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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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I might have a failure of empathy here, but I genuinely can't imagine watching this show and not immediately saying, "what the fuck, who came up with this?". Having a group defined by their bloodline be racially diverse is just so unfathomably stupid, so incredibly hamhanded, so current year that I just can't understand how it isn't wildly distracting to everyone watching. I do see some people on Twitter with the snarky "oh, you can accept dragons, but not a BLACK dragonmaster" kind of sentiment, but even that just feels incredibly forced. I greatly doubt that any of these people are stupid enough that they don't grasp that people are willing to sign up for fantasy concepts, but still want fantasy stories to have internal consistency and have vaguely legible rules of the road. Want to have some rival house with black dragonmasters? Sure, cool, it might wind up hamhanded, but it could also be pretty neat. This ain't it.

Imagine a future version of America, where Yellowstone detonates and the remnants of the US invade Australia after the rest of the world decides the US hegemony being broken is a pretty good deal actually. The refugee US population enacting their manifest destiny may well escalate being American descended (white, black or asian) above being rest of the world descended (white. black or asian), given the struggle was America (or Valyria) vs everyone else. With our current language we might not call that a bloodline per se, but that's basically what they are saying. being Valyrian (of any color) is better than being non-Valyrian (of any color.) It's actually an interesting look at a place where nationalism blended with aristocracy to create a group who eliminated ethnic difference in their own Empire (to an extent at least), then reinvented them (us vs them) in a time of great stress.

If black and white Americans had to fight together for survival after a cataclysmic destruction of their homeland, it's not too far fetched to imagine that "American" becomes the new bloodline to preserve. The myth of their shared history blending with the refusal to accept that others are equal to them. It's not skin color that makes you superior or pure, it's whether you can trace your ancestry to America/Valyria directly.

Sure the Doylist explanation is that it was for cast diversity. But the Watsonian explanation isn't that crazy for a an Empire that spread across a good chunk of the world. We know they enslaved people from the Summer Isles and perhaps one was able to achieve freedom and power. They're not dragon riders, so they weren't at the top of the heap, they seem to have been part of the navy of Valyria, freed for some long lost act of service and given dominion over the seas? Adopting the incest ideal of Valyria, those families could maintain their features, largely. Some marry out perhaps for alliance purposes, hence the hair. Though we don't even know if the silver hair and violet eyes is a natural trait of Valyrians or caused by exposure to the dark magics they were rumored to use. Overtime the family identifies more strongly with Valyria than any past ancestry they ever had. Or the Valyrians has local regents in some places and eventually one of those rose to become part of the Valyrian freehold. Or a Valyrian took a local dark skinned wife and that plus the incest angle, takes over from there.

Given Valyria is a loose proxy for Rome, we also have the Romanized Africans who spoke Latin and the like:

"The willing acceptance of Roman citizenship by members of the ruling class in African cities produced such Roman Africans as the comic poet Terence, the rhetorician Fronto of Cirta, the jurist Salvius Julianus of Hadrumetum, the novelist Apuleius of Madauros, the emperor Septimius Severus of Lepcis Magna, the Christians Tertullian and Cyprian of Carthage, and Arnobius of Sicca and his pupil Lactantius; the angelic doctor Augustine of Thagaste, the epigrammatist Luxorius of Vandal Carthage, and perhaps the biographer Suetonius, and the poet Dracontius."

In our world they were largely Punic and Berbers, but in Valyria? Who knows? Note that the black family are not Targaryens, they are House Velaryon who are allies of the Targaryens, so while they aren't a rival house, they are a separate house as per your request.