Tom Glynn-Carney and Ewan Mitchell recreating aegond’s wedding dance at CCXP Mexico

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I don't think that Rhaenyra looking for Luke after 10 days is that farfetched really. Aemond might have done a sensible thing and decided to keep silent for the most part and the storm could've been going for quite a while and then someone found the remains. Tho yeah, it's a bit weird, I would have it started within 3-4 days, really

They say s2 starts 10 days after the finale of s1...... WTF? We won't see Aemond coming back with the news or Aegon's party for him? No iconic lines from Otto and Alicent? Rhaenyra only searches for Luke days later? Why? It took ten days for Jace to get to the Vale?? Is Condal ok? I see he continues the tradition of skipping everything and being boring.

Now I'm overly excited after tonight to assess the situation sensibly, but yes, this is some kind of nonsense. I initially didn't think that Aemond's return home would be shown to us, because the screenwriters love timeskips and cut out all the most interesting and important things for characters development, but there was still a little hope + I really wanted to see Aegon supporting Aemond. It turns out that Rhaenyra waited 10 days, and only then began to look for her son's remains? Considering that he fell into the sea, it would be difficult to find them anyway, and after 10 days… And the party we saw in the promo is not a feast because of Luke's death, as I had hoped. My expectations for the second season are getting lower and lower.

I think Aegon is misunderstood in many ways. He would make a great King once he learns how to channel his fire

Tom Glynn-Carney as Aegon ii Targaryen in the new House of the Dragon season 2 promo

My guess that he and the gold cloaks (?) are at a tavern having fun and getting drunk, he might get into a castle after to sleep, be awakened by servants and rushed into the council chamber after b&c and that's where we have this scene

What is happening

New bts of Tom in season two 😍😍😍

Can’t wait to see how unhinged he becomes after B&C. Tom is going to do beautiful 💚

What do you think will happen to Rhaenyra? Do you believe that the show will depict her gradually turning into a villain or that it will always be she that is the true heir?

It seems to me that Rhaenyra and Alicent are on opposite trajectories, to where Alicent starts on sorrow and ends on rage, and Rhaenyra starts with rage and ends on sorrow.

The thing is, and Rhaenyra herself almost makes this point in episode 10 of season 1 although it's kind of glossed over a bit, that it doesn't actually matter who the "true heir" is. Tearing the realm apart over ambition is not the action of a queen who actually cares about peace and stability and yes, the stupid prophesy. The reason why Daemon chokes Rhaenyra is because she's considering the prophesy, and whether it might be worth making peace with the greens for the sake of keeping the realm intact to face the greater threat united (remember, the prophesy does not say Rhaenyra must sit the throne, it just says the Targaryen line must continue). Like, even if you believe Rhaenyra is the true heir, someone who puts the realm first is going to need to think about whether or not asserting her claim is worth throwing the realm into war, which includes risking the dragons. And at that point, the onus is on her to back down, and Rhaenyra knows this. She acknowledges it. Aegon has been crowned and anointed and holds King's Landing, and Otto has arrived with a pretty generous treaty offer (I want to talk, at some point, about how the offer of Dragonstone, which gets scoffed at a lot, is actually a really good one). Yes, it's unfair, but she saw the state her father was in and decided to fly off anyway so she was caught at the disadvantage and the greens got the jump on her. So actually considering the terms makes sense if they show wants to paint her as potentially a good ruler. She has to put the realm above her own ambitions if she's a good ruler. If she can't do that, does she have any business sitting the throne in the first place.

But then Aemond goes off and kills Luke and that all goes out the window. And here's the thing, at this point, although it would hurt, Rhaenyra still can back down. The greens are not going to make the next aggressive move, it's up to her, and so far there have been no pitched battles, the conflict is still a family conflict, and with Luke's death Rhaenyra can probably make some more demands. But the rage takes over (and this is understandable, don't get me wrong, who wants to treat with the family that's responsible for your son's death?). "Alicent's son sits on my throne," and "I mean to fight this war," she says to Jace, Baela, and a table full of dragonseeds, several of which who will end up betraying her. And I think in the S2 trailer, this is what Rhaenys is warning against. She says it very explicitly, "when the desire to kill and burn takes hold, and reason is forgotten, we will not even remember what began this war in the first place." Rhaenyra is, of course, not going to heed those warnings, because the desire to kill and burn has taken hold.

