Explained: How House of the Dragon is making the same mistake as Game of Thrones
Explained: How House of the Dragon is making the same mistake as Game of Thrones
It seems like yesterday that the shouts of R plus L equals J filled our coworking spaces. In 2022, ‘You Know Nothing’ memes have been replaced by ‘Say It’ memes, and just like with Game of Thrones (GOT) we are eagerly participating in the fanfare around House of The Dragon (HOTD), trickling back into Work from Work, feeling relieved and nostalgic about simpler times, where, yes, we worried about made-up medieval murderers and wedding massacres. There’s a fundamental difference between GOT and HOTD though, one which still fails to make us optimistic about Westeros’s ‘woman’ problem.
We must keep in mind HOTD and GOT feel like period pieces but they are really fictional fantasy worlds created for modern viewers. On the face of it, viewers of the new series are experiencing a radical axis shift – this time we find ourselves in golden Lannister shoes and not the Starks’– Toto, we’re not in the North anymore. We root for a character with Cersei’s fatal flaw and despise the other, full of Ned Stark’s spotless virtues. We are supposed to go along with Rhaenyra Targaryen’s incestuous ways – a dealbreaker even for our GOT favourite ‘Jonaerys’ – but bristle at Alicent Hightower’s moral righteousness. Alicent is a hater, Rhaenyra, a woman fighting for love and joy, against the heteronormative traps of marriage, political or otherwise.
Modern viewers can get behind Princess Rhaenyra’s liberal or progressive values, as she becomes an ally to the gay heir to the Driftmark throne, Laenor Velaryon and settles into the seat of highest power as the inheritor of the Iron throne. Alicent, who has been manipulated by her father, does not enjoy Rhaenyra’s freedoms and is compelled into joyless wifely duties to the sickly king and she still commits to this world of men, becoming a puppet in the hands of her father. it’s a conflict between obedience versus self-expression. Alicent’s foil is enough to carve out a soft corner for Rhaenyra and take the focus away from the incest.
Incest remains scandalous even today, despite softening cultural attitudes towards queer sex and championing of love is love. Even if we reject associations of Victorian prudence and the orthodoxy of civilised societies, incest is naturally given to associations of sexual abuse. Shows like Arrested Development and movies like The Royal Tenenbaums, Cruel Intentions have gone some way in giving us an alternative notion by using incest as a vehicle to examine “anxieties about intimacy and otherness…the state of the modern family.” In GOT, Dany and Jon’s liaison revealed how the same act can simultaneously induce severe judgement and incredible sympathy. Cersei’s relationship to Jamie externalises the insularity of aristocracy, how it is unwilling to look beyond itself is ultimately its undoing. In Wagner’s Ring, arguably the mother of all these dragon shows, close relations with close relatives rebels against bourgeois restrictions on sex. However, House Targaryen and its “queer” customs have been alluded to so often throughout GOT and HOTD, that one might have expected an even more nuanced representation of the theme. But HOTD doesn’t take advantage of this.
The show also asks us to ignore that Daemon is a violent murderer with impunity, a hot-tempered bully too close to the seat of power so Rhaenyra’s attraction to him feels like wilful ignorance. It’s hard to look at the age difference between them and their dalliance in the brothel and not think: grooming. In fact, King Viserys is offended by the thought of his daughter and brother together and sends Daemon away but without a word accepts their marriage when they return to King’s Landing. Even in his condition, if he could show up for his daughter in his court, he might have mustered up a few words of disappointment at least for the sake of continuity. The subsequently hasty ageing up of the characters, insufficient exposition of faith in Westeros and the moral code in turn, ordering Laenor’s assassination glosses over ethical problems all in Rhaenyra’s favour. Where contraceptive teas exist, and sex is safely separated from reproduction, HOTD does not let this separation influence action, it hardly affects Alicent’s insistence on chastity nor how the characters might view incest.
It’s plain that Rhaenyra is awarded main character privilege. In HOTD, incest is not a tool to delve deeper into the complicated link between sex and power – darker corners of sexual fantasy, where boundaries are blurred and power dynamics, unpoliced. Rather, in HOTD it serves as a symbol of Targaryen (and monarchical) exceptionalism, which is as much about eugenics as is tabooing incest against the threat of deformed children. Instead of challenging an age-old moral code like in Wagner’s operatic drama, incest in HOTD is that very code.
With Ned Stark’s death, and neither Jon Snow nor Daenerys Targaryen inheriting the throne, GOT attempted to subvert our expectations about the Chosen One – how honourability, a just cause all for short without political canny, how it doesn’t matter if a character is the protagonist, there is no miracle coming. For all her talk about birthright, Rhaenyra isn’t as careful as Cersei in protecting the secret of her virtue and then her sons’ birth despite knowing that the odds are stacked against her due to her gender. She has done nothing with the opportunity given to her by her father in fortifying her claim, gaining allies or learning anything about statecraft. She assumes that the throne will go to her Alicent’s son, wasting time and grievously injures Ser Criston’s self esteem by seducing and spurning him. She even gets the guy – the uncle she desires – no consequences and arbitrarily refuses to give Laenor, who is finally ready to show up for her, a chance. Her entitlement towards handouts and inability to comprehend that it’s her father’s blindness that protected her shows her to be naive and incompetent. Though the protagonist looks to be rebellious and unladylike, and the antagonist, not a product of ambition, but fallen morality, these attributes are cosmetic to Rhaenyra and Alicent and do not adequately animate action.
In GOT, It was frustrating to watch Sansa and Arya immediately dislike Danaerys even after she sacrifices her dragon, in bringing back their brother just like it is difficult to watch the sisterhood between Rhaenyra and Alicent break in HOTD. We are led to believe that the crack in their relationship would not exist had Rhaenyra just been honest with Alicent in the first place. But Westeros is made of mean girls, women that only distrust other women and compete with them. In HOTD, women have more screen time, and the show is serious and dry-eyed about the risks of childbirth, there are no phoenix moments rising from sexual assault and fewer moments of gratuitous nudity as compared to its predecessor. However, there is still the sense that HOTD women are developed with misguided empathy, missing the point of the outrage against GOT season 8.
Eisha Nair is an independent writer-illustrator based in Mumbai. She has written on history, art, culture, education, and film for various publications. When not pursuing call to cultural critique, she is busy drawing comics.
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