The War Within
House of the Dragon Season 2 and Subjectivity
Season 2 of House of the Dragon stays on the acute difficulty of living within one’s social coordinates. Instead of intrigue and conflict we get an entire season of hair pulling and heel grinding. And rather than building to a dramatic payoff, it cuts off with a season finale of characters who are only now charging in to battle. IS there an interesting way to read this? Can the structure of setting up viewer disappointment itself be interesting? Perhaps, but it takes some careful thought.
Season 2 engages with four distinct modes of subjectivity (i.e. stances that structure us)—three masculine modes that show different ways of clinging to what you are, one feminine mode of giving your very stance up.
The show’s overall mode is dying-for-cause, so it shouldn’t surprise us to see so many masculine takes within the characters. But it’s not an outright prioritization. The show’s figures who cling the tightest to masculinity, Daemon and Aemond, both show its clear limit, masculinity’s inherent fiction. Radical self-questioning—what’s usually at the heart of feminine subjectivity in fiction—was the stuff of Season 1. In S2, when a coming-of-age character like Jacaerys has his identity in question (other Targaryen bastards appear with even stronger dragons, making it harder for him to assert himself as heir) he just clings tight to his identity till it brings conflict. There’s no openness, no room for change, Jace just tries to shore up the apparent gaps of the feudal system. Feminine radicality in S2 lies only in the hands of Alicent. It’s curious to see if any of HotD’s other characters will follow.
KEEPING TO WHAT YOU HAVE OR SEIZING WHAT YOU MIGHT BECOME
We’ll work our way from simple to complicated. Ser Criston Cole is the most radical example of clinging to what you are, and he does so to the point of undergoing subjective destitution (i.e. a structural carrying on without the succor of life). Dragon (medieval atomic) warfare pries Cole from his paramour Alicent, and it shatters his sense of worth as a general, but still he cherishes Alicent’s token and leads his men onward. It's not that meaning and pleasure motivates us, it’s the clinging itself.
Cole shifts from austere to cosmic nihilism; he recognizes that it’s really the dragons who decide everyone’s fate. Cole shows humanity’s acephalic going on with the tautology of “I cling because I cling”. His identity—paramour and king’s guard—is shown in its emptiness, but it’s here that Cole clings all the tighter. These aren’t fictions to be discarded but necessary forms. Though Cole’s isn’t the only way out.
The Velaryon children either cling to their roles (dragonriders/sailors) or strive to realize their desire for something more (to become dragon riders). We’ve yet to see the result of that clinging, but there’s a turn of the screw with Alyn that’s worth unpacking.
Corlys Velaryon is the most powerful figure in HotD without a dragon, and he does nothing in S2 but struggle to be some sort of external father figure for his two adult children out of wedlock. He visits them again and again with tense, unspoken attaboys, and this presents us with an expectation of achievement. Addam does this; he rises from commoner to dragonrider. But Alyn suffers under this bombarding demand to become more than he is, to be Corlys’s heir and the leader of a powerful house.
Alyn’s final outburst is a break from the show’s structure, and it’s made to be the viewer’s as well. He presents a direct shift from the Cinderella fantasy of Jon Snow, which is the Fantasy heart of Game of Thrones. Instead of merit and royal lineage leading the right person to greatness, we get the fantasy thrust too close by Corlys. The would-be pleasure of it only becomes anxiety.
Alyn asserts his own solitude, the bitter recognition that he’s always had to make his own way without the protection of a father. He clings to his duty, but he fully resents Corlys, whose comfort and care was always dangled in front of him. This sends back Corlys’s own message—Alyn is Corlys without the grandeur, a self-made man without the weight of legacy.
Alyn is called to war, but like Cole, it’s bereft of any fantasmatic hope and adventure. Alyn doesn’t flee. He stands his ground. And that charges him with possibility. More than simply the finitude of harsh realities (war is bad, abandoning children is bad), maybe Alyn shows a way to avoid the self-wrenching of HotD. He’s Cristan Cole without the doom. Meanwhile, Corlys and Rhaenys cling to what they are not, and that’s a dead end.
BECOME WHAT YOU ALREADY ARE
Queen Rhaenyra delays and delays taking action in order to avoid starting nuclear dragon warfare. Season 2 begins in the wake of her son’s death, and she declares that she wants the killer, her nephew Aemond. Rhaenyra’s husband/uncle Daemon tries to provide the answer to her desire by sending assassins who end up settling for four-year-old prince Jaehaerys. And this atrocity turns her into a monster for the kingdom. Like with every attempt to set the uncertainty of female desire into some sort of fixed coordinates (i.e. “This X is what you desire”), it only sends the male subject reeling in uncertainty (no X is ever enough). It sets Daemon on a vision quest at Harrenhal where he will have to decide whether he will pursue the crown for himself or remain true to Rhaenyra.
On the surface, viewers are supposed to reject Daemon’s evil excess (it is, of course, abhorrent), and this horror gets another iteration as he sends men to kidnap and slaughter innocents for more political ends. But there is something interesting going on here.
The real point isn’t that Daemon is secretly committing the evil that he wants to do under the excuse of Rhaenyra—he’s not willfully misinterpreting her. What Daemon lays bare is the dark underbelly of Rhaenyra’s disavowed desire: the murder of her opponent’s heir, the ruthless obliteration of all who stand in her way.
