Who Is Dyana in ‘House of the Dragon’? Explained

Who is Dyana in House of the Dragon? She’s a symbol for victims of Targaryen cruelty, a reminder that the lives smallfolk are “small” in name only, and potentially a force to be reckoned with in the show’s second season.

Content warning for discussion of rape.

Who is Dyana?

While Dyana doesn’t appear in any of the source material penned by Georgie Martin himself, she has a small but significant appearance in House of the Dragon season 1. She is a servant of Aegon II and his sister Heleana, and she is raped by Aegon in the first season of the show after pouring him wine. While this never happens in Fire and Blood specifically, the book describes Aegon II as a totally slimy dude who makes a habit out of assaulting his own servants. Dyana was likely not the first, but hopefully she will be the last.

After Aegon’s mother Alicent finds out about his assault of the girl, she arranges a meeting with Dyana. She pays Dyana as a semi-sympathetic compensation for her son’s act, but it is also an effort to buy the girl’s silence. If that wasn’t enough, she tacitly threatens Dyana not to tell anyone what happened to her, and then gives the girl moon tea (a Westerosi concoction that aborts pregnancies) and commands her to drink it. Afterwards, Dyana is not seen at the Red Keep any longer.

Where did she end up?

After leaving The Red Keep, we don’t see Dyana reappear again until season 2, where she is working in a tavern in King’s Landing. She doesn’t fare much better there. Dyana endures sexual abuse from the bar’s patrons, including the friends of the recently introduced Ulf the White, a (spoiler alert) later dragonseed and ally of Rhaenyra. To make things worse, Aegon II shows up with his f***boy knight friends and she’s forced to serve them drinks, and he doesn’t even remember her.

What does Dyana signify in “House of the Dragon”?

Dyana is one of the countless smallfolk whose lives are jeaporized by the capricious whims of the ruling class. And if there’s ever a lesson that history teaches, its that when the voice of the people speaks, even rulers must listen. And the voice of the smallfolk in King’s Landing may not have very nice things to say. See, Aegon II is not exactly what you would call a “man of the people.” He sees smallfolk as worthless pawns to be used and discarded at his leisure. He fails to understand that a king must win the hearts of his people in order to rule successfully, and he isn’t about to win any hearts anytime soon. After the stunt he pulled with his mass execution of rat catchers, the people of King’s Landing are solidly against the ruling class.

House of the Dragon‘s second season is slowly shedding light on the lives of the smallfolk of King’s Landing. Their struggles to find a chicken for their pot, money for the coffers, and a reason to keep on living in a hard done world. The dissatisfaction of the common man is soon to become a major plot in the Dance of the Dragons, and the smallfolk response to the war effort ends up having lasting consequences on the Seven Kingdoms as a whole. Dyana is a symbol of a put upon people, a people who will not stand for tyranny any longer.

What is it all really setting up for? Readers of Fire and Blood have some ideas. Warning, serious spoilers ahead, but anyone who knows a thing or two about the Dance of the Dragons knows that the dragons themselves were one of the greatest causalities of the war. At the beginning of the war, dragons lost their lives due to fighting with their own kind on opposite sides. Human beings were able to stand against dragons about as well as they could stand against a nuclear bomb … or so we thought.

One of the most pivotal events in The Dance of the Dragons is the Storming of the Dragonpit, a mass civilian assault against the remaining dragons living in King’s Landing. The purpose? If dragons are exterminated, so is Targaryen power. The result? Though hundreds lost their lives, the people of King’s Landing were ultimately successful in killing many of their draconic foes. It was the cruelty of kings like Aegon II caused the problem, and the “enough is enough” response of people like Dyana that brought the most powerful animal species in the world to the brink of extinction.