#Medieval obsidian scalpel make tv

Seriously, I loved this, and laughed out loud in delight at the glassblower trying to glassblow what is essentially solidified lava. Have you heard of the Doom of Valyria and it's FOURTEEN FIRES? (Which sounds a lot like a supervolcano.) And yeah, to quote Samwell Tarly: 'The Maesters call it 'obsidian'.' CHECKPOINT, totally normal people who don't think too much about this! ) Volcanology is definitely a part of the books.

#Medieval obsidian scalpel make tv

Yet there is no mention of felsic lava at all in any of the canonical ASIOF much less the tv show But this is an important aspect of world-building that good writers of fantasy take into account, and make considered choices about.

Obviously, different audience members have different thresholds for suspension of disbelief, and sometimes it's not always worth it to sweat the small details for worry that a really pedantic and knowledgable person will come along and 'well, actually' your story. If you indicate that a material is obsidian, then it's reasonable that your audience will expect it to behave like obsidian, absent some explanation of why not. 'It's just fantasy' doesn't mean that anything goes. In a well-written fantasy story, departures from the real world are intentional and follow an internal logic they are also signaled to the audience in a way that the audience understands.

Fantasy worlds are never created from scratch they always draw heavily on elements of the real world and rely on the audience's understanding of the real world to make sense. I strongly disagree with this response to any incongruity between a fantasy world and a real world.

It doesn't matter if they say it's obsidian from our universe and planet Earth, our underlying knowledge about the material cannot apply