Durgan vs Elfe: The House Of The Dragon

My migraines are kicking up again and as such I haven’t been reading a whole lot, but by a happy coincidence two major fantasy TV shows–Game Of Thrones prequel House Of The Dragon and Lord Of The Rings prequel(?) The Rings Of Power–are starting almost back to back. In lieu of having anything else to talk about, here’s my review of the first two episodes of the former; a Rings Of Power post will follow after its streaming premiere on the 2nd of September.

I guess I am, technically, a Game Of Thrones fan, in the sense that I watched every episode of it and enjoyed it more than I didn’t. However, my feelings on the series are a lot more muted than the real hardcore fans—I didn’t like the earlier seasons as much as other people, I didn’t hate the last two as much as other people (or, really, at all; I was actually fine with all of the things that happened at the end, it was just the rushed pacing that tripped it up).

So while I’m interested enough to watch the episodes as they come out, I’m not exactly going into this vibrating with excitement. I didn’t watch any of the trailers and didn’t know what it was going to be about beyond the absolute basics, which is also how I experienced Game Of Thrones. How do these first two episodes compare?

Game Of Dragon: House Of The Thrones takes place 217 years before the birth of Daenarys, during a time when Westeros is firmly under the control of house Targaryen, white-haired incestuous dragon-riders who all have names like Vhrisaryaes and Rhalenaeaea. That control is under serious threat due to a good old-fashioned succession crisis, king Viserys I having not managed to produce a male heir. This situation has multiple interested parties jockeying for the Iron Throne, especially since Viserys’ own ascension to kingship was rather contentious to begin with and left a lot of bad blood in its wake.

The original plan to defuse this powder keg was for Viserys’ younger brother Daemon to serve as heir, but when that idea gets scrapped following Daemon turning out to be this show’s obligatory depraved-rape-and-murder-guy, Viserys breaks with centuries of tradition and appoints his daughter Rhaenyra. Which, of course, just emboldens the vultures circling the throne, as an unmarried teenage girl as heir looks like a weak point too good to pass up.

So in a way, this feels like a re-do of the original Game Of Thrones. “Oh, you didn’t like the fact that Daenarys turned evil at the end? Here’s another white-haired dragon girl, we promise this one won’t burn down any cities.”

But at the same time, there are pretty clear differences. The show appears to be focusing much more firmly on the political machinations and wars that accompany the downfall of House Targaryen, with the Long Night and the White Walkers being a distant future threat known only to Viserys and Rhaenyra. Since I always felt the ground-level human action in GoT was a lot more successful than the more fantastical elements, this is a welcome shift in focus.

Other aspects of the production also come across like attempts to address long-standing criticisms of the original series. King’s Landing is now a bit more diverse and cosmopolitan, which if you think about it makes sense for a major capital and trading hub situated a stone’s throw from a continent with a mostly non-white poulation. More significantly, House Of The Dragon’s major central theme, as stated in its opening scene and reiterated by the setup of the plot, seems to be the role of women in Westeros (or at least the royal halls of Westeros, which is the only part of Westeros these stories actually care about—more on that in a second). 

Game Of Thrones went through kind of a strange transformation over its eight seasons, starting out in the typical grimdark fantasy vein with women being primarily disempowered victims, before undergoing something of a girl-boss makeover by the time the show wrapped, with multiple Westerosi kingdoms and important court positions now being in the hands of female rulers (Daenerys turning into Dragon Hitler arguably spoiled this, although you could equally see it as equal-opportunity villainy). This rang kind of hollow for a lot of people due to a failure to really address why all those women started out as disempowered victims to begin with; House Of The Dragon appears to be trying to address this head-on.

This is where we run into some potential problems. The other thing Game Of Thrones (and the books, and a lot of grimdark fantasy in a similar vein) was infamous for was having a lot of rather brutal sexual violence inflicted on its female characters, in a manner that a certain stripe of fantasy reader will insist is absolutely integral to telling an “authentic” story set in a medieval-inspired setting (while ignoring all of the other ways these stories deviate from the historical mileus they’re drawing from, but that’s an issue for another day).

House Of The Dragon continues this proud tradition, with the first episode featuring what might be one of the most off-putting scenes of this nature ever featured on television. How—or whether—the show addresses this going forward is going to make or break its attempt at tackling misogyny and gender roles.

One of the big problems with Game Of Thrones’ depiction of violence against women was its tendency to feature these brutal incidents and then just move on without the scenes in question having any more relevance to the plot or the characters they happen to. This, more than anything else, contributes to the feeling that all of this rape and gendered violence is being inserted into the show for no reason other than to spice the story up with shocking content, something that in my opinion it already had a baseline issue with in its plot outside of any consideration of gender. 

So if House Of The Dragon is going to seriously try to put the misogyny of its world under the microscope in a way that its predecessor never got around to, then this scene, and any future scenes like it, needs to have some purpose beyond making the viewer say “Woaaaaah, man! Dude!”