The books are able to get past the superficial visual stereotypes because there is time to delve into the complexity of the characters and the cultures that they come from. That being said, I think Kerim is right in the critique that the cultural tropes of the Dorthraki persist very strongly in characters across the board. They run the risk of being automatons of culture rather than agents within a culture. This is especially true of Khal Drogo, who is the Dorthraki ideal made manifest. It’s not all one way or the other. Martin lets some of the Dorthraki get past the entrenched “The Dorthraki believe ______” or “The Dorthraki are ______” but not as much as he could.

One last example of how he could have done it better comes from the depiction of one the characters from the Iron Islands. Among these very viking-like people is Robert Harlaw, a leader of one of the houses, who though the sigil of his house is the scythe and is expected to be very violent, is reserved, patient, and remarkably well-read. Of all the characters in the series, he is one of the most studious characters who’s job doesn’t require such study like the maesters. Robert “The Reader” is an example of how even in fictional depictions of culture, we can get past the notion that cultures allow for no behavioral variety.

Anyway, interesting article. I may have to go out and read The Cultures series.

In Elder Scrolls the Redguard people of Hammerfell have dark skin and vaguely resemble Africans or African Americans. In older games… The Hammerfell region is made up of dozens of small city states. Their material culture is the same sort of mash up of antiquity and renaissance that most of the other cultures have. In the older games they have Sword Saints who supposedly blew up their ancestral home island by splitting atoms with the blades of their swords. They wear doublets and carry rapiers.

Fast forward to the latest game and they have become swarthy Arabian Nights Arabs or Berbers. Turbans, robes, ridiculous fantasy ‘scimitars’. Rather than explaining a land of Renaissance Italian city states in a desert with magical samurai warriors and bizarre fantasy armor they recreated the Redguard as something much simpler and easier to understand without delving into huge amounts of backstory.

Banks is dirty filthy commie, like Mieville — the Culture novels are about imagining what a post-scarcity world would look like, no?

Apologies for the Mongolist sidetracking: my wider point is that trying to just flip the distinction and call the Mongols “the REAL democrats and liberals” doesn’t do much for us. (Especially when a lot of us don’t take those ideas for granted either).

On GoT, this summer I had a friend pass through my place in Mongolia with GoT on her computer, and at first I was pretty annoyed about the Dothraki. To back up Dick though, I was more okay with how things proceded. BTW, my dissertation in progress is about the dual involvement of Mongolians in a Soviet legacy mining corporation and nomadic pastoralism, so I especially like how the Dothraki have a city (with a sacred mountain– seems to be a reference to Chinggis’ Burkhan Kaldun). Things as far as the sex and violence on the Dothraki side seemed to be exaggerated in the show verses the movie I need to ask one of my friend here how he thinks about the Dothraki now that I know he is also in GoT! (He’s a Mongolian Kazak who grounds his place in the Mongolian state partly by claiming that one group involved in Chinggis’ conquests, the Kereids, were Kazaks).

Le Guin’s Always Coming Home is hundreds of times more inspiring though than GoT, because again GoT, as Dick says, is pretty much just flipping a common distinction instead of looking at other ones.

@DWP thanks for the Le Guin link. Here’s a post about LeGuin by @rex: /2009/10/22/happy-birthday-ursula-k-leguin/

This might be an interesting angle to take should I write it up for an future blog post.

I read half of Consider Phlebas, but frankly the Wikipedia articles about the Culture are far more compelling.

Yes, this is why I used to post as Discuss White Privilege. Like Rex said in his post on advanced alien species as disembodied, once you notice a cultural phenomenon, you notice it everywhere: so white privilege always has to be reckoned with. Not as ‘polemic’ or a ‘confrontational’ moniker, but as foundational structural condition of social relations.

As many a Racialicious post (among others) has opined, constantly seeing oneself written out of and excluded from–or marginalized and predictably stereotyped in–fantasy worlds is *not* a pleasant ‘escape’ for most minority readers. It only reinforces–annoyingly, frustratingly, dispiritingly, enraginly–the very marginalization/discrimination/invisibity one would rather escape from in the ‘real world’.

So yes, escape for whom? And isn’t this really always the question, anthropologically speaking: for whom is this (not) true?

And doesn’t this last question also speak to Adam Fish’s recent post, citing David Graeber, on committing ‘anthropological suicide’ and theorizing from ethnography (and the ethnographic/anthropological record), instead of trying to be Sophisticated Theorists of ‘Continental’ Philosophy?

“For whom?”, anthropologists. “For whom?”

Of course we can critique such comments as being made from a stance of heterosexual privilege, but I imagine they might mirror sentiments among sci-fi/ fantasy fans that to bring a racial critique to Game of Thrones is to, in a sense, introduce the very problems of the real world that one is trying to get away from by seeking out this kind of entertainment in the first place.

Now I’m not especially sympathetic to that view point. As these “Culture” books you describe sound very interesting and show that the genre can be well done and be complex/ complicating at the same time.

For instance, one popular history of Genghis Khan emphasizes the importance of the Mongols in the creation of the “modern world.”

That’s the default position among historians and Mongolists. The Mongol empire had a huge role in creating the modern world by facilitating contact between Persia, China, India, Europe, Russia, and even the Malay archipelago, to a greater extent than before. The Mongols fought all the way to Egypt, Java, Korea, and Hungary – they were one of the first waves of globalisation. They were also (usually) religiously tolerant; Chinggis [Genghis] Khan and his offspring seem to have thought of religion as a type of supernatural insurance, and they bought several kinds. I studied Mongolian for three years at university, and I’m a little ashamed to say that I’ve forgotten most of the language except basic phrases and the classical script.

Interesting post, in any case!