House of the Dragon changed Fire & Blood and made it more problematic

On the newest episode of House of the Dragon, “We Light The Way,” the Kingsguard knight Ser Criston Cole approaches Princess Rhaenrya Targaryen and asks her to run away with him to Essos. This is on the eve of her marriage to Laenor Velaryon, whom she must wed in her capacity as heir to the Iron Throne in order to help unify the realm. She turns Criston down, since marrying him would mean abandoning her responsibilities. She offers instead to continue their under-the-radar relationship, but he freaks out. He is ashamed that he broke his vow of chastity by sleeping with her in the previous episode, and blurts out his secret to Queen Alicent Hightower when she questions him about an unrelated matter.

Later, at Rhaenyra and Laenor’s wedding, Criston is approached by Ser Joffrey Lonmouth, the lover of Laenor Velaryon. Unlike Criston, Joffrey is fully on board with the arrangement that Rhaenyra and Laenor have struck up: both Rhaenyra and Laenor know their marriage is political, and both are happy to allow the other to pursue their own romantic interests. Joffrey, who correctly surmises that Rhaenyra and Criston had slept together, tries to cement a partnership with Criston: the four of them are in this together, and should protect each other.

But Criston is in a shame spiral and in no mood to hear this suggestion. Displaying a dangerous temper, he completely loses his shit and brutally beats Joffrey to death with his bare hands, in front of everyone at this wedding feast.

Violence in Westeros is nothing new, particularly at weddings. So why are some outlets criticizing this episode for engaging in a “painful trope” or even being “homophobic”? Let’s get into it.

Tropes and how to use them

Let’s begin with the trope. Joffrey’s death is a pretty clear-cut example of what’s popularly known as “Bury Your Gays.” In brief, it describes the tendency of TV shows and movies to kill off queer characters at a higher rate than cis straight characters. The trope has gone through many permutations over the years, but when used badly, it gives the impression that the queer characters are more expendable than the straight characters, that their lives matter less, regardless of whether producers meant it that way or not.

To be clear, just because a show uses a trope doesn’t mean that show has some kind of bigoted agenda. A trope is just a story beat that tends to crop up in multiple stories, and there are plenty of legitimate reasons to use one. For instance, a lot of women died on Game of Thrones, but I don’t think that ever made the show feel misogynistic. After all, a lot of men died too, so the deaths of characters like Catelyn Stark, Margaery Tyrell and Olenna Tyrell didn’t feel malicious; it just felt like this was a dangerous world and that anybody could die at any time, male or female.

Also — and this is crucial — all of those women felt like fully rounded characters with rich internal lives. If Game of Thrones had a habit of introducing paper-thin female characters just so their deaths could push along the story, I think you could plausibly argue that the show did have a misogynistic streak, or at least that it underthought the female roles to the point where their lives seemed to matter less than the lives of the men. Happily, that wasn’t the case. Also, even though many female characters died, there were plenty of other complex women who lived, so it didn’t feel like the show had it out for women in particular.

Westeros Pride

The treatment of queer characters on Game of Thrones was more suspect. There weren’t many, none of them were central to the story or particularly well developed, and they tended to die off. I don’t think anyone on the Game of Thrones staff was homophobic, but I do think the gay characters felt undercooked compared to the straight ones, and their deaths less meaningful.

That’s the form the Bury Your Gays trope mainly takes today: it’s not that producers are being outwardly bigoted, but more like they’re just not giving much thought to how it might look to introduce a queer character into a mostly straight cast, not give them much development beyond acknowledging their queerness, and then kill them off. It can give the impression, very likely unintended, that the gay characters are here mostly to be props, that they don’t deserve as much attention as the straight characters, or even that their deaths are some kind of cosmic punishment for being gay in the first place.

And this is made worse when there aren’t many or any other gay characters around for contrast. Remember: part of the reason Game of Thrones can’t plausibly be called misogynistic for killing off female characters is because lots of other female characters survive and even thrive; there’s a diversity of experience on display. The gay characters usually weren’t so lucky. For instance, Loras Tyrell was kidnapped in Game of Thrones season 5 specifically because he is gay, and then spends the rest of his time on the show in prison before he dies. He was the last gay male character on the show.

I was getting some of these vibes from the death of Joffrey Lonmouth. I don’t think that House of the Dragon was trying to say that the lives of gay people must inevitably end in tragic violence. I do suspect that the producers wanted a horrific set piece and didn’t give much thought to the optics. And it stings a little more given that Fire & Blood author George R.R. Martin gave them a more palatable alternative in his source book.

A song of sex and sexuality

“I do have gay characters,” Martin once said of his Song of Ice and Fire novels. “That was something that was very important to me to do when I began this series back in 1991 because at that time, there were very few gay characters in epic fantasy and I wanted to reflect that segment of the population. You know, gay people enjoy epic fantasy too and gay people are an important part of our world and any imaginary fantasy worlds.”

