#bncommentary

Every account of her being “less than innocent” comes from biased sources(the chroniclers) that don’t think that a lowborn girl, especially a homeless Black lowborn girl with a prostitute for a mother who’s had to steal for her supper, can be innocent. She’s simply not allowed to be innocent(other than acknowledging that the execution orders for her were wrong) based on the boxes that she’s been put into.

When you are dealing with a character like Netty you can't take one action in a vacuum. You have to cipher through the biased accounts and take into her entire life story to see who she is. When you actually look at her you have a girl who still possesses a great deal of empathy and compassion despite everything she’s been through and she’s been through a lot.

We never see her harming innocents. During the Battle of the Gullet, we see her defending her home(Driftmark) from the Triarchy:

The civilian casualties came from the Triarchy’s end, not Nettles and Sheepstealer who had come in to attack their ships at sea after they(the Triarchy) had already attacked Driftmark. Nettles never rained “fire and blood” down on the innocent people of Driftmark. She had only come in to protect them.

Furthermore, she shows great empathy when Jace a boy she barely knew was killed before his time during the battle. She mourns for his loss and sacrifice(in conjecture with witnessing the overall destruction of her home).

When the Blacks take the capital, shes not raining down fire balls, she literally just lands her dragon on Visenya’s Hill:

She isn’t a warmonger, or a war criminal, and while she’s technically a soldier, we don’t see her harming any civilians or instigating any fights. She sees very little combat and she’s not terrorizing everyday citizens.

Now onto her “innocence” or lack thereof. If she was forced to prostitute herself(aka if you believe that she’s not a maiden) then it’s most certainly not because she wanted to:

Her losing her virginity isn’t an empowering moment. It’s not a moment we should look onto to show she’s got agency or control or God forbid that she’s a wanton Jezebel. It’s a moment where we see just how dire her circumstances were. We can see how Westeros society harms girls like Nettles and leaves them vulnerable to abuse.

Nettles isn’t willingly having sex(we’ve got no indication of her having normal sexual relations with a lover, with the exception of Daemon, only that she potentially trades sex to feed her belly).

She's not some liberated medieval woman who because of her low status in society has sexual freedom. She’s not choosing to f*ck. That’s not what is happening here. It’s about survival plain and simple. In a world where women do not have many options and lowborn women even less, this is her only option. The option being rape(because again this isn’t something she wants).

She’s potentially a victim of pedophilic rapists. She would’ve forced herself to endure rape when she was a child as young as 9 all to feed herself. The act of losing her innocence is a sin on her abusers and not on her.

Let’s talk about her relationship with Daemon Targaryen. The most “villainous” thing she does is sleep with a man, Daemon, in an open marriage:

A man with whom she finds some amount of happiness (and she’s gotten so little of that). A relationship that hurts no one except her when it’s cruelly ripped away from her (and leaves her reeling in the aftermath because unfortunately, she’s the innocent who suffers from loving a man like Daemon).

In her other sexual dealings(her rape) she isn’t willingly choosing the course of action she’s taking. She’s doing so to survive, but with Daemon for the first time in her life, it’s not only about survival. It’s about her joy. This is what she wants and she puts herself and has someone who is willing to put her needs first.

As far as her slaughtering sheep and symbolism go, the sheep are more so a metaphor for herself. The sheep are her, not her victims or her sins. She's the lamb for slaughter. She's the innocent who is destroyed and transformed by others' sins to

Slaughtering the black ram(which symbolizes strength, determination, and triumph over one’s enemies) when she leaves Daemon marks her final transformation, because up until then I think she had hope and had found some happiness/peace in where she was. She is still a seed sprouting.

However, the last shred of what was is taken away with her execution orders. She therefore grows as a person. She’s overcome what has been thrown at her to come into her own. She is not beholden to anyone. She's her own woman. Yet at the same time, she’s still the same empathetic fearless Netty that she was. Those demons who sought to destroy her did not break her spirit. She's just been freed from them.

At the end of the day, Nettles is just a young woman who’s been dealt an unfair hand in life but still manages to rise above it all and never impart harm on a world that has harmed her.

