‘House of the Dragon’s Extremely Bloody Forced Childbirth Scene is a Horrifying, Necessary Moment

The most shocking moment in the premiere of HBO‘s House of the Dragon has nothing to do with tits or dragons, but the way Aemma Arryn (Sian Brooke) is killed off the show. The Queen of the Seven Kingdoms dies in childbirth, like countless women before her; but what is so revolutionary about her death scene is how House of the Dragon never cuts away from the pain, horror, and savagery of her passing. It’s a powerful choice that reverberates throughout the show’s first season, and sets House of the Dragon apart from Game of Thrones in a big way.

House of the Dragon tells the story of how the Targaryen dynasty imploded upon itself over the question of who would succeed King Viserys (Paddy Considine) on the Iron Throne. When the show opens, the previous ruler’s eldest heir Rhaenys (Eve Best) is passed over in favor of her younger cousin Viserys, because she is a woman. By the end of House of the Dragon‘s first episode, Viserys boldly decides to name his only surviving child, Rhaenyra (Milly Alcock), as his heir (even though he has a brother). This decision is spurred by the recent loss of his beloved wife, Aemma, in childbirth. It’s a death that may have been avoided were it not for Viserys’s painful choice to allow the maesters to cut Aemma open in a mad dash to save a potential male heir.

House of the Dragon is unflinching in its portrayal of this forced birth, framing King Viserys’s decision as a grotesque, nonconsensual act. The terrified queen has to be pinned down by multiple people to let the maester attempt a crude joke of a Cesarian section, all while she screams for them to stop. She emphatically does not want to be cut open!

To hammer home the violence of this scene, Aemma’s death is intercut with Daemon Targaryen’s (Matt Smith) own brutish battle with Criston Cole (Fabian Frankel) on the tourney field. (It has to be said: the tourney takes place in a stadium that looks suspiciously like female genitalia from above. You can’t tell me that’s not symbolism. I was an English major.) When Aemma dies, blood gushes out from her belly, soaking the sheets and staining what’s been done. We hear the dim cry of a baby boy, but he also dies within the day. Her sacrifice was for nought but ashes.

This sequence is difficult to watch, but necessary. Most of our entertainment flinches away from the uglier parts of childbirth, preferring to frame the experience as a joyful miracle. The pains of birthing are depicted with a few seconds of sweat and moans; it’s more of an athletic endeavor than a fight to survive. And when childbirth goes wrong on television, it often happens offscreen or is shown in the most discreet terms, after a baby has been delivered, framed as an act of martyrdom.

Thanks to modern medicine, pregnancy and childbirth aren’t nearly as life-threatening as they were for millennia before the modern era. Nevertheless, it’s still an unpleasant, trying, traumatic experience. In a later episode, another character successfully gives birth, but then has to deal with the afterbirth — and later, milk-sore breasts and the perceived embarrassment of lactating in public. In refusing to romanticize childbirth and its aftershocks, House of the Dragon is emphasizing how women aren’t just politically squashed in this patriarchal world, but physically ground down by the demands of giving birth.

Aemma Arryn’s death scene doesn’t just set the tone for how House of the Dragon will approach the intimate experiences of women in a fresh way, but how this event traumatizes specific characters. In future episodes, Rhaenyra will rail against the notion that her most important role in the realm is to wed a lord and sire heirs. You can sort of see why that prospect would offend her now! Likewise, Viserys is a king who will become unable to choose between his loved ones. He wants to make everyone happy, which is a recipe to make no one happy. Having already decided between a wife and child to spectacularly terrible results, Viserys will likely shy away from making the same call again.

Aemma Arryn is a character that House of the Dragon could have reduced to a footnote. After all, she dies long before the events of the Targaryen civil war that is still to come. You could argue that her death in childbirth is only worth an off-handed comment or close up shot of a nurse wiping a dying woman’s brow. Instead, House of the Dragon introduces us to Aemma as a loving mother and caring wife. She is allowed space to feel things about her circumstance; and a scene where she tells Viserys she can’t mentally, physically, or emotionally be pregnant again. We are pulled into liking Aemma and seeing her as a fully-dimensional character. That just makes the visceral nature of her bloody death all the more upsetting, and all the more important for the future of House of the Dragon.