The House of the Dragon Goes to War

Last week, Max, formerly known as HBO, dropped not one but two trailers for the second season of House of the Dragon, a series based off of George R.R. Martin’s Fire & Blood. The show is a prequel to Game of Thrones, which aired its final season in 2019. 

Unconventionally, the two trailers ask viewers to “pick a side” in the battle for the throne between the “Blacks,” led by Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D’Arcy), and the “Greens,” led by her half-brother King Aegon II Targaryen (Tom Glynn-Carney), with the “blacking” of his mother and Rhaenyra’s childhood friend, Queen Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke). This strategy telegraphs a noticeable and welcome shift from the first season of the show and suggests that politics will further recede in favor of the character-driven action and drama that has been the mainstay of Martin’s world of ice and fire.

Franchise reboots and adaptations have been having a rough go of it recently. The Star Wars sequel trilogy and subsequent Disney shows have all felt soulless. The Wheel of Time and The Rings of Power were both mediocre. After a promising first season, Netflix’s The Witcher went off the rails. Even the latter half of Game of Thrones, especially its final two seasons, simply didn’t measure up to the rest. But House of the Dragon has stood out by performing remarkably well. It has deep, realistic characters, a plot that is both engaging and easy to follow, and phenomenal acting.

Were there problems with season one? Of course. The season had some janky pacing, with months or years passing between episodes and some characters, like Ser Criston Cole, never seeming to age a day. Book readers wonder how Prince Daeron the Daring became Daeron the Disappearing. The callbacks to the main series just serve to remind everyone about how poorly it ended; after all, the long night wasn’t all that long, the realm didn’t need to be united to overcome it, and it just wasn’t anything worth worrying about.

While not “strangled by wokeness” as some feared, House of the Dragon has thus far been incredibly reluctant to have any of its female characters do anything morally condemnable, at least on purpose. Princess Rhaenys Targaryen’s decision to murder thousands of peasants for no discernible reason doesn’t count because they don’t qualify as people anyway, and it looked cool, at least according to the showrunners. 

Alicent’s character was especially sterilized. Instead of believing that her children have a better claim to the throne than Rhaenyra’s “brood of bastards” and orchestrating the plot to crown her son, she’s shocked and outraged that the other Greens have been plotting to make him king. In addition, she thinks that Viserys wanted her son, Aegon, to be king because of some inconsistent and clearly delirious words he said right before he died. It just so happens that everyone around her was already planning on crowing Aegon anyway, so, because of this insane luck, she goes along with it. (The forced friendship between her and Rhaenyra is entirely an HBO invention that the show likely would have been better off without. When Alicent married King Viserys in the original story, she was 19 and Rhaenyra was only 9. Fire & Blood tells us that they got along well enough, but the age difference between them makes it hard to believe that they were truly friends.) None of it makes her look like a good person. It just robs the dowager queen of all of her agency and paints her as a gullible idiot.

Now, in spite of the objectionable way the ball got moving, it’s careening down the hill. Its inertia necessitates that it smash into things in ways equally horrifying and entertaining, and everyone, man and woman, seems set to get their hands dirty. Battles will be waged, dragons will fight each other in stupendously expensive CGI scenes, characters you love will do horrible things and/or die when you least expect it, and there will probably be quite a bit of nudity. This is HBO, after all.

One notable area where the show seems to be making amends for the last season — and heeding the advice of some smart critics — is in its treatment of the Greens and Aegon II. As the actor who played him worried publicly, the king claimant was made too evil too quickly in season one. Portraying him as a rapist who enjoys watching his bastard children participate in child-fighting pits was a conscious deviation from Fire & Blood that made any nuance going forward difficult. It was a too on-the-nose signal that you’re supposed to hate the guy.

It appears, however, that this was a case of incompetence rather than malice. The writers have said: “We are very sympathetic towards [Aegon] because we were very conscious that we didn’t want him to be Joffrey [Baratheon from Game of Thrones]. He’s not a sadist.” What is done cannot be undone, but season two seems set to let Glynn-Carney play a more dynamic, less cartoonish antagonist. Given how little he had to work with, he gave a phenomenal performance in the first season, and I’m looking forward to seeing more.

People often read A Song of Ice and Fire as a liberal or deconstructionist critique of The Lord of the Rings. There is something to that perspective; Martin himself has said: “I look at the end and it says Aragorn is the king and he says, ‘And Aragorn ruled wisely and well for 100 years’ or something. It’s easy to write that sentence. But I want to know what was his tax policy, and what did he do when famine struck the land? And what did he do with all those Orcs?”

But a paradox that nobody seems to have grappled with is that the world and characters are certainly not “woke” in any modern sense. Instead of a Manichean good-versus-evil narrative, Martin writes about the human heart in conflict with itself, about how most of his characters are not fully good or fully bad but instead shades of gray. His approach is more Dostoevsky than Rousseau.

All the dominoes have been set up. Now, it’s time to sit back and watch how they fall. As the trailer puts it so eloquently: to war, then!

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