#like it's the first ever official post-canon thk depiction

[herman-draws]

iS THIS CANON? DID THK'S ARM GREW BACK?? DID THEY DO IT JUST FOR THE PLUSHY TO BE MORE SYMMETRICAL??? TEAM CHERRY ANSWER ME

[nobodysuspectsthebutterfly]

How canonical are illustrations from a Knight of the Seven Kingdoms? i am still thinking about the topless person from Baelor's funeral - is it supposed to be allegorical or "for real"?

No illustrations are canonical, some just match the descriptions in the books better than others.* The only canon is the text. (See Neil Gaiman’s post about canon, it’s neat and applies to many things.)

Gary Gianni’s illustrations are very pretty, but they tend to be kind of Renaissance-y and figurative and are not always that accurate to the text. Same with his ASOIAF calendar – for example, the one with Pycelle, Varys, and Littlefinger is highly inaccurate (LF never wears a sword, Pycelle’s hat is bwahuh? and Varys’s robes don’t look like that lol) – and the less said about the racist Dany art the better. Which also has a topless lady!

So yeah, don’t worry, the illustration of Baelor’s funeral is highly figurative and allegorical with things that were not described in the text, just like the crying dragons while Dunk holds the dying Baelor, the dragon and lion in Dunk’s dream of Rohanne, and the dragon in the tree that’s the frontispiece of the book. (And obviously Egg and his dragon egg and the dragon are figurative.)

*For example, Tanselle.Some ramblings about various artists’ interpretations under the cut:

The text describes Tanselle as “a tall drink of water, with the olive skin and black hair of Dorne. She was slim as a lance with no breasts to speak of […] a head shorter than [Dunk] was, but still taller than any other girl he had ever seen.”

This is Gianni’s Tanselle:

And this is Mike S. Miller’s Tanselle, from the Hedge Knight graphic novel:

(more here)

And this is Amok’s painting of Tanselle, mostly based on Miller’s character designs:

Which one matches the text better? Gianni added curly hair, which isn’t described in the text; mind you straight hair isn’t either, but we know of more Dornish people with straight hair than curly. (Arianne has lush curls, but Oberyn and the Sand Snakes (excluding Sarella) have straight hair.) Miller added an undescribed widow’s peak (like Oberyn has), Amok’s Tanselle just has a straight hairline. Gianni’s Tanselle is way too short, Miller’s is a touch too tall (lol). Gianni’s Tanselle has a lot more than “no breasts to speak of”, but only Amok’s is really flat-chested. Gianni added an undescribed necklace and bracelets, Miller added undescribed earrings and bracelets. Gianni’s art is not colored, but I really wouldn’t say that Tanselle looks Dornish, no ethnically different from any other character in the story – whereas the colorist for the THK GN made sure to give her mid-dark olive skin, Amok painted her with mid-dark olive skin, and Miller’s b&w sketch (as seen in the back of the THK trade paperback) distinctly shows ethnic differences in her facial features.

So which depiction of Tanselle is “canon”? Again, none, only the text is, but I think Miller sticks much closer to the canon text than Gianni does, and Amok’s is best at it. (FWIW, when I met Mike Miller at a convention, I asked him why he’d chosen to draw Tanselle the way he did, with the widow’s peak and big dark eyes and all, had GRRM told him anything, and he just shrugged and said nope, he’d drawn her just as she was described in the story. Which tells you a lot about artists.) But all artists are free to create their own interpretations, that’s the great thing about art, and the grand variety of interpretations is the thing I love most about ASOIAF art. All these Tanselles are beautiful, I love them all, whether they fit the text or the image of Tanselle in my head or not.

Like, fan art, commissioned art, “official” art, whatever, it’s all filtered through the artist’s mind and then the viewer’s; if the viewer is also a reader, they can match the artwork to their own head-image of the character created when they read the story, and choose to agree with it or not. Sometimes an artist’s character design can be very unique (looking at @icesalamander​’s lovely work here, some of yours too), and whether it matches the exact text description or not, whether it matches a reader’s initial head-image or not, the viewer can still choose to feel that it’s an amazing depiction of the character, even if it’s not “canon”, and maybe that artist’s interpretation will even replace their head-image.

To me, Miller’s Tanselle is my Tanselle, and his Baelor is my Baelor (ugh at Gianni’s), and his Dunk is my Dunk. That’s mostly because his work was the first illustrations of the characters I ever saw, so they fixed my head-images early, not to mention that I actually read the THK comic before I read the novella, so the two went together. But my head-images of the D&E stories and characters are not any more “canon” than someone who read A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms first with its illustrations (and has never seen Miller’s), or someone who’s never seen any art of the D&E stories at all and just has their own unique head-images. I mean, I think my head-images are better (especially if some person actually thinks there were half-naked people crying at Baelor’s funeral, lol), but that’s me, and it’s all still opinions and interpretations of the canon text. Anyway, I’m just totally rambling now, so let me just cut this off…