The East Is Least: The Stereotypical Imagining of Essos in <i>Game of Thrones</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While Game of Thrones may appear to offer an avenue of escape to an imaginary realm, in its representation of race and geography, this fantasy universe simply reinforces existing preoccupations of our actual world. An example of this is in the representation of the Eastern lands and cultures in the story. The link between Eastern cultures and depravity has been part of Western imagining of the “Orient” for centuries, and the peoples of the Middle East are generally depicted as “fallen” compared with the more honourable denizens of the West; this occurs in fantasy literature, as well. This article examines the dynamics of ethnic and geographic representation in Game of Thrones from the perspective of Edward Said’s Orientalism and the historical foundations of Western depictions of the Middle East. It argues that despite the reputation of the series as ground-breaking escapism, its depiction of Eastern peoples is anything but.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".