Hurry Up With My Damn Croissants

hippoiathanatoi:

I don’t care if something he said invalidates the book. If he said it, I take it as fact within the series. And since Nym is Oberyn’s daughter, it doesn’t matter if her mother was a fucking albino, it’s biologically impossible for someone who has a dark parent to have pale skin.

I do have to give a special award to this particular piece of comedy gold. You are aware, right, that GRRM himself has noted on numerous occasions that ONLY what is printed in the books is canon? It was in fact one of his stipulations for us doing the So Spake Martin archive, that if necessary we’d remove anything he later changed his mind on.

Answers he gives in emails, at conventions, at signings, etc are not considered binding canon by GRRM himself.

Also, no, it isn’t biologically impossible for someone who has one dark parent and one pale parent to have pale skin. First of all, it is a matter of degrees. The child’s melanin levels may very well come out closer to the pale parent than the dark parent, or vice versa. But yes, it is likely that the child will be darker than the pale parent, though it cannot be predicted to what degree. It should also be noted that we have no idea how dark we’re talking here. Olive skin covers quite a range, after all. 

However, it starts getting really tricky when there are lighter-skinned ancestors in the darker parent’s lineage, such as in this case. We know for sure that there’s Targaryen blood in the Martell lineage and there could very well be Stony Dornish blood as well. This means that both parents in this particular example could actually be passing on genes for light skin since those are recessive and can hide for generations even in a darker-skinned person.

And again, the text says milk-pale.

Look at you, Linda, throwing science at us!

ALSO YOU USED LINDAAAA AND YOUR NAME AS TAGS IN YOUR OWN FUCKING POST. NOW THAT IS COMEDY GOLD.