Let’s talk about Corlys Velaryon’s race in House of the Dragon

HBO is currently hard at work on House of the Dragon, its follow-up to Game of Thrones. Like the mother show, the cast is large. The series is about a brutal Targaryen civil war that took place over 100 years before Jon and Daenerys and everyone else we know was born, and there are a lot of players. One of the most important is Corlys Velaryon, known as the Sea Snake. He’s the head of a powerful family that hails from Valyria just as the Targayens do, although the Velaryons aren’t dragon-riders. Their power lies at sea: Corlys is a great mariner and has amassed a huge navy by the time the war begins. His ships and his wits will be vital to the way the Dance of the Dragons unfolds.

Corlys is played by British actor Steve Toussaint, who isn’t a household name but who has a pretty long list of screen credits. That’s normal for the series; apart from Matt Smith and arguably Graham McTavish, we’re mostly looking at unknowns here. I’m all for that; it means we won’t be thinking about what other roles these actors played while watching them act out this drama.

It’s early yet, but the show has already weathered some fan blowback for the casting. Some have all but flat-out said that Matt Smith is too ugly to play the role of Daemon Targaryen, which is so gross and wide of the point I think we can safely dismiss it. (Incidentally, Smith was also accused of being too ugly to play the Doctor back when when he joined Doctor Who, only for fans to come around once they realized that the performance was what mattered, not the look. And the idea that TV star Matt Smith is too ugly for anything just shows how vicious people are willing to be when someone with less than impossibly perfect dimensions dares to show their face onscreen.)

Meanwhile, Toussaint has faced some backlash because he’s Black. That is also gross, and at the risk of swerving wildly out of my lane, I think it’s worth looking at what people are saying and why.

The Textual Objection

To start, I have been encouraged to see that there hasn’t been a huge blowup about Toussaint…yet. And when I say “huge,” I’m comparing it to something like John Boyega being boycotted for appearing in a Star Wars movie, or Kelly Marie Tran being chased off social media for appearing in The Last Jedi. By comparison, any uproar over Toussaint has been very mild, and plenty of fans have been welcoming. I hope that holds as we get closer to the premiere date and the show is more top of mind.

But there have been some fans who, to put it plainly, are upset that a Black actor has been cast as Corlys Velaryon. They usually frame their objections as being about textual accuracy: in Fire & Blood, the book on which House of the Dragon is based, Corlys is a white man, whereas on the show he is Black. The problem, they argue, is that the show is not faithful to the source material.

To start, there’s no guarantee Corlys even is a white man in the book. His skin color is never directly described, although his hair color is: it’s Targaryen white-blonde, hence the wig choice for House of the Dragon.

That said, yes, Martin probably imagined Corlys as a white man, and there is some indirect evidence for it in the pages of Fire & Blood. But it’s not like changing that for TV is rocking the foundations of the story. The Valyrian Empire was huge and cosmopolitan, not unlike the Roman Empire on which it was based. It’s not a stretch to imagine that people with dark skin were a part of it. Alternately, perhaps Corlys comes from a branch of the family that intermarried with people with darker skin tones more recently. It’s just not a big jump to make in any case.

That leads to another objection: that A Song of Ice and Fire is based on history — specifically European medieval history — and there weren’t many Black people in medieval Europe. Ergo it doesn’t make sense for a Black man to play such a powerful lord.

Setting aside whether it’s actually true there weren’t many Black people in medieval Europe (there’s a lot of evidence that it wasn’t), it doesn’t matter, because like Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon isn’t history; it’s fantasy. Yes, George R.R. Martin takes some cues from real-world events, as do a lot of fantasy authors, but he’s writing a story about dragons and zombies and time-traveling children and faceless assassins. Being inspired by history is very different from being history, and it’s interesting that the fans objecting to Corlys’ skin color are upset over that alleged incongruity with European history and not literally any other part of this wholly made-up story.

Other objections zero in on the particulars of Fire & Blood. You see, at one point Corlys’ son Leanor Velaryon (who we think is being played by Black actor John Macmillan, although it’s unconfirmed) marries Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D’Arcy), a key character in the story. Leanor is gay, and it’s pretty well known that Rhaenyra takes a lover in the form of Harwin “Breakbones” Strong. There’s a running plot where it’s suspected that Rhaenyra’s three children by Leanor are actually the product of her affair with Harwin, on account of them not having the signature Valyrian white-blonde hair.

Corlys is also rumored to have a couple of bastard children. None of this will work on the show, the argument goes, because Rhaenyra’s children not having dark skin (or in the case of Corlys’ bastards, having dark skin) will make their parentage obvious, obliterating the ambiguity.

My response to that is: well, yeah, what of it? Everyone knows Rhaenyra’s kids aren’t Leanor’s because they don’t look like Leanor; they won’t look like Leanor on the show, either. Skin color could be a part of that, as could hair color (we don’t know who’s playing Harwin, by the way; HBO could choose to cast a darker skinned actor if it wants to heighten the ambiguity.) Likewise, dark skin isn’t so rare in Westeros that Corlys’ bastard children being darker would immediately mark them as the sons of the Sea Snake.

Ultimately, these nit-picky reasons why Corlys Velaryon shouldn’t be Black are so minor they’re barely worth talking about. What’s really behind people’s objections? Cause reading through them, I sometimes get the idea that they’re less about concern for textual fidelity (for this point and this point only), and more about just sorta being uncomfortable with a Black person having a prominent role in the show. As one commenter wrote on social media of the casting choice, “HBO like most of the entertainment industry hates white people.” I know that it varies from person to person, but there seems to be some angst underlying the objections that go well beyond, “It’s different from the book.”

The Bottom Line

The fact of the matter is that HBO could have cast a white actor as Corlys; it chose to make him dark-skinned. His children play prominent roles in the story, and darker-skinned actors will play them, as well. I don’t have HBO’s casting department on the horn, but my guess is that the network made this choice so House of the Dragon will have a more diverse cast. I’m guessing they did this both because Game of Thrones was criticized for being racially homogenous and because HBO believes that representation matters and that it’s a good thing to have a diversity of races depicted onscreen.

I suspect that whether you object to Steve Toussaint being on House of the Dragon depends on whether you agree with them. I do. There are scholarly works that show the benefits of representation, but I think common sense pretty much tells you what you need to know: if you see someone who looks like you onscreen, it’s easier to identify with them, particularly if you’re a person of color with a long history of not seeing yourself onscreen and especially if you’re younger and haven’t fully developed your sense of empathy yet. Studies show that feeling close to someone increases empathy, and anyone who loves TV knows that characters in a story can sometimes feel as close as people in your actual life.

So yeah, why not put some people of different races up on the screen? That’s good for both people who don’t normally see themselves represented and for people who might not otherwise see that kind of person onscreen or off, boosting empathy all around.

I feel like all the talk about whether Corlys Velaryon is Black in the books is a distraction from this point. Even if Black people didn’t exist in Westeros (they do) or in medieval England (they did), and even if making the character Black did muddy parts of the story (it doesn’t), it would still be worth doing, because a popular show doing what little it can to promote inclusivity and understanding is more important than remaining slavishly devoted to the source material.