Game of Thrones is better off white

I used to think I was the only one who felt this way. Thankfully that’s not the case.

To me, there’s much more value from both a representation standpoint as well as an artistic one to have more speculative fiction in settings that are something other than a reheated version of 14th century England and France with magic dribbled on top like off-brand sriracha on a gas station breakfast burrito. Stridently demanding that nonwhite characters be fitted into stories led and driven by white people in white settings seems, for a couple of reasons, much less valuable. It’s also pretty unseemingly.

Oxford Kondo’s article nails a layer of nuance I’ve spent a long time trying to parse into words: that the sides in this argument are arguing two different things, equality vs. inclusion. The normie liberal conception of inclusion is built around the “representation matters” trope and is more concerned with the idea of having non-white characters in every story as a matter of racial justice, regardless of whether their presence makes any contextual sense or not.

In terms of argumentation this is a clever position to take -- when it comes to debates among left-of-center views planting your flag on the hill of social justice always provides a distinct advantage. Anyone coming from the position that representation in speculative fiction should take the form of more world and stories built off cultures other than white Anglo-Saxon medievalism can be dismissed as petty. “You’re just a nerd talking about sci-fi and fantasy ideas you think would be cool. We’re talking about REAL issues of social justice for real people of color.”

So clever, and normative to the core. If we want to make a real difference we need to target works where the overwhelming amount of eyeballs are going already, which means getting non-whites into white narratives! Basically you’ve surrendered to the idea that we live in a white world and the highest goal we can strive for is to remind the dominant culture that we exist -- e.g. the mindnumbing idea shown in Kondo’s article of casting Henry Golding as Mr. Darcy in Pride & Prejudice. Who the hell would that even be for, and what would it accomplish? Are we supposed to take it in a historical context? If so does that mean we now have to square the idea of an East Asian member of the British gentry during the height of Victorian despoiling of Asian nations? What does that say about this dude? If we’re not supposed to take it in any sort of context then isn’t that just an open admission that liberals’ conception of race is, literally, skin deep, divorced from any notion of cultural context, and we’re somehow supposed to be inspired by an Asian playing a character who would’ve been totally cool with the subjugation and abuse of East and South Asians at the time?

This is the Lin-Manuel Miranda Maneuver.

By creating more stuff that takes place in non-white settings among non-white cultures the context changes from the dominant culture doing minorities a favor to other cultures doing everyone a favor that the dominant culture should be grateful for. Hell, just look at acclaimed works like The Witcher and Metro 2032. Both have been praised up and down for having gripping worlds and characters that stand in contrast compared to what usually gets published in their moribund genres. Why is that? Sapkowski and Glukhovsky, respectively, didn’t appropriate Western Euro Anglo-Saxon tropes but instead built off their own contexts -- late medieval Western Slavic and Baltic for Sapkowski, and Soviet Russian for Glukhovsky. There’s no reason English-language genre fiction shouldn’t be enriched with worlds that draw from African, Southeast Asian, or Caribbean history. We’d all be better off for it.