Im Gonna Catch Heat For This, But Im Gonna Say It Anyway:

I’m gonna catch heat for this, but I’m gonna say it anyway:

The Velaryions should have stayed white and racebending them was a racist decision disguised as representation.

I can’t expand on this without giving away spoilers, so read more.

As a black latina woman (giving y’all my credentials before anything else), since it was announced the Velaryons would be white, I didn’t like it. Which was a conflict for me because hellow, of course I love to see shows where the characters aren’t all two shades of beige.

But the racebending of the Velaryons was made the for the sake of appearances only, and the lack of real representation inside the writer’s room is clear in the ramifications of what this decision brings to the table. To add more salt to the injury, racebending them absolutely undermines the original narrative’s essence.

Valyrians are white, and this plays a significant role in the story.

The reason why this is annoying the hell out of me is because spoilers suggests that Addam Velaryon (Corlys Velaryon’s bastard) won’t have his Valyrian white-silver hair. So to anyone else’s eyes, he is a black man with no blood of Valyria running through his veins.

Which means that Nettles and her entire arc is severely compromised, because a lot of her story is based on the points that:

she is the only black character with a crucial role to play in The Dance and

she has no Valyrian looks.

Nettles journey lies in her distinctiveness: she is a black woman who lacks typical Valyrian features. The narrative emphasizes her experiences with racism from the white Valyrian families, who consider themselves divine. It is IMPORTANT that this happens to her.

Yet, the showrunners chose to racebend the Velaryons, and by doing that, took away from the experiences and uniqueness of Nettles and her story. And what happened when they changed their race? They treat the Velaryons like shit.

And I can’t help but think it’s because they are, now, black.

The only conclusion I can infer from this is that the choice of changing the Velaryon from white to black was solely for appearance’s sake, because the writers clearly not only don’t know how to write for black characters, they also surely have the biased view that a character once turned black will definitely lack in comparison to a white one. What the Velaryons got in return for being black was their storylines made worse, as if they don’t deserve the same treatment now they are no longer white characters.

An example is Laena Velaryon.

Laena went from being universally acknowledged as the woman Daemon Targaryen truly loved/loved the most by the fandom before the show aired (because funny enough they ignore the existence of Nettles, which is a whole other topic for discussion)… to become “second best”, to be portrayed as a secondary choice, feeling inadequate and as if she would never be enough in comparison to the white thin woman. Her death was changed from a sad bittersweet scene between herself and her husband to a violent traumatic scene where she suffered until the very end.

And now, if Addam Velaryon indeed has absolutely no Valyrian traits whatsoever to his physical appearance, then what this changes will mean is that the sole canonical black dragon rider in the entire lore of ASOIAF, who endured racism and discrimination due to her non-Valyrian looks, will be stripped away from several key aspects of her story. Nettles distinctiveness is minimized, and the absence of Valyrian traits in one of the Velaryons further erodes the significance of her narrative.

Nettles’ importance is already being downplayed in certain discussions across several HoTD boards. Nettles “isn’t that special anymore, is it even necessary to have her in the story” and “you can’t say that rhaenyra is racist because she married Laenor, Addam will be her ally according to several spoilers, it makes no sense. The maesters lied to make Rhaenyra look bad”. In an effort to make the white Targaryen family (and the white Targaryen woman) more appealing and palatable to the public, they stripped away the only canonical black character of important plot points in her story, all to prevent the Targaryens from coming off as antagonists.

Like I said before, the fact that Targaryens and Valyrians in general are white is important to the narrative. Their whiteness encapsulates their sense of racial superiority. Black characters never get to have their own “I’m special” moment, they never get to have a hero journey like white characters often do, and then we have a story where a black character has exactly that, where her story arc mirrors the ones often given to the white heroes, in all of its tropes and awesome achievements… and that gets stripped away from that black character as much as possible just so your show looks diverse? (Although we know the real answer: it’s so your white characters don’t come off as shitty as they are in the original story).

Historical figures that have served as inspiration for the women in ASOIAF - George R.R. Martin interview

Interviewer: What women through history have inspired and helped you on your way to creating these female characters that we love?

George: There are some very interesting queens in both English and French history who have, at least partially, inspired the characters in Game of Thrones. Many people have observed that Game of Thrones is based, in part, on the Wars of the Roses and that is certainly true, although I don't do a one-for-one translation. If you go and say “This character is based on that character” you're gonna be partly right, but also partly wrong, because I like to mix and match and throw a few twists, making the characters my own. Certainly, the wife of Edward IV, Elizabeth Woodville, was one of the most interesting queens in English history. She was the mother of the princes in the tower and married secretly. She was a Lancastrian, but she married the Yorkist claimant secretly and that produced all sorts of trouble, and she was in the middle of all that stuff with Richard III. She was fascinating! On the other side, the Lancastrian queen, Margaret of Anjou: she was pretty amazing and definitely hardcore! She was married to the idiot king, Henry VI, and she basically had to command her side after some of the leading Lancastrian supporters were killed in the early parts of the war. If you go back a hundred years before, Isabella, the wife of king Edward II, the She-Wolf of France, she was a pretty amazing one too. She basically got rid of her husband, imprisoned him, and allegedly had him killed by having a hot poker thrust up his ass while he was in captivity and then she and her lover took over and ran the kingdom until her son Edward III rose up against his own mother and imprisoned her. All of this stuff, I play with it, but I can't claim to really have invented any of it. There are some things in history that are just as violent and twisted and bizarre and amazing as anything in my books.

- George R.R. Martin, Supanova Expo

Alice Nokes as ANNE BOLEYN THE SPANISH PRINCESS (2019 — 2020)

Jaehaera dying doesn’t devastate me because of the green bloodline dying off

It’s truly not what bothers me about the situation

It makes me feel icky because Jaehaera was neurodivergent.

GRRM could have chosen to make her non-neurodivergent or he could have made her a Septa and killed off the Green bloodline in a different way.

But he specifically made her non-neurotypical and made her Queen and then killed of this neurodivergent girl in the most violent manner so she could be replaced specifically by a “more perfect” happier girl to be Queen.

That’s what disgusts me, as if neurodivergent people don’t deserve good things.

Nina Marlin as Margaret Beaufort

Royal Bastards: Rise of the Tudors (2021)

They wasted Edmure's, I don't forgive

the tullys really got the best actors