#the targaryens should absolutely be much more mixed/black than they're portrayed as is in the show

[navree]

The truth of the matter is that both Targaryen and Velaryon are of the Valyrian race. That’s all Showrunners Ryan and Sara are considering. They are not viewing it as a racial issue of the white family targeting the black one and trying to steal their land.

Yeah that's, like, kinda the problem. In the book the Targaryens and the Velaryons are both Valyrian, so issues between them cannot be viewed through a racialized lens beyond Valyrian supremacy vs the whole of Westeros (which doesn't show up on the Velaryons' end in the book anyway), so that critique cannot exist. But the showrunners changed that, they deliberately changed that by making the Velaryons Black and the Targaryens decidedly not. Which fine, go nuts, but when you're doing that kind of "race bending", especially when adapting a property that already exists, you need to be conscious of that.

I've talked about it before in my discussions on why a lot of "color blind casting" for historical dramas tends not to work out (the 2021 Anne Boleyn show cast Black Boleyns without thinking about the implications of sexually aggressive, dirty nailed, Black Anne Boleyn not only being rivaled by but also literally forcing a kiss on sweet, demure, lily white Jane Seymour, or of giving Black George Boleyn a story about abandoning a child he has with a woman and then of being murdered by his white king due to his white wife fabricating false accusations of sexual impropriety against him, so instead of whatever the Hell they wanted to do, we just had a boring TV show with some really racist implications). And that exists when it comes to adapting race from one story to the next. If you're going to turn white characters into characters of color, that's all well and good, but you need to acknowledge that the way they live their lives and look at the world and are viewed BY the world is going to subsequently change. And more importantly, you need to be aware that how those characters and their storylines are perceived by the audience is going to change as a result of that switch as well.

Because suddenly, it's not two different families of white people fighting over some rock in the ocean. Suddenly, it's a white family, with significantly more social capital and influence in their world, attempting to dispossess a Black family of their longterm, ancestral homeland, that is the only piece of land that they have, for that white family's gain. And that is something that comes with a lot of historical context and historical implication (we're STILL dealing with the ramifications of white-run cities and wealthy white people straight up stealing land and property from Black people during Jim Crow), and that's going to be on people's minds, especially in a show made by an American company and aired on an American network. You have to be aware that you're now not just writing characters, you're writing Black characters, and even in a fantasy world that might not have our history of anti-Black racism, that doesn't exist in a vacuum, especially to the consumer, and that there are going to be implications that might not have existed before that you need to be aware of and take into account.

And this doesn't even touch on my issues with the fact that, out of all the characters, the Velaryons absolutely got the fucking shaft writing wise. And I'm not sure how much you can divorce building up Rhaenyra and Criston or Harwin but not Daemon and Laena, or spending time developing fully fledged personalities for Aegon and Aemond but not Baela and Rhaena, or attempting somewhat consistent motivations for Viserys but not for Corlys and Rhaenys, from the fact that one half of those pairings is Black, and one is white.

They might not view it as a "racial issue", but when they made the change to the Velaryons' race, they made it one, at least in the eyes of the viewers and the context we grew up with and the knowledge that we have. Because creation doesn't exist in the aether, it is influenced by humanity here and it influences how we take it in once we put it out in the world.