Transcript: Hot D mid-seasonish update

This is a transcript of (the scripted portion of) my latest podcast episode, in which I discuss House of the Dragon up to episode six.

A quick content note before we begin: I’ll be discussing themes present in the show such as incest, sexual coercion, and violence against queer characters. I’ll also be discussing the plot of House of the Dragon up to episode six, and there’s a minor spoiler for Rings of Power episode three. I’ll also mention some character deaths in The Magicians and The 100, because I’ll be discussing the ‘Bury Your Gays’ trope. Okay, on with the show!

When last we met—unless you listened to my chaotic Mubi episode—I had said that I was going to continue watching both Rings of Power and House of the Dragon. That did not last long. I managed to get through the third Rings of Power episode, but only just, and I had to admit to myself that I really wasn’t enjoying this show. The third episode didn’t even have Bronwen in it! I was still kind of invested in the Harfoot storyline, and I love the dwarves though I didn’t really care about their actual plotline so far, but other than that it was not hitting for me at all. The line that actually turned me off the most was when Galadriel told Halbrand that he “chafed under the rags of the common”. I mean, Hot D has a hereditary monarchy, sure, but I don’t think it’s buying into concepts like birthright. The central thesis behind Game of Thrones has always been that power goes to the person who can play the game the best—unless you count season eight, which, let’s not. I mean, House of the Dragon explicitly tells us that inbreeding and hoarding weapons are the way that the Targs cling to power, and I don’t think it’s condoning those practices, even though Daemyra is totally hot.

Yes, I have fallen deeply into the House of the Dragon rabbit hole, so much so that I briefly started haunting the subreddit. I’ve left it now because someone was mean to me, and I know, someone on reddit being a dickhead is not headline news, but it bummed me out. Actually I think there was an influx of new members as the show increased in popularity, and the quality control really went downhill. There’d be like two posts a day where someone would say “Am I the only one who doesn’t like Daemon?” and then there’d be a bullet pointed list of all the bad things he’d done, like his character introduction wasn’t him cutting off a guy’s balls. Yeah, dude, he’s not supposed to be a nice guy! It’s like if you were in the Hannibal fandom—which I was—and had to deal with constantly being reminded that Hannibal is actually really problematic. Bullet point one: he eats people.

Anyway, I’m off the subreddit now, but for a brief window there was actually a lot of really interesting conversation happening. After episode three, there was a lot of discussion about whether Rhaenyra sleeping with Criston could be considered sexual coercion. It got quite heated, but a lot of people had nuanced and thoughtful takes. I have to say that at the time I was on the fence about it, and honestly much less invested in their dynamic than I was in the preceding scenes with Daemon, but given Criston’s subsequent behaviour in episode five, I think it actually does make a lot of sense to read him as not being entirely consenting in that scene. It’s obvious that in his ill-advised proposal to Rhaenyra, he was bargaining to try and find a way that he could incorporate what had happened into his self-concept, and when that fell apart he couldn’t handle it. You can read it as someone who read too much into casual sex, of course, but I think that his talk about honour makes it clear that this is less about any feelings for Rhaenyra and more about his own sense of self being threatened. To me, all of that is consistent with a reading of his sex scene with Rhaenyra being coercive.

On the other hand, I did notice a lot of chatter about Alicent that I felt was uncharitable and probably misogynistic in origin—I know, shocker, on reddit. I do also think a lot of that was from book readers who were letting what happens later—which I’m patchy on—colour their perceptions of the character as written on the show. It’s so obvious that Alicent has no choice or agency in marrying Viserys, to the point where she’s developed an excoriation disorder due to her anxiety around it. It was definitely interesting to see the double standards at play there, especially when a lot of people pointing to the Criston scene as being an example of sexual coercion were accusing anyone who disagreed with them of having double standards.

One more thing that I picked up from the subreddit before I fled was a very interesting observation about Mellos. Someone pointed out a look between two of the female attendants in episode one when Mellos tells Viserys that Aemma is breached and they’ve “tried everything”, and he also seems resistant to the idea of cauterisation for Viserys’ wounds later in the episode. In episode five he has another disagreement with one of his attending staff about whether to use poultices or leeches. And, of course, he brings Rhaenyra the moon tea at the end of episode four. While I’d noticed most of this, I had put it down to Mellos being stuck in his ways rather than actively plotting, but now that it’s been pointed out to me I do think that he might well have a bias towards the Hightowers and there’s something going on with this guy.