She’s a scrappy girl who has to do what she has to, but she's not a “bad girl.” She hasn’t done anything reckless or harmful enough(any time she attacks, or steals, or whatever it’s in self-defense) to be considered a “bad girl” (which is why I find the accusation that she is downright untrue when you look at her character's actions) or that she’s even “morally gray” or a “wayward girl.” I think she’s an all around good person who hasn’t done anything fundamentally wrong especially considering the world she lives in.

Nettles is well within her rights to exact some vengeance on a world that has shown her nothing but cruelty and contempt, but when it’s all said and done what does she do? She chooses to lead a quiet life away from it all. She isolates herself and shuns polite society. She chooses peace and solitude rather than violence.

Does Nettles have to be an innocent character? No, but leading with the argument that she’s somehow a deeply flawed character who’s not a innocent to prove a point that you can do bad things and still deserve sympathy which is an important point to make, but it isn’t telling her story. There are plenty of characters throughout the Dance who are less than innocent that you can sympathize with, Nettles, however, isn’t one of them.

I think it’s a cop-out to say that Nettles isn’t innocent because that’s how the world, both ours and in universe, sees her. She’s not a mother whose innocent child has been unjustly murdered right before her eyes, or a little girl who witnessed her family killing each other, and she’s not one of the faceless victims of the Dance. She doesn’t have blonde hair or pale skin.

Physically, she’s not what we think of when we think of “innocent” and that blinds our own opinions of her and her story despite who she’s shown to be.

It takes more to see past our biases, to take off the goggles, and to truly recognize that she’s not a corrupted person than to say that she’s innocent because that is what we see when we look at her.

We don’t recognize that someone like Nettles is one of the innocents whose life was almost destroyed by the destruction around her. We don’t see that she is unquestionably a good girl who has a lot of garbage thrown her way but manages to rise above it and not sink into its depravity because that is not what we have been taught to see.

Instead, we see the less-than-innocent girl who while she did not deserve to be murdered, she still has something about her that leaves one feeling like she is tainted.

I won’t say it’s worse than other fandoms, but admitting there is a problem is like pulling teeth.

You have people blatantly lie and pretend like their headcanons are actual canon which is extremely disturbing when it comes to the Black(ish) characters because those headcanons are made to take away their characterization.

There is only so much one can ignore without disregarding their self pride.

As far as the showrunners go I will say I don’t think they are trying to prop up that ghost ship because they wouldn’t have added choke-gate if they had any intention of turning Dumbnyra(I’m not respecting a ship populated by people who think it's fine to call Black characters the n-word) into an epic romance, but they are trying to hold off on putting Nettles on the show because she makes said self-insert look bad and they can’t have that.

Yet they know cutting her looks suspect considering their past actions.

They think diversity = having Black(ish) people there never mind lighting them on fire, sidling them, turning them into an undisputed villain, turning them into stereotypes, etc., and unfortunately they’ve emboldened an extremely racist and toxic fanbase with their (in)action(s).

Laena was deliberately made into the disposable Black girlfriend, but no one cared about that. No one cared about how that looked or how Black fans would feel with that being our representation. How it's harmful and damaging to see that play out time and time again. They cheered it on and called her slurs while doing so.

Now I’ve seen people claim to be concerned about Nettles and her being made into a mistress and yes there are problems with showing a Black woman as a mistress, but there are just as many if not more problems with showing a Black(ish) woman as someone’s second choice or showing us as undesirable. Not a peep was said about the latter.

The same people who are so concerned(I see y’all in her tag) are the same people who a couple of months ago were calling for Nettles to be cut and replaced with Baela and Rhaena or even Addam because they are all Black(ish) now. Never mind that Nettles’ story is vastly different from theirs.

That Nettles isn’t supposed to be indisputably Valyrian like the others(at least in the books her heritage is the least clear out of everyone present and in the show she still isn’t being claimed by anyone).

Never mind that she isn’t supposed to be Daemon's daughter(the dates don’t line up and I dare anyone to tell me they bathed naked with their father at 17; I dare anyone to say that someone who claimed a wild dragon with the highest body count during the sowing doesn’t know how to bathe herself).

Or that she isn’t just someone’s mistress(you don’t risk your life for a woman who is just your mistress).

That she isn’t an unloved unwanted woman despite who she is(Daemon chooses her. We can talk about how that isn’t “progressive” enough for some people although I’d argue that it’s progressive for a character like Nettles, but that’s what’s written in black and white).