What I hope will happen is that we'll see Rhaenyra in her kill and burn era, and then she takes King's Landing. She's "won," she's the one sitting the throne and "Alicent's son" is missing, maybe dead for all she knows, it should be the triumphant capstone to all this rage and -- it feels empty. It doesn't bring her children back. Daemon's love turned out to be fickle, and she and her remaining children are living in the same keep where her nephew was killed by her husband's order, and her advisors don't seem to have her best interests at heart, but she's too beholden to say no to them. She doesn't feel safe, or secure, or triumphant. And now she has to govern, and the people show her no grace. While they cheered her arrival, now they blame her for their losses. It's not like being Lady of Dragonstone and she doesn't know how to do this, how to manage this realm and fight this war and keep more of her children from dying. This, I think, is where it turns to sorrow for Rhaenyra. Because it turns out it was all empty. In fact, it's just as Rhaenys warned, she can't even remember why it was so important to sit the throne in the first place, but it's too late now. Even if she wanted to end the conflict, she couldn't. When she flees, she flees to Dragonstone because it's the one place that still feels safe. Maybe she can go home, regroup. Let Aegon III get a bit older. Maybe her allies will come. Maybe she can hatch a new dragon. But it's too late. Even her death doesn't stop it, her supporters literally keep on fighting after she's dead, such is the extent to which the fighting has spiraled out of both Aegon and Rhaenyra's control.

If I was writing the show from this point on, this is what I'd do with Rhaenyra. I'd also be working hard to disabuse the viewership of the notion that asserting your position as the "rightful heir" is something that's worth sacrificing all those lives. Like, one of the issues with OG GoT was that D&D failed to do this. Instead they had people anticipating Dany's triumphant return for 8 seasons and then when her story turned tragic at what felt like the last moment, people felt cheated. HotD has to do a better job with the tragedy of Rhaenyra's character, because the tragedy is not that she had her throne stolen, it's that her house cannibalized itself, ended the dragons, and threw the realm into chaos and destruction over a conflict that was ultimately meaningless.

To piggyback off of @shunnedmorlock's post here about the relative justification for both the black and green causes, and how the show presents Rhaenyra's cause as sympathetic.

The in-world choice of who to support in an internecine conflict is, for a lot of lords, ultimately going to be based in self-interest rather than legal, ideological or moral justifications. This fandom fixates a lot on who is in the "right," but the houses that throw their support behind Rhaenyra or Aegon mainly do it for self interest or self preservation. Every lord is going to have multiple literal dragons breathing down their necks, many lords are going to be offered enticements from one side or the other, and some will be considering their own personal circumstances and the precedent their choice sets. A great number of the houses seem pretty determined to stay out of the conflict altogether, even several of the houses that pledge their support in theory, wait until the risk of being caught up in a dragon battle has passed to take any action.

For viewers, our reasons for supporting one side or another are different. Strictly speaking, looking at things from a modern framework, no one has a "right" to the throne. Usurpation is not a human rights violation or even a crime by our standards. Imagine fixating on women being unable to own slaves and thinking that a woman fighting for her right to do so is an expression of feminism. Ridiculous! Certainly it is bullshit within an already bullshit system that a woman comes after her brothers in a hereditary monarchy, but in a just system this conflict wouldn't exist in the first place, not because Rhaenyra would automatically be queen, but because Westeros wouldn't have a king or a queen at all. Liberation doesn't start at the top and trickle down, but rather the opposite.

That said, to modern viewers, Rhaenyra's cause is sympathetic because it feels like an injustice. Most of us don't live within a feudal system and do not have the framework to understand why it's not a form of oppression to be denied the throne. We see it more like a presidential race, in which Rhaenyra is the Hillary Clinton who might have defeated Trump in 2016 if not for misogyny, in which even if we didn't particularly like her, we were disgusted by the fact that that man beat a woman who was at worst no different from many of the men who had occupied the seat before her. To the average vaguely liberal American watching the show, it's insane for fans to support Aegon and the greens and clearly you'd only do it for horny or antifeminist reasons. And you see that a bit in even the showrunners' comments on Alicent being a "woman for Trump," how both they and much of the audience fail to fully understand the historical framework, but in a way that's kind of understandable, because while what happens to Rhaenyra might not be injustice, it is unfair.

