House of the Dragon is about maniacs. Rich hot mutant killer maniacs. The Targaryens crush continents playing Fuck-Marry-Kill with their siblings and cousins. They all have monster pets and terrible hair. This should be a hot show about freaky power lunatics. Why is it so blah?
In the season 2 premiere, two Targaryens speak. Daemon plots violent vengeance. Rhaenys cautions against rashness. Their tone suggests a logical exchange between authority figures.
Remember, though, the ludicrous specifics. They are cousins and he’s her former son-in-law. Daemon’s twins — Rhaenys’ granddaughters — were betrothed to Daemon’s great-nephews, who are also Daemon’s stepsons, because he married his niece.
Lot of turbulent personal history here. Rhaenys could think Daemon is a sludge, this Don Juan slayer-parasite spiking her bloodline full of heiresses. Maybe she’s cynical enough to view him as an opportunity for her brood’s advancement. What a meal for performers to feast upon! Eve Best and Matt Smith exude, I don’t know, Hushed Intensity? House of the Dragon only wants you to know these are Serious People.
The Targaryens are not serious people. The Targaryens are crazy. If they aren’t crazy, they’re in love with crazy, which means their actions are only crazy-motivated. House of the Dragon refuses to notice this. It treats the family’s internal dynamics with extreme sincerity, often insisting that terrible deeds stem from miscommunication. It is sensitive about material that demands zero sensitivity. The long-awaited second season has had two straight episodes where everyone mopes about dead children the viewers barely knew.
Consider Rhaenyra, the most important figure on the show. She met Uncle Daemon when she was, like, a newborn. Years later, they engaged in heavy petting. I can think of six awesome disgusting reasons why the grown-up princess would marry him:
1. She seeks the clout of his dragon power and knows he’s obsessed with her, so she convinces him she loves him.
2. They’re using each other because they both desire the throne.
3. Frustration with her puny dad leads to a spiteful infatuation with his alpha brother.
4. She seeks to preserve Targaryen bloodline purity.
5. After long years of dutiful responsibility, she impulsively runs off with the bad boy of Westeros.
6. She loves a psychopath because she’s a psychopath.
These characterizations are depraved and controversial. Seducer Queen, Nefarious Ally, Not Daddy’s Little Girl Anymore, Eugenicist, Thirsty, Joker 2 Lady Gaga. Season 1 leaned into a feminist interpretation, portraying Rhaenyra as an overlooked woman in a male-dominated society.
Sexism is terrible. But no one should reign over a continent because they have the most firepower. Rhaenyra seeks dominion over everyone, of all genders, in Westeros. She is a dynastic tyrant. Rooting for her, in real-world terms, is like supporting Putin’s coolest daughter.
Obviously, you can root for anyone in fiction. But House of the Dragon wants us to find something inspirational in her struggle. The Targaryens are not inspirational. They are elfen colonizers from a decadent dead land. The nicest Targaryen is a monster, because monarchy is monstrous, especially when it depends on the existential threat that your village will be cooked.
The Targaryens are fun because they are awful. House of the Dragon looks, Paddington-ishly, for the good in people. Scenes which should have clear, wicked motivations become ham-handed and nonsensical.
At the end of season 1, Prince Lucerys (flop-haired Henry Thomas lookalike) flees Prince Aemond (eye-patched Legolas lookalike). In Fire & Blood, George R. R. Martin’s splendid source novel, the showdown is cruel. As the younger prince flees, a princess mutters to Aemond, “Was it one of your eyes he took, or one of your balls?” The cyclops kills the kid to prove testicular fortitude. The book is a faux-history built on overlapping sources, so Martin leaves open the possibility that Aemond found the boy’s corpse to cut out his dead eyes.
In the show, Aemond is shocked when his steed devours Lucerys. A simple impulse (AEMOND IS OUT FOR BLOOD) hazes into unnecessary complication (Aemond hopes to, um, wound Lucerys, I guess, maybe chase him to an island and gouge his eye out and then let him go?) The adaptation gives the murderer an alibi. It wasn’t me, it was the dragon! The dragon made me do it!
Martin knows the Targaryens are crazy, because he invented them. A Storm of Swords quotes one King’s assertion that “madness and greatness are two sides of the same coin.” When a new Targaryen is born, “the gods toss the coin in the air and the world holds its breath to see how it lands.”
The plain read on that quote is that half the family suffers from mental illness or neurological disorder — possibly because they’ve been inbreeding for centuries, they maintain unstable biochemical symbiosis with mega-reptiles, and their version of a Bar Mitzvah/Quinceañera is giving their children living weapons of mass destruction.
Mental illness is a complex issue in reality. But it is not a complex issue with the Targaryens. They are horny incest Caesars mind-melded to feral nukes. Fire & Blood features some sage counter-examples, but even the technocrat Targaryens are flawed, because they don’t see their country’s main problem is the Targaryens.
The deeper read on that “madness and greatness” line is that every Targaryen is a coin flipped constantly. Their power is madness, sometimes held at bay but never really defeated.
