#and all the pretty silks inspired by the Middle East for Dorne

[15-lizards]

If A Song of Ice and Fire was written by a teenage girl you can bet your sweet ass there would be entire chapters dedicated to regional westerosi/essosi fashions and how they were influenced…god we could have had it all why does Mr Martin have to be an old guy who likes writing (inaccurate) battles more than historical clothing and hairstyles 💔

[wodania]

what race are dornish even supposed to be? like canonically (ive never read the books). a lot of the art ive seen has them looking either tanned white or black. but then the clothing and inspirations seem to come from the middle east?

okay warning… I rambled a lot here I’m so sorry 🤒

there’s a pretty dubious and unspecific answer to that question 😭 to me, it’s obvious george had an orientalist idea of the middle east in mind when writing the characters, but he also claims that his inspirations are exclusively european, which imo doesn’t really add up. the dornish seem to be orientalist caricatures more than anything. so as George puts it, and based on the descriptions of sexual silk wearing desert people, they are white people with darker features cosplaying middle eastern stereotypes. Though I’ve seen some sources say it was specified as Islamic Spain, which still is not helping the orientalist accusations but rather encourages them. I’m not very familiar with this era of history, so I can’t say much about it. In the show, they choose to portray them by casting people of colour (and white people with darker features) such as Tanselle, Ellaria, Doran, etc, except in the case of the Targaryens, who are the major cast members of Dunk and Egg. Also worth noting is that in the books northern Dornish are much more ambiguous than southern Dornish and are described as paler with lighter features more resembling Westerosi people, so I’m mainly talking about southern Dorne.

a lot of people rewrite the descriptions of the Dornish characters to be less orientalist and more reflective of the real world cultures orientalism as a concept butchered. that’s why you see a lot of SWANA or South Asian Dornish designs. my own southern dornish designs are based off of historical iranian and persian styles. but some artists definitely lean into the silk and veiled orientalist tropes originally used to describe Dorne which is… ick. Characters like Arianne suffer from it greatly, being viewed as the sexy, Jasmine-esque character. I do think a lot of people also fall into the “brown people are a monolith” idea that the show also falls into. The Disney’s Aladdin idea that stereotypical Middle Eastern and Indian aesthetics are the same. I’m not from these cultures, however, so I’m not an authority on it. I’m just basing my observations on things I’ve learned from other people about orientalism in different contexts. It’s also worth mentioning that people come in all different shades. A pale person can still be a person of colour, so some Dornish designs may be lighter while also still portraying someone as a person of colour, if that’s what the artist intended.

Also, in my humble opinion, if you are drawing the Dornish as white but using clothing from non-white cultures as opposed to the European cultures George said he took from, you’re just contributing to that orientalism.

Hope this helps I kinda rambled and summarized a bunch of the convos I’ve had with people about the Dornish from a critical lens 🙏