The fourth episode of House of the Dragon season 2, “The Red Dragon and the Gold,” brought us our first real dragon battle—the likes of which we had never really seen, not even in that sorry excuse of a climax that was Game of Thrones’s Long Night.
Spoilers ahead for House of the Dragon season 2, episode 4
This was definitely a battle worth waiting for. It kept everyone on the edge of their seats and showcased how destructive a dragon battle can be—not just for the dragons and their riders but for the people on the ground as well. When Meleys cleverly drags Vhagar to the ground, she lands right on top who knows how many soldiers. Sunfyre’s blood is shown to be scorching hot, burning the soldiers it falls on as he tries to fly away.
And the fact that it was so spectacular proved once more that Rhaenyra was right to wait to order her dragons to descend into battle. She recognizes how a full-out dragon war has the potential to raze the realm to the ground and so she waited until it was the only option left to her. I still maintain that was a good choice on her part that showed her restraint and maturity as a ruler when screaming bloody vengeance for her great losses would have definitely been easier—and would have torched the Riverlands much sooner than when it is inevitably going to happen. The Riverlands are always going to get torched no matter what, that’s just what happens to you when you’re smack in the middle of every troop movement in Westeros.
Still, the battle was also incredibly heart-wrenching—because the fact that the dragons are all CGI doesn’t exempt them from being included in the rule that animal suffering is actually the worst possible thing to witness on screen. Sunfyre’s pained wails as he crashes to the ground were terrible to hear, and Meleys turning back to see Rhaenys one last time before she dies did honestly make me burst out in tears.
It was a beautiful showcase of the mysterious bond that binds dragon and rider together, one of the most fascinating, and yet unexplained parts of ASOIAF lore. Aemond and Vhagar’s matching brutality and ruthlessness, Rhaenys and Meleys’s well-practiced movements coming from a lifetime of flying together, and Sunfyre trying to angle himself so that he will protect Aegon from the fall. Maybe it’s because I’m a dragon stan before I’m anything else, but I loved to see all these little moments—would have much preferred to see them not in the middle of battle, though, that’s for sure.
And there’s also an undercurrent of tragedy to the whole thing that I think did come out at the end of the episode—the fact that dragons were not supposed to end like this. These are ancient, powerful creatures that can live for centuries, intrinsically tied to the magic coursing through the lands in the ASOIAF universe. That they’re serving as weapons of war—a war that will be their end until Daenerys Targaryen lights that pyre in the Dothraki Sea—feels somewhat wrong, something that should have never happened if Valyrians hadn’t been arrogant enough to want to bind them to their will through blood magic.
It was an arrogance that eventually meant the collapse of Valyria itself and that echoes back in the words that Viserys said to Rhaenyra back in season one—the only ones I will give him credit for by taking a break from my full-time job as Chief Viserys Targaryen Hater. “The idea that we control the dragons is an illusion.” In this case, it’s not to be interpreted in the sense that the Targaryen don’t—we see Rhaenys, Aemond, and Aegon very much control their dragons, even though one might say that a dragon would have any chance to not to what its rider tells it to and so it does it because it also wants to and it wants to because it can feel its riders’ intentions through the bond.
It’s more the fact that Targaryens’ control over dragons is born out of dark magic and so something that didn’t happen organically, even though one could technically argue that the very first Valyrian riders did start the whole thing in a less blood-fueled rituals kind of way. Still, it was always going to have some terrible consequence—they escaped the Doom of Valyria but the Dance of the Dragons really is it. And I will hate to see it because I love every single one of those groups of pixels as if they were.
Published: Jul 15, 2024 11:14 am