That she’s saved and survives the Dance. She’s the only dragonseed that survives maybe even the last dragonrider for two hundred years. She certainly gains more than what she had(she becomes the spiritual leader of a tribe for God's sake). 

Is Nettles’ story perfect, no, but people are holding her, her arc, and her potential characterization in the show to an unhealthy standard that they would never hold a character like Rhaenyra, Daenerys, or an even Helaena to and basing whether they like her or not based on that standard.

They aren’t allowing her to be a nuanced character let alone someone with her wants and motivations who experiences love and loss alike.

Nettles' arc is as complex as every other character in this story, but people don’t want that. They don’t even want her there.

Never mind that she’s important to the narrative and there is a reason for her complexity, it’s her skin color they see. Her skin color is the only thing they see and therefore they fail to see her as someone deserving of her dynamic arc.

Instead they want the downtrodden girl. The abused girl. The poor orphan girl who is just grateful to have found a family. The girl who can easily be placed into a box and doesn’t need any analysis whatsoever.

A girl. She doesn’t need love because she’s a girl. She doesn’t need to have her own will and desires because she’s a girl. She’s a child. She’s not a nuisance. A box of gunpowder waiting to go off and change the narrative. She’s not a threat.

I’ve talked about this before(too many times), but that’s who they want.

They can’t have a Mammy that looks too obvious given the story, or Jezebel(I imagine that’s what they’ll say she is once she appears although they’ll look crazed trying to pigeon hole her into the slut category), and they know she most likely won’t be cut, so they settle for the non-threatening, sexless, naive(selectively intellectually challenged) child.

The show calls itself diverse and the fans claim themselves to be feminists, but that’s a joke and a slap in the face to Black fans who aren't self-haters (who the fandom has harassed anytime we don’t blindly agree with and call them out on their bullshit).

Black fans don’t want characters who look like us wrapped in bubble wrap with a pretty little bow on top. We want characters (in every sense of the word), but neither the showrunners nor the fans seem to get this(tale as old as time or at least it’s centuries old).

Both are second sons of House Targaryen who must forge their paths in life since they’ll never inherit the throne. They have both done their share of questionable things to make their mark and they get more caught up with their need for vengeance, personal glory, and the women in their lives, than their responsibilities to their first families.*

*Daemon is married, but he is in an open marriage and Aemond isn’t married, but he’s betrothed to a lady from a great house to the benefit of his family.

Alys and Nettles are both lowborn bastard (non-Valyrian) women without a dollar to their names who have accusations(real or imagined) of witchcraft thrown their way. Both have the chroniclers of the Dance questioning why these powerful princes (who could have anyone they wanted) would ever look their way.

Alys is an old wetnurse though young looking and Nettles is young though “ugly” and Black. They are not who you would typically picture princes of the realm would want and yet Aemond and Daemon are infatuated in love with them to the point where they are willing to do things for them and put their lives ahead of anyone else’s.

Aemond goes back to Harrenhal after having abandoned it to save Alys from Sabitha Frey(this is something he didn’t even do for his mother and sister who were trapped in Kings Landing*) and Daemon chooses to abandon his wife and queen to save Nettles from an untimely death.

*I know he had his reasons for not going back/it probably would’ve been suicide going by himself, but that isn’t the point. He could’ve easily left Alys to her fate, but he didn’t same thing goes for Daemon with Nettles.

Both couples also have a severe age gap (20+ years) which is where in part the problematic accusations come into play (especially for Dettles).

I’ve seen people use the excuse that even though Aemond is a prince Alys is older than him. Hence, it evens out the power imbalance issue in comparison to Dettles, but what good is being older when your man/husband you married (with next to no witnesses) could turn on you at any moment, abandon you, or order your death and no one would bat an eye?

Aemond would never do that cause he cares for her, but he could easily do so and face 0 consequences for his actions, same for Daemon. Age isn’t a get-out-of-jail-free card. It doesn’t protect a peasant woman against a prince. Alys has no more power in her relationship with Aemond than Nettles does with Daemon.

And honestly, Nettles does have a dragon. It’s nothing compared to what Daemon has, but she’s not completely powerless. If she didn’t want to be with Daemon based on her character(she’s a fighter) I think she would’ve left Maidenpool way sooner and never looked back.

