House of the Dragon Just Made Incest Taboo Again

Spoilers follow for House of the Dragon through the fifth episode, “Regent,” which premiered on HBO on July 14. 

It takes a lot to one-up Game of Thrones when it comes to incest. That series had twins who were sleeping together since their adolescence and whose secret children were lined up to rule the kingdom, an heiress whose crummy older brother molested her, a wildling who married his own daughters and sacrificed their sons to a race of ice monsters, and an overprotective mother who still breastfed her tween son. GOT had no shortage of gross images, but wimpy heir Robin Arryn suckling away at his mother Lysa’s breast is one of the worst. It’s impressive, then, that in “Regent,” House of the Dragon has Daemon Targaryen say to Robin, “Hey, kid, hold my breast milk,” with an Oedipal sex dream so unsettling that it shakes the foundations of this series’ established acceptance of interfamilial love.

Incest is pretty much a given in George R.R. Martin’s Westeros, but until now, GOT and HotD have approached it with different levels of approval. In GOT, incest is a great taboo, and those linked to it are portrayed as inherently villainous: Joffrey’s insane cruelty is implied to be a natural by-product of his parents’ unnatural deviance, Craster is an abusive monster, and Lysa is so paranoid and deranged that she wants to be the only woman in her son’s life. It felt incongruous when GOT tried to frame Cersei and Jaime as tragic lovers who died together because so much of their relationship in the series and in the books — Cersei’s scorning of Jaime after he befriends Brienne, Jaime raping Cersei next to Joffrey’s corpse — had been shaped by their own codependency and resentment of each other. (“The things I do for love” is not meant to be a grand declaration!) And Viserys coveting Dany was a sadistic example of his own obsolescence; while intermarriage may have been common for House Targaryen decades ago, Viserys clinging to customs of the past was a sign of his own unfitness to rule in the present.

But 200 years before, when Targaryens were ruling the Seven Kingdoms and trying to keep their bloodlines pure, marrying each other — or, as a backup, marrying into families with ties to Old Valyria like the Velaryons — was convention and tradition. Silver hair, let’s go there, you know what I’m saying? Within that context, HotD has presented its incestuous relationships in a more neutral or even positive light. The series barely spends any time with Viserys’ wife and cousin, Aemma, before she dies in a horrific childbirth scene, but Viserys is shown to have genuinely loved and mourned her for years, even after marrying Alicent. Before Rhaenyra marries Daemon, she marries her cousin Laenor, an engagement that’s matter-of-factly treated as political maneuvering to keep the Old Valyrian bonds strong. (Recall that Laenor’s parents, Rhaenys and Corlys, initially wanted Viserys to marry their 12-year-old daughter, Laena, and tried to sweeten the deal on both sides by promising that Viserys didn’t have to bed her until she was 14. Viserys’s issue with the suggestion wasn’t the incest but Laena’s age.) And even if incestuous marriages like Aegon and Helaena’s aren’t great, they’re not presented as inherently flawed because of the incest so much as because of the shitty husbands involved.

Speaking of shitty husbands, that leads us back to Daemon, who has always been a contradiction when it comes to HotD’s stance on incest. He practically ruins a young Rhaenyra’s honor after flirting with (and arguably grooming) her in her adolescence, yet years later, their sex scene by the beach and forehead touch during their wedding are presented as sincerely affectionate and emotional moments. He mostly ignored his daughters Rhaena and Baela after the death of their mother, Laena, his second wife and second cousin, but when Laena was alive, their marriage seemed somewhat solid. At the same time, Daemon is also an ambitious, aggrieved prince put out by the fact that he didn’t get to rule the Seven Kingdoms, and so much of his character development is shaped by his bitterness toward elder brother Viserys; when Viserys didn’t want Rhaenyra to end up with Daemon, it wasn’t because of an anti-incest stance but because he knew his younger brother was a brat with his eye on the Iron Throne. HotD’s lack of a clear bad-good incest binary, like GOT’s, is embodied within Daemon, which is why his imagined dalliance with another silver-haired woman in “Regent” is so disruptive to the series’ established approach.

