#poc gendry

[bitchfromtheseventhhell]

The "modern AU!knighthood" question is tricky because there isn't really a single status equivalent to knighthood. Who is a knight of today? A soldier? A business owner? A politician? A graduate of higher education? None of these, not even all of them together, hold the same meaning. Maybe becoming a celebrity would have the closest to a similar meaning. Maybe he became famous for something unexpected, like metalworking art or heroically saving a bunch of people, when he's "just" a bastard.

yeah–it’s really tricky.  i keep reading and rereading your ask trying to figure out your response and the main answer i have to it is “yeah.  just yeah.”

the closest i’ve ever come to beginning to capture all the dynamics of gendry’s situation in a modern society is the headcanon that he’s not white in a modern society that assumes a white supremacy.  (i come at it with an american lens, where perceptions of class are racialized, even if race =/= class).  

i think it can depend on from headcanon to headcanon; it should, really, because each headcanon is different and it really depends what sort of au you’re chucking him into.  

[bitchfromtheseventhhell]

anon submitted:

Does your black Gendry look something like a young Michael Ealy?

I LOVE!!!!!!

[bitchfromtheseventhhell]

a very late reply to @deliriousfaol, who said:

I personally love the idea, but I'm wondering how you'd go about the "he looks exactly like Robert/renly" thing, I mean they can still look very alike but people comment on how exactly alike they look, don't they? Unless you also make Robert mixed, perhaps through his targaryen ancestor by making them poc too? (how much more interesting would it be if they were no?)

i think that’s part of what i like about it (it being gendry’s being biracial)--that it challenges the concept of what it means to “look exactly like” someone.  like, maybe the tone of his skin is different, but his facial features are roberts in their shape, or maybe people zoom in on the eyes and it takes a moment to shake that his skin color is different.  especially since you frequently have people who see race first and then facial features second, i like it as a subversion of that, a moment that demands to know in what way people do interpret visual similarity between family members.  (and especially it gets interesting given that the things that people associate in text with gendry’s similarity to robert are primarily colors: his black hair, his blue eyes.  yes there’s also his size, but it’s more frequently the black and blue.)

it’s a different ballgame if you have robert also be a person of color, of course, but i think what i like about the biraciality of it is that it challenges a lot and highlights prejudices and inconsistencies, which, of course, are so central to gendry’s experience in asoiaf as a (presumably*) white bastard.

*win, i loved your art so much.

[bitchfromtheseventhhell]

@masha-russia replied to your post “i’m not saying you’re wrong if you don’t headcanon modern gendry as…”

But why … His father is Robert Baratheon, a white man, and his mother was a blonde white woman …

Because it’s an AU and you can do what you want in AUs.  Especially with Modern AUs, where all of GRRM’s worldbuilding goes out the window.

If you’re making it a modern AU, you can still have Robert Baratheon be white if you want.  GRRM’s Westeros is one where whiteness is assumed, especially when talking about blondes, but this is the only information we have about Gendry’s mother:

The boy shoved a fresh fall of black hair off his forehead. "She died when I was little. She had yellow hair, and sometimes she used to sing to me, I remember. She worked in an alehouse."

GRRM did what he does with many mothers: made it so that she disappeared pretty early on in Gendry’s life.  I’ve always assumed her “blondness” was to move counterpoint to Cersei’s.  Which you can move to a modern AU if you want, or you don’t have to.

That’s the thing about Modern AUs--you can do what you like.  For example, bastardy--something that stings Gendry heavily--is nowhere near as stigmatized now as it is in Westeros.  That’s a major point of his characterization that just flies out the window when you AU him.  Yes, you can (and people do) still write him as lower class to still get that “too bloody lowborn” element into his characterization, but that doesn’t mean that he’s going to be identical to his canon counterpart.

But that’s me going on a tangent from my main point:

You don’t have to have Gendry’s mother be blonde in a modern AU.  And, if you do, women of color 1) can have naturally occurring blonde and red hair 2) can also dye their hair blonde, so young Gendry may remember his mother as blonde anyway. (For that matter, even if you do have her be a blonde white woman, why doesn’t she dye her hair to whatever fucking color she wants?  Hell, we have many characters in canon who dye their hair, how do we know that Gendry’s mom didn’t henna her hair blonde in canon? Because literally we know fuck-all about her.)

Just because GRRM’s assumes whiteness in Westeros doesn’t mean that we as readers and fandom creators have to be bound to it, especially when racial politics in our world are so interesting and so frequently swept under the rug. 

Why though?  Because I personally find it more compelling for a character that I love to be biracial (or straight-up of color if you want to racebend Robert too which I’ve seen people do in a really awesome way (x) (x) (oh here’s arya and gendry of color too!)) in a setting where I can be as creative as I want to be.