Hello, everyone and welcome back to this week’s Trauma Response newsletter. This week has been pretty funny. I originally wrote this newsletter for The Friday Post, but then it got too long and I decided it would be better for Tuesday so I just wrote a little blurb for Friday saying there would be no Friday post. Then I got into an argument with a leftist cell of the Chicago cycling community on Twitter and wrote about that for Friday. Things continued normally from then on, but I’m happy I was able to get out a satisfactory Friday post, and one I find especially interesting.
For this week I want to discuss one of my favorite shows on television right now, and no, for once it’s not one of The Real Housewives! Today we will be discussing HBO’s House of the Dragon, the first and possibly only one of a handful of HBO’s planned Game of Thrones spin-offs we’ve yet to see, and how I believe it is being unfairly criticized in the media. Strap in as I take you on a perilous discussion about dragons, incest, death by cesarean section, art, art criticism, and, of course, the internet. Let’s get to it!
When House of the Dragon was announced I was cautiously stoked. I was a big fan of Game of Thrones when it was on (and, more importantly, when it was good), and House of the Dragon centers around the fictional Targaryen family dynasty and is set over 100 years before the events of Game of Thrones. My favorite character from Thrones was Daenerys Targaryen, so my ears definitely perked up when I found out we would be getting a show entirely devoted to her family. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t a little worried about the new show, but I knew it was in the capable hands of writer George R. R. Martin who wrote the book Fire & Blood that the series is based on, as well as the original Game of Thrones book series. From the first episode, I was instantly hooked. A medieval fantasy world with blood, deception, violence, intrigue, and even more dragons and incest than Thrones had! What’s not to love? Game of Thrones was a bit of a phenomenon because it was billed as “fantasy for people who don’t like fantasy.” It wasn’t afraid to be dark, it wasn’t afraid to be sexy, and it wasn’t afraid to kill off main characters when you least expected it. Westeros, the fictional continent where the show is set, is a gritty world that is supposed to more or less mirror what life was like in the real medieval ages, just with more dragons. House of the Dragon is just the same.
I wanted to talk about this show several weeks ago right after the first episode aired. Not only because I already knew I loved it, but because in the days following its airing certain people had certain opinions that I found silly. In the first episode of House of the Dragon, spoiler alert, King Viserys’ wife Aemma Targaryen goes into labor for the birth of their second child, their first child Rhaenyra is a girl and therefore deemed unsuitable to be an heir, so this next baby is important. Complications arise during the baby’s delivery, and Viserys is forced to choose: save the baby, who might be a boy, via emergency medieval C-section, but the mother will die, or save his wife that he loves, but the baby will die. Again, spoiler alert, Viserys chooses to save the baby which (hooray!) turns out to be a boy. Sadly, the newborn baby boy, and prospective heir, dies shortly after. With his wife and now newborn son both dead, basically by his hand, Viserys is left with less than he had before. Twitter user Gabe Hudson had this to say:
Hudson continues the thread by calling the House of the Dragon writers “psychopaths,” and admonishes them for putting out such “garbage” in a “post Roe world.” He goes on further, calling Game of Thrones the “most MAGA tv show ever,” despite it originally airing in 2011, and “soft porn for white supremacists,” with no real reasoning. In a sense, I can understand the ethos behind his Twitter thread. Roe v. Wade was rolled back in the weeks preceding the first House of the Dragon episode, so seeing a woman die after being forced to give birth probably would trigger some people. However the writers of House of the Dragon would have had no way of knowing Roe v. Wade would be overturned when they wrote, filmed, and edited the episode months and months ago, and even if they did the scene in question is integral to the plot and I’m happy they kept it in.
Game of Thrones was never not a brutal show, and to expect House of the Dragon to be anything less would be misguided. It is a horrific and grueling scene, no doubt about it, but if anything I think that it highlights a tragic reality of a post-Roe world. The woman is sacrificed in favor of the baby, is that not part of what pro-choicers are fighting against? Either way, the Dragon writers were not trying to make a political statement with the birth scene, they were trying to tell a story that is ripped from the pages of George R. R. Martin’s books. It’s unfair and stupid to judge a piece of media on a perceived slight against your own political ideology, and takes a considerable amount of media illiteracy for a man like Gabe Hudson, the editor-at-large for McSweeney’s Publishing, to think that this show is “MAGA” because of that.