I’d also like to touch on the death of Joffrey Lonmouth in episode five. A lot of people have pointed to this as an example of ‘Bury Your Gays’. Of course, this is hard to argue with factually, and of course the emotional response some people are having to that it completely valid, but I want to explain why for me personally it wasn’t a major issue. For me, how much the death of a queer character bothers me is based on two factors: first of all, how major a character are they, and second of all, how common is permadeath on the show. So for example, while I know a lot of people were deeply upset by the death of Lexa on The 100, I have to say that I had a different reaction to it. Lexa was a relatively new character, and it was a show where major characters died all the time. Lexa wasn’t even the first of Clarke’s love interests to die on the show, let alone the first recurring character. I also felt it was pretty obvious that they were setting up her character coming back in the City of Light, which is indeed what ended up happening. Again, this isn’t to invalidate anyone else’s feelings about it, just to express my own.

A queer character death that I really was upset about was that of Quentin Coldwater on The Magicians, for a lot of reasons. This wasn’t a minor character, it was the protagonist of the show; a character whose mental illness was not only textual but was a key part of his character introduction and arc; a character whose bisexuality had fairly recently been revealed. Major characters had died on the show before, but in both cases they’d been brought back in one way or another. The thing, I think, that bothered me the most about it was that there had been a whole episode about how the show wanted to move beyond the white male protagonist and tell more diverse stories… but there was nothing stopping them from doing that without killing off a mentally ill queer character who was part of a same sex relationship, though the writers seemed to kind of forget about that. Also, the other major queer character in the show was pretty much completely sidelined for almost that entire season, because he was possessed by a monster, which was not even the first time the show had had a queer relationship break down because someone was possessed by a monster. There also was seemingly a lot of behind the scenes bullshit where most of the cast were not told that Jason Ralph was leaving, and they filmed a fake ending, and then season five—which I didn’t watch—was apparently written for spite? Listen, I don’t want to go off the rails here.

The point is, Joffrey Lonmouth was a very minor character who had only just been introduced. In terms of screen time, he’d only had slightly more than the guy who got stepped on by Caraxes a few episodes ago. It’s also a show where minor characters get offed very, very frequently. Particularly in light of the character deaths in episode six of major and beloved characters, two of whom have been around since the first episode, Joffrey’s death seems like kind of a drop in the bucket. Also, this is a Game of Thrones spin-off! Game of Thrones was notorious for killing off characters that people had got attached to. Famously, everyone was fair game. While of course I would like there to be more queer characters on TV who don’t die, I don’t really think this is the franchise to look to for that. Unlike The Magicians, which seemingly had a whole episode congratulating itself for the fact that was about to kill off its neurodivergent queer protagonist before he could even say goodbye to his monster-possessed soulmate, Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon have never billed themselves as being unproblematic bastions of positive representation. They’ve always been brutal shows full of death and incest, and while I’m not saying that insulates them from criticism by any means, and I have had major problems with Game of Thrones myself, in this instance I think that what happened was consistent with the tone of the show. Also, Laenor does now have another lover who at time of recording is still alive, so we actually still have the same number of queer characters in the show as we did before, and this one has already had almost as much to do as Joffrey ever did. But that’s just my take!

Okay, let’s move on to episode six, which comes after a major time jump and a big cast shake-up. The fantastic Milly Alcock and Emily Carey have been replaced by Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke; Theo Nate has been replaced by John Macmillan, and Savannah Steyn, who was only in one episode, has been replaced by Nanna Blondell, who… was also only in one episode.

Let’s start with Blondell. I have to say that, while the emotion of her performance was great, I was a bit thrown off by the fact that her accent was so different than what had already been established of Laena in previous episodes. As much as I love Peter Dinklage, I always had a similar problem with him, as he was the only major Game of Thrones cast member whose accent was truly terrible. Nikolaj Coster-Waldau’s was actually pretty solid, and he doesn’t even have English as a first language. I also thought that what we saw of Savannah Steyn in episode five was excellent, and it was a shame to lose her so soon. That said, I was NOT prepared for Laena to fucking die in this episode, in the first of two serious holy shit moments. If I were going to get upset about a death in this show on a metatextual level rather than just an emotional one—because there are other deaths that I’m very upset about but don’t consider bad storytelling—it would be this one. While I thought Laena’s actual death scene was really well-done, and it’s of course striking that this is a death where she has agency, in stark contrast to that of Aemma, it did feel like a but of a rush job to me. It’s also kind of convenient that she happened to have a conversation with Daemon immediately before that about how she wanted to die and how she wanted their children to be brought up. I do think this could have been drawn out a little bit more, but I think that events like this are kind of the nature of the way the show is operating, with major time-jumps between episodes.