The best character on House of the Dragon is Helaena, currently Queen of the Seven Kingdoms, a sad mess muttering wisdom and prophecy. Phia Saban exudes the fantasmic drugginess of a fairy doped on diazepam. She was dour comic relief in season 1, and recently spent a whole episode in mourning. The show has not underlined the central horror of her life. She was married off at a young age to her older brother, a drunk rapist idiot. Her parents encouraged the union, because her parents were crazy. None of her relatives stopped the marriage, because her relatives are crazy. When she puts her babies to sleep at night, Helaena might reasonably assume her children will be forced to marry each other. This is Faulkner material, Craster’s Keep stuff, Cronenberg, Chinatown. It is so goddamn weird, and I cannot get over the sense that House of the Dragon hopes you don’t notice how weird it is.
Helaena’s brother-husband, Aegon, should be a good villain. Tom Glynn-Carney is going for Joffrey Malfoy. He understands the character better than the writers. In the season 2 premiere, Aegon gleefully nudges his son Jaehaerys to disrupt the Small Council. In interviews appended to the episode, Glynn-Carney explains:
I think Aegon is the kind of father that encourages bad behavior ‘cause he finds it funny… he’s having competitions with his children to see who can be the most rebellious. And Aegon often wins.
Here’s the boring way House of the Dragon co-creator/showrunner Ryan Condal describes the same incident:
It’s meant to be a moment of fun…But I think on a perhaps nuanced character level, this is the thing that Viserys [Aegon’s dad] never did for Aegon… I think [Viserys] enjoyed having the son but didn’t put in the work the way that he did with Rhaenyra when he was a younger man. And I think Aegon resents that, and feels that part of the reason that he’s not seen as being suited for the crown is because he didn’t get that training from his father. So now he’s going to make up for that tenfold with Jaehaerys.
Where to begin? Aegon is not nuanced, he’s a fratboy hosting broseph boozers on his stab-throne. He possesses the confidence of a mediocre Targaryen male and obviously believes he’s a great leader. Viserys didn’t “put in the work” as a parent, he gender-shamed his daughter before marrying her best friend. Does Condal honestly think Aegon wants to tutor his son? More likely, he’s keeping his advisors in line, embarrassing a Lannister with a horsey ride.
Every scene reflects this total mismatch between what we can clearly see (crazy assholes being outrageous) and what the creators hope we see (secret melancholiacs who love their kids). I get the sense Condal believes he’s managing beloved icons whose moral ambiguity invites supportive fandom. He thinks he is writing Game of Thrones. But Game of Thrones was not about the Targaryens. The predecessor series took place at the end of the family’s line. The remaining male heir was a vile dunce. His sister Daenerys was — well.
Martin began this fantasy saga with A Game of Thrones in 1996. From the beginning, he preferred the misfits. “I have a tender spot in my heart for cripples and bastards and broken things,” says the hated dwarf Lannister to the paralyzed Stark, who both must depend on their cleverness in a world of warriors. The books’ vast ensemble swelled to characters born low or falling lower. Focal aristocrats were often prodigal. Daenerys was another square peg, a highborn refugee married off to a barbarian horde. The five existing books track her rise to power. HBO’s adaptation followed the complete sweep of her life from liberator to tyrant. I won’t relitigate whether her villainous turn ruined her, or whether Dany lovers were blind to her shaky moral code. What’s important to note is the TV show flipped its Targaryen coin and landed on madness.
House of the Dragon seems chastened by the negative reaction. Condal and his collaborators don’t want to ruffle feathers. These Targaryens get treated with comparable kid gloves, even though (unlike Dany) they were born in glorious five-servants-at-bathtime privilege. Game of Thrones initially focused on outsiders, but nobody has ever been more inside than these Targaryens. Daemon is a castratin’, wife-killin’ madman who gets sad sometimes. Aegon hangs a bunch of innocent men and gets sad sometimes. Queen Alicent doesn’t stage a coup out of ambition, but because she misunderstands her dying husband’s last words. Such vast internal sorrows!
Meanwhile, in the season 2 premiere, two random nobodies we’ve never met cut off a young prince’s head. They come off like violent thugs, hired by Daemon to slay an adult prince but changing the plan to murder a younger boy. House of the Dragon could reveal that Daemon demanded the toddler decapitation. Why shroud this in secrecy? Think how much more shocking, funny, and honest it would be if Daemon screeched “BRING ME THE CUTEST PRINCE HEAD YOU CAN FIND!” Think how much more agency the writers would grant Rhaenyra if she gave the same command. Instead, the next episode strands her in reputation management, swearing she never asked for any kidskulls. The narrative stinks of elitism. The worst bad guys are the least fancy; the Targaryens stay clean. It wasn’t me, it was the poor! The poor made me do it!
So House of the Dragon reflects many of the worst ideas powering big-budget storytelling in 2024:
1. That the fabulously unrelatable lives of royals and aristocrats aspirationally relate to our own cultural struggles.
2. That most powerful characters are also the most interesting and most multi-dimensional.
3. That the dragons were the best part of Game of Thrones.
The Targaryens are not relatable. They are uncle-fucking lizard people who barbecue their enemies. Which will make them very entertaining, if the writers ever figure out this dull tragedy is a bombastic soap opera. Nuance? Let it burn.