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| Drogo as angry brown man. Source: dothraki.org |
Graddakh! We the brown people of Vaes Dothrak collectively curse the producers of HBO and the slanderous “creator” of our world, which you call the Game of Thrones.
We know that your people have a long standing tradition of questionable and objectionable racial imaginings in your “fantasy fiction” genre.  So we are not surprised by your ifaki ignorance of our civilization.  Anyway, we have also come to understand that much of your television programming broadcasts an unreflective and unapologetic world of whiteness, so maybe you can’t help but reduce us to barbaric caricatures. Some of your smarter viewers (and there are really so few) and scholars have been drawn to the Machiavellian elements of the series, but like Saladin Ahmed, Pablo K, and Alyssa Rosenberg, we cannot help but linger on the way our “horde” has been depicted in the series.
We the Dothraki are portrayed as undifferentiated mass of colored people at the periphery of an otherwise lily white medieval world. Â (It is not that the white characters are all portrayed in a glowing light, all the characters are obviously flawed, but the Dothraki stand in for an undifferentiated mass representing the entire non-white world.) Â We are portrayed as a fierce Mongol-like people, except that these are not the historic Mongols of your world. Â You know, the people who introduced your hopelessly barbaric and quarrelsome Europeans ancestors to firearms technology and whose massive naval armada twice attempted to cross the seas and conquer Japan. Rather we Dothraki are portrayed as a technologically backward collection of clod-hopping barbarians who embody a range of degrading caricatures based on your own trite knowledge of Native American, Sub-Saharan African, and Arab societies.
In particular, we Dothraki seem to be driven purely by the thymotic aspects of our soul. We seem barely able to reason and need to be guided by a foreigner who goes “native.” We are shown enjoying acts such as publicly fornicating while dancing at weddings and murdering one another on the slightest provocation.  According to the depiction on television, no Dothraki wedding is complete without at least three murders. You are even told blatant lies. Who says we “have no word for ‘thank you'” or ‘throne’?  Me nem nesa, we have those words!  And we have plenty more for idiot, choyo nerds like George R.R. Martin and the producers of the show. I would rant more, but that would only play into your lame and dismissive stereotypes about belligerent brown people.
Look if you’re going to be racist, perhaps you could show a bit more creativity? Repeating the classic mid-twentieth century American variety of racism is just boring. Â Might we suggest that you overlay the racist tropes with a highly gendered discourse in the manner of the British imperialists? Â Which is not to say that you’re not sexists with your whore/matriarch/whore-matriarch triads, but you don’t really combine the two discourses very well. Even the British got bored with just using a martial races trope. Or perhaps you could try hipster racism?
Good point
Ok, so this will probably sound bad. But is it possible that the Dothraki are portrayed that way because this is how they are viewed by those in Westeros? I mean most (all?) of the POVs that we get in the books are from Westerosi. There are similar views of those in Slavers Bay as well.
Then again, I may just be attempting coming up with excuses…
If that were the case, then the activities and dialog would subtly undermine the perspective of those in Westeros. Â Instead, we see only caricatures. Â Apparently the caricatured portrayal can be traced back to G.R.R. Martin but the HBO version has made the Dothraki even more cartoonish.
I take your point in that I don’t think that it is the case that Martin was only showing Westerosi views of the Dothraki.
However, Can you explain more? How would it undermine them since we are only seeing it through their eyes? I guess you mean that what they see wouldn’t fit their preconcieved notions? But this doesn’t seem to have happened in the case of European colonialism.
Maybe we’re talking past each other a bit… I meant that if HBO producers of GoT did not want to give us a racist caricature, then the outlook of the Westerosi would be undermined by the distance between the perception of the Westerosi and the actions/dialog of the Dothraki. Since there is no distance between the Westerosi outlook and the way the Dothraki actually talk/behave, one can assume that the producers of the t.v. series are not engaging in a subtle critique of racism.
I think I agree: it’s the opposite with gender, I think. However I will add that though the many “periphery” cultures are rather essentialized in the book series, Martin’s does expand and diversify the periphery over the later books especially (we already see this in Season 2 of the TV series as well with wildling culture, the Ironborn and the Pentoshi introduced as distinct and diverse ‘Others’). Though all of them suffer to some extent from the same caricaturization Vikash identifies, the sheer diversity of “others” outside Westeros does something progressive relative to other fantasy fiction by forcing the reader to recognize how situated the “core” experience is. That is, while we can never really see things accurately outside of Westerosi eyes, we get an increasing sense that Westerosi perspectives are caricatured and incomplete and that this is to their detriment, as well as a sense that the “core” is increasingly situated, insignificant and vulnerable – sort of like the shrinking of US and Western Europe on Petersons world maps. While this doesn’t really address Vikash’s complaint about the essentilaization of any one culture, to be fair it’s difficult to really do an ethnography of these periphery cultures in the context of such a fast-moving, wide-ranging story. So I think he’s both right and wrong, but I also think GRRM maybe does a little better than his predecessors like Tolkein on this point….
So Martin/HBO moves from orientalism to ornamentalism… ahh, progress. ;)
I have only seen some of the series. But, the Dothraki struck me as being pretty closely related to the Turkmen before their subjugation by the Russian Empire near the end of the 19th century. I fail to see any similarities to any sub-Saharan African, Arab, or Native American societies. They definitely appear to be nomadic Central Asian slave raiders similar to the Turkmen.Â
The producers of the show say that the Dothraki are modeled on the Mongols and Native Americans. For other traces, just watch the actions in the background (especially scenes with dancing) and you will see a host of tropes that would make even a seasoned Orientalist cringe. Â If you speak Arabic, you’ll notice traces of Arabic in the Dothraki language itself.
I mostly hear Klingon.