Now their relationships aren’t carbon copies of each other, and it’s fine to like one more than another or you don’t like either, but the premise and dynamics at play (rich boy falls in love with and saves the poor girl; think Cinderella, but worse 🤣) are pretty much the same.

This is what the actual text says about Rhaenyra(first highlighted passage) vs Nettles becoming a dragonrider(second highlighted passage):

Nettles is the only seemingly non-Valyrian dragonrider(there are 36 dragonriders in total, and all at least have evident Valyrian heritage) that we know of in the entire ASOIAF universe:

(*Aurion was a dragonlord and rider from Valyria who was last seen in 102 BC. Jaenera was also another Valyrian dragonrider from before the Doom).

Keep in mind that Nettles was not born into a royal dragonriding family, the sole surviving Valyrian dragonriding family, where it was expected that she’d eventually claim or hatch a dragon. She was not born with a dragon egg. She tames a wild dragon who even the likes of Alyn Velaryon, who has obvious Valyrian heritage, could not tame. She’s an “unlikely dragonrider.” Certain characters, cough cough Rhaenyra, have a hard time believing that she could even tame a dragon unaided in the first place due to her dubious heritage.

Now, let’s get into how certain fans like to claim that Rhaenyra is oppressed when she is in fact the most privileged woman* in Westeros at the time(see the first highlighted section of the prior text and these passages):

(*Yes Rhaenyra experiences misogyny, but most certainly not in the way that Nettles does. She is very privileged being a highborn Valyrian royal woman in comparison to Nettles who is a lowborn non-Valyrian bastard woman. If you want a real life comparison, think of the misogyny Black women deal with as opposed to white women).

She actually uses her privilege as queen and as a Valyrian to try and murder Nettles:

Who is spared mainly because people feared what Daemon would do to them if they hurt her(first highlighted passage):

Even among Nettles' defenders, she is not thought highly of. I.e. Corlys Velaryon referring to her as “dirty and ill-favored,” while trying to save her life(second highlighted passage above).

Those more ambivalent towards her certainly do not have many kind words to say about her. Archmaester Gyldayn tries to insinuate that she is “lifting her skirts for some shepherd” in order to bind Sheepstealer to her. (In all likelihood, Nettles chose to live on the streets instead of following in her mother’s footsteps). The Archmaester also mentions how she might have been too ugly (while referencing her skin tone) for Daemon to be attracted to her(third passage).

Whether by Andal or Valyrian standards, Nettles is actually someone who is looked down upon due to the circumstances of her birth, breeding, and complexion. She’s a Black brown-skinned bastard girl born to a whore who grew up on the streets and can barely get a kind word to be said about her.

Rhaenyra on the other hand is a white blonde haired high-born woman who is recognized as queen by many in spite of the fact that she has younger legitimate brothers whose claim to the throne is greater than her own(by the laws of the land). She’s beloved by the realm for much of her life and only becomes genuinely unpopular after the standard of living lessens under her reign.

Moving on, how can we forget the claim that Daemon would die for Rhaenyra. In actuality, he was willing to give his own life to save Nettles when he most certainly did not have to, but love often includes sacrifice:

Daemon left Rhaenyra out to dry and never looked back, but saying that is the eighth deadly sin according to a particular segment of this fandom. Keep in mind, the text clearly states his “final act” was an act of betrayal:

(Before anybody tries to use this as “evidence” for Daemon offing himself cause he couldn’t handle Nyra not loving him no more, which is another lie, Rhaenyra doesn’t think Daemon has betrayed her until she learns that Nettles got away. Up until then, she thought Daemon was under Nettles' “spell,” see the passage on Rhaenyra ordering her death, and that he’d be “freed” once she was dead. She lets it be known that she wants him alive and back with her, but Daemon himself did not want that after she tried to murder the woman he loved).

Lastly, even the nickname Nyra which is a fandom invention seems to be a play on Netty which is as canon as canon gets:

(I’m bringing the nickname up because I don’t even see people refer to any other character in HOTD by a fanon nickname at near the frequency that I see people refer to Rhaenyra as Nyra. Someone, please correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m not seeing it).

Obviously, I’m not saying that people are trying to copy Nettles' story word for word. Still, there are some headcanons that are being peddled for Rhaenyra that line up with Nettles' characterization. Enough to make one pause and ask what’s really going on here.