1. Introduction
[1.1] In the final season of Game of Thrones (GOT; 2011–19), Missandei is brutally executed in front of her loved ones. Queen Cersei, the main antagonist of the show, captures Missandei to demonstrate her power to Daenerys, Missandei's close friend, as they fight over the throne. Missandei is forced to stand on the wall surrounding King’s Landing—a stage for her death—with her hands bound in chains. Her loved ones, including her romantic partner Grey Worm, watch as Cersei gives the signal to murder Missandei. GOT's writers are known for killing characters, beloved and hated. Missandei's death is just one of many; every character's demise affirms there are no happy endings in the GOT universe. Yet, in the final season, the writers offer fulfilling endings for several characters, including Arya, Sansa, and Jon. They survive extreme violence and live with trauma, but they each find hope at the end of the series. Missandei's death, in this context, hurts; her life ends, ceasing her liberation arc and preventing her from ever returning to her homeland. Her death resonates differently than most other characters; her death is a type of violence that feels all too real in the face of colonialism and white supremacist systems of power.
[1.2] Missandei, portrayed by Nathalie Emmanuel, is one of the only Black characters consistently in the show. She survives and escapes enslavement and then dedicates her life to liberating others alongside Daenerys and Grey Worm. She breaks her metaphorical and literal chains. As Emmanuel once stated, "[Missandei has] gone from enslaved object and a piece of property to this free-thinking, free-feeling person with emotions, opinions, and authority. And in a way, assertiveness" (Yandoli 2017). Missandei and Grey Worm's relationship—Grey Worm, another recurring Black character played by Jacob Anderson—is the only representation of Black love: even their sex scene is feminist, centering Missandei's pleasure. Yet, as Writegirl (note 1) points out, "[Missandei] dies in chains, basically in a pissing contest between two white women." Her liberation arc, her hopeful ending, is stolen the moment chains are placed back on her wrists.
[1.3] Henry Jenkins (1992) argues that fans create their cultures, "mirroring the fault lines in dominant ideologies." As Rebecca Wanzo (2015) argues, larger fandom can mirror white dominant ideologies, especially when a source text centers whiteness. How do some fans, in their fan fiction, critique these patterns and dominant ideologies? To show how fans center Black characters—even when the source text and many fans do not—I close-read three fics that center Missandei and interviewed one of the authors. Each of these fics uses "Missandei" or "Grey Worm" in the additional tags, which is how I selected them: "Missandei deserved better," "Missandei lives," and "Y'all need to write stories about the trauma Grey Worm is going through." By using "Missandei" and "Grey Worm" in the additional tags, the authors signify the importance of Black characters in their fics and in GOT. These fics are simultaneously fix-it fics that reimagine Missandei's death and direct interventions in the fandom. These interventions demonstrate how critical fans challenge fandoms' and popular culture's dedication to whiteness; critical fans "love Blackness" (hooks 1992) as an act of liberation and emancipation.
2. Missandei as window dressing
[2.1] GOT valorizes whiteness. As Sarah Florini (2019, ¶ 2.7) argues, GOT is a "show coded as white, featuring all white leads." The few characters of color—like Missandei, Khal Drogo, Grey Worm, and Oberyn Martell—often meet violent ends or are portrayed through a racist and colonial lens of savagery. In the show, especially in later seasons, Missandei's appearance is often just a supportive voice for Daenerys. As Ebony Elizabeth Thomas (2019b) argues in her response to Missandei's death, "although Missandei is free, her story remains tied to Daenerys."
[2.2] From our interview, Writegirl carries Thomas's argument to the GOT fandom (note 2). She argues that fics often depict Missandei as "window dressing…She's there, she doesn't speak, or she speaks, [but] it's one or two sentences in the entire fic." According to Writegirl's and Chewing_Gum's observations, Missandei's "story remain[ing] tied to" Daenerys is replicated in the fandom. Fandoms may mirror dominant ideologies, especially white supremacy. They are entangled in the same systems of power as popular culture; whiteness permeates media, from mainstream source texts to fan-made media. Writegirl, Chewing_Gum, and antiracist fan researchers argue that fandoms can therefore uphold rather than subvert anti-Blackness (De Kosnik and carrington 2019; Lothian and Stanfill 2021; Pande 2018; Wanzo 2015).
[2.3] White supremacy—through the consistent and persistent valuing of white characters—is often difficult to untangle. Fans' choices about which characters they value, which characters they ship, and how they reimagine particular characters reveal whose stories they believe deserve to be centered. Unfortunately, these values often overlook characters of color, particularly Black characters like Missandei and Grey Worm. Yet, there are and will always be fans who challenge fandom and popular culture's dedication to whiteness.
