In George R.R. Martin’s perverted modern “fantasy,” you must kill the baby.

Unfortunately, that was often how things went in medieval times.  It was also how the communists dealt with the Romanov family less than a year after they took over Russia in 1917. But what does it mean when it is depicted by a work of art today?

House of the Dragon has some minimal entertainment value, but it owes audiences a better sense of reflection given how much the show seems to have on its mind politically.  It pretends, just as Game of Thrones did, to be complex and morally “grey” (or, more appropriately, uncertain), but is there a single one of you who prefers Team Green to Team Black?  Even though Team Black just decapitated a baby?

With that in mind, let’s talk about January 6th.

As time goes by, I encounter more and more people who have my own position on that silly little riot, which is that the failure of the Capitol Police to open fire on the crowd (not counting the one guy man enough to pull the trigger, despite his somewhat unfortunate choice of a target) makes it impossible to believe that there was ever a real threat to the transition of power that day.  If that ordeal really was the “insurrection” so many find fashionable to call it, the janitorial staff at the Capitol would have needed quadruple overtime pay to clean the blood, corpses, and shell casings off the floor by Thursday morning, and it would have been as justified as when George Washington put down the Whiskey Rebellion.  But despite this, the one constant is that both “sides” have retreated, feebly, to their self-interested positions.  Donald Trump refuses to believe that he lost the 2020 election, and insists that he was usurped from office by a cabal that is desperate to prove its legitimacy by targeting him and his supporters for the crime of saying so.  The Democrats insist that Donald Trump attempted to usurp a perfectly legitimate political process that went against him, and that the riot that took shape that day was entirely of his making, and that he’s a unique threat to basic order and stability both here and the rest of the world.

The coming election will ultimately decide which narrative the general public prefers, whether votes are cast with that in mind or not.  That is the nature of binary elections where the two parties and the champions they put forward dramatize themselves as the valiant foil to the evil of the other.  Kind of like when two factions within the same royal family each dispute the legitimacy of the other, and must forge narratives that treat facts as mere tools of convenience.  It’s hard to blame one of them for this when you know that the other must do it too.  But what you can do is blame a show for failing to intelligently comment on this.

House of the Dragon finds itself with a unique opportunity to explore the kinds of characters, politics, morals, and values that make up a world where something like January 6th can plausibly happen and examine it from all sides.  Make no mistake – Team Green conspired to seize the Iron Throne from the rightful successor and fabricated every ritual of legitimacy – religious, political, and traditional – in order to convince the world that there was no irregularity whatsoever to it.  This is the Trump narrative about Democrats in 2020.  Don’t tell me a show that preaches sanctimony through Princess Rhaenys as though she’s Hillary Clinton (the rightful queen who had every qualification for the job passed over by the Patriarchy, and who also has a philandering husband) can’t understand that.

When the Hightowers executed their plot to install one of their own on the Throne, imprisoned Rhaenys as though she was a traitor, and marched Aegon to the Dragon Pit for a coronation the size of one of our inaugurations with all the pomp and circumstance that such things entail, House of the Dragon earned its most thrilling moment when Rhaenys emerged from below the ground on her dragon and smashed the whole facade to pieces.  The part of it that made it even better was that Rhaenys did not choose to side with Team Black because it is led by a woman.  There was a principle, clearly articulated, of what made the Hightower plot so sinister, how it held its proximity to power to its advantage the way, say, the “deep state” might serve a well established political party in doing the same.

After that, House of the Dragon ended its first season with a clumsy and comical attempt to raise the stakes further, which continued into this season with the killing of that baby.  However, the bigger problem is that up to this point, the only other intelligent political observation was the folly of King Viserys I in declaring Rhaenyra as his successor – at that time thinking only of his brother Daemon as the rival heir with whom to contend – and then spending the next decade and a half or so unintentionally destabilizing that decision by siring two sons with Alicent Hightower.  It was not the decision to anoint Rhaenyra that turned out to be the problem, but rather the way he wavered on it over the rest of his reign.  He didn’t just leave the door for an alternate successor ajar.  Viserys all but invited the Hightowers to kick it down.

The reason all of this matters is because up to this point, the perspective we have been mostly denied is Daemon.  If Team Black and Team Trump have anything else in common apart from what’s been said here already, and the fact that Daemon and Donald are both degenerates, it’s that Daemon, played by the show’s greatest actor by far, almost certainly feels the depths of hatred that “the establishment,” so to speak, has for him and the lengths to which they have all traveled in conspiring to keep away from the Throne.  You’re on his side, but House of the Dragon is too afraid to establish the connection in such a way as to invite you to think about that.  It “can’t” be about Daemon the man.  But it is, though, isn’t it?

While events and action sequences in Season 2 thus far have been executed well enough to get by, the unwillingness or inability of the show to realize its greater political significance reduces any meaning it might otherwise have, and makes it that much less a work of fantasy.  Characters are shallow versions of themselves; their intentions and motivations presumed or, at most, implied with the most minimal work.  Not because there’s nothing to work with, but rather because the show is unfocused.  Like Game of Thrones before it, it cannot help but to just mindlessly hype women in power and in royal status, as though such a concept never existed before George R.R. Martin came along.  And like Game of Thrones, it seeks to pummel “realism” into its audience without awareness of the implications of that.

Like the fact that in Westeros, just like in the Middle Ages and in all places where the political system depends on blood and hereditary lineage, a baby is a legitimate target.

If this is a shock to you, it’s only because you haven’t thought about it.  There is a reason our history is rich with monarchs and emperors who wiped out rival families, even their own, to secure power.  Those who did it almost certainly believed that the same would have been done to them were the other rivals in such a position.  Is this not a commentary on human nature?  Is this not also a scathing indictment of the monarchy?  By usurping the Throne the Hightowers initiated a war that began within the Targaryen family and household – a war where every member of that family, including a child, became an objective.  But if they believed that Rhaenyra would have seen Aegon II, Helaena, Aemond, Daeron, and their bloodlines as threats, can you really blame them?  They may have simply decided, as so many others did in real life, that to save your baby, you must kill other babies.  Say what you will about January 6th.  If that’s the worst fate that might befall your “democracy” while power is being transferred, you’ve got it made pretty good.

But House of the Dragon doesn’t get that.  It cheaply advocates for a royal feminist monarchy, just like Game of Thrones did, to audiences of “people who vote” without an understanding of how such audiences might be thinking about the interplay and parallels between characters and color teams in the fantasy world and the much stranger reality in which they live.  A better show would give us a more complex set of politics and metaphors actually worth thinking about.

– Vivek