Race Bending (And It's Obvious Consequences)
It has been a Hollywood agenda for quite some time to have diversity more prominent in American media. It is understandable and fair to have this representation (I am black and I do not mind seeing representation.) However, much of this “representation” comes off very color-blind.
House of the Dragon is one of the prime examples.
At the time of the Dance of Dragons, canonically, there was only one character of color. The rest were basically white. So when Steve Toussaint, Sonoya Mizuno, Fabien Frankel, Phoebe Campbell, Bethany Antonia, among others were announced as castings, I originally didn’t see an issue.
Until I watched season 1…and the bullshit is so hard to unsee.
(I would like to clarify that this is not an attack on any of the actors and actresses.) Casting minorities isn’t exactly the issue. However, casting minorities paired with particular narrative changes to these characters without seeming to acknowledge how this may come across the POC viewers of the show is certainly a choice.
The show's diversity casting, however well-intentioned, means nothing when the show still carries an unchanged racial power structure. Worse, the show erased the one canonical character whose existence in Martin's text actively challenges that racial ideology, while simultaneously having a minor racial hierarchy within its own invented Black family.
The end result is a show that carries visual representation for progressivism, while ignoring all the undertones that come with it.
THE VALYRIAN SUPREMACY PROBLEM
The racial aspect of House Targaryen, and by extension, the Dance is very important in the world of A Song of Ice and Fire. The Targaryens and the Velaryons are both descendants of Old Valyria, a piece of once-great civilisation whose defining physical appearance are silver-white hair and purple eyes. This shared bloodline is not incidental to the story, it is central to it. The Targaryens intermarry brother and sister to preserve this blood. Their dragons bond to them partly because of it. Their claim to rule Westeros is inseparable from it. Valyrian blood is, within the logic of the story, a form of supremacy and they push this biological inheritance that marks them as categorically different above ordinary Westerosi people.
(ie. The Doctrine of Exceptionalism.)
In Fire and Blood, House Velaryon shares this Valyrian heritage visually and biologically. They have the silver hair and the pale colouring too. The two houses are visually unified, their shared blood legible on their bodies. The casting of Black actors as the Velaryons therefore does not merely diversify the show's cast. It breaks the Velaryons from their canonical Valyrian identity and creates a visual contrast in which Valyrian supremacy is coded as exclusively white, embodied by the pale skinned Targaryens, while their closest allies and blood relatives are visually and racially distinct.
The Targaryen Valyrians are white and the primary focus. The Velaryon Valyrians are black and secondary. The show made the master family white. The diversity casting did not challenge this structure. It confirmed it, by populating every role adjacent to Targaryen power with non-white actors while leaving the direct silver-haired conqueror family (nearly) entirely intact and entirely white. (even Alicent’s children, though they aren’t given as much grace.)
As we will describe, this is only the beginning of the problem.
THE ERASURE OF NETTLES
The most obvious example comes with Season 2 and not with who the writers included, but rather who they didn’t. Nettles is one of the most unique characters in Martin's Fire and Blood. A young woman described explicitly as a "brown girl" of ambiguous, common origin, who during the Dance of Dragons bonds with and rides the wild dragon Sheepstealer. She does not do this through Valyrian blood. She does it by bringing the dragon a freshly killed sheep every day until it accepts her. She earns her dragon through patience, resourcefulness, and courage rather than through biological inheritance.
She is not important, in terms of what she does during the war, but the significance of this cannot be overstated. The entire ideological architecture of Targaryen power rests on the premise that dragon-bonding is a function of Valyrian blood, that the ability to ride dragons is a biological privilege of a specific lineage, which is precisely why the Targaryens guard that lineage so obsessively.
Nettles, a brown girl of no noble blood and no (obvious) Valyrian heritage, rides a dragon anyway. Her existence in the story is a direct challenge to the blood supremacy logic that underpins the entire Targaryen claim to power. She is, in narrative terms, proof that the master race ideology is a lie.
Yet, House of the Dragon removes her entirely.
