Let's Work It Out On The Remix
Regarding Season 2 of House of the Dragon
I am and always will be a huge dragon show fan, like as we know, I was a BNF (big name fan) in the original Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire fandom back in the day, and I wrote about Season 1 of House of the Dragon here. So, I thought I’d offer my thoughts on season 2 of HotD now that it’s concluded (not to return until 2026!!!) and I’ve finally read Fire and Blood (F&B), the text that the show is based on. Spoilers for the show and F&B abound below.
I find it interesting how so many people are just really averse to the framing of HotD being about Rhaenyra and Alicent as like, the central pillars of the show. Part of it is misogyny yes, but also, I think that there’s this confusion about how in a show about dragons and magic and weirwood trees, the core of the show is about the relationship and bond between two women, once girls, who loved each other (and maybe always will). I don’t have any problem with the male characters on the show, they’re all problematic in their own ways, but to me at least, it seems obvious that Daemon, Aegon, and Aemond are secondary to Alicent and Rhaenyra.
I really liked Daemon’s arc in Harrenhal this season. I feel like a lot of people want Daemon to be a full out Daemon In Leather Pants, leaning against walls and looking smoldering and quipping (partly but not entirely because he’s played by Matt Smith), but that’s not remotely as interesting to me as what Daemon actually is. In season 1, Daemon flits around for decades, fucking or fighting and is allowed to running away from having to do any real reflection of who he is and what he’s done, but this season, he’s trapped in Harrenhal with Alys Rivers, and there’s no escape.
The scenes with Daemon and young!Rhaenyra are fascinating to me because that’s the first time he’s confronted with the weight of what he’s done to Rhaenyra and to little Jaehaerys. Daemon is a groomer of young girls (Rhaenyra, Laena, and Nettles in F&B), he’s a murderer, and the narrative doesn’t hold him accountable for it, which is meant to make the reader/viewer uncomfortable even while Matt Smith’s performance renders Daemon eminently likable.
Relatedly to Daemon, I’m absolutely crushed that the show doesn’t seem to be including Nettles, who rides the dragon Sheepstealer since she’s one of the few not noble characters that’s prominently featured. In F&B, she is one of the dragonseeds and she bonds to Sheepstealer by bringing him a freshly killed sheep each day, positive reinforcement so to speak. Nettles is described as a small, skinny brown girl, sometimes rumored to be Daemon’s bastard daughter, and her and Sheepstealer join Daemon and Caraxes in the Riverlands to hunt Aemond and Vhagar.
However, Rhaenyra, now Queen of the Seven Kingdoms, becomes jealous of her husband’s relationship with Nettles after Mysaria feeds her rumors that the girl shares Daemon’s bed, and orders the Lord of Maidenpool, where Daemon and Nettles were residing, to kill her. Daemon lets her escape and then he flies off to the God’s Eye where him and Aemond both perish. The point is, I really wanted to see Nettles on screen because in a way, her relationship with Daemon explicitly lays out everything that was true about him before and takes it up to eleven. He’s a middle-aged man who’s taking baths with a 16-year-old girl who might be his own daughter, he’s feeding her food from his own hand, and even if he’s not having sex with her, he’s treating her like he treated Rhaenyra as a child, and the adult Rhaenyra sees it for what it is.
By combining Rhaena and Nettles, that aspect of Daemon and Nettles’ own personhood is erased.
Speaking of Aemond, man do I love Ewan Mitchell’s performance as Aemond like what a fantastic fantasy villain. Aemond killing Lucerys by means of Vhagar (his ancient war dragon) in the season 1 finale was accidental but his killing Rhaenys Targaryen and attempting to kill his own brother Aegon were both intentional.
I actually really love the Aemond/Daemon parallels (their names are even anagrams) as well, since in a sense, Aemond IS Daemon and Daemon realizes it even if Aemond doesn’t, just like Jaime Lannister saw his younger self in Loras Tyrell centuries later. I’m looking forward to season 3 when Alys Rivers messes with Aemond’s head!
