vanya

this is gonna be messy and not comprehensive but i've been thinking about this for like a week and there's just so much....... context. there's layers to this shit.

so let's start at the beginning.

You do realize that the show writers have no idea what the ages of their characters are, right? They did not even bother to establish that basic trait. They decided for Rhaenys to blow up the coronation in an impulse of "it would look cool". They have no idea what to do with adult!Rhaenyra or Daemon in general? Their personality shifts from one episode to the next?

Team Black's entire dynamic as a family is inexistent because they didn't even bothered to write it? And the only Green that is somewhat complex and entertaining in the worst way possible - for me, at least - is Aegon, but that's because Tom fought for his life to bring his own input to the character and portray him in that way. (Pretty much like Matt did with Daemon, over and over again)

Like, as much as I enjoyed what they did with Daemyra, I also realize it was by complete chance and accident. These people cannot write to save their lives. And I do very much think they will ruin them in season 2, and they will be over as a couple. But I honest to God could be fine with destroying their marriage if at least they made Rhaenyra and Daemon interesting separately (which is absolutely not going to happen either).

There are a set of recurring themes in the Gothic narrative that make the genre so apt to discuss anxieties and projections regarding the concept of family, identity and gender. It is no wonder, then, that House of the Dragon dabbles in it with both feet, reminding the audience that, above all, this is a story about the fall of a family line. Much like the House of Atreus, or the House of Usher, the Targaryens – wrapped in each other like overgrown ivy – have their destiny laid out in front of them no matter their decisions. It is what makes the story so compelling, so captivating, and it is why it becomes the perfect container to discuss gender politics especially in relation to a family (and by proxy a reign) like this. Out of all the themes of the Gothic, one in particular serves the purpose in the most encompassing way, and that is the “doubleness”, the mirroring, the doppelgänger. This trope finds its way in most commentaries about the gender experience in a Gothic space, as Luce Irigaray puts it, the double is “two lips in continuous contact”, a split in subjectivity that helps to explore the tensions between masculinity and femininity. Emma D’Arcy, who interprets older Rhaenyra in the show, touches on this concept in several interviews, saying that their character “pushes at the edges of womanhood” and “is obsessed with masculinity”. This obsession is what manifests into the trope of mirroring, as they further explain “It’s like she has a doppelgänger. The doppelgänger is Rhaenyra born male, who has access to all the things that she craves and feels to be hers”. Doubleness, henceforth, becomes a way to negotiate the differences between and within the masculine and feminine experience, the outside and inside, the public and private. To be a “double” is to resist categorization as one thing rather than the other, to discuss binary oppositions without feeling comfortable in either of the two terms opposed. To be a double, therefore, means to have a mirror, and Rhaenyra’s mirror, according to Emma D’Arcy’s words (and as I will explain, to the narrative itself), is Daemon, her uncle. According to D’Arcy “She has this amazing connection with her uncle Daemon,” and “in some ways, they’re [of] the same fabric, and yet the rules are completely different [for them].”

This is immediately clear in the narrative style adopted to characterize these two characters in the very first episode of the show. Visually and metaphorically explaining how, out of all the Targaryens in the family, they have the closest connections to their dragons. The similarities in the way Rhaenyra and Daemon treat their rides, as opposed to the way Viserys talks about dragons (in episode two he mentions how dragons are maybe too big for their world and deserve to be left in peace), mirror both each other and their position in the family. Dragons are elemental creatures, volatile and connected to their riders via an almost magical bond that digs its talons in their blood and ancestry. They are also possibly fluid in their gender, as mentioned in Fire and Blood itself “Septon Barth’s speculation that the dragons change sex at need, being ‘as mutable as flame’”. Furthermore, in High Valyrian, the word for prince (or most accurately heir) is gender neutral, further implying the doubleness and fluidity of gender when tied to the old blood of Valyria.

in episode 4 of the show daemon takes his niece rhaenyra, who is 19, to a brothel with the intent of seducing her, publicly, so it gets back to his brother viserys who has disinherited and exiled him, as an act of revenge.

rhaenyra is very into it. he’s her favorite relative, she clearly has had a crush on him for a long time, and he’s returned a dashing war hero.

daemon looks into her face, sees a sweet, eager desire - and stops. he can’t go through with it.

when confronted by his brother, daemon brings up the fact that when they were rhaenyra’s age “we fucked our way through every brothel in the street of silk.” implicitly - together.

viserys is, of course, married to his his teenage daughter’s best friend. he has already impregnated her twice. we see him maritally rape her in the same episode, intercut with the brothel scene.

viserys and daemon of course come from a family that marry brother to sister. but daemon was born a brother.

daemon - and this is something he still obviously finds painful - was married off at 16 himself, and sent away from home.

in episode 5, after viserys refuses daemon’s plea he be allowed to marry rhaenyra (to make this all right?) on grounds he is already married, daemon kills his estranged wife. he spooks her horse - it’s unclear whether this was intentional. her spine is broken, and although the scene cuts away, it’s strongly implied he finishes her off with a large rock.

he then returns to court, unencumbered, obviously with the intent of marrying rhaenyra. at her betrothal banquet to another man, in hurt fury at his abandonment and from a genuine desire, she dares him to steal her away and make her his wife. again, he cannot do it. when violence breaks out, he flees again. he knows if he did this he would destroy rhaenyra’s political prospects and relationship with her father.

