Fans of House of the Dragon are very active online (like, really active) which is probably why the show does so well! The fanbase is huge and everyone is always talking about those pesky little dragons and various brooding blonde-haired boys…which is both a good and bad thing. Good for publicity, but bad when fans are bullies.
When the initial cast was announced, the show received backlash from viewers who didn’t think that Black Valyrians existed, and the stars were subsequently harassed online. Steven Toussaint, who plays Corlys Velaryon, said that he wasn’t prepared for the amount of hate he received. “I didn’t realize it was a bigger deal until I was racially abused on social media when it was announced,” Toussaint said earlier this year. “Yeah, that sh*t happened.”
Of course, showrunner Ryan Condal says that the decision was just to cast incredible actors in a fantasy world. Condal told recently The Wrap why they chose to cast Black actors for the family:
It’s 2022, it’s a different era than the shows used to be made in, we have an incredibly diverse audience that’s not only across America, but in multiple countries that speak all sorts of different languages, that represent all the colors under the sun. And it was really important to see some of that reflected up on screen. This is a fantasy world. I think if this was a historical fiction piece, it’d be a more nuanced discussion. But I think simply because of the fantasy world, if we believe in dragons, and shapeshifters and direwolves, we can believe everybody in the story is not white.
Condal added that there were vague descriptions in the text that inspired him when it came to casting the show. This is significant considering the fact that Martin’s frequent collaborator (and Game of Thrones scholar) Linda Antonsson has been vocally opposed to casting people of color in the series. “There are no Black Valyrians and there should not be any in the show,” Antonsson blogged at the time. She was wrong! Condal added:
Why we went to the Velaryons, in particular, was because that felt like the most fantastical race in the show, and it felt like these were people from a lost continent that we don’t really know that much about. We know they all silver hair, we know they have an affinity for dragons, some of them. And we know they are seen, as quoted in the books and in the show, as closer to gods than to men. So what does that all look like? It always stuck with me, this article where George had talked about when he set out to write these books, considering making all of the Velaryons Black, and Black people with silver hair, that always really stuck with me as an image.
We will likely never hear what Martin has to say about the cast since he refuses to interact with the “toxic internet” ever since The Incident, but it’s good to know that at least the showrunner is looking out for his cast!
