Division has left the realm writhing in misery, split between a would-be leader surviving an assassination attempt, and another whose struggle to prove their fitness has left them open to slanderous claims and presumptions of feebleness.
Then there’s the grim situation in Westeros.
Comparing American politics to George R.R. Martin's brutal fantasy universe is a classic pastime dating back to Barack Obama’s second administration, during which “Game of Thrones” premiered. However, the first season of “House of the Dragon” doesn’t as easily lend itself to facile parallels.
Once we get past the Targaryen incest of it all, it boils down to a succession story stewed in envy and that timeless plague, sexism. Then again, maybe that view is informed by this series’ proximity to the end of succession.
Still, from its first scene, “House of the Dragon” encourages us to wonder whether Princess Rhaenys, Eve Best’s slain Queen That Never Was, would have been as sensible of a ruler — or better — than Viserys, her cousin whose maleness gave him a better claim to the Iron Throne. We will never know.
All that Viserys’ named heir Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) can do is strive to restore the 80 years of peace she inherited. That task grows onerous by the day thanks to an all-male small council that doubts her abilities and, like their counterparts in King’s Landing, equates one’s suitability to rule with shows of strength.
“Regent,” the second season’s fifth episode, debuted a day after an assassination attempt on the Republican party’s then-presumed presidential nominee. It also met us amid an intraparty debate over whether his Democratic opponent, the sitting President, is fit to hold another four-year term.
The situational dissimilarities are obvious, to say nothing of what I cited in 2021: Westeros is not a democracy, and our nation’s founders opposed the notion of presidents governing as rulers.
But Martin’s stories, along with being informed by actual history, are parables of power struggles among the ruling classes. In theory, the privileged ranks inherit the charge of regulating the well-being of their subjects.
In practice, they focus more on establishing or extending their legacy or growing their family’s wealth and influence. That makes these episodes enduringly relatable to our politics. Malcontent is good for business as long as you're the one who benefits from it.
With that in mind, “House of the Dragon” wants us to pay attention to the smallfolks’ suffering as these great houses regard their farmlands and villages as resources to be sacked and their livestock as dragon food.
This is one of the reasons the story keeps checking in on Hugh the Blacksmith (Kieran Bew), the King’s Landing tradesman who unwisely places his faith in the crown’s word that he’ll be paid, and sits waiting empty-handed while his starving child grows sicker. (If you’ve read Martin’s work, and one of the series’ flaws is that it appears to assume most of the audience has, you may be right to suspect that he has a bigger role to play down the road.)
When the rich want war, the little people suffer; when the wiser among the powerful try to “turn down the temperature,” their allies see that as folly and their opponents as frailty.
Westeros is not a democracy, and our nation’s founders opposed the notion of presidents governing as rulers.
Rhaenyra may have a few more dragons than her rivals, and Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney), the half-brother who usurped her throne, might have earned some cheers from the commoners by waving his sword in the air. But both are weak leaders. Rhaenyra looks like the nobler of the two by striving to honor her father’s diplomatic legacy. Marrying his hot-headed brother Daemon (Matt Smith), a man who would rule through fear and murder, makes that next to impossible.
While Rhaenyra disappears to sue for peace by appealing to her father’s second wife the Dowager Queen Alicent (Olivia Cooke), Daemon busily inserts himself between two warring clans, the Blackwoods and the Brackens. He instructs his Blackwood ally to take his enemy's children hostage and put their unarmed kinsmen to the sword to force their allegiance.
To the dithering lords of the great houses, that is what a man of action does.
House of the Dragon (HBO)
“Regent” reminds us yet again of how sexist Westerosi politics can be, which shouldn’t be a surprise. Every woman in “Game of Thrones” faces some version of misogynist dismissal. The smartest figure out how to manipulate their circumstances or work around them to achieve their ends. Why should the players in its prequel display more enlightened behavior?
As such, Rhaenyra chafing at the way she’s treated by the lords who are supposedly on her side is familiar. Men like Ser Alfred (Jamie Kenna) mansplaining that “the gentler sex heretofore has not been much privy to the strategies of battle or their execution” is not so far removed from Tywin Lannister chiding Cersei for not being smart enough to manage the top job.
Rhaenyra is savvier than the Lannister Queen Who Shouldn’t Have Been, pointing out that the previous ruler’s decades without major conflict means he hasn’t seen any battles either.
Yet her cabinet insists she remains safely ensconced on Dragonstone, while Ser Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel) parades the dragon Meleys’ head through the streets of King’s Landing. “They speak around me, not to me,” Rhaenyra says to Mysaria (Sonoya Mizuno). “They would make me queen, but they wish to keep me here confined.”
Alicent isn’t faring much better in King's Landing. With the son she installed on the throne clinging to life and looking like an overdone grilled cheese, Alicent mistakenly assumes the weight of ruling in his stead would naturally fall to her.
She reminds her (again, entirely male) small council that she spent many years guiding the realm as her husband rotted away in their bed chambers. That’s not entirely true, since her father Otto (Rhys Ifans) was the one telling her what to say and how to act.