10 years later, after their marriages to other people and after daemon has been widowed (natural causes, this time), they reunite. rhaenyra confronts daemon about his abandonment and he says: “i spared you. you were a child.” rhaenyra initiates both their sexual encounter and their marriage.

in episode 9, we get a depressing anecdote about daemon’s nephews, rhaenyra’s brothers, the ones by viserys and that teenage girl he married. the elder, aegon, took aemond, the younger, to a brothel when he was 13, saying “time to get it wet.” it’s clear from the way aemond tells this story he found this an upsetting experience and first experience of sex.

in episode 8, we learn aegon only pays attention to his sister-wife helaena “when he’s drunk.” we learn he has raped a teenage maid.

the point i’m trying to make is we are shown a society, a class, a family, where relationships with sex, between men and women, older generations and the young, are warped at pretty much all levels. it’s a story about patriarchy and incestuous families and intimate violence. i’m not trying to say daemon is some paragon for stopping with rhaenyra. i can hear the refrain - what does he want, a medal for being a decent human being? the point is - we see no other man in the series do this. no other man in this family realizes brothel dates with close family is probably not the best thing to be doing. no other man has a sense of sexual responsibility, especially with young women, at all. and it’s meaningful to me - genuinely very moving - in this story about how everyone is trapped in a patriarchal hellscape, in this family, to have daemon repeatedly - while still fucking up hugely and being a fucked up guy - have this ability to look into rhaenyra’s eyes in that brothel and be unable to act selfishly if it means hurting her. it means more to me than some bloodless depiction of flawless sexual ethics. it’s an important story about abusive family dynamics and cycles of violence and the absolute power of men over women within the family.

great question!

obviously talking about daemon and rhaenyra as individuals entails talking about them together, and a lot of what i like is shared between them. they are where the series is doing it’s most interesting thematic work on gender, power, and family. they are the flaws that trouble the patrilineal line: the second son, the daughter. this status as the perpetual gothic outsider makes them keen, wry, bitter observers about the things that limit them, the straightjacket of gender, the hypocrisies of power (embodied in viserys as the sort of ultimate patriarch, who rejects them both in different ways at different times.) this makes them fun and fascinating. it also lets them sit outside these structures because they view themselves as targaryens first and foremost, more dragon that human: the last of a vanished people, the heirs to a destroyed glory, to a magic that is leaving the world. and they are SO targaryen, and i will be clear - i love nearly everything about these books and this universe but the targaryens are the best thing george has created. they are the best family in fantasy literature. i do not care!!! the incest dragon atlantis people rule because they take everything most interesting and troubling about power and bloodline and inheritance and dial it up to fucking 11 to sexy unhinged effect. and daemon and rhaenyra are everything that’s great about them. the bloodlust! the obsession with the past! the desire for an intangible lost greatness! the mental unwellness! being extremely sexy! being toxic!

rhaenyra i loved instantly. i love her boldness, her arrogance, her fire, how spoiled she is, how confidant and yet heartbreakingly unsure she is, her simmering rage, and her anger specifically at the ways she’s caged and confined because of her girlhood. her final gender is “king” and in the meantime her gender is “my uncle.” she’s also this lost, hurt child whose family was totally destroyed at 15, and she’s so wounded in this very fundamental way. she is insanely horny, a horny icon. she is gaslighting gatekeeping girlbossing. she’s kind of dykey. she’s the most bisexual character of all time.

Daemon Targaryen

Children will listen

Careful the things you do

Children will see and learn

Children may not obey

But children will listen

Children will look to you for which way to turn

To learn what to be

Careful before you say "Listen to me"

Children will listen

Careful the wish you make

Wishes are children

Careful the path they take -

Wishes come true, not free

Careful the spell you cast

Not just on children

Sometimes the spell may last past what you can see

And turn against you

Careful the tale you tell

That is the spell

Children will listen

compiling my favorite "peepaw CAN fuck" tags

Goodbye, sweet boy

Rhaenyra has family who loves her like daemon gives her good advice but takes advantage of her. alicent wants to protect her but can't help judging her and viserys for all his faults loves her but isn't emotionally available to her.

aemma's death really is a pivotal point for her character that it leaves rhaenyra alone to be exploited and if her mother was alive, she would protect, inform and nurture her.

screaming licherally fabien whenever: so anyways there is this matt