HotD has been clever in its dispensation of Daemon’s Harrenhal visions, conditioning us to think about them as flashbacks to versions of Daemon we’ve seen before. (These visions are all unique to the series; of the relationship between Daemon and the witch Alys Rivers, who might be causing his dreams, Fire & Blood states, “Whatever her powers, it would seem Daemon Targaryen was immune to them, for little is heard of this supposed sorceress whilst the prince held Harrenhal.”) But notice that Daemon hasn’t been having visions of Lady Rhea Royce, his first wife who he murdered, or Mysaria, the sex worker turned fake baby mama who is introduced offering Daemon a prostitute “with silver hair” to help with his erectile dysfunction. They don’t rate in his history of kinfolk lust, while Rhaenyra and Laena — and, it’s implied, the unnamed woman in this sex dream — do. Whatever entity is manipulating Daemon into these visions, it’s underscoring in these dreams a baseline level of ick connected to Daemon’s most agonizing and repressed relationships; his incestuous history is simultaneously a regret and a pressure point.

Even within this through-line of Daemon’s visions, though, this one immediately stands out. It looks unlike the rest of HotD, with its soft-focus camerawork, warm lighting, all-white aesthetic (except for that weirwood bed), and center-aligned shots of Daemon and this mystery woman caressing each other and gently writhing around. It sounds unlike the rest of HotD, too, since this woman is telling Daemon everything he wants to hear: cooing that he was “always the strong one,” insisting that Viserys was “unsuited for the crown,” and assuring Daemon he was “made to wear it.” Matt Smith keeps his face beatific during all these affirmations, and it’s the most blissful the character has ever looked.

The bait and switch here is multilevel, since the scene’s idyllic vibe is so clearly at odds with Daemon’s many, many insecurities. The scene’s focus on Viserys heavily suggests that this woman is Aemma, Viserys’s wife who died decades ago, and given how Daemon’s Harrenhal visions have moved backward throughout his life, this would make sense. Daemon coveted everything else about his brother’s life, why not his wife? That suggestion aligns with Daemon as a usurper, the passed-over heir trying to make his own claim on the crown. Even the trail of blood that Daemon spreads over the woman’s neck seems to align with her being Aemma, whose gory death occurred in such a bed.

Daemon dreaming of cuckolding his brother with his brother’s wife is fucked-up enough. But for HotD to twist the metaphorical knife by revealing the woman as the siblings’ mother, Alyssa, who says to Daemon, in her last line in the scene, “If only you’d been born first, my favorite son” as he’s killing her? That’s a real “stop, he’s already dead” moment not only for us viewers but for Daemon himself, who looks unmoored as he breaks out of the hallucination. Is he upset that the dream isn’t real or that his mother was its focus? Is he confused by how rapidly he’s losing time, or by how much the dream revealed about his unending jealousy of Viserys? Does he think, like I do, that the duck Ser Simon Strong served was way too bloody? Take your pick, because they’re all persuasive evidence for why Daemon imagining a tender sex scene with his mother is deeply, irredeemably wrong, no matter how many other times we’ve seen relatives get physical on HotD. (Something else to consider: For all of Rhaenyra’s support of the “ice and fire” prophecy, we know that chosen saviors Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen don’t go the romantic distance; they’re another incestuous coupling doomed by the nature of their nephew-and-aunt relationship.)

HotD introducing a major character through an incestuous sex scene that becomes a morbid death scene, and throwing in some Oedipal complex stuff for good measure, is the series beating GOT at its own shock-value game. Yet it’s also a moment of HotD arcing back to its predecessor in terms of making incest feel genuinely taboo. Daemon has been a mercurial character from the beginning, but this vision goes a long way in clarifying his yawning and destructive need for validation, and simultaneously disrupting how normalized incest has otherwise become in HotD. Foregrounding the woman who helped make Daemon Daemon is a solid way to hammer that home — especially when you realize that one of the few pleasant conversations Viserys and Daemon had in season one was when Viserys insisted to Daemon, after the latter’s battle triumph in the Stepstones, that he was “always” their mother’s favorite.