fatpinkcast:

Hi everyone,

Over on livejournal under my fandom handle I ended up asking George RR Martin some questions about the Oberyn Martell casting and diversity in Game of Thrones. I know it’s gotten some attention on WinterisComing.net and Reddit and here on Tumblr.

In my first question, I expressed my concerns about the casting of the Martells, shared that many readers saw them as people of color, and concluded by asking ”Is there anything fans can do to help encourage the showrunners to cast the Martells diversely?“

After I wrote the comment to GRRM a friend asked me if I wanted to know what his answer would be. Another asked what the likelihood of getting an answer that would satisfy me would be. I paused for a moment, and then put it at about 5%. But, I added, justifying it to myself, it’s always important to know where things stand.

That didn’t stop my stomach from sinking when I read his response, though.

"Though by and large I reject one to one analogies, I’ve always pictured the “salty Dornish” as being more Mediterranean than African in appearance; Greek, Spanish, Italian, Portugese, etc. Dark hair and eyes, olive skin.“

And a glass door slammed. In the roar there was an ensuing wave of anti-blackness, fandom misogyny, etc. I still don’t know how George RR Martin and some of my fellow fans could read “people of color” and immediately jumped to black people. Over on reddit my “diction choice" of using the “nonsensical" term people of color was deconstructed as SJW whinging and having a race agenda (even though Martin himself has used the term in other contexts before.)

I wrote back to GRRM, using textual evidence to explain why fans saw themselves in the Martells, and I called out the existing characters of color in the franchise as “otherized supports to the stories of white PoV characters" in contrast to the Dornish characters who were actually “players of the Game of Thrones.“

I said that now after what he’s said about the Martells and how he sees them, for me as a reader, "my view of Westeros has changed. Some of the verisimilitude has faded, the world of Ice and Fire feels more plastic and shiny."

And I asked again, what can fans like me do to encourage the show to cast the upcoming Martells diversely? because I noticed he hadn’t answered the question the first time.

Martin responded:

It does trouble me to have [my PoC characters] dismissed as “otherized supports to… white PoV characters.” Yes, they are supporting characters; they’re not protagonists, they don’t have chapters from their own viewpoint. But Oberyn Martell is a supporting character as well. Which is not to say he is unimportant. Robb Stark never had a viewpoint chapter either.

I can’t think of a single non-white character in ASOIAF as plot-significant as Robb Stark, or even Oberyn Martell, now that we have cleared up that he is white.

I try to make ALL my characters fully-fleshed and human, whether they are secondary or tertiary characters, minor players, or spearcarriers who only have one line. I grant you, I may not always succeed, given that I have literally thousands of characters, but the intent is there. I should also point out that I am not done writing the books. If you’ve read my novels, you’ll know that sometimes a character who seems very minor in one book assumes great importance in later volumes… and sometimes even becomes a POV.

But later on, he responded to another fan (and called tumblr a cesspool—ouch.)

“While I stand by my previous descriptions of Prince Oberyn and the salty Dornish, and support the casting of Pedro Pascal, I hate to disappoint any of my readers, and I am sympathetic to their desires to ‘see themselves’ in the text. "The text — the NOVELS — are actually the only thing I control, but I can say, with some certainty, that there will be people of color therein. Salladhor and Xaro are white in the books, true, but I have some interesting new characters coming forward (not viewpoints, admittedly, but cool, I hope) you may like, and there will be more of Strong Belwas, Moqorro, Missandei, Irri, Jhiqui, the bloodriders, many other Dothraki, Chataya and Alayaya, Jhalabar Xho, and the captain and crew of the Cinnamon Wind. "They may not all come to good ends, mind you, and some will be deeply flawed, and some will be minor players… but they will be there, in living color, for good or ill.”

Not viewpoints, though. The characters of color in ASOIAF, they won’t have old House words, Unbent, Unbowed, Unbroken, proud and strong. They won’t press a cyvasse piece in your palm and tell you to wait for fire and blood, or ride a cavalry of horses streaking across hot desert sands. They won’t whisk a Lannister princess away or sail an ocean to court the Mother of Dragons.

