Addendum to my Yunkai/io9 rant

Two things I missed. One, the author's tag at the bottom indicates he's a stand-up comedian. I don't know if the rant was satire or not. It was neither funny nor a serious critique.

Two, I should explain my "This. Is. Deliberate." comment a bit more. So that's what most of this post is going to be.

When I read, I'm colorblind. Normally a character's skin tone gets mentioned about once, and then that's it. If there's something important about a character's description - say, golden hair - I'm more likely to remember it. How brown is Arianne Martell? I can't remember off the top of my head, and I'm one of the people who likes the Dorne plot. So to me, when I read fairly late in A Storm of Swords that Astapor and Yunkai both went to pot after Dany's revolutions there, my first thought was less "Iraq or Afghanistan" (the novel was published in 2000), and more "The French Revolution." Which, by the way, had a bunch of white people in it.

Now, because a bunch of intellectuals going potty over an unequal class system and losing some heads is basically Occupy Wall Street's wet dream, we're probably going to see more "War on Terror" and less "French Revolution" in the show. (Although again, I'd like to point out: the show equates homosexuality and incest pretty much every opportunity it gets. So either it's hyper-liberal or it's fairly conservative.) Which in turn means that, because the TV audience is stupid and doesn't understand metaphor unless it dances naked in front of them while singing "I am the Walrus," the "liberated" folk have to be brown.

TLDR: Read the frakking books and you'll see what they're doing and why.

What do I mean by "the TV audience is stupid?" Read on.



If the TV audience isn't stupid...

• Why rename Asha Greyjoy?
• Why change Cleos Frey into Alton Lannister?
• Why replace Jeyne Westerling (daughter of a Lannister bannerman) with Talisa Maegyr (noblewoman from nowhere)?
• Why always put Lannister soldiers in that easy-to-identify color-coded-for-your-convenience red armor, even when the plot requires that they not be?
• Why cut out Loras Tyrell's older brothers?
• Why completely change the way Stannis learns about his claim to the throne?
• Why cut "Reek" from Season Two?
• Whence that stupid "where are my dragons?" plot in Season Two?
• Why have Jaime actually have to say "I was that hand"?
• Why have Littlefinger spell out his entire backstory, motivation and plan to a pair of hookers when it's completely out-of-character for him to do so? 

Okay the answer to that last one is "titties." But for every single other one, it's "because they think the audience is stupid."