Bizarre Gender Politics Squander House of the Dragon’s Potential

Well, mea culpa. I willed myself into not believing it — even after I saw it coming. The second season of House of the Dragon, HBO’s prequel series to the critically acclaimed Game of Thrones, has been thoroughly disappointing. Like the later seasons of Thrones, the writing has degraded the characters and the plot past the point of redemption. Unlike Thrones, however, the damage has been done not through incompetence but malice, to sate the ideological bloodlust of the showrunners in attempting to subvert the original story with progressive politics.

Unlike George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, which has infamously gone over 13 years without a new book, House of the Dragon is a prequel, allegedly based on volume one of Fire & Blood. House of the Dragon tells the story of the destructive civil war called the Dance of the Dragons. Fought between the “blacks” under Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D’Arcy) and the “greens” under King Aegon II Targaryen (Tom Glynn-Carney) and his mother Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke), the conflict brings everybody’s favorite silver-haired, dragon-riding, incest-loving family to the brink of destruction. (READ MORE: The Star Trek Election III: Men vs. Women)

Thrones went off the rails, we told ourselves, because the showrunners ran out of book material to adapt. The Dance of the Dragons, by contrast, was a completed story, and a faithful adaptation could therefore take Martin’s blueprint and make a series as strong as early Game of Thrones, and see it through to the end.

The First Season Had Warning Signs, But It was Fine

It soon became clear, however, that House of the Dragon was no such show. In the lead-up to the first season, the showrunners made a series of comments that set off alarm bells. “[T]he patriarchy would rather destroy itself than see a woman on the throne,” Cooke told the Hollywood Reporter in 2022. She continued, “If all these men just [f***ed] off … the realm would be fine. It’s the meddling and the peacocking and egos that completely muddy everything.” 

Alicent was supposed to be a “woman for Trump” sort of character that bought into a “complete indoctrination and denial of her own autonomy and rights,” according to an Entertainment Weekly article in 2022. Rhaenyra, by contrast, was supposed to be a “punk rock” character.

The first season, however, surprised many by being done competently and not bashing the audience over the head with progressive pieties. There were warning signs, to be sure. Alicent was stripped of her agency and autonomy. Instead of pushing to crown her son because she thought he had the better claim, she instead misinterprets a prophecy from her dying husband Viserys (Paddy Constantine) that refers to the first King Aegon, thinking that he means that her Aegon should rule instead of his chosen successor Rhaenyra. (READ MORE: Sound of Hope: Angel Studios’ Fight for Kids Continues)

But with deep and nuanced characters, an engaging and logical plot, and great acting and music, it seemed to fit in just fine with the early seasons of Thrones. The season ends on a shocking note when Aegon’s brother Aemond (Ewan Mitchell) uses his dragon to kill Rhaenyra’s son Lucerys (Elliot Grihault) in revenge for the boy cutting out his eye years earlier, and war becomes inevitable.

At least, that’s what you would think.

The House of Dragon’s Feminist Bent Is Too Woke to be Support Itself

One could have been forgiven for believing, as I did, that the comments from the actors and showrunners had merely been sound and fury, signifying nothing. Surely, they must not realize that the product they’ve created doesn’t comport with their worldview. But unlike its boring, meandering plot, season two goes off like a delayed fuse for all of the bizarre politics and fascinations the writers were alluding to when the series was first getting started.

Key to the problem is the relationship between the two queens. “This is a show about Alicent and Rhaenyra, about two women, and their story through the Dance of the Dragons, and will continue to be until the end,” showrunner Ryan Condal said in a Paris interview. 

To be clear, the friendship between the two is a show-only invention — the age difference between the characters in the book is too great. In the first season, one could argue this relationship provided nuance and complexity to their interactions. By the second season, however, after the two sides have killed each other’s children, it’s dragged on far past the point of believability. Yet, the two characters persist in their melodramatic and monomaniacal pseudo-sapphic romance, seemingly for no other reason than the writers demanding it.

As a result, the allegedly feminist bent of House of the Dragon can’t even support itself. If one wanted to tell a story about how women are all wise and kind and how men are dumb and brutish, it would follow that the women should be making correct choices and the men should be making incorrect ones. That isn’t the case, the framing of the showrunners notwithstanding.