If you're looking at things from a historical in-world framework, this is a world in which stability takes a higher priority than equality. Inequality is everywhere, completely baked into the system. If you want to bring about gender equality in a feudal monarchy with a large agrarian population, you have to have first the stability necessary for the rise of an urban middle class which allows for more women to move into the trades, you need the printing press for widespread literacy, which means that more women are getting educated, you need movements such as the reformation to challenge the divine right of kings, and you need to reform the political structure so that leadership is not based on birthright in the first place, because that concept inherently reinforces patriarchal norms even in modern countries that allow women to become queens regnant. So making one woman queen is not going to make things better for women across Westeros, but that woman going to war to reclaim her "stolen" birthright could make things a whole lot worse for a pretty much everyone. This is why you see a lot of history nerds on this site going well, yes but Rhaenyra does have the weaker claim because common law was a big deal in the medieval world and her becoming queen is going to lead to long term succession crises due to the circumstances of her children's birth, so the thing to do would be to take the peace deal. Because while on an emotional level you can understand why she doesn't, it's not the choice that prioritizes the good of the realm.

I think on some level Condal understands (and I think GRRM probably hammered this point home) that you can't really grant anyone the moral high ground in a war of succession if you want to approach the issue with any level of nuance; Rhaenys' speech in the previews for S2 seems to indicate as much. The problem with HotD is that it wants to have its cake and eat it too. It wants to say war for the throne bad, but HBO also wants to make up for the way GoT fumbled the ball with Dany and give the people their likeable dragonriding princess triumphant.

Except Rhaenyra isn't triumphant, she is felled by her own Targaryen hubris and belief that nothing could possibly overcome the might of dragons. It's not Aegon that defeats her, truly, it's the people emboldened in various ways to act against Targaryen interests. It's the dragonseeds she hands dragons to who wonder why they have to take orders from a queen or king when they have control of the kingmaking weapons of mass destruction, it's the smallfolk who face down dragons with pitchforks because they've had enough. They've backed themselves into a bit of a corner with what @shunnedmorlock called the "engoodening" of the black faction, but they can turn it around by showing that it's not enough to be nice to your family, you have to actually care about the people and at the very least (the bar is on the floor, it's fuedalism!) not throw them into chaos, famine, and war for no reason. Give us payoff for Rhaenys' dragonpit scene, have Mysaria and Alys Rivers play a role in their sides' downfalls, show how resentment on Dragonstone allows Aegon to infiltrate. And yes, show Rhaenyra losing herself and becoming a worse person, but in ways that the audience can't excuse as justified. This is how you sow the seeds for that actual progressive change that people seem so desperate to find in the dragonshow, you show how the Dance emboldens the regular people who for the first time realize they can slay dragons, dovetailing into the new show, which stars Dunk, a commonborn man from Fleabottom, and Aegon V, the only Targaryen who ever cared about the smallfolk.

Can HBO pull it off? Ehh. But I remain eternally hopeful, against my better judgement.

The show was the worst thing that happened to the Dance, just look at that shit.

Can't believe Jaehaerys gaslighted everyone so hard the phrase "King's word is the law" is used unironically

Can't believe Jaehaerys gaslighted everyone so hard the phrase "King's word is the law" is used unironically

The thing about show!Rhaenyra's reaction to stillbirth is that I don't find it that unbelievable (as would be the case with book!Rhaenyra) grief after all can manifest in anger but it can also manifest in sorrow (or both). Losing one child could make show!Rhaenyra think about her remaining children and make her desperately cling to them. HOWEVER, we don't see that either and THAT'S what I'm salty about. Show!Rhaenyra is not allowed to have any emotions at all, she always has to be calm and logical and good or her emotions happen off screen (like with Harwin death and with her court situation after Jace's birth and even when she stays at Dragonstone). I sincerely hope that Luke's death will make her angry ON SCREEN so that she's finally has some substance.

To the point about Rhaenyra being boring, it continues to elude me why the producers, writers, and directors decided they needed to humanize Rhaenyra by downplaying if not outright removing her worst traits. That’s not humanizing, that’s sanitizing.

There are plenty of female characters that exist in fiction who are frustrating to morally ambiguous, to completely evil but still have their fans and are beloved, or at the very least compelling. The comparisons to Shiv Roy from Succession already exist, so I won’t belabor that point, but look at other shows like Mr. Robot, Better Call Saul, and if anyone really wants to press the button for feminism: The Handmaid’s Tale. Those shows have incredibly well-written female characters that aren’t necessarily paragons.

House of the Dragon choosing to center Rhaenyra as the protagonist as opposed to making her part of a true ensemble a la the original Game of Thrones wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. The narrative decision to frame her as heroic (as far as S1 is concerned) is how we get the ‘Protagonist Centered Morality/Unreliable Narrator’ trope that results in plenty of media literate fans that are either neutral or Green-leaning who feel frustrated that there’s not an equal balance between characters.

