"A plague on both your houses."
Oct. 30th, 2022 03:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
timegoddessroseReporting from the other side of my second full week of returning to work. At the moment, my main goal is still giving myself grace as I readjust to the old rhythm, so I am attempting to relax and unwind in my free time as much as possible. And because it's me, that means HOUSE OF THE DRAGON.
[HOTD SPOILERS FOR ALL OF S1 AND FIRE AND BLOOD]
The season finale was last weekend, so S1 is finally a whole and complete narrative that I can analyze as a finished section of a wider story. If taken wholistically, although S1 has flaws that will probably always plague the show, HotD is a vast improvement to GoT. It is more self-aware, more deliberate with its themes (by acknowledging that it has themes in the first place), and explicitly has the intention of righting historical wrongs in the genre of high fantasy although how successfully it accomplishes its mission statement varies across the season.
Honestly, I could whole-heartedly recommend HotD to people (and have done), unlike GoT which I can only ever cautiously recommend with a list of caveats equal to its overall runtime. Which is a tremendous relief because HotD is adapting my favorite source material from ASOIAF (a fact which always seems to surprise people??? Like, yes, Fire and Blood is my favorite GRRM book. It's all Targs/dragons all the time, which is the way I like it).
The S1 finale is especially good, possibly one of the best of the season, which is exactly what you want from a finale. I've seen complaints about its most controversial elements (Daemon choking Rhaenyra and Lucerys' death being a purposeful accident), but I understood where both choices were coming from.
Lucerys' death in particular I want to pull focus on. Yes, in the overarching narrative, I don't like that all the bad things the Greens do to start the war have been contextualized as either misunderstandings or accidents, this lends itself to the interpretation that the Greens are blameless and it's all the Blacks' fault. But setting aside fandom interpretative nonsense for the moment, and with the clarifier that I don't for a second believe that Alicent would have stopped the coupe if she hadn't misunderstood Viserys' dying words, let's talk about Aemond murdering Lucerys.
Being me, guess what, I'm bringing Romeo and Juliet into this. The creators have many times compared HotD to Shakespeare tragedies, so I don't feel like I'm stretching here. We've got a blood feud, "two households both alike in dignity," we've got generational trauma, we've got the kids inheriting their parents' prejudice and hatred without fully understanding it, and when the violence erupts into fatality it's the children who die. And it's also, arguably, not on purpose.
Aemond and Luke are children. Luke more literally, but Aemond is very much a little boy playing at being a badass, playing at violence, playing at being his uncle Daemon. He doesn't understand that he's not still in a training yard. He is equal parts Tybalt and Romeo. He wants revenge for the loss of his eye, and perceived wrongs to his family, as an amorphous concept but doesn't understand the potential consequences. He doesn't understand that there's a difference between threatening his little nephew with a knife and jumping on the back of the world's largest dragon to chase his nephew down. A dragon is the nuclear option, and once you're riding on its back there is no way to hurt your opponent a little bit. It's all or nothing.
Luke, fourteen-year-old Lucerys, ironically understands this better than Aemond. For one thing, because his mother is Rhaenyra, but for another because he's the one who will die if he doesn't escape. He's flying for his life, and he knows it.
But both of them forget that their dragons, for all that people say a dragon and its rider are one, are separate entities from them, entities who choose to obey them but he are not actually under their control. Not anymore, not since the knowledge was lost with Old Valyria [fan theory rant goes here about whatever Daemon is doing with Vermithor, though. That looked a hell of a lot like dragonbinding, and it's previously established that he was doing research into dragon husbandry in Essos). Aemond and Luke are young, inexperienced riders, and their dragons have soaked up their hatred for each other, the way Aemond and Luke have soaked up their parents' hatred. So, in the skies above Storm's End, they lose control of their hatred/their dragons; the blood feud takes on a life of its own that does not need their permission any longer.
Luke dies, and with him the little boy inside Aemond, along with any chance of avoiding war. "Then, the storm broke, and the dragons danced."
All that to say, good change. I like it.
[HOTD SPOILERS FOR ALL OF S1 AND FIRE AND BLOOD]
The season finale was last weekend, so S1 is finally a whole and complete narrative that I can analyze as a finished section of a wider story. If taken wholistically, although S1 has flaws that will probably always plague the show, HotD is a vast improvement to GoT. It is more self-aware, more deliberate with its themes (by acknowledging that it has themes in the first place), and explicitly has the intention of righting historical wrongs in the genre of high fantasy although how successfully it accomplishes its mission statement varies across the season.
Honestly, I could whole-heartedly recommend HotD to people (and have done), unlike GoT which I can only ever cautiously recommend with a list of caveats equal to its overall runtime. Which is a tremendous relief because HotD is adapting my favorite source material from ASOIAF (a fact which always seems to surprise people??? Like, yes, Fire and Blood is my favorite GRRM book. It's all Targs/dragons all the time, which is the way I like it).
The S1 finale is especially good, possibly one of the best of the season, which is exactly what you want from a finale. I've seen complaints about its most controversial elements (Daemon choking Rhaenyra and Lucerys' death being a purposeful accident), but I understood where both choices were coming from.
Lucerys' death in particular I want to pull focus on. Yes, in the overarching narrative, I don't like that all the bad things the Greens do to start the war have been contextualized as either misunderstandings or accidents, this lends itself to the interpretation that the Greens are blameless and it's all the Blacks' fault. But setting aside fandom interpretative nonsense for the moment, and with the clarifier that I don't for a second believe that Alicent would have stopped the coupe if she hadn't misunderstood Viserys' dying words, let's talk about Aemond murdering Lucerys.
Being me, guess what, I'm bringing Romeo and Juliet into this. The creators have many times compared HotD to Shakespeare tragedies, so I don't feel like I'm stretching here. We've got a blood feud, "two households both alike in dignity," we've got generational trauma, we've got the kids inheriting their parents' prejudice and hatred without fully understanding it, and when the violence erupts into fatality it's the children who die. And it's also, arguably, not on purpose.
Aemond and Luke are children. Luke more literally, but Aemond is very much a little boy playing at being a badass, playing at violence, playing at being his uncle Daemon. He doesn't understand that he's not still in a training yard. He is equal parts Tybalt and Romeo. He wants revenge for the loss of his eye, and perceived wrongs to his family, as an amorphous concept but doesn't understand the potential consequences. He doesn't understand that there's a difference between threatening his little nephew with a knife and jumping on the back of the world's largest dragon to chase his nephew down. A dragon is the nuclear option, and once you're riding on its back there is no way to hurt your opponent a little bit. It's all or nothing.
Luke, fourteen-year-old Lucerys, ironically understands this better than Aemond. For one thing, because his mother is Rhaenyra, but for another because he's the one who will die if he doesn't escape. He's flying for his life, and he knows it.
But both of them forget that their dragons, for all that people say a dragon and its rider are one, are separate entities from them, entities who choose to obey them but he are not actually under their control. Not anymore, not since the knowledge was lost with Old Valyria [fan theory rant goes here about whatever Daemon is doing with Vermithor, though. That looked a hell of a lot like dragonbinding, and it's previously established that he was doing research into dragon husbandry in Essos). Aemond and Luke are young, inexperienced riders, and their dragons have soaked up their hatred for each other, the way Aemond and Luke have soaked up their parents' hatred. So, in the skies above Storm's End, they lose control of their hatred/their dragons; the blood feud takes on a life of its own that does not need their permission any longer.
Luke dies, and with him the little boy inside Aemond, along with any chance of avoiding war. "Then, the storm broke, and the dragons danced."
All that to say, good change. I like it.