The showrunners that congratulated themselves on its diverse casting and spoke publicly about its commitment to representation, could not find room for the one canonical character of color whose presence in the story actively dismantles the racial power hierarchy that the show otherwise left completely intact (despite criticizing plenty of other issues).
The brown girl who proved that dragon-riding was not about blood supremacy was written out. The white silver-haired dynasty that embodied that racial supremacy remained untouched. Of course it is possible she appears in Season 3 (Cue: my eyeroll), but the pattern of decisions surrounding her absence is not encouraging. The show has demonstrated a consistent preference for diversity casting that populates supporting and sacrificial roles while leaving the central power structures white. Nettles, who complicates it more than anyone, is not present.
Her absence is the most important statement the show can make on their views of diversity.
ADDAM, ALYN, AND THE RACIAL HIERARCHY OF HOUSE VELARYON
Casting black men to play Addam and Alyn follows the trend from the previous season. However, it causes another representation failure as it is solely due to the show’s casting and nothing to do with the source material.
In the text, Addam and Alyn of Hull are the unacknowledged bastard sons of Corlys Velaryon, a secret their mother kept for years. They carry some Valyrian heritage through their Velaryon parentage, which is the explanation for Addam's ability to bond with and ride a dragon. They are characters of the same racial background as the rest of House Velaryon, which is to say, Valyrian-descended and white.
The show cast black actors in both roles. On the surface, this reads as a natural extension of the decision to make the Velaryons black, Corlys's bastards would presumably share his appearance. But the consequences of this casting decision, when set with the show's other choices, are interesting.
The show has now constructed a problematic racial family portrait for House Velaryon. At the top: the white Targaryen dragon-riding wife. In the middle: the legitimate Velaryon children, mixed. At the bottom: the black bastard sons, born outside of wedlock, unacknowledged for years, defined by their illegitimacy.
All while simultaneously expecting the audience to accept Rhaenyra’s white sons as Velaryons.
THE STRONG BOYS
The central scandal of Rhaenyra Targaryen's story is that her sons by her first husband Laenor Velaryon are not, as everyone knows, actually his children. Their dark hair and strong features mark them as the bastard sons of Harwin Strong. In Martin's source text, the visual logic is clean and simple: the children look nothing like their silver-haired Valyrian parents, and everyone can see it. (No, Rhaenys having black hair doesn’t change this. Sorry not sorry.)
The casting of a black actor as Laenor Velaryon complicates this logic in ways the show never fully addresses deliberately. The visual illegitimacy that is supposed to be obvious, the mismatch between a Valyrian father and decidedly non-Valyrian children becomes muddled when the father is himself visually distinct from the Valyrian norm.
More significantly, the show created a situation in which the black character's bloodline is the one under public scrutiny and dispute. It is the black man's paternity that is doubted, the black man's children whose legitimacy is questioned, the black family's lineage that becomes a site of political scandal.
When considered alongside the casting of Addam and Alyn as black bastards, a pattern becomes visible that extends across the entire Velaryon family. In the show's racial logic, blackness and questioned legitimacy are structurally linked. The black patriarch's bloodline is doubted. The black husband's paternity is publicly disputed. The black bastard sons are defined by their illegitimacy.
Blackness, in the world the showrunners have altered, is consistently adjacent to the question of whether one's blood is really what one claims it to be.
VAEMOND VELARYON
Perhaps the most revealing moment in the show's entire treatment of the Velaryon family is the death of Vaemond Velaryon. Corlys's brother appears before the Iron Throne to contest the succession of Driftmark. Truthfully arguing that Rhaenyra's sons are not Laenor's children and therefore have no (close) Velaryon blood. He is not making a frivolous claim. He is making the most obviously true claim in the entire story. (Hell, saying Luke is a bastard is more justifiable than saying Rhaenyra or Aegon is the rightful heir.)
The children are obviously not Laenor's. Every person present knows it. Vaemond is simply saying out loud what everyone is afraid to say.
For this, he is killed. Daemon Targaryen, the white dragonlord, Rhaenyra's future husband, cuts off the top of his head mid-sentence, in the throne room, in front of the king and court. The killing is framed as darkly funny and deserved. (Scratch that, Vaemond is killed for calling Rhaenyra a whore, which is used to undercut the truth he spoke seconds prior.) The “last supper” that follows, in which Vaemond's body is still cooling nearby, is presented as a moment of bittersweet family reconciliation.
