This article contains spoilers for season eight, episode four of Game of Thrones.

When you’re a pop culture-loving person of colour you learn to take the character wins where you can, but on Game of Thrones the losses just keep piling up. There is barely a brown person left alive in the long-running fantasy series – and after the broadcast of season eight, episode four, yet another of the few minority ethnic characters became an expendable casualty of the writers’ room.

“So,” director Ava DuVernay tweeted in response to the death of Missandei (Nathalie Emmanuel). “The one and only sister on the whole epic, years-long series? That’s what you wanna do? Okay.”

The disposability of POCs in Game of Thrones is something that we’ve had to get used to. Bye Khal Drogo! Laters, Oberyn! Farewell, Dothraki horde! See you on the other side, Sand Snakes! This is a show with a high kill count, of course, but, when there are already so few black or brown characters, seeing them drop like flies at the hands of white characters, in service to other white characters, makes it all the more frustrating.

Some fans will bang on about George RR Martin’s show being based on British medieval history as a reason for the lack of POC characters, or that they exist merely as slaves or barbaric deviants – but it’s not actually a historical show, is it, friends? It’s a fantasy filled with fire-breathing dragons, the walking dead and a kid who can make like Professor X and take control of the minds of animals or Hodors.

At this point, is it really too much to ask for some fan service paid to the brown characters for once? Brienne was made a knight, little Lyanna Mormont went out a giant-killing hero, and the Arya-Gendry hook-up was a YA dream. But for the only speaking characters of colour left in the show, Martin and the writers chose not to give them any sort of fist-pumping triumph, just devastation. Again.

So if this is the fate that awaits the non-white characters of the Game of Thrones successor shows, then, in Daenerys’ and Missandei’s own fiery words, I have just one thing to say to them: dracarys.