The Serie House of the Dragon it has come to an end. It has been seven long and intense days of waiting – with leaks included – but finally, yesterday, Monday, all HBO Max subscribers were able to enjoy the last episode of the season of The House of the Dragon. In general terms, we can say that it was a great chapter: if 1×09 showed us how things were developing in King’s Landing with the Green Queen (Alicent), in the 1×10 we have moved to Dragonstone to see how it responds the black queen (Rhaenira). We’ve had strategy, heartbreaking moments, “fights” between dragons, and momentous conversations between several of the protagonists… including one that did not like anything to the most purists: the readers of the book fire and blood. Why?
As much as a TV series (or movie) tries to be traced to a literary work, you always have to cut moments from the books and modify certain situations or even characters that make the result not to everyone’s taste. It is the price to pay for adapting the pages of a book to the screen. In that sense, however, we can say that fans of the Game of Thrones books can be satisfied: in the main series, game of Thrones, the readers were quite satisfied (until the fiction stopped being based on them, of course) and in the adaptation of the famous dance of dragons, despite the changes introduced, the followers have not been particularly upset either, always understanding the decisions taken creative. Until today, of course.
Daemon and Rhaenyra’s relationship isn’t like that
The specific scene that has bothered so much has been the one that we can see in the middle of the episode (around minute 31:00), when Rhaenyra and Daemon discuss how to deal with the Hightower’s disloyalty and the usurpation of the throne. The prince is determined to go to the war with all the consequences, while the daughter of Viserys is much more contained, wanting to avoid at all costs the chaos and destruction that a confrontation of this caliber will cause.
Rhaenyra even throws Daemon in the face if his desire does not also respond to the hatred he has always had for Otto Hightower (“If you could take the Throne without nailing Sir Otto’s head, would you do it?”), to which Daemon asks if really this whole situation does not make him furious. She confesses to him that she has to keep in mind the Song of ice and firethe prophecy that talks about the war against the darkness of the North, the dream of the conqueror, something that makes Daemon extremely angry that ends up taking her by the neck and telling him that his brother was a slave to his omens and that he used it as an excuse to justify your “sterile reign”: “Dreaming didn’t make us kings, dragons did.”
Said moment of aggressiveness it never happens in the book. Despite the prince’s rogue personality and all his misdeeds, Daemon was always a man who professed great love for his family, something that helped to balance his way of being in the stories, even to redeem him a little, and that helped to that perception of such an ambiguous character:
I don’t understand how there are people who believe that daemon would do that to rhaenyra. yes, we know that daemon is not a saint but precisely his love for his family is what makes him a gray character and in the series they do not show that facet of him even though they recorded those scenes.
October 22, 2022 • 15:15
Why that decision with Daemon?
Without a doubt, exercising that violence against Rhaenyra does not stop drawing an aggressive and ambitious character who only cares about winning and, ultimately, sitting as close to the Iron Throne. It is not the only image that helps to have that impression of Demon: when the Black Queen is in labor, the prince does not even deign to come to her chambers to see how she is or to inquire about her condition. Instead, he prefers to be reunited with his allies to establish the strategy for the war.
We assume that the reason why the producers have decided to introduce scenes of this type is to polarize even more to the character. Both the Game of Thrones saga and fire and blood They usually show us very gray characters, who sometimes act well and others… not so well. That is even more evident in the history of the Targaryens, where the protagonists are tremendously ambiguous. This works well on its pages, but not so much on television: there is less time to explain the development of each one, so it takes radicalize a little more to both “the good” and “the bad” so that the viewer is not so lost and knows how to identify their favorite characters well (and even identify with them).
Interestingly with Daemon, despite showing the miserable that he can become in the TV series -data: it is not clear in the book that he killed his first wife-, a curious phenomenon has occurred: he has become “the boyfriend of the internet”, with a good legion of fans that have idealized him, something that even some scriptwriter of the fiction of hbo max has criticized, expressing his bewilderment at the fascination with such an element.
Will the last scene with Rhaenyra break that fascination What awakens among the followers of the series?
