Empire contributor Jimi Famurewa on
the representation problem in Westeros —
and why the future looks brighter
GOT never
understood
its people
of colour
Vcoming 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 —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 wallsof
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
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.