And besides two throwaway lines in episode 10, The Black Queen, Vaemond’s death is never mentioned again.
What the show does not pause to examine is the racial image it has constructed. A black man demanded that the legitimacy of a white woman's claim not be built on a lie about his family's bloodline. A white man killed him for it. A black man is killed, by a white man, for insisting that his family's blood matters and should not be falsified for a white protagonist's political and/or personal convenience. The white characters then had dinner. The show treats this as a plot beat and moves on.
Vaemond is killed for speaking the truth about the boys' parentage in Fire and Blood. But in the source material, the Velaryons are white and Valyrian, and the killing reads as political ruthlessness in a world of political ruthlessness. The casting decision transforms the same issue into something the show's creators apparently did not notice or didn’t care about.
DL, DRUNK, AND DEADBEAT
As previously mentioned, Laenor’s character is also affected by these changes.
Laenor Velaryon's arc presents a different but equally uncomfortable cluster of associations. He is gay, an open secret at court that everyone politely ignores. He is a father in name only to children that everyone knows are not his. He is frequently drunk and disengaged. His narrative climax is a faked death that allows him to escape entirely. Abandoning his children, his responsibilities, and the story, so that Rhaenyra can remarry, of course. He is, in summary, the absent father: present on paper, absent in practice, disappearing when the story no longer needs him.
The show did not invent these characters. They exist in Fire and Blood with similar functions. But the source material does not cast them as black. The decision to do so imported a set of racial associations like the absent black father, the down-low black man whose hidden sexuality is a source of social embarrassment.
THE DISPOSABLE BLACK GIRLFRIEND
Laena Velaryon's narrative function in House of the Dragon is a textbook example of what critics have termed the Disposable Woman trope: a female character introduced primarily to serve a male character's emotional arc, given insufficient development of her own, and there to have conflict for a dynamic’s relationship. In Laena's case, these structural problems are compounded by her racial coding.
Laena is Daemon Targaryen's wife. She gives him children. She dies in childbirth in a scene of considerable dramatic violence, choosing to be burned alive by her own dragon rather than bleed out after a botched labour.
Which is interesting because in canon, she doesn’t actually make it to Vhagar. Laena dies on the way there and Daemon carries her body back to the castle. Also, this happens on Driftmark, her home. Whereas in the show, it takes place in Pentos, where Daemon is intentionally keeping them because he doesn’t want to return to Westeros, to Rhaenyra.
Her death is framed with genuine pathos, but its narrative purpose is clear: it frees Daemon. It removes the obstacle between him and Rhaenyra, the white protagonist who he has desired for years. The black woman dies so that the white woman can have the man she wants. The black female character exists, ultimately, in service of a white couple’s love story.
As it is with Laenor, both Velaryon siblings serve as stepstones for Daemon and Rhaenyra’s marriage. There is a rumor that Daemon may have orchestrated Laenor’s death via his lover Qarl Correy. However, having him “escape” was a terrible move, especially considering Seasmoke. The only hint of this is the scene in season 2 when Mysaria and Rhaenyra are talking, implying that Laenor is dead because Seasmoke has been “restless”.
Canonically, Laena is beloved by Rhaenyra. “Fond and more than fond” is how their relationship is described. So framing her as the other woman in her own marriage is certainly a choice. Not to mention how quickly the two got married after she died and they “killed” her brother.
Of course, this naturally falls to her daughters as well.
B(L)ACKGROUND
Baela, like her younger sister, has more relevance to the story after the Dance of Dragons and she gets her moment against Aegon in the final dragon fight of the war, later. So, there wasn’t much to expect from them.
However, beside the scenes of them in episode 6 and 7, The Princess and The Queen and Driftmark, they are furniture. Literally, only having one line each at the end of season 1. They appear at family gatherings. They stand in the background of scenes about other characters. They are occasionally referenced in dialogue. They have no meaningful storylines, no character development, no narrative agency.