Perfectly put together, anon. I'm sorry I answered so late. -_-

There's nothing wrong with characters that are written to be good people, but you see, that only works when said character is written consistently and somewhat realistically. Something that the writers completely didn't do in Rhaenyra's case. Are you going to tell me I'm supposed to watch her go through Visenya's traumatic birth, which by the way, happened so quickly after learning that her father was dead, keep her calm, and find it believable?

There is no sense of reason when it comes to grief. None. When someone close to you is gone, you check out. They take a part of your mind away with them and sometimes you don't even realize it. Especially if it's as horrid, as painful and helpless as what Rhaenyra went through. I am not going to sit here and blame the Greens for that baby's death, for all we know of her she had dragon features and was 100% going to die either way. That is digestible for us viewers/readers, who have no connection for a baby mentioned in a few lines.

But Rhaenyra's her mother. And rightfully, when she loses her this way, she goes mad with grief. She wants someone to blame, she cannot cope with the idea that there is no one to blame in this situation, that it would've happened either way. So she blames her enemies, the Greens. She isn't right, but she isn't even sane anymore, she's just had a stillbirth, how can you expect her to think before she speaks?

But the show strips her completely of this anger, and makes her push for peace. Is it possible that not even THAT can make this perfect angel Qween lose her temper like any human would? I understand wanting to rid her of any sin so she looks like a Saint, but really, where's the flaw in being angry and irrational after your stillbirth?

I never liked Rhaenyra as a person but I was looking forward (I'm STILL looking forward lol) to the role she will play as a character, a literary device, a tool to tell a story. I'm not saying I hope they bring out the worst of her this season so more people have reasons to hate women and feel justified for it, but LET HER BE RIGHTFULLY ANGRY. I'M BEGGING YOU.

People will always choose and be more obsessed with the evil but interesting one, not the one who's got more morals. It's already been said in a post I saw not so long ago, but Luke shouldn't be winning polls for best character against OTTO HIGHTOWER of all people because we choose morality in none other than a world like ASOIAF. Please give characters nuance. There's so much potential they got lazy with using timeskips etc. already.

Do you have any headcannons about any culture clashes Robert Baratheon would've faced in the vale? And do you think that made him even closer to Ned as they both felt like outsiders at the tender ages of 8&10?

Yes omfg I don’t know why they didn’t treat his stay like a reeducation camp bc To Me the lords of the vale would never let any "undesirable" behavior go unchecked. I guess Jon Arryn was like hey guys Autism runs in the Starks dw

The ppl of the Vale (to me) are like supper stuffy, haughty nobility who are obsessed with tradition and the “proper” ways of doing things. So when Ned (from the brusque, straightforward, severely unfrivolous north) and Robert (from the loud, crass, rough around the edges, also straightforward Stormlands) came up the mountain they were like who is this autistic child and his feral buddy.

They definitely felt alone like ugh I wish we got more of Ned reminiscing on his time in the Vale, he spent most of his youth there. I think they both felt really lonely with they both arrived. Ned was probably super closed off while Robert was trying to overcompensate. Causing problems and such in order to fill the storms end shaped void.

When they both realized they were equally lonely they probably attached at the hip immediately. Prime example of those friendships that are like high energy excitable risk taker outgoing impulsive chasing the adrenaline rush friend X anxiety disordered overthinking painfully shy 30 step plan for any possible scenario friend.

Once everyone got used to their outsider personalities the boys were just like...those two weird kids who we have begrudging affection for. Robert probably tried to convince Ned to climb down the side of the Eyrie with him multiple times and Ned had to be his impulse control multiple times. Cut to Lord Royce having a stroke in the background while Jon goes ahhh the youth

Keira Knightley as Elizabeth Swann Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)

True! I went with a mix of the book and the show because it's funnier that way

‘aemond takes harrenhal finds a witch who looks uncannily like his mother with almost the same name and takes her as a sex prisoner’ and ‘larys meets the queen who looks uncannily like his witch older sister (who breastfed him) with almost the same name and starts a multi-decade long campaign to psychologically and sexually torment her’ fight

We unfortunately don't have Alicent's appearance described in the books and the show has its own version but I feel like "viserys meets alicent who looks uncannily like his grandmother/mother with almost the same name and takes her to wife to sexually abuse and neglect her" can also enter the fight

‘aemond takes harrenhal finds a witch who looks uncannily like his mother with almost the same name and takes her as a sex prisoner’ and ‘larys meets the queen who looks uncannily like his witch older sister (who breastfed him) with almost the same name and starts a multi-decade long campaign to psychologically and sexually torment her’ fight