3. On loving Missandei: Emancipation arcs in fan fiction
[3.1] Fandoms are not homogenous. Wanzo (2015) argues Black cultural critics have always acted as critical fans, both enjoying texts and critiquing their racism and other forms of oppression. Not only do antiracist, critical, and Black fandoms explicitly critique white supremacy, but they also practice "loving Blackness." bell hooks argues, "In [the] white supremacist context, 'loving Blackness' is rarely a political stance that is reflected in everyday life" (1992, 10). To love Blackness is to value Black joy, romance, languages, diasporic cultures, and people. There are fans who love Missandei, cherish her relationship with Grey Worm, and represent what loving and centering Black women can look like in a culture of white supremacy. I examine these fans' critical and disruptive writing practices that respond to Missandei's death in particular.
[3.2] Ebony Elizabeth Thomas (2019a) argues that Black women characters in popular culture follow the narrative arc of the "Dark Other." One step in this narrative cycle is "haunting," which occurs after the "violence" cycle: the haunting is how the violence that Black women characters survive or die from resonates throughout the texts. She looks, for example, at Rue from The Hunger Games, a young Black girl whose death motivates the white main characters' story forward, sparking a revolution. Missandei's death is the final straw that leads to Daenerys burning King's Landing and its people. Missandei's final words—Dracarys, or "dragonfire" in Valyrian—haunt the last few episodes of GOT as Daenerys and her armies destroy King's Landing, murder its people, and suffer the consequences. Critical fans' antiracist reimaginings of Missandei's character and execution align with Thomas's call for "critical counterstorytelling for a digital age" (2019a, 10), in which emancipation is the final step in this Dark Other narrative arc. How do fans, then, reimagine and construct this emancipation? Fans' reimaginings of Missandei's death demonstrate not only their care and love for her but the recognition that she "deserves better." On the Archive of Our Own (AO3), a few fics use the additional tag "Missandei deserves better" or a similar tag, signaling fans' mourning of Missandei as well as the recognition that she was subjected, like many Black characters are, to an unjust violence and death.
[3.3] Writegirl provides one alternate version of Missandei's arc. Her fic, "OtherWhen: Game of Thrones," is a collection of short vignettes reimagining particular moments in the show. She uses the "Missandei deserved better" tag, which is how I found the fic. Chapter 10, titled "In Which Missandei Takes Control of Her Fate," reimagines Missanndei's death, where she refuses to be used as a political pawn. In her interview, Writegirl cites her motivation for critically taking up Missandei's death as frustration toward the writers—not only that she believes Missandei's final words were out of character but that the writers undermine Missandei's liberation arc by choosing to have her "die in chains." While the frustration Writegirl felt was the exigence of her piece, she also argues that not enough fics focus on Missandei, and she wanted to provide space for that.
[3.4] In Writegirl's fic, Missandei's arc still concludes with her death but centers her agency and emancipation through two actions: Missandei openly critiques Cersei and then chooses to jump off the wall with her, effectively ending the war. Her final words are not to Daenerys, Grey Worm, or the army standing before the wall—Missandei speaks directly to Queen Cersei. She says, "You would have fit in well with the masters in Astapor." The "masters" here refer to Missandei's enslavers. When I asked Writegirl about this moment and why she chose to have Missandei speak to Cersei, she explains, "She's really seeing Cersei for the creature Cersei is, beyond just being kind of a high-born woman in Westeros. She's seeing the monster that's inside Cersei." Cersei is one of the main antagonists, and her status as queen demonstrates how she is able to manipulate those around her to gain her position of ultimate power. Missandei, however, refuses to acknowledge Cersei's power.
[3.5] This moment resonates with bell hooks's (1989) theorizing on the oppressed using speech to combat their oppression: "Moving from silence into speech is for the oppressed, the colonized, the exploited, and those who stand and struggle side by side a gesture of defiance that heals, that makes new life and new growth possible. It is that act of speech, of 'talking back,' that is no mere gesture of empty words, that is the expression of our movement from object to subject—the liberated voice" (9). The choice to have Missandei talk back to Cersei here—to carve out her own space and speak truth to power—demonstrates how Writegirl is thinking through both characters' positionalities and another form of liberation. One of Missandei's goals, Writegirl explains, is to help liberate all those who are enslaved. She not only uses her "liberated voice" to openly critique Cersei but also chooses to kill Cersei by jumping off the wall with her. Cersei's death means the people of King's Landing and Westeros are no longer under her tyrannical and violent rule, hopefully ushering in an era of peace.