The showrunners write Rhaenys to say that Driftmark should go to Baela and in the very next episode, which revolves around the succession of House Velaryon, this is a non-factor. In fact, it implied that Rhaenys would attempt to rule in the event of Corlys’ passing, which makes no sense whatsoever.
This is reiterated in season 2, where Baela turns down Driftmark because she is “of blood and fire”. The framing of Baela "choosing" to step aside makes it look like agency when it's actually just the show needing her out of the way and giving her a line to make it seem voluntary. The "of blood and fire" line is doing the hard work here. It's essentially the show using Targaryen identity, the white dynasty's identity, to justify a black girl relinquishing her black family's inheritance.
Rhaenyra uses Baela as well. Rhaenyra refuses to send Jace to scout the Crownlands. She sends Baela. Rhaenyra refuses to speak with Corlys after Rhaenys died for her. She sends Baela. (Also, she sent Rhaena to Rhaenys to “soften her resolve” in season 1.) Baela comes across as disposable and useful rather than a valued member of this family.
Even most of her dialogue revolves around every other character of the Blacks. Rhaenyra, Jace, Rhaenys, and Corlys. If anything, Baela's most natural character relationship would be with Daemon. Her actual father, the person she most resembles in temperament, is almost entirely undeveloped.
Baela is more a mouthpiece and plot device than an actual character. Which is definitely bad when she is one of few black characters in an (almost) all white world.
BLACK AND INTERCHANGEABLE
Rhaena’s story is also interesting. The show decided that Rhaena’s story wasn’t good enough and merged it with Nettles. This isn’t an inherently bad decision. They could show Daemon and Rhaenyra’s split about choosing his daughter over her rather than a “love interest”. And if House of the Dragon had different showrunners, it could be well written. The point of this: if Rhaena was played by a white actress/non-binary actor, they would have never merged her story with a girl’s, who was described as being a “brown girl”. The merger only read as acceptable in the writers room because Rhaena is played by a Black actress. Which means the showrunners looked at: A black actress playing a white Valyrian character and a canonical brown girl of low birth and saw the same thing.
Not two distinct people with distinct identities and distinct narrative positions. Just two slots marked non-white. The tragedy is that this reveals something about how they see both characters simultaneously. Nettles is not a specific brown girl with a specific radical meaning, she's just a diversity placeholder that can be absorbed into an existing non-white-presenting character. Rhaena is not a specific person with her own story worth telling, she's a non-white-presenting vessel available to receive whatever story needs a non-white face.
Neither of them are individuals to the showrunners. They are both just non-white girls (now).
THE DRAGON LADY (WITHOUT DRAGONS)
The casting of Sonoya Mizuno introduces a different but related set of representational problems. Mysaria is a character of deliberately ambiguous origin in Martin's text, a former slave and prostitute who becomes Daemon Targaryen's mistress and eventually a significant political operator known as the White Worm, running an underground spy network in King's Landing. She is a survivor, a schemer, and a morally complex figure.
The decision to cast a Japanese-British actress in the role is not inherently problematic. What is problematic is the cluster of associations the show then constructs around her.
Mysaria as portrayed in House of the Dragon is an exotic foreign woman, introduced as a prostitute and sexual companion to a powerful white man, who survives by trading in secrets and whoring out women. She is soft-spoken, inscrutable, and dangerous. She stays on the margins of the story, always adjacent to powerful characters. Her motivations are confusing. Her loyalties shift. She is, in the vocabulary of long-standing stereotype, the mysterious and untrustworthy Asian woman, the Dragon Lady stereotype.
The dragon lady stereotype has a long history in Western popular culture: the Asian woman who is sexually available, politically dangerous, always unreadable, and ultimately subordinate to the white characters whose stories she orbits. She is exotic enough to be interesting, foreign enough to be untrustworthy, and never centred enough to be her own character.
Mysaria does not map onto this stereotype in every particular, the show gives her moments of genuine agency and moral clarity, but the broad edges are recognisable, and the casting decision made them unavoidable.
