So We All Agree? The Harrenhal Arc in ‘House of The Dragon’ Needs To End
Brother, ewwww!
We’re all going to need some time to recover from the traumatizing images we saw in House of The Dragon season 2 episode 5, “Regent.” First, the severed head of Meleys the dragon paraded through the streets of King’s Landing. And second, THAT vision Daemon Targaryen had at Harrenhal of his mother.
Very icky spoilers ahead!
Ever since Daemon departed Dragonstone, we’ve all been making memes about him being utterly useless at Harrenhal while the rest of the characters were out there fighting a war. But as long as this haunting house arc was building character and amounting to great storytelling, we were on board.
So … that changed with episode 5 after it went ahead and gave us Daemon dreaming of going down on HIS MOTHER!
Yeeaaah, nope. The Harrenhal arc in House of the Dragon needs to end. Like, now!
What happened to Daemon in Harrenhal in episode 5?
The scene began as a montage of Daemon having sex with a woman. It was hazy and blurry, and was understood that this was one of his haunted visions courtesy of Alys Rivers. But it wasn’t quite clear who the woman in the vision was. She was beautiful, though, and she was sweet-talking Daemon about how he was strong, and a fierce dragon rider compared to his weak elder brother Viserys, and how he could’ve been king if only he were born first.
It was clear that the woman was a Targaryen, which led some book fans to even wonder if this was indeed the arrival of a character called Nettles from Fire & Blood who had not yet been introduced in the show. But it wasn’t until her last words, when Daemon was touching her body and a streak of blood appeared, and she called him, “My favorite son,” that we found out who the woman really is: HIS MOM!
*shudders*
End the Haunting of Harrenhal and send Daemon back to work!
Look, I was all for the psychoanalysis of Daemon Targaryen’s mind, thanks to the witchy woo-woo of the mysterious Alys Rivers. She poked around in his noggin, extricating his deepest, darkest thoughts about how the throne by rights should’ve been his, and twisting them into these visions that played out like snippets of a haunting movie. Some of it, like the visions of a young Rhaenyra’s chopped head beseeching Daemon, and his dead ex-wife Laena Velaryon appearing to him, were quite effective.
However, this latest vision … the psychology behind it does fit with what he has been experiencing so far. Daemon has only ever valued women who looked at him like a hero or a God, and he thrived in that admiration. That’s why he didn’t like his first wife, the late Lady Rhea Royce, because she didn’t stroke his ego. Instead, he wanted Rhaenyra, who worshipped him. When he couldn’t have her, he was happy to be with Laena Velaryon because she sought him out, and she was a powerful dragon rider of the mighty Vhagar herself.
However, the fact is that he did end up letting both these women down ultimately. Doomed them in some ways, you could say. And it all began, of course, with the first woman in Daemon’s life whose love he could never have. The ultimate validation that he till now seeks—His mother’s.
According to the books, Daemon’s mother, Alyssa Targaryen, died after she couldn’t recover from a difficult third pregnancy. Daemon was only two and he barely knew his mother, though the books say that Alyssa was a fierce one, an impulsive warrior much like Daemon, and she’d often strap her sons Viserys and Daemon to her chest and take them riding on her dragon, Meleys. She was loved by her husband Baelon the Brave very much, and there were also stories that her lovemaking on their wedding night was rather loud.
For Alys to prey on Dameon’s Oedipal issues with all the pieces of information about his mother floating around in his head, and for the makers to unravel them, so as to bring Daemon in the right headspace for what is to happen next is a great idea. BUT there were surely better ways of depicting this than showing Daemon getting intimate with a woman, who would turn out to be his mother.
We’ve seen incest; heck, we’ve even shipped some of it on Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon. But this serves no other purpose than shock value! Instead, we could’ve shown Daemon facing his guilt for not being there with his wives during difficult labor!
Fans didn’t hold back in expressing their disappointment and disgust over the sequence.
Some book fans were also upset that the show was being overly unfaithful to the characters. In episode 3 earlier, the character of Ulf is shown to boast about being a bastard son of Baelon the Brave, Alyssa’s husband. This would mean he cheated on his wife, which fans don’t buy since he loved his wife. As for Alyssa, she was known to have heterochromia (two different colored eyes) and the woman in the dream had normal eyes.
The sequence does more than disgust. It has finally made us HOTD fans realize that we want Daemon out of Harrenhal because he seems stuck there, undertaking DIY home improvement projects and giving some truly bad orders to his men, like he did with the Blackwoods, who went on to pillage and rape Bracken lands to get them to declare for Rhaenyra. His arc is too slow to develop and if all it is going to do is give us more such shocking twists, then we’ll skip the psych eval, please.
Just get Daemon out of Luigi’s haunted mansion, STAT! He and Caraxes have got work to do!
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