The wait is over. After years of anticipation, fans are welcomed back to Westeros with the exciting premiere of HBO’s House of the Dragon. Complete with all the gore, sex, violence, fire, and incest that fans of the game-changing original series have grown accustomed to, House of the Dragon is already a huge hit and is destined to keep improving. But, if you were turned off by watching Daemon Targaryen slicing off men’s vital organs and getting mildly flirtatious with his teenage niece, you might want to stop here, because there is far more where that came from.
Beware: there are SPOILERS for Fire & Blood beyond this point.
The show hints at some of the things Daemon will get up to during a small council meeting from which he is absent. The council briefly discusses the issues in the Stepstones, an archipelago in the Narrow Sea. The king dismisses Corlys Velaryon’s concerns about roaming pirates making trade with the East impossible. Corlys, as he is throughout most of the episode, isn’t taken seriously, and the Stepstones are left to deal with later. But if the show continues to remain true to what’s laid out in George R.R Martin’s Fire & Blood, we should expect to see these pirates in the very next episode of House of the Dragon.
Daemon Targaryen, played ingeniously by the incomparable Matt Smith, was ordered by the King, his brother, to return home to his wife in the Vale at the end of the first episode. While it would be grand to see what the Vale looked like back then, Daemon Targaryen isn’t one to follow orders. Instead, he joins with Corlys Velaryon and makes war in the Stepstones, bringing peace to the region. He will use this to once again earn a place by his brother’s side. This will also forge an important alliance between Daemon and Corlys Velaryon which will prove essential in the wars to come.
Daemon’s exploits at the Stepstones are by no means noble. As we’ve already seen, the Dragon Prince is brutal, and that’s without the aid of his vicious and terrifying dragon, Caraxes the Blood Wyrm. Daemon is about to take every ounce of anger shown in his sinister staredown with Viserys in the throne room out on a rocky island of unsuspecting pirates.
The unpredictable Daemon Targaryen
Daemon’s relationship with Rhaenyra is also going to cause some conflict. At some point, things are going to get very uncomfortable for viewers at home. It’s only a matter of what they choose to show and when.
House of the Dragon is nailing its foreshadowing so far. For instance, look at the way we see Viserys being cut by the iron throne. We’ve seen this before with Prince Joffrey; rulers routinely get cut by the blades of this chair, and those to whom it happens a lot are considered doomed. The Mad King was famous for getting slashes by it. In King Viserys’ case, his cuts are not only festering, but leading to health complications that may lead him to an early grave. The show is foreshadowing that this king’s mistakes, which possibly begin with him assuming the Iron Throne in the first place, are destined to lead Westeros down a dark path.
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