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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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