In the fifth episode of House of the Dragon, Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen, now the heir to the Iron Throne after the death of her baby brother, bends to her father’s wishes that she gets married to forge a political alliance. Rhaenyra is to be married to Laenor Valaryon, the soon-to-be leader of House Valaryon. Rhaenyra has fought against being married for so long as she does not want to just be one of those women who get married and basically just serve as a vessel to pump out new heirs. She agrees to marry Laenor for one simple reason: he’s super gay and she knows it. Pretty much everyone knows Laenor is super gay, his parents know, Rhaenyra knows, his “battle companion” Joffrey certainly knows, but it’s a win for everyone involved. Rhaenyra and Laenor can both be married, thus forging a deeper alliance between their two houses, but also suck and fuck whoever they want on the side. To make a long story short, Joffrey overplays his hand and is killed in a brawl at a feast to celebrate the nuptials. Again, people took umbrage. “House of the Dragon hates queer people,” “House of the Dragon has a major queer problem,” etc. all came pouring out of major news outlets.
“Bury your gays” is a trope found in media where LGBT characters are considered expendable and easily killed off without any deep exploration of their inner world, or really any good reason why they should be killed off in the first place. This was used by a variety of entertainment writers to describe Joffrey’s death in House of the Dragon. Again, I think people are totally missing the point here. It’s true, Joffrey’s inner world wasn’t explored much, just as it’s true he’s gay, but he didn’t die for no reason. In the narrative of the show, he overplayed his hand and revealed too much information to the wrong person and that person killed him for it. If Joffrey had been a woman, or if Joffrey had even been a straight man, he would’ve still met the same fate as he did because of his actions on the show.
House of the Dragon doesn’t take place in the 21st century, it doesn’t even take place on the same earth we live on, so to expect the show to abide by the logic of 21st-century identity politics would be absurd. Joffrey and Aemma didn’t die because one was gay and one was a woman, they died despite that. In its heyday, Game of Thrones was notorious for being no holds barred in its approach to killing people, the main character of the show literally dies at the end of the first season. Identity, be it race, gender, or sexual orientation, does not provide any character in Westeros with any sort of armor, nor should it.
House of the Dragon is a work of fiction, and fiction gets to play by its own rules, but above that, it’s a work of art. The goal of art isn’t necessarily to make you feel safe, the goal of art is to make you feel something. In the case of the birth scene, and even the death of Joffrey, the goal was to make you feel explicitly unsafe and even uncomfortable. Art is at its best when it makes you feel uncomfortable, leaving you to think about what it all means, but immediately disavowing something when it makes you uncomfortable only does yourself a disservice. When we consume art that only seeks to reaffirm our own view of things it strips the art of its meaningfulness, “safe” art is barely art at all.
It’s upsetting to watch established critics write about House of the Dragon, particularly the few scenes that make them uncomfortable and refuse to engage with the show on its own terms. Throwing around terms like “anti-gay” and “anti-woman” are extremely easy to do when faced with the challenge of examining what the scenes are actually trying to say. I hate talking about “wokeness,” and I try to avoid conversations about it whenever I can, but House of the Dragon is not and has never claimed to be, a “woke” show. To talk about it as if the writers boasted about how it’s incredibly woke it is and then failed to deliver such a woke show is ludicrous. From the beginning, House of the Dragon promised bloodshed, violence, and war, and it has delivered on its promise.
When you consume media, be it a painting at a museum, or a show about dragons and incest, and you consume it with bad faith, you’re only going to see what you want to see. If you watch a show and expect it to conform to and reaffirm your ideology, you will only be disappointed when it doesn’t. House of the Dragon isn’t for the faint of heart, it might not even be for you, but it’s a well-made and well-written story, at its heart, about family. Yes, it’s in a brutal world where even the most vulnerable and pure get killed, but it’s a damn good show that deserves good faith criticism, and an open mind. Give it a shot, you might like the dragons.
That’s our show, folks! Hopefully, you have enjoyed my ranting and raving about House of the Dragon, maybe even enough to want to watch it yourselves. If you have no interest whatsoever in watching this show: that’s okay too! The last thing I want anyone doing is forcing themselves to watch this show, only for them to start calling it MAGA trash, so watch at your own risk. I hope everyone has the best week imaginable, and I will see you all on Friday. XOXO