I've just finished reading ADWD, and therefore have given myself clearance to participate in online discussions about Song of Ice and Fire without any fear of spoilers (while, of course, being resolute on avoiding spoiling anything for anyone else).
I always assumed that Daario's character (and Tyroshi in general) did look pretty ridiculous, only made workable by the fact that he's a very dangerous man who's very good at killing people and leading men whose business is killing people.. not to mention his swagger and self-confidence.
But when people see it in a TV show, to some degree we won't (can't?) suspend disbelief, and we'll be looking at a ridiculously dressed television actor. The audience would laugh, and they'd be right in doing so.
fgalkin wrote:Hell, the book-Unsullied are silly as hell while the Dothraki are basically Klingons on Horseback, and the less that can be said about the people of Slaver's bay, the better. Martin doesn't do foreign cultures, he makes caricatures and self-parodies.
Vaporous wrote:the "mysterious orientalism" of the Essos setting is so ridiculous that you get the feeling Martin knows how far he overshot the mark, and just decided to roll with it because he thinks it's too late to scale it back.
I think that aside from the in-universe explanation of the unprecedented levels of decadence that the slaver nobility enjoy (possibly beyond anything we've had on Earth), there's also the out-of-universe reasoning that I assume Martin had.. and here are my assumptions:
I'm simply of the impression that rather than being portrayed as a realistic juxtaposition of transplanted real-world cultures, the Eastern continent is actually meant to be as mysterious and exotic as our real-world West once
believed the Orient to be.
That's only my assumption, but I noticed how Martin was careful to avoid mapping out the world and properly giving accurate descriptions of the lands further to the east (Ashai and other lands around the Jade Sea, beyond Qarth).
Basically our view of the SoIF's east is shrouded in mystery, hearsay, fable.. much as the real-world West of 1500 years ago would have viewed the East. Today those views are outright ridiculous, and the truth about the layout of the world's continents and their cultural history is a glance at an Atlas away (or a quick Google search), so we are denied that sense of wonder and mystery.
Martin is basically affording us the ability to experience the fascination with the unknown, by having a fictional world, with a fictional layout, populated by fictional cultures, where we really have no idea what goes on in the Far East of that world.
In line with that, their fictional Eastern cultures are
really as fantastic as Western civilizations might have once thought they were in real life, including the levels of exoticness and crazy black magic and shit.
"..history has shown the best defense against heavy cavalry are pikemen, so aircraft should mount lances on their noses and fly in tight squares to fend off bombers". - RedImperator
"ha ha, raping puppies is FUN!" - Johonebesus
"It would just be Unicron with pew pew instead of nom nom". - Vendetta, explaining his justified disinterest in the idea of the movie Allspark affecting the Death Star
