Tuesday 1 September 2015

Why are most of the main characters Caucasian in Game Of Thrones?

The reason most of the main characters -- those who come from Westeros -- are "caucasian" is that A Song of Ice and Fire is inspired by the English War of the Roses (Stark vs Lannister -- York vs Lancaster) and Hadrian's Wall in northern England.



Caucasian is a rather silly thing to call white people, though, since it does not only refer to white people. A more accurate term here is to ask why the main characters seem to be English, which is what they are.



As you may have noted, several things in the novels are traditionally English (well, not all of them are entirely English), like knights, lords, heraldry, jousting. And in the TV-show, they have taken it one step further and given a lot of different British accents to a lot of different people.



In southern Westeros you have Dorne, whose people are described somewhat like arabian/african and definitely not English. Dorne is ruled by house Martell, a key house in the ASOIAF story. There is a great description in one of the books, I seem to recall it was A Clash of Kings, but I might be wrong.



The people of Westeros are not all of the people in ASOIAF, however. You have the other continents: Essos (asia/middle east), Sothoryos (africa?) and Ulthos. And islands like the Summer Islands (african), Naath and Ibben. And I guess we can add the Iron Islands (vikings/nordic) to this list, though they are formally a part of Westeros. All of these place contain lots of people who are not British.



And then of course we have Valyria, whose sole surviving people are the Targaryens -- a race all of their own, that have light coloured hair (silver, platinum blond, etc) and eyes in strange colours (lilac, indigo, purple).



I could list the specifics of those places, but you have the links and the information, so go there and read instead. I will however list a few people who are not from Westeros who have roles in ASOIAF:

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