Let House of the Dragon’s Women Be Evil

Photo: HBO

The people we meet in House of the Dragon’s source material, Fire & Blood, are not characters in the traditional sense. The book takes the form of a historical text told through multiple primary sources, each biased in their own way. The most fleshed-out figures are lucky if they get a single defining trait, the others are little more than cardboard cutouts with hard-to-spell names. This affords the writers and performers of House of the Dragon great leeway when it comes to characterization. From major players like eternally on-edge Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke) to minor roles such as Simon Russell Beale’s bone-dry Simon Strong, the show’s renderings are far more interesting, far more human, than their book counterparts.

However, one aspect of House of the Dragon’s coloring outside the lines of the original text has fallen short of the show’s otherwise high standards: These women aren’t evil enough!

From the off, the show has labored to soften the depictions of dueling royal ladies Rhaenyra Targaryen and Alicent Hightower. Fire & Blood’s versions are meant to be read as misogynist propaganda, court gossip hardened into historical legend. Alicent is presented as a sexually manipulative schemer, Rhaenyra a vengeful harpy. The adaptation purports to show the objective truth, which necessitates a more nuanced approach: Each is now granted sympathetic shadings with Alicent and Rhaenyra, alongside the latter’s ally Princess Rhaenys, portrayed as the rare Westerosi leaders sensible enough to foresee the devastation of a dragon-on-dragon war. While the men around them rage for battle, these women are the last ones holding out the possibility of peace.

On a thematic level, this was undoubtedly the correct move. But on a plotting level, it’s responsible for House of the Dragon’s biggest groaners. As my colleague Roxana Hadadi notes, the show’s timidity around making any character too villainous ensures major plot points hinge on misunderstandings and coincidence. This happens with the babygirls in the male cast: Aemond never meant to kill Lucerys, and Daemon never explicitly told assassins to murder a toddler; both kinda just happened. But it’s especially notable for the women, with the writers’ impulse to soften the story’s harshest elements leaving many of these characters strangely lacking agency. Alicent’s decision to back the Green coup comes not from coldhearted ambition, as it did in the books, but from her mistaking one Aegon for another, a mix-up Jen Chaney correctly pegs as more appropriate for a sitcom. This distancing effect can also be seen in season two’s approach to Rhaenyra’s Mistress of Whisperers, Mysaria. In Fire & Blood, she was a full participant in the Blood and Cheese affair, while the show establishes her as a crucial go-between who is nevertheless completely off the hook morally. Swerve hard from one set of stereotypes and you often wind up with another — in this case, a distinct gender essentialism in which women are uniformly benevolent but also a little bit naïve.

In its hesitance to allow women to express negative emotion, House of the Dragon leaves them feeling curiously detached. Rhaenyra’s son was killed in cold blood at the end of season one, but the show hasn’t treated it as the breaking point it was in the books. This Rhaenyra has the forbearance of a Buddha, and while the show is clearly drawing a contrast between her patience and the impetuousness of Aegon II, it also means its main character has spent three episodes (almost half the season) not doing much of anything. Alicent has undergone a similar alteration. While I find her affair with Criston Cole deliciously tacky, her shame at being caught in flagrante the night of Blood and Cheese has overshadowed any sort of anger over the fact that her young grandson was brutally slain in her own house. In Sunday’s episode, “The Burning Mill,” she went so far as to brush off Jaehaerys’s death, saying she cared less for him than for her grieving daughter. Alicent channeling the tragedy into self-hatred is an interesting note, but I can’t help wondering how the realm wound up with two leaders who barely hold a grudge over matters of infanticide.

House of the Dragon’s penchant for patchwork solutions to the problem of female aggression reaches peak silliness in “The Burning Mill.” The books tell us Rhaenyra “prepared for war” after the coronation of Aegon II, but the show pits her against a bevy of foolish male advisers who attempt to sideline her while ignoring her preference for peace. She’s right, of course, that a war will destroy the kingdom, but the way the writers have chosen to dramatize this makes her look daffy. Rhaenyra’s master plan turns out to be sneaking into King’s Landing dressed as a septa in an attempt to convince Alicent to unilaterally end hostilities — a scene more suited to a telenovela than a series with prestige aspirations. (Most likely, this was HOTD bowing to TV logic that says you’ve simply got to put your strongest actors onscreen together, plot be damned.) The conversation went nowhere, because there was nowhere for it to go. House of the Dragon’s Rhaenyra “prefers diplomacy” as a character trait, but she can’t actually do diplomacy. In the words of our recapper Amanda Whiting, “This is Rhaenyra’s one last stab at keeping her father’s peace and his throne all at the same time, but she’s not actually prepared to give anything up.”

I’ve seen speculation from fans that HOTD sanding down Rhaenyra’s less sympathetic sides could be a reaction to the backlash over Game of Thrones’s ending. Viewers already revolted when one dragon-riding girlboss broke bad, the thinking goes, and now the writers are worried about painting another Targaryen queen in too negative a light. We should get a test of that soon. With all alternatives to war exhausted, the Dance of the Dragons will ramp up majorly in the coming weeks. A lot of characters are about to embrace their worst selves — and it will be to everyone’s benefit if Rhaenyra and Alicent are among them.