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Notes -
Spoilers follow for House of the Dragon, you've been warned.
HOTD is based on an era of Targaryen history called the Dance of the Dragons, which is a civil war between rival claimants for the Iron Throne - one side led by Rhaenyra Targaryen, and the other by her half-brother Aegon Targaryen. The gist of it is that Rhaenyra, whose mother died when she was young, was King Viserys I Targaryen's only child for a long time, and he made her his heir because otherwise the throne would have gone to his thoroughly unsuitable brother Daemon, a prideful man with a violent and sadistic streak. But then Viserys remarried and had a son, Aegon, with his second wife Alicent Hightower. Now there was another male claimant to the throne - the king's own son, no less. Many began to say that Aegon was the rightful heir, in keeping with the traditional male-preference primogeniture of Westeros, but Viserys refused to change the succession. When Viserys finally died, Aegon had no personal interest in contesting Rhaenyra's succession, but his councilors persuaded him - not without some merit - that his life would be in peril if Rhaenyra ascended the throne, as she was now being advised by her uncle Daemon, and Daemon would likely seek to have Aegon killed since lords discontented with Rhaenyra's rule might try to use him to undermine her. So Aegon declared his claim in King's Landing while Rhaenyra was away on Dragonstone; the two summoned their allies, armies and dragons, and war began.
At the outset I have low expectations for this series because it's based on a sidebook by GRRM called Fire & Blood, which is written as a historical account and rather shallower in perspective than ASOIAF proper, so the source material is somewhat thin. But aside from that, what I do respect in GRRM's writing is his ability to write events, character motivations, and interactions that follow the internal logic of the time and setting. Westeros is a patriarchal feudal culture, so Rhaenyra's claim to the throne would be sketchy without considerable support from the nobility. GRRM writes characters and dialogue that follow that logic, highlight Viserys's weakness in failing to foresee and prevent the looming conflict, without wasting time scoffing about the backwardness of the setting from his 21st century liberal perspective. The quality of the writing near the end of GOT, and interviews given by the writers of HOTD, leave me with no reason to believe that HOTD will be anything other than a simple-minded morality tale about sexism and misogyny, since modern writing rooms seem to be full of people who believe the internal logic of the setting is inherently illegitimate if it doesn't conform to the Democratic Party's policy platform. In the lore, the king has to take the views and biases of his lords into account, as he depends on them for soldiers, taxes and support; on the show, we're bound to get a lot of speeches about how the sexist lords should shut up and do as the crown says, Time's Up.
The other CW aspect of it is the casting of House Velaryon, led by Lord Corlys Velaryon. In the lore, the Velaryons are close allies of the Targaryens, as they are the only other Valyrian house in Westeros. The Velaryons and Targaryens have intermarried extensively over the centuries to keep the Valyrian bloodlines pure. On the show, the Velaryons are played by black people, while the Targaryens are all white. The Velaryons even make it a point to repeatedly stress how pure their Valyrian blood is and how far back they go, all the way to Old Valyria before it was destroyed.
ASOIAF is a story that obsesses over genealogy and phenotypes. How characters look, and how different they look from certain other characters, is an actual casus belli in the lore.
The most well-known example is Ned Stark going over 300 years of Baratheon genealogy, observing that Baratheon children always have black hair no matter the coloring of the non-Baratheon parent, and realizing that the blonde Joffrey cannot be Robert Baratheon's son. HOTD throws that out of the window in Episode 1 by giving Rhaenys Targaryen, who is Corlys Velaryon's wife and the daughter of Aemon Targaryen and Jocelyn Baratheon, the standard silver hair of Valyrians even though it's actually an important plot point that she had black hair. Not only did GRRM make note of this in the lore, he retconned an earlier short story he wrote where Rhaenys had silver hair because he realized it would contradict Baratheons always having black hair.
In the story that HOTD is based on, Rhaenyra Targaryen is engaged to Corlys's son Laenor Velaryon, to fortify her claim to the throne by bringing the two Valyrian houses together in marriage. Laenor turns out to be a cross-dressing homosexual who cannot consummate the marriage, and Rhaenyra cuckolds him by sleeping with one of her bodyguards, Ser Harwin Strong, and passing off Strong's children as Laenor's. Notably Rhaenyra and Laenor are both Valyrians with silver hair and violet eyes, but Rhaenyra's children all come out with the brown hair and eyes of the Strong family, naturally leading to (accurate) rumors that they are bastards. The phenotype of Rhaenyra's bastards actually undermines her claim to the throne because her rival Alicent consistently produces Valyrian-looking children with her husband Viserys, leading several lords to decide that Alicent's bloodline should be the true ruling dynasty. Rhaenyra even makes it a capital offense to question the parentage of her children, going so far as to execute Corlys's brother Vaemond when he objects to the obvious cuckolding of his nephew, and Corlys is forced to watch her place her bastards in a position to inherit his family's title and fortune.
