#cause tg clearly has some racist tendencies

[juniorfor2]

For all the racism that’s very obvious in the show, I really think one big one has been missed - C&H’s decision to make the Velaryon boys bastards, instead of Laenor’s sons by blood, simply because of their skin color.

Due to the writers’ decision to make the Velaryons black, but Jace, Luke, and Joffrey white, this was used to support the idea that they must be bastards. Rather than using hair color, only skin color is brought up as an issue (or at least that’s what’s obviously implied). Because the writers think that kids come out looking like a 50/50 mix of their parents. That if they aren’t exactly in the middle of Laenor and Rhaenyra’s skin color, then they can only be bastards.

But this just isn’t how real life works. Kids come out looking all sorts of ways, lighter or darker than both their parents, right in the middle, or only like one parent. My own mother is from Pakistan, but I came out looking exactly like my white, American father (except as a girl).

And that has consequences for a lot of people. Those who come out looking different from one parent can often experience difficulties as others refuse to see them as part of their group or culture. Biracial children are often forced to choose one race over the other, or are deliberately excluded from one group because they aren’t light or dark enough.

And the thing is, this issue is actually raised in the show. Vaemond actually gets the closest to the real life issue, when he says to Rhaenyra, “you wouldn’t know Velaryon blood if you saw it.” Because they are white, they are excluded from being Velaryon. They are viewed almost as weird colonizer-parallels, “stealing” from the only black family in the show, thereby erasing any racial culture the Velaryons currently have.

Even Alicent, despite not being part of the dispute, shows so much disgust towards the boys. They aren’t darker skinned, and so she views them as unworthy and unable to be part of the Velaryon family. It’s not even her fight, but she still is vitriolic towards them - and that’s how so many biracial people are actually perceived and treated in real life.

The issue of how biracial children are perceived should have been a fairly easy message to portray and resolve. We could have seen how Jace was ostracized and pushed away because of his looks, how much it hurt him for everyone to say he wasn’t Velaryon, even while Laenor raised him and viewed him as his son. We could have then seen how Jace eventually resolves this, realizing that it doesn’t matter what he looks like, because all that mattered was that Laenor was his father who loved him and raised him with Velaryon culture. That Corlys accepted him as well, despite the rumors.

But C&H, because they are both racist and mainly ignorant of how skin color works in real life, went the easy route and didn’t try to even find a single explanation for why the kids could be Laenor’s children by blood. I don’t need a complete reversal to make them undoubtedly Laenor’s, but some ambiguity would have been nice.