I’m one of the book readers who was okay with how Blood and Cheese was adapted. Basically, Blood and Cheese (two assassins hired by Daemon Targaryen) come across Queen Helaena and her twins, Jaehaerys and Jaehaerya, and tell her to pick the boy out and they then kill him. In the book, Helaena is with the twins and 2-year-old Maelor, and told to pick a son to kill, Helaena picks Maelor since he’s younger, and then, the assassins kill Jaehaerys. Some book readers were annoyed that the Sophie’s Choice element wasn’t directly adapted, that Helaena pointed out Jaehaerys, and that the boy’s death wasn’t shown on screen but rather his mother’s reaction. I get why they streamlined the narrative (also, no Maelor), I think it was more poignant to show Helaena’s reaction and also, I’m pretty sure it breaks some sort of labor law to depict a child being brutalized on his screen in that way.
Aegon is interesting because on the one hand he’s a rapist and I think it’s fantastic Granny Vhagar shish kabobed his cock but on the other hand, he absolutely makes perfect sense as a character, as do his siblings, Aemond and Helaena. The thing is, Alicent never actually wanted any of her children, they’re the product of marital rape and yet, they’re her children and she loves them all despite everything.
Aegon, as her oldest child born when his mother was 15, is hyper-aware of this throughout his life. In episode 9 of season 1, King Viserys has died and Criston Cole and Aemond are scouring the city for Aegon, who’s hiding out in the fighting pits where little children, including Aegon’s own bastards, fight each other for coin. Aegon openly declares he never wanted to be king while Aemond always did, and that’s the summary of their relationship: Aemond always fixes Aegon’s messes, that is, until he doesn’t.
I really like the sibling dynamic of Aegon-Aemond-Helaena because it’s just tragic. Aegon and Helaena are married as per the Targaryen tradition and have children together, but when their son is killed, they don’t know what to say to one another. Aegon drinks and rages and throws things while Helaena, who’s the local clairvoyant, retreats into herself even more and doesn’t recover until her death.
Meanwhile, Aemond and Aegon are both resentful of each other throughout their lives. Aegon is the heir, who marries their sister, and seems to have actual friends that aren’t his dragon, but Aemond is more intelligent and more cunning, fluent in Valyrian (the native Targaryen language), and the stronger of the two. It’s to Aemond directly that Criston Cole directs missives of war, not to Aegon and his council. I described it as Aemond and Criston texting outside their group chat with Aegon and I’m not wrong.
Meanwhile, Helaena loves and hates Aegon, her brother and husband, who is unfaithful to her to the point of raping other women, but he’s also the father of their children whom she loves. It’s a cycle of violence, the dragon eating its own tail, and there is no happy ending for any of them.
Criston Cole really came into his own this season. He was kind of just a violent incel in season 1, but this season, he really becomes a cipher for how mortals see the Targaryens as well as the impact being solely known as a killing machine for decades has on a man. Criston’s kind of like a proto Jaime Lannister like Jaime absolutely has a poster of Criston Cole and his “the white cloak soiled me” monologuing self in his bedroom at Casterly Rock and Cersei’s jealous because Criston is prettier than she is.
Anyways, in season 2, Criston is now having sex with Queen Alicent, taking their previously platonic co-parenting of her children with Viserys to a non-platonic level. Criston idealizes Alicent because she saved his life, but at the end of the day, he doesn’t see her as a person, just like he never really saw his former lover Rhaenyra as a person. In his final scene this season with Gwayne Hightower, Alicent’s brother, Criston lays out the thesis of the Dance of the Dragons: everything he was taught about righteousness and justice and protecting the innocent was wrong. War is out of the hands of mortal men like him and Gwayne even while they march towards their own annihilation so to speak, since the dragons, and who controls them if anybody, will decide the fates of them all.
Finally, to get to the central pillars of the show, Alicent Hightower and Rhaenyra Targaryen and man do I love them both but not as much as they love each other. They only have two scenes together this season, at the sept in episode 3 when Rhaenyra goes to Alicent and begs her to call off the war, which she obviously can’t do, and in the final episode, when Alicent comes to Dragonstone and entreats Rhaenyra, her former friend that once loved her, to end the war.