Then, all of this is retconned in season 2. Mysaria isn’t a schemer. She is a helpless victim of the Greens rather than a player in the Game of Thrones who found herself at a (temporary) disadvantage. And of course, who “saves” her? The main white protagonist, selflessly, considering Mysaria is her husband’s former mistress/wife. Which leads Mysaria to “owe” Rhaenyra and aiding her in a good way instead of being the Larys Strong to Alicent’s Rhaenyra.
She may have been called the White Worm, but Mysaria was more akin to a snake and the show completely defanged her to fit her in with the other moralist minorities that follow Rhaenyra.
THE BROWN GUY (+IGNORED CANONICAL DORNISH PREJUDICE)
However, there is only one character who escapes this. And yes, he is an antagonist.
The casting of Fabien Frankel as Ser Criston Cole introduces a further complication. In Martin's text, Criston Cole is explicitly from the Dornish Marches, the Stormlands, not Dorne itself.. The Marcher lords greatest conflict is fighting each, fighting Dornishmen. Casting an actor of Indian descent and changing his canon ethnicity to Dornish (Rhoynarish?) creates a canonical issue the show does not acknowledge.
In A Song of Ice and Fire, the Dornishmen faced heavy prejudice and outright racism from the rest of the realm. They are heavily sexualized and seen as violent. This was present in the main series. Imagine what it would have been like before Dorne was integrated into the realm. But more importantly, how the Targaryens would have viewed him.
Valyrian supremacy is the staple of House Targaryen. Racism against those who aren’t the blood of the dragon is very present in the family, likely even in the best of them. Criston is also lowborn and lower class people aren't regarded in the best light.
Yet, the show ignores all of this, until season 2 when Gwayne arrives in King’s Landing and decides to be racist, classist, and just outright dismissive of Criston. Which narratively makes sense. Gwayne's attitude would have been completely standard in this world.
Even then, his racism and classism toward Criston is presented in a comedic way and framed as deserved.
So, Criston’s intro into the show is showing off his skill by beating noble men. The show has Alicent explicitly draw attention to Criston's Dornish identity at the tourney. Rhaenyra's interest begins at that moment. In the second episode, The Rouge Prince, she chooses him to be her kingsguard. Of course, she says it's because he was the only knight present that had seen real combat, but we can blatantly see that she only cared once she remembered him from the tourney.
So in the show, his addition to the Kingsguard is more about Rhaenyra’s minor infatuation with him rather than his skill. (It was similar in Fire and Blood, but she was seven years old, so that makes sense.)
Yes, Criston does still kill Joffrey in Fire and Blood, however, it makes way more sense than what the show does. The minor change of Joffrey’s death being at the wedding feast rather than the melee reinforces the prejudicial idea that Dornishmen are extremely violent. Criston verbally acknowledges his and Rhaenyra’s social inequality, telling her that most people would wish to be a royal, an heir at that. However, the biggest offender of all of this: it is completely ignored during and after the events of King of the Narrow Sea.
Remember what I wrote about Dornishmen being heavily sexualized? After Daemon abandons Rhaenyra in a brothel (because of his newfound morals or something), she returns to her chambers. “Playfully”, she steals his helm and goes into her room. Criston goes to retrieve it and she gives him the run around. Rhaenyra then locks them in the room together and when he tries to get his helm back, she outright kisses him. The white, sexually empowered (high-ranking) heroine doesn’t have any regard for the fact that socially, less than man of color, can be extremely punished for this. Kingsguard have oaths of celibacy and the only one at this point to have been known to break his vows was gelding and sent to the Wall. Which Criston would likely know at this point. (Keep in mind, Jaehaerys was one of the more merciful kings.)
The show presents the bedroom scene as: playful, mutually desired, Rhaenyra being bold and sexually liberated in a way most women (coughs Alicent) never would, a romantic precursor to their affair.
What it actually is when you apply the racial and social logic of the world (and ours): A high-ranking white noblewoman, the crown princess, the king's named heir, deliberately isolating and then initiating sexual contact with a low-born man of colour whose oath of celibacy, if broken, carries the penalties.
She is being reckless with someone else's body and safety. It is also a white woman fetishising and then endangering a brown man of lower social standing who has almost no capacity to refuse her without (potential) consequence.