This is a nice sentiment, although I’d argue that Martin’s books have their own issues with queer representation. It’s true that gay people exist in Martin’s world, but it’s pretty much always on the margins. When it comes to important characters, Renly Baratheon and Loras Tyrell are second stringers at best, nowhere near in the same league as Jon Snow, Sansa Stark, Daenerys Targaryen, and many others. Also, it’s worth noting that while it’s clear that Renly and Loras are gay on the show, it’s only hinted at in the books, albeit pretty blatantly.

There is only one viewpoint character from Martin’s novels who is gay: Jon Connington, who appears in A Dance With Dragons. But even there, it seems like Martin goes out of his way to make sure his sections aren’t too gay. It’s curious that characters like Tyrion Lannister and Theon Greyjoy think plentiful lustful thoughts about women, but that Jon Connington’s chapters are so chaste that Martin had to confirm Connington’s sexuality in an interview.

Think about that: we are inside this guy’s brain, seeing things from his perspective, and fans were unsure of his sexuality to the point where they had to ask the author for confirmation. I actually think Game of Thrones does a better job with its queer characters than A Song of Ice and Fire, because at least it’s not ambiguous about whether they even exist.

We see a similar pattern in Fire & Blood. There are gay characters, but only on the margins; all of our principles are straight. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, although you’d figure that in a story with so many important characters one or two would be queer. Meanwhile, House of the Dragon is more open about the characters’ sexuality, but that doesn’t mean they always put enough thought into it.

Fire & Blood vs House of the Dragon

This brings us back to Joffrey Lonmouth. On the show, Criston Cole beats him to death at the wedding feast. In Fire & Blood, Criston and Joffery square off during a tournament that takes place a couple days after the feast. Criston goes too hard, cracking Joffrey helm with a morningstar. Joffrey lies unconscious for several days before finally dying. King Viserys is angry that Criston turned what was supposed to be a display of martial prowess into a murder. But at the urging of Queen Alicent, Criston is not punished; in fact, he’s made her sworn shield.

To start, I like this scenario more than what we got in House of the Dragon because it sidesteps an impossible question: how in the hell can Criston Cole punch a nobleman’s son — Laenor Velaryon — full in the face and then beat an anointed knight to death at a wedding and be allowed to not only keep his job, but get a promotion? It’s ridiculous and I have a hard time imagining Martin signing off on it. Remember: in the book Viserys is mad that Criston killed a guy during a tourney, and at least there people are supposed to be waving weapons at each other. It’s not unheard of for things to get out of hand during a battle, even one meant for show; we saw something like that happen in the premiere episode, in fact. The tourney scenario is a lot easier to swallow.

But also, moving Joffrey’s death to the wedding feast makes it look less like a sporting event gone wrong and more like a hate crime, what with Criston going absolutely off-the-wall apeshit after the homosexual Joffrey asks him to enter into a kind of love rectangle with him and his male paramour. House of the Dragon is suddenly playing with much more potent imagery that has a long and painful history. And that could have been very powerful…if Criston, Joffrey, and Leanor were well developed characters and we understood the stakes of their situation. But they’re not; we’re still learning a lot about them, and Joffrey was only introduced this episode.

Irresponsible violence

I have no problem with extreme violence on a TV show — I’m a Game of Thrones fan, there’s no way I could — but I think that violence needs to be used carefully, and that it can cross the line into being distasteful if it’s tossed in to shock the audience rather than because it’s necessary for the story.

House of the Dragon showrunner Ryan Condal could have chosen to follow the book and have Joffrey die at a tourney, but he didn’t. “The fun of that sequence is playing on the audiences’ expectations of a Game of Thrones wedding and knowing that these things tend not to go well,” he says in the Inside The Episode feature. “You just don’t know where the explosion is going to come from, and then it comes from the most unexpected place where Criston Cole finally just snaps.”

I don’t know the guy’s mind, but it sounds like Condal and company changed the setting because they wanted to follow in the footsteps of Game of Thrones and have a really upsetting wedding, rather than because doing it this way was what was best for the story. And given everything we’ve talked about, I think that’s a sucky reason. I think it’s sucky because it raises difficult plot questions I don’t know if the show is prepared to answer, I think it’s sucky because it trades on painful images of violence against gay people without having earned them by adequately developing the characters involved, and I think it’s sucky because it falls on the wrong side of the Bury Your Gays trope. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Honestly, what happened to Joffrey reminds me of some of the criticisms leveled at the eighth and final season of Game of Thrones: that things were rushed, or done for shock value. If Ryan Condal  and his team really wanted to “play on our expectations of a Game of Thrones wedding,” they would have featured a wedding without violence. If they wanted to create memorable drama rather than shock us for the sake of it, they would have given us a conflict between two characters we understood, rather than having one “snap” and kill another we’d just met. If they’d wanted to responsibly write a scene where a straight man beats a gay man to death, they would have been more mindful of the pernicious history of such scenes on TV, and would have thought of a way to do it without unintentionally sending harmful messages.

I’m enjoying House of the Dragon, but I did not like this choice. The next episode will jump forward in time by 10 years. Will that be enough to distance itself from this ugly event?

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