When people can accept dragons, giants and fucking ice zombies in a show but black people is too far for their imagination to stretch 😂😂😂
Even if one makes the argument that dragons and such are medieval folklore and thus true to the times in their own way, there’s so much in the show that’s blatantly not medieval. There’s no feudalism. No one is a serf bound to the land, people just kind of live where they live. The prominent organized religion plays a background role, and faith is more of a personal belief than the guiding principle everyone lives and dies by every day. There’s an astonishing amount of upward mobility, titles and peerage are treated like promotions at a company. Books appear to be easy to find, so there are printing presses, but that’s proto-renaissance technology. There’s fast long-distance communication in the form of ravens, which makes coordinating across physical distance fairly trivial. This means wars end instantly, instead of taking months as word of a peace treaty spreads slowly to all armies. I don’t even know what the hell the Night’s Watch is supposed to be (minor legal infractions become lifelong commitments to an ascetic warrior order? But also some people volunteer? What?)
In short, the world of Game Of Thrones is written by someone whose concepts of economics, politics, technology, culture, religion, warfare and basic day-to-day survival are completely modern with no attempts made to make it medieval. You might as well throw modern racial pluralism in there, because it would probably be the least “unrealistic” part of this so-called medieval society.
More importantly, despite T V. and movie representations, black people did not just pop out of Africa when Europeans began slave trading.
That’s another point that applies to all medieval fantasy. The Iberian Peninsula was controlled by the Moors for nearly 800 years, from the Umayyad conquest in 711 A.D to the Reconquista in 1492. Muslim Iberia was a very diverse place for its period, sitting at the crossroad between Europe and Africa. Cities like Lisbon emerged as international trading hubs. And this isnt’t even touching on the great African empires like the Mali, which ruled West Africa for 400 years. These simplistic views of medieval times, which all seem to be flattened portraits of England, really do a disservice to the whole period.