Decades after the events of HOTD, King Daeron II Targaryen brings Dorne into the Seven Kingdoms by marrying the Dornish princess Myriah Martell. Daeron and Myriah's eldest son, the crown prince Baelor, is noted to have inherited his mother's dark hair and eyes, leading Daeron's critics (among them many of the Dornishmen's traditional rivals and enemies in the Reach and Stormlands) to claim that the future king is more Martell than Targaryen. Daeron's perceived weakness and favoritism towards the Dornish leads these critics to support the rival claim of Daeron's half-brother Daemon Blackfyre, whose phenotype is noted as contributing to his support, as not only does he have the traditional Valyrian traits of silver hair and purple eyes, he is said to be the spitting image of Aegon the Conqueror himself.
A common defense of raceswapping characters like this is that it "doesn't affect the story", but if any story was going to be affected by this, it would be ASOIAF. The lore is very unambiguous on the subject - Valyrians have pale skin, silver-blonde hair, and blue-purple eyes. It's a point of pride for them and an indication that their Valyrian blood is strong - these people are unabashedly racial supremacists. Members of House Velaryon are repeatedly stated to possess these traits, and they use it as a justification for their close ties to the ruling Targaryens and all the power and prestige that accompanies those ties. It's ludicrous for the show to keep those elements of Valyrian racial supremacy and blood purity obsession while making the Velaryons black, with the black Velaryons even proposing marriage to the Targaryen king on the grounds that it would "keep the bloodline pure". It's like an aborted attempt at an Americanization of Valyria - "Valyrian isn't a race, it's a culture/idea/Constitution!" - but it doesn't work because Valyrians are obsessed with their race in the lore, and removing that takes away a major part of their characters. It's plainly just bowing to the diversity obsession, but no one wants to actually say so - instead you get everyone reciting this nonsense about how "actually it works with the lore" and "even if it doesn't work with the lore, it doesn't change anything in the story".
GRRM actually has an old blog post where he discusses an idea he once had about making the Targaryens, who conquered Westeros, a dynasty of black people ruling a white continent. He said he ultimately decided against it because it would be problematic, since many of the Targaryens were corrupt, evil and/or insane - in other words, if you're going to write about black people in positions of power, they can only be paragons of virtue as per the cultural-political imperatives of our time. Hard to fault GRRM for that, since it's an accurate assessment of the culture: ask not what the black mayors of Jackson have been doing for the last 30 years, ask instead what the white governors of Mississippi have done.
Re race. They changed the valyrian pure bloodedness to being mostly hair color. The black velaryons all have silver hair too.
While scientifically this is a different genetics than our own world and yes they definitely reconned the baratheon black hair, I think the show runners have done an admirable job keeping the core plot alive while drawing in more woke modern audiences.
Who knows, maybe Laenor will turn out to be LGBTQIA+ and Rhaenyra will cuck him?
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In a show in which fire breathing dragons exist, is it really so impossible that race might be defined differently than how we define race? Or that skin color might be irrelevant to how they perceive pure bloodlines? Or that the affinity between the Valyrians and the Velaryons traces to a mythical past in which the progenitors of each allied to oust some malefactor, and that "purity" is defined as descent from one of those two heroes. Far from being "ludicrous," it is trivially easy to imagine a world in which is makes perfect sense.
That inference is both logically and empirically incorrect. Logically, the statement, "I do not want to portray all the black characters as evil or insane" does not imply, "therefore, all black characters must be paragons of virtue." Empirically, there are tons of shows -- The Wire and Empire leap to mind -- in which black characters in position of power are not paragons of virtue
It's possible to imagine such a world, it would just be a completely different world. The lore explanation for why the Valyrians have their very particular look is that they were an isolated population that interbred heavily and their uncommon features are the result of unusual mutations becoming widespread in the population. They define race the same way we do. If you want to just throw out the lore so that you can cast black people, all you have to do is say that. Instead they want to pretend this is an insignificant deviation from the lore. Why piss in my ears and insist that it's raining?
To clarify, not all the Targaryens were evil or insane, and in fact most of them weren't. But the ones who were evil or insane were rapists, murderers, malicious degenerates and psychopaths, and GRRM didn't feel comfortable letting any of those characters be black.
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One of my normie acquaintances was a big GoT enjoyer, but Season 8 was such crap that even he had to admit it, more or less. Now he's sucked into the HotD hype and he's adamant that this time it won't turn into crap, "because the source material is there for the whole series and it's great". LOL
I despise normies.
I'm not interested in GoT, ASOIAF or this new show but since the creator is still alive, and apparently happy with the race-swapping, it's legitimate. Sure, it contradicts canon, but he can change canon if he likes! (I don't have much regard left for GRRM as a writer, by this point, and I've always resented his throwaway line about "I always wanted to know what was the tax basis of Gondor. Yeah, that was what the show really needed for a better season 8 - a coherent economic policy). And the point that this is based on a complete book so there is a beginning, middle and end to the story is a good one.
