Game of Thrones Author Comments on Lack of Racial Diversity in Series

[beastro]

Yeah, I'm waiting for the authors of the Iliad and Beowulf to edit their stories and bring in some diversity. /sarcasm

Westeros is aping medieval Europe and back then, especially in Northern/Central Europe seeing someone that wasn't white was a once in a life time thing and they stood out like a massive sore thumb. Even a few centuries back in Russia black people were a novelty, though they echoed the Medieval times more naive curiosity around different skin colours before the slave trade started up - Look up Abram Gannibal.

The amusing thing is, the book is full of more diversity than historical Europe purely by having the Dornish around alone in Westeros not to mention all the rest of the ethnic groups featured in Essos and the deliberate changing of characters skin colours for various reason, like the change of Robbs wife's background to Xaro Xhoan Daxos being changed from a Pureborn "milkman" born into the hierarchy of the city to a black man who came for the Summer Isles and made his own name in the city despite their obsession around blood.

Robbs wife was changed because they went by the actress' abilities and worked around that, haven't heard by they changed Xaro's ethnicity.

In the end it's refreshing that he's avoiding pandering like this. Westeros may no by realistic by far, but it tries to be Medieval Europe as much as it can and being "ahistorical" would ruin it, just as murder mysteries in the past 15 years have been spoiled by people injecting modern mores into the world of a century or more ago like with Miss Marple.

 

[beastro]

Really now, if there's anything to complain about series for it's having everyone be utter monstrous shit with decent people being screwed at every turn a bit too much and becoming as unrealistic and tiresome as naive people always winning out because of their power of fluffy bunnies and rainbows.

If there's anything that can be said of GRRM by reading his books, it's not that he's racist and written anything like that into his works, it's that he's deeply misanthropic and hates us all equally, well except for singling out all the good nice people most of all!

He didn't accidentally do any of that. The entirety of Essos is far from savages, slavers, and fanatics as you said. Hell, a lot of them are actually more civilized since as Tywin once said "They fight with coins instead of swords". Braavos pretty much owns Westeros based on how much money the crown owes the Iron Bank. Most of the cities of Essos are some of the most successful trading hubs in the entirety of the Known World. Valyrian Freehold was literally the most advanced nation by a mile in that world's history before it fell due the Doom of Valyria.

I find the complaint about Essos amusing as the Free Cities and Westeros basically hold the same views of each other that Eastern and Western Europe did during the Middle Ages with the Free Cities looking on the Westerosi knight culture being dressed up barbarism ala the Byzantine's while the Westerosi look on the Free Cities as weak, pathetic men with too much money in their hands and not enough swords.

Before people start complaining about Essos culture they should read up about it, especially how in the past centuries before the start of the books Braavos went from a mongrel state of escaped slaves into a hodge-podge Netherlands/Venice that has been actively waging war on slavery in the rest of the Free Cities, forcing Pentos to official abandon it and helping curb the power of Volantis, the greatest slaver state in the world from conquering the rest in their question to become the New Freehold.

You're focusing way too much on the negative aspects of only some of Essos' cultures when there is far more to the continent than that.

Because then there'd be nothing to complain about.

Essos is a very good rendition of Asia in that it's highly varied where ever you go.

I still don't see how slavery only really being a thing in Essos somehow a bad thing? It makes sense when you think about the cultures the Known World of A Song of Fire and Ice are inspired by. Slavery was rarely a thing in Medieval Europe with the advent of feudalism, so it's pretty understandable that a country inspired by it wouldn't have such a thing. Essos is inspired by a mix of Roman, Byzantinian, Middle Eastern, and other such similar cultures, all known to have had and extensive slave. So again, it's not like Martin directly made the choice to only have slavery in Essos, he only went with the real life inspirations as he did with all the other cultures. There's no way you can fault him for writing such a parallel like that without faulting our own history.

Because God-forbid we'd take our eye off of the Western European Slave Trade and look back on how Antiquity was pretty much built on slavery, carried on in Northern Europe until Christianity stamped it out, thrived in the Muslim world without interruption and even still in Christendom due to technicalities like abusing Serfdom and slave galleys in the Mediterranean using captured Muslims because Muslim did the same to Christians.

Most people these days really do not fathom how integral slavery has been to civilization with Medieval Christian Europe and the Modern Era which emerged from it being aberrations which have existed only a good thousand years in places and only a century or two as an evil compared to the rest of recorded history and most likely a great deal of unrecorded history going back into hunter-gather times.

 

[elthingo]

What?? all the stuffy white people are in power? totally unrealistic. No I think he has it spot on. It is kind of racist and that's just how things were there and then. That said it generally states that Essos is far more diverse. It just so happens that Westeros was founded by a bunch of white guys. One thing to note again there's no real heroes. stop rooting for people in this series they're all fools or bad guys. So complaining that the main cast is not diverse enough is silly. In fact all the diverse folks are pretty much the only non-idiots.

Don't see how it's racist for the continent with a 99,9% white population to be ruled by white people. It kind of makes sense to me.

 

[DEAD34345]

We're talking about forced....

Nope. Someone asked a question about the lack of diversity in the book and a bunch of... fill in the blanks ...freaked out about it. There was nothing about force involved.

The words the person in the OP used were that the lack of racial diversity "really hurts". That strongly suggests that the person believes the lack of racial diversity in the book is actually wrong in some way, or that George Martin shouldn't write stories about places with a lack of racial diversity. Maybe "forced" isn't quite the exact word to use, I doubt the person actually wants to create a law to that effect or will go to his house and physically force him to change it, but the point is that they seem to think a story with a lack of racial diversity is automatically bad to begin with (which is where I disagreed with them, and you).

Don't dismiss my entire post because one word of it isn't quite perfect.

 

[gagagaga]

Hmm, racism in ASOIAF... On the one hand, you've got slaughter and rape happy fantasy Mongols and black people who are viewed as primitives, dress in feathers and love sex. On the other you've got multicultural/racial Braavos which seems to be one of the better places to live, same with Dorne, basically the only place in Westeros where there are non-white people.