CANVASHOLIDAYS

Maybe killing a dragon was a mistake

A recurring theme in discussions around House of the Dragon — and Game of Thrones before it — concerns morality. George R.R. Martin’s world is so grimly amoral, just about every character is a bad person on some level. So who do you root for?

Generally speaking, this line of inquiry is reductive as hell and not terribly fruitful. The world of Westeros is full of complex characters who continually pose audiences the question of whether a person should be considered evil as their worst moment, or noble as their best. When the stories function at their peak, the answers are nuanced and interesting, offering a number of possible reads on the characters: There might be a lot of reasons to say “Fuck That Guy In Particular,” but even people who agree on the sentiment might have different reasons in mind. Others won’t feel that way at all.

House of the Dragon is a more specific show than Game of Thrones, however, and it’s about a narrower spectrum of people. It is almost exclusively about the ruling class. This changes the array of lenses available for viewing the characters. It surrounds the show’s drama with a different context. It fills every single scene with a massive elephant filling the corner of each frame: the public.

The everyday people of King’s Landing have almost no representation in the show’s cast of characters. The series is full of privileged bickerers squabbling about power and sending men to die because they believe they have a right to it. Yet in its fifth episode, House of the Dragon shows that the public has been very much on the writers’ minds, and their part in this sweeping tale may soon come to the fore.

Like just about every episode this season, this one starts with horror: Ser Criston Cole’s decision to parade the head of Rhaenys’ dragon Meleys through the streets is not met with the triumphant cheers he expected, but with shocked silence. As one onlooker says, the people of Westeros thought the creatures were gods. Criston has shown them instead that they are just meat, like anything else. The implied follow-up question is powerful and destabilizing: What does all this say about the people who use dragons as evidence of their innate right to rule?

Attempts to placate the public might be too little, too late. Aemond, in his first official act as king-regent, cuts down the ratcatchers who have been hanging from the rafters since his nephew’s assassination, a reminder of the tenor Aegon’s brief reign has struck thus far. But despite this play for better optics, Aemond’s true interest lies in war: An angry crowd soon learns of their new ruler by discovering they are now prisoners in their own city, unable to leave to search for food or better opportunities. To the powers that be, they are more useful at home, paying their taxes and keeping the outside world from learning how hard blockades are hitting them.

This all dovetails with Rhaenyra’s efforts on Dragonstone Isle. Frustrated by the fact that her men of war are constitutionally incapable of accepting a woman’s leadership, she turns once more to her unlikely counselor Mysaria, who suggests there are other ways to wage a war. She gives voice to the unrest felt in King’s Landing, the cumulative stresses that a growing civil war has put on a populace that has only known peace. Those people are eager to blame someone for ending that peace. Will they ultimately be sympathetic to Rhaenyra, even though it’s her blockade that’s starving them? Or is Mysaria’s instinct that they will loathe the warmongers and ratcatcher-killers more accurate? Or maybe Otto’s decision to parade a prince’s corpse through the streets was a powerful enough argument to brand the unseen would-be queen a terror worth keeping at bay?

Here, House of the Dragon seems to draw a clear ideological line between its sides beyond how sympathetic we find its various strivers: Some of these rulers view their people as having a will of their own that’s worth swaying, while some view that will as an annoying issue to be held in check. To both sides, the masses are just one more resource to be leveraged in whatever way helps the powerful preserve their rule. But in a tale of palace intrigue and political strife, the public isn’t powerless. Woe betide those who forget that.