samwellthebard

[samwellthebard]

you were a child

spoilers through house of the dragon 1.07.

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from the very beginning, daemon was her avatar for the kind of freedom she could only dream of. she tells her mother she would rather fight for glory and watches daemon collect wins at the tourney. she tells alicent that she wants to fly away on dragonback and daemon does just that. rhaenyra never wanted to stowaway on a ship with a sack of oranges; she wanted to be daemon and everything he represented.

daemon knew this. he returned in 1.04 to a rhaenyra who felt constrained by her impending political marriage, and gave her one night of freedom. who knows when i’ll next taste freedom? she lived one singular day as daemon targaryen but then he “abandoned” her and it all came crashing down--because for all of alicent’s projections, rhaenyra does not have anything resembling freedom.

in describing this as abandonment, even ten years on, rhaenyra reveals that she had come to see that night as the turning point in her life; she still sees him as someone who would bestow upon her the freedom she wanted more than anything. of course he cannot--he is not the source of the burden of aegon’s dream, her political troubles, or the constraints she faces on the basis of gender--but because she was young, sheltered, and so very enthralled with him, she believed he could. some part of her still does.

that is, after all, the very problem with problematic power dynamics: that roles become blurred, that one person comes to mean too much than can be reasonably expected, that your youthful escapades happened with someone you can never truly walk away from.

if alicent wrongly sees rhaenyra as the source of her pain, rhaenyra wrongly sees daemon as her salvation.

[samwellthebard]

They will fear what else we might be capable of.

HOUSEOFTHEDRAGON (2022- )

[samwellthebard]

Imagine being Corlys though.

The family is over for your daughter’s funeral, her creepy husband says she was immolated. You look over and your son’s wife is making out with her uncle who is your daughter’s creepy husband on the beach as though all 800 people here can’t see them. Your brother keeps stopping the funeral speech to ask why the grandsons are white. Your daughter’s creepy husband audibly giggles at the eulogy. Your decrepit cousin is sundowning and thinks this is a birthday party. Your wife tells you the grandsons ARE white. One of the kids almost kills himself stealing a dragon, your granddaughters jump him and they all get into a knife fight. It’s 3am. Your decrepit cousin’s wife backhands one of the kids and shanks your son’s wife. Where is your son? Kneeling in the beach trying not to puke. You ask your son’s side piece to give him some water and you all go to bed. You wake up to the news your son somehow also got immolated. Your wife is screaming, the grandkids are gone, the sitting room is on fire, someone left a note for the wedding registry of your son’s wife and your daughter’s creepy husband and circled “coffee maker”. It is now 3:25am

[samwellthebard]

spoilers for house of the dragon up to 1.06.

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larys--in a chilling variation on maester aemon’s love is the death of duty speech--says that love will blind you, stay your hand from what needs to be done. larys, who himself seems utterly incapable of love, is speaking most obviously of viserys’ love for aemma, but also lyonel’s love for harwin and his ostensible grandchildren, rhaenyra’s love for her children, even laenor’s love for joffrey.

he has it exactly backwards. i joke that, though both sides had a moral obligation to back down from war, my heart will always be with the blacks not because of viserys’ wishes or rhaenyra’s fitness for the throne or even the principle of gender equality, but because their family stood for something worth preserving.

viserys named rhaenyra heir out of love--love for her and for aemma. in the years since his marriage with alicent and the birth of three other children, we never saw him express the kind of love towards them as he did with rhaenyra. she is, after all, the only living child of the love of his life.

“you are the very best of your mother,” he told her in front of balerion’s skull. i didn’t quite understand what he meant then because aemma’s prevailing quality in the brief time we knew her was dutifulness, a trait rhaenyra does not share. but now i think he was speaking of her capacity for love; how despite her visceral fear of childbirth, her love for her children radiates in every scene she shares with jace, luke, and joff--just as unconditional as aemma’s love for her. they too are children produced from love, as the brief moments between rhaenyra and harwin evidence.

(harwin, in a sharp contrast to criston, does not view it as an insult to be merely rhaenyra’s lover and the father of her children. he does not vie for marriage or formal acknowledgement; it was enough to be with those he loved.)

it’s no coincidence that these very reasons--the very best of them--are what make rhaenyra and her family most vulnerable to political machinations. as lyonel points out, harwin’s love for rhaenyra places them all in danger. rhaenyra’s refusal to treat her sons as anything less than her true heirs puts her claim at risk. viserys’ loyalty to rhaenyra--and to aemma--turns the hightowers against him.

some--like alicent--look at this and conclude that the trouble with viserys and rhaenyra and harwin is their unwillingness to yield to political realities. when alicent speaks of “decency,” she does not speak of moral goodness, especially when she surrounds herself with the likes of criston and larys. rather, she speaks of the idea if she had to suffer through a political marriage, so should rhaenyra. if she had to bear children who were the product of duty--alicent never once looks as happy in motherhood as tomboyish, independent rhaenyra did with her boys--so should rhaenyra. the greens are bound not by love or decency, but by resentment--or rather, ressentiment.

but for me, when a political system renders love poisonous, it is the system that is broken. viserys was a better man and a better king when he was buoyed by aemma’s love. rhaenyra is better able to stomach the ugly realities of womanhood in this world when her children are the proof of her love, and not a reminder of her loss of freedom or of marital rape, like alicent’s. viserys is right in that our capacity for love is the best of us.

the trouble is not that viserys loves rhaenyra too much, but that all children should get to grow up as rhaenyra did. for all their cruel japes, for all our aegon’s, uh, proclivities, the children very much have the capacity to be bound together by love. it will be this system--and their powerhungry parents--that beat that out of them. alicent’s telling off of aegon was a painful echo of otto sowing fear in her. that’s nothing worth calling decency.