‘House of the Dragon’ Drama King Daemon Targaryen as a Girl Dad Is Something Else
Every week, I think to myself, “Okay, maybe this will be the week that Daemon Targaryen is ruined for me” and instead, I just fall more in love with him. And that’s weird given the fact that I watched him spook a horse to kill his wife who was mean to him. But alas, that’s the world of Westeros and what I signed up for with HBO’s Game of Thrones and now House of the Dragon.
My beloved Drama King, played by my husband Matt Smith, has consistently whined and pouted about his life, but the most recent episode, titled “The Princess and the Queen,” showed us the heart that Daemon really does have and how quickly he loses everything he wants. During Rhaenyra’s wedding to Laenor Velaryon, we saw Daemon begin to talk to Laena Velaryon and, being that he’s recently single, it was no surprise that in the next time jump (which brought us Emma D’arcy as Rhaenyra), we see Daemon and Laena’s family together.
And they decided to make Daemon a girl dad, which … feels like it is targeted at me and I don’t want to unpack that. But we got to meet Baela and Rhaena, Daemon’s twin daughters, as we saw his wife Laena trying to give birth to their third child. It was a brief look into their life, but it seemed as if, for once, Daemon was happy. He wasn’t trying to start a war or fighting with his brother. He was content, and while Laena asked him to move back to where she was from to raise their children there, he wasn’t the brash Daemon we’d been seeing.
And thus his status as a girl dad continued to fall into the trope that I love oh so very much.
I don’t love the rushing of him being a single dad
Our Princess Weekes wrote about how the sixth episode of the series failed Laena Velaryon, but the episode really does establish Daemon’s relationship with Laena and then watch as it all falls apart all in the span of an hour. Because of the time jumps and the rushing of the series, there are some characters that we barely get to meet, and it means that our emotional connection to them is limited.
In the brief moments we did get to meet Laena (when she was being promised to Viserys and then again when she was a teenager before marrying Daemon), she was a fascinating character to unpack. We weren’t given enough time with her to do that before she died in childbirth with their third child, making Daemon a single dad.
Daemon, unlike what we saw with Viserys in his reaction to Rhaenyra’s mother dying, went to comfort his children. He sat with them, cared for them, and again, made me sigh knowing that I was going to love him no matter what other mess he brings into this world. So, Daemon having twin girls and falling into that trope of the girl dad that plagues my every waking moment is, probably, what I deserve most in this world.
(featured image: HBO)
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