The show is so committed to Rhaenyra's sexual agency as a feminist beat that it never once considers what Criston risks here?
And the show frames his subsequent bitterness as his failing. That his inability to handle her rejection when she later chooses duty over him instead of an entirely rational response of a man who was put in an impossible position by someone who had the power to destroy him and treated that power as irrelevant when he confronted them about.
The Kingsguard selection scene compounds this. His appointment is framed as merit-based, she says it's because he's seen real combat, but the show makes clear it's her infatuation. Basically, a brown man of low birth is elevated to the Kingsguard not through pure merit but through a white princess's minor obsession with him. His entire subsequent position stems from her choosing him for reasons that had nothing to do with his actual qualifications. And then she initiates a sexual encounter that puts everything he was given at risk. Mind you, he literally explained this to her in the previous episode.
But he is the villain of this part of the story.
Of course, there are the arguments. “Criston could have refused her!”or “Criston wanted her too!” or “Criston is stronger than Rhaenyra!” You know, the arguments that would never fly if the roles were reversed.
What does refusal look like exactly? He pushes her away, physically assaults the princess? He loses his position at best, death at worst. He reports the incident, to whom exactly? Her father, the king? He could simply leave the room? She is blocking the door.
The "he could have refused" argument assumes a symmetry of power that does not exist. When someone with the power to destroy your life initiates sexual contact, "just say no" is not a straightforward option. It does not matter how much one may want that.
Desire and capacity for meaningful consent is parallel, not perpendicular. A person can want something and still be in a position where they cannot freely choose or refuse it without serious consequences.
The show uses his desire as a way of dissolving the power question entirely. Because he wanted it, the show implies, there's no problem here. Which is a logic pattern that feminist analysis correctly identifies as deeply problematic in every other context. When it's a powerful man and a less powerful woman. When it's an employer and an employee. When it's a senior and a freshman.
"They wanted it" is never considered a sufficient answer to a power imbalance. Also, physical strength is irrelevant when the power differential operates through institutions, oaths, and social hierarchies. A knight being physically stronger than a princess does not make them social equals any more than a bodyguard being physically stronger than a CEO makes them professional equals. By that logic, no powerful person could ever be accused of abusing their position over anyone physically capable of fighting back.
These are all arguments that average feminist analysis would immediately and correctly dismantle in any other context applied to a woman in Criston's position with a powerful man in Rhaenyra's position. Every “feminist” viewer of this show would correctly identify those as rape apologists.
I could even dive into how this scene is the same way Dyana described Aegon assaulting her and about his dynamic with Alicent (another white female character who he is subservient to), but this section is getting way too long.
GOOD INTENTIONS, BAD OUTCOMES
It is important to be clear about what this essay is not arguing. It is not arguing that the creators of House of the Dragon are racists, or that the casting was malicious, or that diversity casting in fantasy television is inherently problematic. The intentions behind the Velaryon casting were almost certainly good. The desire to populate a historically white genre with non-white faces is understandable.
But good intentions do not guarantee good outcomes. The problem with House of the Dragon's approach is not that it cast Black actors or an Asian actress. The problem is that it cast them without examining what those actors would be asked to do, what narrative roles they would occupy, what tropes they would embody, what racial associations their storylines would inevitably invoke, and what the overall racial power structure of the story would look like once those casting decisions were made.
The questions that were apparently not asked include: What does it mean to make the family whose bloodline gets publicly questioned black? What does it mean to construct a racial hierarchy within that same black family, with mixed-coded legitimate children and black bastard sons? What does it mean to kill a black man for insisting his family's blood should not be falsified? What does it mean to render black girls invisible while white girls drive the plot? What does it mean to cast an asian woman as the exotic foreign prostitute turned inscrutable spy? What does it mean to leave the silver-haired master race exclusively white? And what does it mean to erase the one non-white character who proved the master race ideology was a lie?
TL;DR
The showrunners should have seriously considered how the narrative changes could be perceived by POC once they decided to cast minorities to play these characters. Also, they shouldn’t have removed the only canonical character of color if diversity was what they intended.