GOT never understood its people of colour
TALLY THE LONG, long list of viewer grievances that greeted the final season of Game Of Thrones and you enter a dense, discursive forest, thick with heated arguments about hereditary madness, the plausible accuracy of giant crossbows and the best trench-digging strategy when facing a horde of undead soldiers.
All fair enough. But the thing that most frustrated me in this run happened during an episode 2 scene within the walls of Winterfell. Missandei catches a look of prejudiced revulsion from some begrimed Westerosi natives. She voices her feelings of hurt alienation to Grey Worm. And his response? To racist smallfolk who were insinuating that he, Missandei, the Dothraki and all the other non-white people who had crossed the Narrow Sea beneath Daenerys’ banners should, essentially, go back where they came from? He, well, he… basically agreed with them.
Grey Worm and Missandei hatched a doomed plan to retire to the beaches of her homeland Naath. And Game Of Thrones’ lesson — after 70-odd hours of television featuring vanishingly few named characters of colour — appeared to be that not only should minority characters be defined by discrimination, they should also make life easier for any bigots they encounter by clearing off. Watching, as a book-reading devotee of the show, it felt unforgivably clumsy. And endemic of a series that, whatever its many, many virtues, seemed unable to conceive of a world containing both dragons and a vaguely representative cast.
So is the standard defence for Game Of Thrones’ whiteness — that Westeros is modelled on predominantly white Medieval Europe — sufficient? And, as the focus shifts to the blank narrative cheque of Jane Goldman and George R.R. Martin’s coming prequel pilot, what can be done to rectify things? Well, firstly we must give Thrones showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff some credit. They have managed to untangle a story that original author Martin is still grappling with. And they did give multiple parts that were written as white to black actors (including guardsman Areo Hotah and roguish pirate Salladhor Saan).
But, with hindsight, like the shaky moments concerning abused female characters, the racial homogeneity of Thrones’ principal cast seems a wider symptom of a less-than-inclusive creative staff. Yes, Martin’s handling of race in the books can be a touch crude (hello, lascivious black prostitutes, ‘savage’ Mongol-like warriors and rum-loving sailors from Africa/caribbean stand-in region The Summer Isles), but there is also a willingness to challenge the racialised preconceptions of his white characters. And there are crumbs of interest about non-westerosi cultures — exiled feather-clad Summer Islander princes, tales of the seven-foot-tall, faintly Egyptian inhabitants of Leng — that still feel rich in dramatic potential. Which brings us to Martin and Goldman’s new show, set thousands of years before the events of Game Of Thrones and notable for a cast that — as well as Naomi Watts and Miranda Richardson — features black actors Naomi Ackie, Sheila Atim and Ivanno Jeremiah. Will it be partly set in the Summer Isles? Will these actors play characters whose blackness is part of who they are but not a huge deal? Who knows. But it is a cast that reflects the changed pop-cultural landscape of 2019 and, conversely, shows Game Of Thrones to be a decade-old product of its time. In more ways than we realised, as towers crumbled, bodies fell and fire rained down, we may have been watching the end of the old way of doing things. Here’s hoping the combatants in the wars to come better reflect the people watching on the sofa.