To tackle the rest of the cast, I think John Macmillan is great, and I’ve been a big fan of Olivia Cooke for years. This is the first thing I’ve seen Emma D’Arcy do, but I think their take on the character is really interesting. In the case of both D’Arcy and Cooke, these definitely don’t feel like the same characters we’ve been watching for five previous episodes, but I think that might be deliberate. It’s striking how twisted Alicent has become compared to the victimised young girl portrayed by Emily Carey, and how passive D’Arcy’s Rhaenyra is compared to Alcock’s, but I can see how that could happen to these people after ten years of power games and parenthood.

Speaking of parenthood, let’s talk about those kids. We didn’t really get to know Rhaenyra’s that well—Jace probably did the most, but I don’t know if I got a strong (haha, STRONG) sense of who the two older boys were and how they were differentiated from one another. In the case of Alicent’s children, I think we got a lot more information. I’m not a big fan of Aegon so far—I mean, he seems like a pretty normal teenage boy, but my experiences with normal teenage boys have not been overwhelmingly positive. I’ve heard rumblings of spoilers about Aemond’s character trajectory, though I’ve been trying to avoid them, but at this point I actually think he’s a much more sympathetic character than his brother. As someone who was bullied at that age myself, I really felt for him and the way he was ganged up on by the other boys, though I absolutely think Aegon was the ringleader and I don’t really blame the Strong boys for it.

Then there’s Helaena. WHAT is going on there? I mean, she’s clearly coded neurodivergent, which I think is interesting, and Alicent’s attempts to connect with her are actually quite touching, but—and again, this is largely gleaned from spoilers I picked up on the subreddit, which I have now left—it seems like she may have some kind of psychic ability? I know this is something which somewhat runs in the Targaryen family, so it’ll be interesting to see how that develops.

Last but not least, the Dragon Twins, Baela and Rhaena (possibly not actual twins in the show). We don’t know much about Baela yet, but we know that Rhaena’s dragon egg didn’t hatch and that she feels overlooked by her father, though we have seen Daemon interact with the kids in a way that suggests he’s affectionate towards them, as he was towards their mother.

Like Rhaenyra, Daemon seemed muted this week, and I think that maybe that’s a reflection of the fact that they’ve been apart for so long. It seems like they’ve both been avoiding Dragonstone since the previous episode, and of course these two characters very much echo one another. They’ve both married Velaryon siblings and settled into marriages that fall on the contented but passionless end of the spectrum—though I think Daemon’s is by far the more successful of the two, and he and Laena wouldn’t have been a bad match at all if he weren’t hung up on Rhaenyra. While Daemon perhaps doesn’t love Laena as much as Viserys loved Aemma, it’s obviously very significant that when he’s offered the same option as his brother was, of sacrificing his wife to potentially save his unborn child, he not only refuses but doesn’t even seem to be tempted. Sure, Daemon’s under much less pressure than Viserys was to produce a male heir, but I think it does demonstrate that—for all his many flaws—Daemon isn’t as enmeshed in the heteropatriarchy as Viserys is, and I think we saw that in episode four too. Also, if Daemon had wanted to dispose of his wife, this would have been a very convenient way to do it without any blame being attached to him, and that he didn’t take that way out of the marriage—unlike in the previous episode where he actively murdered his first wife—shows that there was genuine affection and respect between the two of them.

I’ve talked about Laena’s death from a couple of different angles now, so I want to talk about the other two very shocking deaths in this episode. We lost our Strong men, Lyonel and Harwin, the two unproblematic kings of Hot D. Let me say this: I will never forgive that rat bastard Larys for this. Speaking of people I’ll never forgive, I was never the biggest fan of Criston anyway, but it turns out he’s the absolute fucking worst.

All right, I’m going to leave it at that for now, partly because [Seinfeld audio clip: “George is getting upset!”] but also because I originally was intending to put an episode out at the mid-season point, prior to episode six, but then I left it so late I thought I might as well wait until the next episode had come out, and if I wait any longer this time I might as well wait until Monday, and then I’ll probably keep procrastinating until next weekend and so on ad infinitum. I’ll probably do another one of these after episode ten. As always you can follow me on Letterboxd at panickyintheuk or email me at panickyintheuk at gmail.com. All right, until next time, valar morghulis.