#racisim

[groanings-0f-a-dying-empire]

Racist Beat down 🤛🏾

Pt. 10

[ryan-is-a-god]

Local man declares "you people" call everything racist after seeing "you people" call racist imagery racist. The man appears to have lost his brain and "you people" are attempting to recover it despite the mans repeated attempts to stop the search.

More at 5 when the same local man declares "you people" are crybaby cucks while being cucked by the boot he licks. Back to you Jan.

[vonnie422]

Y’all can’t invoke Dr. King while ignoring everything he actually stood ...

[closetcoffincasket]

I genuinely do not like fandoms or consider myself to be a part of them. They are hotbeds for racism and bigotry. As a black person, I simply don't have it in me to tolerate this type of BS anymore.

[sansa-stark-is-me]

What makes this worse is how both the writers and large parts of the fandom treat the only existing black characters in the show aka the velaryons not as people with their own dreams, emotions, ambitions, or grievances, but as vessels to uplift Rhaenyra, grant her moral high ground, and validate her claim to power.

They exist to be loyal, to forgive, to die or disappear when inconvenient, and to never challenge the narrative’s white, privileged center.

The show frames diversity as aesthetic, not substantive. Black characters in prestige fantasy are often welcomed only as long as they serve the protagonist’s arc, not their own. Overlooked within the story and often dismissed in fan discourse, the Velaryons become a prop for representation without the messiness of real personhood.

Also Thank you for writing about nettles! She is so overlooked and often forgotten and hated by the fandom! So thank you! You are honestly a great and amazing person, your analysis is so insightful and refreshing to read!🤍

Coming from this post.

Thank you, that really means a lot!

“black characters in the show aka the velaryons not as people with their own dreams, emotions, ambitions, or grievances, but as vessels to uplift Rhaenyra, grant her moral high ground, and validate her claim to power. They exist to be loyal, to forgive, to die or disappear when inconvenient, and to never challenge the narrative’s white, privileged center.”

That’s because they used the Magical Negro trope:

In fact, the Magical Negro really seems to have no goal in life other than helping white people achieve their fullest potential; he may even be ditched or killed outright once he's served that purpose. If he does express any selfish desires, it will only be in the context of helping the white protagonists realize their own racism and thereby become better people.

The Magical Negro is basically a Black character whose entire job is to be an emotional support NPC for a white protagonist. The Black character has limited personal goals of their own and exists mainly to facilitate the white character’s story.

Their humanity gets sacrificed so the white main character can have a better story.

Now, to be clear, the Velaryons are not a “perfectly” textbook example of the trope. They have more agency than classic examples.

BUT STILL…

Corlys repeatedly returning to support Rhaenyra despite enormous personal losses. HOTD turns him into a passive cheerleader for both Rhaenyra and Daemon: his son dies, his brother is executed, and then he shrugs and goes, “Well, history remembers names.” No. Bk!Corlys remembers blood. That’s the entire point of his character. The show reduces a smart, calculating legacy-obsessed lord into someone who sounds like he’s giving a TED Talk about branding. And worse it erases the tension between Corlys and Rhaenyra that makes Driftmark so complicated in the books. Their relationship was very complex.

The show wants viewers to believe Daemon never loved anyone the way he loved Rhaenyra, yet Laena shares many of the qualities Daemon supposedly admires: dragonrider pride, fascination with Valyrian heritage, fearlessness, independence, and a deep connection to dragon culture. If those qualities are what make Rhaenyra special to Daemon, why don’t they matter when embodied by Laena?

Baela and Rhaena receiving comparatively little focus on their own ambitions or frustrations. And Nettles’ story is giving to them!

In Fire & Blood, Vaemond when he challenged the legitimacy of Rhaenyra’s sons and pressed his own claim, he wasn’t standing in the throne room screaming insults and calling Rhaenyra a whore. The show added that. That change matters because it shifts audience sympathy. Instead of seeing a succession dispute and a conflict over inheritance, viewers get a scene where Vaemond appears openly misogynistic and personally abusive right before he’s killed.

They removed The Silent Five Vaemond’s kin who were mutilated on Viserys’s orders simply for repeating the truth. It shows Viserys as a tyrant and his near-death injury while giving the order reads like poetic justice. More importantly, there are actual consequences. Several Velaryons later support the Greens because of the outrage and humiliation inflicted on their family. The event becomes part of the political reality of the Dance instead of a one-episode shock moment. In the show? Completely gone. Vaemond just gets a dramatic death scene, and nobody mentions it again. No consequences, no pushback. There’s no exploration of how brutal the response actually was or how other Velaryons might react to seeing one of their own publicly killed & dissent violently crushed. And then you have the episode making Alicent as sympathetic bc she feels bad for Rhaenyra after Vaemond’s words as if he wasn’t killed for speaking the truth (that she was repeating) The result is that Rhaenyra ends up insulated from criticism while the Velaryons lose much of their perspective in the story. Rhaenyra comes out of it protected at every turn first by her father, who uses the power of the crown to shut down challenges to her position, and then by her uncle-husband, who literally kills the a Black man fighting for what was legally his is brutally silenced.

There are many things to point out…

The result is that the Velaryons end up being more like emotional npc support characters for the white protagonist story. Their perspectives, ambitions, and reactions frequently get sidelined so the narrative can stay focused on Rhaenyra, Daemon, and Viserys. Instead of being allowed to exist as a family with their own interests and political agency, they’re reduced to supporting or suffering for the arcs of the central characters.

And this fandom’s racism is honestly so vile and so baked into how hotd frames them. Instead of actually engaging with what’s in the text, or how the velaryons are written in the books vs the show, it just turns into denial or dismissal when certain characters don’t fit the version of the story they already want to believe in and what makes it worse is how quickly it gets normalized. instead of questioning why certain characters are being erased, or reinterpreted in adaptation, people just treat it as default truth and shut down any critique as if pointing it out is the problem.

[vampzzstarzz]

So let me get this straight when a white person gets murder everyone cares, but when a black person it's nothing but silence or they deserve it because so and so

[grumpysskatesncrafts]

quarterly reminder to the white folk that just because you know racism is bad doesn’t mean you’ve stopped internalizing racist standards or ideals

take some time to consider the racial biases society has conditioned you to subconsciously subscribe to and have a good day 👍

[validblogname]