Seems to me we simply have to distinguish between Valyrians and the Valyrian ruling class.
http://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Valyria
And the Tagarians weren't even a particular powerful house within Valyria, according to the same wiki page.
So still Aryan super race
But yes they are still people, and the Tagarians got rather mad, presumably due to inbreeding.
That's true of the books, but not really of the tv series, in which high-class Valyrians don't trend particularly Aryan- but at this point we're debating the seniority of competing canons within a franchise, which is never a fruitful exercise.
Interesting point.
The reason to my mind is, that all that in-depth illumination of politics and society was reserved mostly for Westeros, because Essos served as a candy store for exotic other (non-Northern-European) stuff, while never going to be the main place of events, just a place for Dany to have some adventures, and get that army. Hence also the lack of an empire in Essos, while the abundance of city states with unique features.
I think that's the author's central point, if you strip away all the counter-productive attempts to make it fit within a framework of contemporary American racial anxieties. The Orient appears as somewhere that white characters go to develop the plot and/or their personal arcs, not somewhere that exists for its own sake. It's a sort of collective lack of object-permanence on the part of the West. The core criticism made by the article isn't that
Game of Thrones fails to depict non-white people, but that it drops the ball with them, that none of them seem to have any real existence or plot-significance outside of their relationship to white characters, mostly to one specific white character. While Westeros gets to be a big chaotic and full of different factions and families and ideologies all crashing into each other, Essos seems almost like a personal extension of Daenerys. (Arguably part of Daenerys' arc is learning that the world isn't just an extension of her mind, that it's full of people with their own aspirations and interests and who do not behave in predictable, robotic ways- but we've still built an entire continent to teach a white girl a lesson about governance, so we're kinda back to square one.)
Although, the author does seem to miss an important nuance, that the East, in
Game of Thrones as in the real world, is not the East because it is brown, but rather, is "brown" because it is the East. Exoticisation precedes racialisation, which is why the author is able to find "white" narrative tropes in stories written by people who did not have any meaningful identity as "white people". The population of Essos aren't overlooked because they're brown-skinned, they're brown-skinned because we're not expected to be interested in them. They could as well be blue or lizard-men or anything else that an audience would reliably interpret as exotic and, therefore, not really people. The problem is, while nobody is blue or a lizard-man, a lot of people- most of them, statistically-
are brown, and media that treats them as a shorthand for "not really people" is, to use a contentious term, problematic.
I don't get the Mike Tyson reference
Mike Tyson's energy drink is apparently the leading Polish energy drink brand, so in the UK you find it stocked in the "Polish food" section. I guess it's not a stereotype that has reached those parts of the diaspora that aren't within reasonable energy drink-shipping distance of the homeland.
