Arianne Martell

Arianne Nymeros Martell is a fictional character in the A Song of Ice and Fire series of epic fantasy novels by American author George R. R. Martin.

She is a member of House Martell and the heir to the desert kingdom of Dorne. Arianne is first mentioned in A Game of Thrones (1996) and first appears in A Feast for Crows (2005). The character also appears in A Dance with Dragons (2011) and will appear in the forthcoming volume The Winds of Winter.

Arianne is the first introduced person of color to serve as a point of view character in the book series and has been positively received as a strong and complex female character. As a result of her storyline in A Feast for Crows, which deals with Arianne's struggle to subvert the patriarchal system of Westeros, she has sometimes been described as a "feminist icon". Arianne was controversially cut from the television adaptation Game of Thrones, where her role was given to Ellaria Sand but the overall Dornish storyline drastically altered.