The season 1 finale of House of the Dragon is brutal for Rhaenyra Targaryen. First she finds out her father is dead and that her best friend back in King’s Landing is trying to usurp the throne that should pass to her. Then she goes into labor and loses her daughter. Then she and her husband get into a fight and he strangles her. Finally she sends her sons off to different corners of Westeros to deliver messages, and one of them is killed.
“All throughout the episodes I’ve played Rhaenyra, she is getting a repeated education in grief,” actor Emma D’Arcy told GQ about Rhaenyra’s journey. “She loses her lover [Harwin Strong], and she loses her father, too, but this episode, losing her son really shifts the goalposts on what that suffering can do to the body. So I knew, heading into this episode, this was the moment when a massive reframing would happen to her.”
"The way that I made sense of it is that she feels well-educated in grief. Then she learns at the end of episode 10 that she knows nothing about grief up to this point. There’s that idea that you would die for your lover, but kill for your children. She understands that now."
Rhaenyra spends part of the season 1 finale trying to hold off on plunging the realm into all-out war. Come season 2, all bets are likely off.
Emma D’Arcy disagrees that House of the Dragon’s birth scene go too far
In an episode full of intense scenes, the most grim may have been the one where Rhaenyra is in labor with her daughter Visenya, who is stillborn. Rhaenyra goes into labor right when it becomes imperative for her to focus on her political ambitions, and she’s clearly very upset about it.
“I don’t know how contentious this is going to be, but the most important thing for me about the birth in episode 10, is that… She has a fear that begins when she loses her mother. And that’s one of either dying in childbirth, and/or being incapacitated by childbirth by being forced to bear children within this system,” D’Arcy explained. “Simultaneously, she lives in anticipation of this call to the throne when her father dies. But she’s in the worst-case scenario, in that she is fundamentally incapacitated at the same point as being told ‘your father’s dead, the throne is yours, and you’ve been usurped.'”
"The advice Rhaenyra is receiving is to have patience, in the hope of preventing the child being stillborn or preventing harm to the child. And she ignores the advice, seeking instead to get this body out of her. And I think it’s really fundamental, and it will be possibly divisive, but ultimately I think she chooses her own bodily autonomy. She prioritizes her own bodily autonomy. She literally says in the scene, like “get it out.”"
The birth scene in the finale is the fourth traumatic birth scene on the show so far, which hasn’t gone unnoticed. “House of the Dragon’s Brutal Birth Obsession Is Cruel,” writes Vulture. “How House Of The Dragon let itself down with traumatic birth scenes,” writes Cosmopolitan. Not everybody feels this way, but it’s a pretty common critique.
D’Arcy doesn’t agree with this criticism. “I take real issue with the idea that we shouldn’t see women in labour depicted with gritty realism, and blood, and placentas,” they said. “Especially on a show where part of its USP is big, gory battle sequences.” (USP means “unique selling point.”)
"What it feels like is that we want women to conform to a certain image. Which is interesting, insofar as acting is concerned, because, there’s also a lot of fun to be had getting to do the big physical, physically demanding sequences. And it’s interesting that maybe sometimes that is not afforded to female characters."
Daemon Targaryen is “shafted from beyond the grave by his brother”
Finally, D’Arcy weighed in on the scene where Daemon strangles Rhaenyra after she tells him about the Prophecy of Ice and Fire, something his brother Viserys never shared with him. “Me and Matt spoke about this scene a lot,” D’Arcy said. “We wanted to make sure we understood it really intimately. That moment could be perceived as a huge change in their dynamic. In that scene, by the fireplace, two things happen at once. First, you have two characters who are grieving. And I think one might say that Daemon is managing that grief less eloquently than Rhaenyra is.”
"I don’t actually think he’s been violent to her before, although I think there’s been a lot of conflict. But fundamentally, when Rhaenyra realizes Daemon was never taught the prophecy, she suddenly gains legitimacy. Because she understands that it was her, she was chosen for this.There’s this huge question for her all the way through the series: “you chose me, and now you don’t fucking speak to me.” She was tasked with uniting the kingdoms when she becomes Queen but by naming her his heir, Viserys has done the opposite, because his heir is a woman and that has divided the Kingdom.She begged him to show her what to do because she can’t do it alone, and I think in this scene, she gets a message from beyond the grave the moment that she understands that Daemon wasn’t chosen. Simultaneously, Daemon gets shafted from beyond the grave by his brother, who he loves more than any other character in the show. On the one hand, he can say that he doesn’t believe in prophecies. But he was never trusted to anyway."
All 10 episodes of House of the Dragon are available to stream on HBO Max right now. We shouldn’t expect season 2 until 2024.
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