[3.6] In "The Girl Who Got Away," Lady_R incorporates the moment Missandei stands on the wall before her loved ones. Lady_R uses the tags "Missandei lives" and "Fix-It" to emphasize her focus on Missandei. This fic reimagines only her ear being cut off as the catalyst for the burning of King's Landing. Missandei survives and escapes, watching in horror the destruction Daenerys brings upon the city. She finds Grey Worm and tends to him as they exchange promises of love. The story progresses by focusing on exchanges—their choices, their actions, and their emotions—between Missandei, Grey Worm, and Marselen, Missandei's brother. There is a conflict between Grey Worm and Marselen early in the piece, as Grey Worm continues to slaughter soldiers after they surrender. Marselen convinces Grey Worm to help survivors instead of slaughtering them, thus defying Daenerys and resisting his own conditioning from enslavement. He chooses then to keep everyone safe by calling his soldiers to "'Find the survivors!'—Grey Worm's throat itches as he screams the new command, but he repeats it once more, and twice again in the Valyrian tongue. 'Find them. Keep them safe! This is not who we are! This won't be who we are!'"
[3.7] Just as Grey Worm defies Daenerys, so does Missandei. Lady_R actively critiques the "window dressing" convention in fics that Writegirl points out, in which Missandei appears merely to affirm Daenerys. In Lady_R's fic, Missandei defies Daenerys, both in thought and action. Missandei helps survivors find shelter away from Daenerys and her dragon, commands the Dothraki from Daenerys's army to do the same, and realizes that Daenerys has never cared about liberating others. Missandei thinks, "So much for the Breaker of Chains." Lady_R highlights Missandei's agency and personhood as separate from Daenerys, emphasizing the philosophies that Missandei lives by: "But the way of the Naathi is to grow what we can from burned terrain." Missandei is a survivor; she survived being enslaved, she survived Queen Cersei and Daenerys's dragons, and she will continue to endure, as generations of her ancestors taught her on Naath.
[3.8] In the last scene, Missandei asks Grey Worm if he is afraid of Daenerys, and he says, "I had one fear, remember that. A fear that I left behind." This calls back to the scene in season 5 of GOT when Missandei and Grey Worm first kiss, demonstrating the importance of representing romance and joy for Black characters in popular culture texts. Lady_R's focus on Missandei and Grey Worm's arcs, their choices to defy Daenerys, and their final reunion signifies how fic authors can challenge white supremacy and other systems of power.
4. Criticism as an act of love
[4.1] Black fans, fans of color, and white allies often need to carve out their own spaces from mainstream fandom spaces or reimagine how discourse and connection operate within these platforms to create community. Using platforms' different affordances for community formation, such as additional tags on AO3 or hashtags like #DemThrones on Twitter, is one method of carving out these spaces. The community-making mechanism of carving out space and resisting white-dominated hegemonic media is where critical fans and antifans thrive.
[4.2] Wanzo (2015) builds upon Jonathan Gray's definitions of antifandoms, tracing a lineage of Black antifandoms as critical spaces for merging how critical reception and fandoms may be understood: "Black Twitter participants can be highly creative; their responses continue a century of media critiques offered by the Black public—criticisms archived in the responses of African American politicians and political organizations, in the Black press, and by African American writers and entertainers" (¶ 3.4). Wanzo's analysis of Black antifandoms demonstrates how antifans critique both fandoms and white-dominated popular culture texts. Antifans' criticism often explicates how popular culture fails Black cultures, countercultures, people, and representations. Florini (2019) in her analysis of #DemThrones points to antifandoms as a necessary perspective for understanding Black fans' responses and reactions to GOT; while the show is white-coded and reconstructs white supremacist ideologies, Black fans and fans of color simultaneously enjoy and critique the show, as they often must in white-dominated hegemonic culture.
[4.3] One fan's AO3 post, "Fuck this shit" by Chewing_Gum, perfectly captures how fan fiction may be both critical and disruptive. I found her fic because she used the "Missandei/Grey Worm" relationship tag and has "Grey Worm" included in one of the additional tags: "Y'all need to write stories about the trauma Grey Worm is going through." Her fic—less than one hundred words long—is a post calling out the fan community for ignoring Missandei's death and Grey Worm's trauma and demands better from the fandom and media writers. Specifically, Chewing_Gum's piece demonstrates how Black antifans may use disruptive writing techniques as activism, specifically their criticisms of racism and white supremacy. Chewing_Gum disrupts by using expletives, reimagining platform norms, and incorporating a call to action. She uses expletives in the title and additional tags directed at both the show and the fandom. She also disrupts traditional use of AO3 by using the space to write metacommentary rather than a fic. Fans have previously used AO3 to write metacommentary about fandoms and community practices, including toastystats’s (destinationtoast's) extensive documentation of fandom stats. Most fandom metacommentary, though, occurs on platforms like Tumblr or Twitter. When fans use AO3 for metacommentary, they often utilize the additional tags, author's notes, or comments. Chewing_Gum takes space largely designed for fics to both respond to the GOT fan community and invite others to respond to her. Her piece acts as a writing prompt, inviting others to take up her call.