I like Rhaenyra a lot because she’s like, kind of the end game of generations of inbreeding and familial violence and weapons of mass destruction looming over them all. In a way, while she’s accountable for her own flaws and actions, she can’t escape everything that came before her, she IS a Targaryen, warts and all. This season, Rhaenyra and Daemon, her uncle-husband, are on the outs for most of it after Rhaenyra’s son, Lucerys, is killed by Aemond, and Daemon botches his attempted revenge with Blood and Cheese and kills an innocent child. In Daemon’s absence, Rhaenyra makes out with Daemon’s former lover and her own eventual Mistress of Whisperers, Mysaria, and Mysaria becomes her only confidant on Dragonstone with Daemon gone and after pushing away her son, Jacerys.
At this point in the show, Team Black is losing the war since Aemond and Vhagar have killed Rhaenys and their biggest dragon, Melys, and Daemon and his dragon, Caraxes, are off in the Riverlands having his mind scrambled by a 300-year-old witch. After the dragon Seasmoke claims Addam of Hull (Corlyn Valeryon’s bastard son) as her rider, Rhaenyra still has multiple dragons without riders, and seeks out common people with Targaryen heritage (“dragonseeds”) for Vermithor and Silverwing, the one-time mounts of King Jaehaerys (who I’d LOVE to fight in a parking lot somewhere for several reasons) and Queen Alysanne.
In universe, dragons are a sort of divine mandate that’s only granted to House Targaryen and Rhaenyra drinks that kool-aid entirely like she absolutely believes the Iron Throne is her birthright, which makes her do some … interesting things. During the Sowing of the Dragonseeds, Rhaenyra introduces the Dragonseeds to Vermithor and then strides out of the room, locking the doors behind her, having told the guards to not let any of them escape. Obviously, this ends in fire and blood since waking a man-eating, fire-breathing dragon from his slumber and providing him a bunch of edible humans and well, Vermithor and Silverwing’s eventual riders, Hugh and Ulf, will remember what she did.
In a funny way, Rhaenyra leaning into the whole “Targaryens are descended from Gods” woohoo complements her erstwhile friend Alicent’s divergence from the path of religiosity. When Rhaenyra comes to Alicent in the Sept, Alicent is taken aback but she doesn’t call for her guards, she lets Rhaenyra talk and then escape unharmed, as Rhaenyra knew she would. During their conversation, Alicent realizes she was mistaken about Viserys’ last words, that her son is not the rightful heir, and for the rest of the season, she loses her religion as Rhaenyra develops it.
In episode 7 of season 1, Alicent tries to stab Rhaenyra after Rhaenyra’s son takes out Alicent’s son’s eye, and her words hang over the rest of the show. Alicent says, “Where is duty? Where is sacrifice? It’s trampled under your pretty foot again. And now you take my son's eye, and to even that you feel entitled!” And she isn’t exactly wrong. Rhaenyra has always been free to do as she pleases, the spoiled only daughter of devoted parents, and with a dragon to boot, and Alicent hasn’t. Rhaenyra’s children were conceived through love with men that loved her, and Alicent’s children were conceived through marital rape; Rhaenyra is a loving mother to generally well-meaning sons, while Alicent’s children are a rapist, psychic, and war criminal; Rhaenyra has seemingly avoided consequences for her behavior her entire life while Alicent’s faced nothing but consequences for doing everything right.
The beauty of Alicent and Rhaenyra’s relationship is that despite everything that happens, they never stop loving each other. And it isn’t just me who believes this, the showrunners agree with this interpretation even if the rest of the fandom is frothing mad at it.
When Alicent goes to Rhaenyra in the final episode, she entreats Rhaenyra to come with her as she leaves, but through her tears, Rhaenyra declines since her role is to stay where she is, to wage war for the throne regardless of all who will die. As Alicent frees herself from the confines of her identity and stops concerning herself with how history will remember her, Rhaenyra becomes chained into her destiny, into things larger than her and the woman whose lap she rested her head on when they were both girls.
This season, Alicent’s arm gets cut during a riot in the same place she cut Rhaenyra’s arm years before, and they end up with matching scars. For the rest of their lives, they’ll be tied together by their memories, by the love that won’t go away even when it should have, and that’s just beautiful to me.