But they will be there. Though, all the PoV characters in this sprawling epic will be white.

As this WinterisComing moderator notes on her personal tumblr:

“let’s be real, no way is the crew of the Cinnamon Wind and Moqorro equal with Oberyn, Doran and Arianne Martell in terms of importance. oh, Grrm…”

Not the response I was hoping for, not that 5% chance. I’m thankful that he took the time to respond in a respectful way, even though he says he doesn’t agree with everything I said.

A small stubborn voice in me rails, which part wasn’t agreeable, the part where i said that the Mediterranean region includes more than Europe? the part where i say there are no poc Game players? the part where i said it’s important for POC to be seen in fantasy and that not having them affects the verisimilitude?

Extra props to Martin and/or his assistant for unscreening this clever gem of a comment. ImaJuicyGirl so accurately captures what I was going for (in a reductive, dismissing, and uh, invalidating way.)

I’m fat, so I’ve grown up seeing how everybody like me (fat) was considered either stupid, meaningless or stupidly meaningless in most books, films and tv shows. In fact, I read the ASOIAF novels and I kept seeing how many fat characters (Sam, Lysa Arryn, Hodor, Robert Baratheon…) are either stupid, crazy or even mentally deficient.



But I feel even worse about reducing the number of fat characters in the show. It’s bad to have so many stereotypes around, but not even having a decent amount of overweight and obese people is even more insulting. You even made Lysa Arryn super skinny!!! I’m not gonna forgive you just because the actress was fucking amazing and she WAS Lysa Arryn, I would have preferred to have a mediocre fat person!



Also, when I was reading the books I thought about how some characters would be amazing as fatties. I mean, I know Daenerys is supposed to be in shape and all that, but I like her, so I imagined her morbidly obese. Iit would have been nice of the producers to have chosen an obese actress to play her, that way all of us fat women who suffer discrimation because of our weight would have an amazing role model, and we would have been represented in the show. However, you chose to stick to the book instead of my imagination, which I think is DISCRIMINATORY. Therefore, I HATE YOU SO MUCH.

With everything that has happened, FatPinkCast feels more important to me than ever. There’s just three of us, but we’re women of color and dammit we’ve managed to carve out a space that is just for us and people who feel like us in fandom, and we’re not afraid of having conversations about ASOIAF using a critical media studies, critical feminist studies, and yes, critical race studies lens. So at least there’s that. (Even though I feel like Gendry in his plot canoe trying to row to King’s Landing.)

And the rest of me just feels sorry.

Not sorry that, because I asked, he wrote back instead of writing more TWOW.

Sorry because, before I asked him, the part of fandom that cared about diversity in ASOIAF (and if you don’t care, why are you spending so much time haranguing the people who do?), the fans who were invested in seeing nonwhite actors cast in the roles of the Martells…we could all go on believing that they were people of color in the novel and that the show had slipped up.

It’s so much harder to do that now, and I just feel like if I hadn’t asked, we wouldn’t have experienced this loss.

It is a loss—and the lusty and friendly Cinnamon Wind isn’t a consolation prize, not even close— it’s a loss for readers of color who saw themselves visually in the Dornish the way they couldn’t in the other great houses of Westeros. Readers who could have gone on reading the books that way, more diverse than they are actually intended to be. It is a loss for the book series in terms of verisimilitude; the way the Dothraki, Mereen, and Essos are treated in the context of Dany’s story is a huge awkward colonialist blip in the ASOIAF mythos…one that the presence of Dorne can no longer mitigate.

I’m so sorry I asked. I’m sorry that my questions inadvertently prompted George RR Martin to hammer glass panels all over fandom’s imagination.

Like I said in my comment to him, I’m from a racial group that doesn’t get to be present in western medieval fantasy at all, so I didn’t see myself in Dorne the same way other readers of color did…and I shouldn’t have been so callous in gambling with that when I asked him those questions.

And I realize that even though I repeated my primary question twice—Is there anything fans can do to help encourage the showrunners to cast the Martells diversely?—he hasn’t answered it.

I’m tempted to ask why, but I’m afraid of the answer.

-M