Rhaenyra is weak and passive. Her inaction allows the greens to sack her cities and kill her supporters while she pouts and complains in her castle.  Her son Jacaerys (Harry Collett) and her all-male council are completely right to criticize her for these poor decisions. The writers strain so hard for their “women are wise and want to avoid bloodshed” message that Rhaenyra becomes what the men around her accuse her of being: A squeamish, indecisive leader who is unable or unwilling to do what must be done to win. (READ MORE: Shōgun is a Great Historical Drama)

Martin’s Rhaenyra, by contrast, not only wants justice for Luke but also for her daughter Visenya, who she miscarried when she learned the greens usurped her throne. “They murdered my daughter. They stole my throne and murdered my daughter, and they shall answer for it,” she says. The showrunners must have decided that that couldn’t have been true, since a woman having a backbone must surely have been an imposition by the sexist men writing the histories.

For her part, Alicent is incompetent and disloyal, and the green council is completely justified in passing her over as regent after Aegon is grievously injured in battle. She demonstrates her weakness when, after having been spurned, she defects to Rhaenyra and explicitly consents to the execution of her son Aegon. She also implicitly condemns her other sons Aemond and Daeron (who totally exist, I promise), her father Otto (Rhys Ifans), her brother Gwayne (Freddie Fox), and her lover Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel) to the same fate for their roles in the war. In attempting to make her more virtuous, they’ve turned her into a wishy-washy backstabber. 

Her exchange with Rhaenyra in the finale, and her whole arc this season, seems to have been done to belittle and humiliate her character. Cooke does a fine job acting, but the actions of her character don’t just contradict Alicent’s nature in Martin’s book, they also contradict the person we saw in season one. She demanded that Lucerys have his eye put out in payment for the one he took from Aemond. She told Aegon that, for all of his moral idiocy and degeneracy, she loved him. She put herself between Aegon and the mass-murdering dragon of Princess Rhaenys Targaryen during his coronation. But now she’s going to send him to the executioner because of the throne he never wanted and that she manipulated him into accepting?

Rhaenyra says that “history” will remember Alicent as a “cold queen” who grasped for power, which sounds as much like the writers mocking those expecting Martin’s Alicent than something being said between the characters. But that Alicent, whatever else might be said of her, loved her children and would have died before betraying them or allowing them to be killed. Alicent Hightower is perhaps the worst-adapted character from any of Martin’s books, and that’s saying something. This character waddling about on the show using her name is unworthy of it and is perhaps its most contemptible person.

Another character that was given an undue spotlight that the writers didn’t know how to utilize was Matt Smith’s Daemon Targaryen, Rhaenyra’s uncle-husband (yeah…). After yet another botched misunderstanding that results in the murder of Aegon’s son and heir, Daemon flees to a haunted castle where he spends three-fourths of the season hallucinating and ordering war crimes. His character ends up right where he began: setting aside his kingly aspirations and throwing his support behind Rhaenyra.

Daemon’s arc is emblematic of the season as a whole. We leave the first season reeling from the death of Rhaenyra’s son and knowing war is inevitable. Then, the characters seem to carry on as though nothing happened and that peace is still possible. We end the season where we ended the previous one, steeling ourselves for an inevitable war. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice…

Gender Politics Ruined an Otherwise Good Show

This is not to say that House of the Dragon doesn’t have a lot to like. The score is, as always, brilliant. The action is riveting when the show cares to have some. The battle at Rook’s Rest, especially, has to be the best dragon-on-dragon battle ever portrayed on screen, and the destruction wrought by it is palpable.

The characters are all well-acted. One that deserves a specific shoutout is Tom Glynn-Carney’s Aegon II. Despite his character’s less-than-auspicious start last season, he portrays a fascinating mix of rage, grief, resentment, and overall complexity, becoming far and away the most compelling character on screen. He’s often joined by Matthew Needham’s Larys Strong, another character who has undergone a major upgrade. Aemond is fascinating in both appearance and effect, though his transition into a cartoon villain this season felt somewhat abrupt. Otto Hightower is also a joy to watch for the two episodes he’s present. And the peasants who claim dragons are easily the best part of the second half of the season.

On the whole, though, the gender politics in general and the continued Rhaenyra-Alicent relationship specifically have dealt the House of the Dragon a mortal wound, both in-universe and on the screen.

Nobody would mistake Martin for a conservative, but his characters are always serious, complex, and realistic. In May, he wrote a cryptic blog post that failed to raise the latest adaptation of his work directly but did say:

Everywhere you look, there are more screenwriters and producers eager to take great stories and “make them their own”…. No matter how major a writer it is, no matter how great the book, there always seems to be someone on hand who thinks he can do better, eager to take the story and “improve” on it. “The book is the book, the film is the film,” they will tell you, as if they were saying something profound. Then they make the story their own.

They never make it better, though. Nine hundred ninety-nine times out of a thousand, they make it worse.

One does not need to be a master of subtext to pick up on what he means. Once again, HBO thought it knew better and could improve on Martin’s work. Once again, we are the poorer for it.

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