[4.4] Chewing_Gum includes all the usual features of an AO3 fic—a title, character and additional tags, a summary, and the actual fic body of text—except she does not use the features the platform prompts in a way that others traditionally use. For example, her title is "Fuck this shit," an evocative exclamation with an expletive that signals her justified anger and that may catch readers' attention. The summary simply says "Fuck 8x04," referring to GOT season 8, episode 4. Her use of expletives were what originally drew me to her post. The actual body of text, too, is not a story. There is no plot, no reimagination of characters, and no fictional world. She uses this space to directly critique both the GOT show and the fandom. Her first paragraph says, "Soooooooo D&D wants to kill off the only Black women who's had a story line this whole series so what, Daenerys can finally have an excuse to go Mad Queen on us????!!!!!" She specifically critiques the show and the show's writers—D&D, or David and Dan, is a common phrase used in the GOT fandom—for killing off Missandei, citing her as the "only Black women who's had a story line." She begins with a criticism of the show to situate her position, pointing out the racism in the writing.
[4.5] Her fic also demonstrates how she, as a Black fan, feels—and is—alienated and unwelcome in the GOT AO3 fandom. She writes:
[4.6] Further more, y'all really need to start writing more Grey Worm/Missandei stories because honestly the ones we have now are not the best but they're a'ight I guess. I just need more Black love in this fandom. And I know I'm gonna have a bitch in comments talking about "Well then you should write the stories yourself " nah hoe, if I could write them trust and believe they would be up right now.
[4.7] Her criticism of the lack of Grey Worm/Missandei stories points directly to the lack of Black representation and "Black love" in the GOT fandom; her words resonate with hooks's call for loving Blackness. She prompts readers to rethink how they view Missandei, Grey Worm, and the fan community by encouraging them to write fics that celebrate Black characters, cultures, and people. She also anticipates potential responses, saying "I'm gonna have a bitch in the comments," demonstrating she is prepared for pushback, which Black fans often receive when they point out racism; her preparation also points to the dominance of whiteness in the fandom. Her criticism invites reader response, reimagines how AO3 may be used, and demonstrates why Missandei deserved better. To date, there is no negativity in the comments, and her readers seem to celebrate and agree with her criticism. Most comments echo her anger and frustration, with one commenter writing "PREACH" and two mentioning their own Missandei/Grey Worm stories. Those who engage with her do so because they already have similar perspectives.
5. Conclusion
[5.1] In the GOT finale, Arya sails off to discover what is west of Westeros, and Sansa rules as queen of the North. Grey Worm gets on a ship headed for Naath, Missandei's home; he is finally free to mourn Missandei and celebrate her life.
[5.2] Missandei and Grey Worm deserve better. Chewing_Gum's post and Writegirl's reflection on Missandei's death demonstrate the affective responses of fans of color when fandoms mirror the dominant ideologies (i.e., whiteness) in a show. Lady_R's fic reimagines the representations of white supremacy in GOT to instead center Black characters, their cultures, and their agency. To center Black fans and characters means recognizing—at every level, from popular media tropes to fan discourse to which characters fans desire or identify with—the pervasiveness of whiteness. In fandoms, Black characters are consistently overlooked or not seen as desirable. For popular media products to kill or write off characters of color is a violent political choice, especially in the face of real historical and current violence against Black people. In the face of research that consistently shows how Blackness and Black people are devalued, fans and fan researchers must continue to promote critical and antiracist fan practices; to celebrate subversive practices; and to uplift Black creators, fans, and actors. One of the many paths of healing is to carve out space to love Blackness in popular culture and fandoms alike.
[5.3] Missandei is forced to stand on the wall surrounding King's Landing—a stage for her death—with her hands bound in chains. Her loved ones, including Grey Worm, wait for Cersei to give the signal. Except the signal never comes. In Writegirl's critical fic, Missandei speaks truth to power, telling Cersei she is no better than an enslaver. She leaps off the wall, taking Cersei with her, to bring in a new era of liberation; she still dies, but it is her choice. A final act of liberation. In Lady_R’s piece, Missandei escapes and reunites with Grey Worm and her brother. Lady_R interweaves references to Missandei's homeland, her hopes for a free future for all, and her agency when she refuses to follow Daenerys's violence. Grey Worm and Missandei survive extreme violence and live with trauma, but they each find hope in the end of the fic. Missandei can finally return home.
6. Acknowledgments
[6.1] Since this piece is part of a much larger project, thank you to those who have helped make this research possible: my dissertation committee Mya Poe, Ellen Cushman, Neal Lerner, and Laura Nelson; Meredith Stabel at University of Iowa Press; and my spouse William Quinn. I cannot express my gratitude enough to Writegirl, Chewing_Gum, and Lady_R. Your writing, thinking, and labor mean everything.