turn grass into animal tissue very efficiently but produces little or no secondary products (no eggs and little or no milk); maybe it’s not a mammal.
Alternately, maybe the Dothraki are primarily hunters like the North American Great Plains cultures and their staple food is some sort of fantasy super-bison with similar traits (fast-breeding, fast-growing, very efficient at turning grass into animal tissue), hence the Dothraki can have much bigger populations than IRL horse nomad bison-hunting cultures? Rationalization: this hypothetical super-bison unfortunately tastes like crap, somebody like Danaerys basically never eats it because the immediate household of a powerful leader would be high-status enough to get the good stuff for every meal, and in Dothraki cuisine the good stuff is mostly horse and horse products supplemented with the occasional tastier wild game. The horse meat heavy diet is generally easier to rationalize if you assume Danaerys’s perspective is biased by mostly interacting with rich people who have more meat in their diet than the average Dothraki.
Of course, this is all being bending over backwards to be charitable to the source material, trying to come up with interpretations that might salvage it.
Oh, another thought I had…
I’m thinking of James C. Scott here, specifically their points about how “barbarians” are often not primordial cultures that progress passed by but actually descendants of “civilized” people who fled from the taxation, oppression, etc. of states…
Maybe the Dothraki would make more sense if they’re actually recent adopters of the steppe nomad lifestyle and were sedentary farmers a few generations ago, maybe a couple of centuries ago tops? Their culture isn’t masterfully adapted to the steppe, their adaptation to their new lifestyle is still very much a work in progress. That might explain things like their dwellings being not very good. Perhaps some of the “Fremen mirage” features of their culture could then make sense in a kind of meta way; their culture isn’t so much “barbarian nomad” culture as a “civilized” person’s attempt at “barbarian nomad” culture; in a sense they’re less like Mongols and more like ISIL. Stuff like the sheep-killing might fit with that; it’s people who still don’t quite grok what being a pastoral nomad means doing something stupid because they think it will make them look badass. Aren’t the Iron Islanders supposed to be kind of like that, not so much Vikings as reactionaries violently LARPing at being Vikings? So I guess it would kind of fit.