Tom Glynn Carney as Aegon and Olivia Cooke as Alicent in "House of the Dragon" (HBO)
No matter. Alicent lacks the qualifier that counts, which is a fleshy dangle between her legs. Aegon's little brother and would-be assassin Aemond (Ewan Mitchell), on the other hand, has one of those along with the largest she-dragon in the realm.
It’s agreed in principle that Alicent is right when she tells her advisers that Aemond is a fearsome dragon rider best employed in the field. Nevertheless, as Alicent’s heretofore most stalwart whisperer Ser Larys Strong (Matthew Needham) points out while stabbing her in the back, Aemond is next in line for the throne. Besides, he asks, what would it say if, in response to Rhaenyra’s claim, “we raised up a woman of our own?”
When Ser Criston also throws in with Aemond, Alicent realizes that all her Cole smashing and private footsy shows for Larys were for nothing. The Aemond ayes have it, and Alicent’s one-eyed monster smoothly takes the head of the table, ready to torch the realm.
Looking backward at what might have been doesn’t help us figure out an exit to the current and extremely distressing situation at play in the second season of “House of the Dragon” and in our country.
Rhaenyra and Rhaenys are not Hillary Clinton or Kamala Harris. One might be tempted to liken Aemond to JD Vance, the next in line to the Oval Office if Donald Trump wins and his McDonald’s habit catches up with his 80-year-old heart valves. But Aemond is more experienced in statecraft and, importantly, consistent in his hatred for the comatose king.
As he points out last season while scouring the bowels of King’s Landing to find the drunken playboy, he was the one training with the sword and diligently learning Westeros’ history while Aegon didn’t even want to be king.
That changes, of course, when the hungover eldest child takes in his people's forced adulation, which is enough to persuade him he can run the world.
“I can . . . have to . . . make a war?” Aegon strings together in poor High Valyrian only his brother understands. Aemond is not impressed, so when he has the opportunity, he roasts him.
Ewan Mitchell as Aemond in "House of the Dragon" (HBO)
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Both major American political parties either overtly or tacitly make the case that their candidate’s age matters less than the public thinks since each is surrounded by an apparatus ready to step in and continue enacting their leader’s platform.
One side is positioning itself as the only option for Americans who want to keep our democracy. The other promises to fire all sitting government officials and install loyalists to the man pumping his fist in the air and exhorting his followers to fight – a star who wasn’t expecting to be king and suddenly realizes he enjoys the power.
Looking backward at what might have been doesn’t help us figure out an exit to the current and extremely distressing situation at play.
That is not to say the other guy – OK, I’m talking about Joe Biden — is without fault. He can’t make Rhaenyra’s claim that “The path I walk has never been trod,” for one. Biden has a track record of policy successes and geopolitical stumbles just during his administration that have cost him previously reliable coalitions.
He has also held the fewest press conferences since Ronald Reagan, and that choice to limit his unscripted appearances before the public made his poor debate performance especially shocking.
Trump, meanwhile, has done nothing but speak nonsense to his base, who loves him for it. Since he was pried out of office, he and his surrogates have vigorously promoted the Big Lie along with a slew of other falsehoods and terrifying promises about the vengeance he’ll visit on his “enemies” if he’s voted back into the White House. From their sky suites, the donor class is pleased to see the odds swaying in their favor.
On the ground are their servants who either believe that rich people want them to be rich too, or take comfort in knowing they’re more favored than others. Some of them are ready, to quote Daemon’s orders to his Blackwood ally, to “do things the crown itself must not be seen to do . . . Show them your worst.”
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Everyone else’s alarm may be reflected in Alicent’s quiet hyperventilating with her eyes frozen wide with horror and disillusionment as she finally grasps her total powerlessness.
Her son Aemond, the realm’s official regent, responds to word of the smallfolk exodus from King’s Landing not by asking what can be done to ease their fear and the famine gripping the city, but by acting to prevent word of the city’s dire situation (i.e. “fake news”) from spreading through the land.
“Let the gates be closed,” he says. “No one is to leave or enter save consent – merchants, so forth.” Shortly afterward Hugh the blacksmith and his wife and child are being crushed by the crowds desperately pushing against the soldiers standing in the way of their freedom.
But this is just a story about a land where dragons are real, right? One where the people believe them to be gods until a bloodthirsty knight parades the head of one like a trophy through the streets. Mysaria tells Rhaenyra this is a miscalculation: “The people see an ill omen,” she says. “They are afraid. Bread is scarce. The King has fallen. They whisper to each other that when Viserys lived, there was peace.”
To the discontented rumors are feed, Mysaria tells her queen, advising her to let others do what she can’t. Rhaenyra half-smiles at her courtier’s assurance that sowing rhetoric to counter Aemond and Alicent’s could help her. Here in the real world we know such conspiracy-mongering doesn't lead to a good place, leaving us to ask the same anxious question as Westeros' smallfolk: where can we possibly go from here?
New episodes of "House of the Dragon" premiere at 9 p.m. Sundays on HBO and on Max.
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