What they're doing with Rings of Power does annoy me. I don't care that much about Tar-MÃriel being race swapped, because at least they have a human character played by a human, and looking approximately as you would expect royalty to look. I'm more annoyed about the black Elf and black Dwarf not on racism grounds, but because they've been jammed in there with no attempt at providing a backstory or reason for why they are a different race to others of their species that we see. Where are the other black Elves and black Dwarves? And the media interviews about giving prominent roles to BIPOC are all flannel, because these are not really important characters. They didn't make Durin IV black, they didn't make Celebrimbor black. So the big names and important main characters are all white, still. You can't get much whiter than Galadriel unless you go albino, or that weird Morgoth priest/priestess Eminem look-a-like. But we have a couple of invented original characters, plus background general Númenorean citizens, who are Hispanic or black or Asian, so that ticks off the DEI checkboxes. Actually, now I think of it, that Haradrim village or on the borders of Harad where Bronwyn (new invented human character) and Arondir (our new invented mixed-race Elf) are making cow-eyes at each other should be a hell of a lot browner than it seems to be on screen - again, a lot of white guys so far as I saw. That was a place that could legitimately have been all brown faces, but they dodged on that one, I wonder why? A village of brown-skinned people would fit beautifully with their anti-colonialist, anti-racist theme: "Sure, our ancestors fought on the side of the Big Bad, but that wasn't our fault and it's not right to blame us for the past! Why are we living under military oversight/occupancy by white Elves?"
And since Tolkien is safely dead, and Christopher Tolkien is safely dead, and the estate is happy to take the money and run, they can get away with this.
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Thanks for the writeup, I didn't know much of this backstory.
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I don't know if this is acceptably charitable, but is there any other interpretation outside of they just think we're stupid? They reskinned a character into a black skinned person, despite centuries of intermarrying Targaryens. Do they think that the desire for representation means that people are going to pointedly not think about the elephant in the room, in a show whose opening credits is a blood soaked family tree?
Who doesn't understand what's going on here?
The blatantness is part of the power play. I remind myself it is a TV show, I really should just relax, but getting people to sign up for stupid lies and pretend they are not is not a bug, it is a feature.
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They think "our audience is not going to be all book nerds, it'll be people who watched GoT last time and want to watch another show set in that world". Same with Rings of Power: they are looking to pull in a general audience not familiar with the canon and who don't care about it, but will remember the last hit TV show/movies and are willing to watch a high fantasy epic and pay for the privilege.
So if people complain the casting is not canon-compliant, they have the easy defence of "That's racism!" and get sympathy points for being attacked by trolls and bigots.
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Yes.
This is what people miss when they try to poke holes in stuff like gender identity; they don't care.
The master value is "equity" or "helping the downpressed"/"owning the oppressors" (defined as white men usually). So they are much less sensitive to claims of contradiction, illogic or irrationality.
In fact; they've already set the groundwork for treating the focus on logic as a mere contingent product of a certain sort of Western civilization or worse: not even just contingent (something can be true and our method for getting to it contingent) but always fraudulent and a cover for power.
Therefore their illogic in the service of helping oppressors is not inferior but of the same level, and actually better cause it's beneficial to an oppressed class.
Whenever I've seen a leftist hunted to ground on some of this stuff the final move is to always shrug their hands and go "well, it's helping the right people and it's all socially constructed anyway so I don't really care".
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The best comparison to this I can think of where race/ethnicity affects the story is The Hunchback of Notre Dame. There was an article a year or two ago about a group of students boycotting a university production of it because they cast a white girl as Esmeralda. In the actual book (not the Disney movie) a group of gypsies swap Quasimodo for Esmeralda when she's an infant. Esmeralda's mother is ethnically French. Many years later she runs into Esmeralda and rages against her because she sees her as one of the gypsies that kidnapped her daughter. One of the major points is that she is despising her own daughter, her own flesh and blood, due to ethnic hatred.
There's a lot of beautiful things that have been lost or utterly ruined in the SJW quest to brownwash and blackwash the world of literature.
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this makes the plot point about rhaenyra chopping off the heads of everyone pointing out the obvious fact that laenor velaryon is not the father of her kids even funnier, at least
also is there a way to add spoiler text?
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I forgot that Rhaenys Targaryen was in the ancestry of Robert (pretty importantly because she's the source of his claim to the iron throne).
I found them jarring just because of the Valyrian supremacy that fills the lore.
I get why the show would want to do that, but I wish they'd picked a different character maybe the Martells.
Robert's ancestral claim to the Iron Throne was based on a much closer relation - his grandmother Rhaelle Targaryen, who was Aegon V's daughter and married Ormund Baratheon.
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