The question of Daemon is twofold. Is his renewed pledge to Rhaenyra due to a deus ex machina unveiling of his destiny at all legitimate? And is there any radicality to the self-cut of him having to execute his right-hand man who committed the atrocities? The direct answer is that the steamroller of destiny functions as a cover up for the radicality that’s nevertheless at work in the execution of Willem Blackwood, that part of himself which embraces atrocities for his own ends. And the balance between these incompatibilities is still in flux.
The haunted visions of Daemon’s past are as excessive and displeasing as Corlys’s pseudo-parenting. This accomplishes a desire for Daemon to throw off his own twisted mode of being, to be finally rid of the harm that his self-aggrandizing inflicts on his brother and Rhaenyra (admittedly, ghost fantasies always fail on me).
But where the tables truly turn on Daemon is with the summit of the riverlords. Instead of uniting them by coercion, they cling to the letter of law beyond what Daemon expects. They are formally pledged to Rhaenyra, and the same law demands that justice must be served. The obscene underbelly of power is thus rooted out where it can no longer be tacitly embraced, and this guts Daemon. They make him cut off his own right hand, the riverlord who was most loyal to him through these atrocities.
And this act of self-cutting leads to a final, ghoulish “do you want it still?” of the crown from his dead brother. Daemon’s desire is clear, he doesn’t want it after killing Willem Blackwood, but his stance is still that of a leader with an army that could betray Rhaenyra.
Instead of giving Daemon the room to make his own ethical choice, he’s thrown a vision of the future that just points flatly to Game of Thrones. Whatever his destiny is, we’re meant to take it seriously. Game of Thrones casts a lot of doubt on prophecy—just like Oedipus Rex or Dune. But doubt in HotD seems out of the question, and the vision leads Daemon to what we’re waiting to see, a renewed vow to Rhaenrya.
But even if there’s a return of love/relationship, Daemon’s pledge is still that of a zealot, of someone who thinks that they have direct access to the way of things. This is a psychotic stance bereft of freedom—you just take action to fulfill your destiny and answer the pleasure of the big other.
But I think the radicality of cutting against himself is still operative…the wound’s still there too, and there seems to be a weird mixing of these two factors. Formally they can’t be treated as one. They’re disparate and incompatible stances: intense freedom versus unfreedom. But if they are simply melded together, the prophecy will have to repress the trauma of that self-cut. And who knows if that trauma will return.
RHAENYRA
Targaryen manifest destiny betrays a very clear anxiety of the show. It’s clear that Aegon’s dream is a tacked-on excess. Why can’t we just watch a family civil war? Why do we really need this spectre of Game of Thrones beyond coercing more viewership? By treating the royal prophecy as a purely good/correct thing, the only complication that remains is how the real world threatens to keep the characters from their proper roles.
Here we’re touching on ideology, and the simple answer is that the show doesn’t trust itself to delve into the meaningless horrors of war without relying on some justification (i.e. not the meaning of narrative or character but some cosmic place where the events fit in). The enjoyment of the drama becomes guilty in this light, so it offloads the enjoyment onto the future events of Game of Thrones, and this precludes the need for any kind of self-questioning; it does away with the trauma that forms it.
But as we see, the grappling of S2 isn’t against external finitude. Again and again the cut is directed inward where it belongs, and the resulting struggle is a matter of holding one’s own subjective stance. And we see it too in Rhaenyra.
Rhaenyra basically shifts from moralizing against war to fully embracing it so she can claim the throne. She says she will send dragons to raze the strongholds of her enemies, accepting the horrible deaths of innocents if it means she will win. And Rhaenyra brutally demands that her one-time best friend Alicent sacrifice the life of her son, Aegon, to end his challenge to her throne. Aegon himself is an impotent figurehead at this point, and Rhaenyra repeats Daemon’s own line that was itself too brutal for us to hear from his own mouth: “a son for a son”, the murder of an innocent child. So the point of Rhaenrya’s moralizing was not as initially expected for her to find the least-worst course of action but for her to properly take the brutal one.
What are we to make of this brutality? That it’s inherent to rule. The excess of brutality (not simply violence) is inherent to the structure of power: there has to be a libidinal enjoyment to it, even if that enjoyment is offloaded onto the figure of someone else (e.g. the pleasure of destiny and the realm itself). Still, we need to see where this brutality will go, whether it will become the viewer’s or not. The ethics of it is still in play.
THE REALM’S DELIGHT
King Aegon and Prince Aemond offer more depth because they’re not just at odds with their own desires but also with their own positions as well. Aegon is placed on the throne to oust Rhaenyra. He doesn’t want to rule, but he’s lured into it by its structural tie to the love of the people. Aemond, on the other hand, overidentifies with being a Targaryen. He’s forever conscious of the role, and he behaves like the Terminator in his constant conformity. Aemond is ruthless and calculating, and he has the strongest dragon, but both he and Aegon show how the role never fits.
Aegon does violent and unethical things—he executes 100 ratcatchers to catch the 1 who was guilty of murdering his son—but Aegon’s immorality is structural, a response to his sheltered position in life. He doesn’t value the lives of others because he’s been told he’s more important, and he’s allowed to ignore any kind of training that would make him a good ruler. So when his rule faces its first crisis, he lashes out in a way that puts his impotency on full display.
But what makes Aegon interesting is that he wants to be a good ruler when he isn’t one. He makes flippant decisions at a time of war, but we also see his willingness to learn and grow. He breaks from the strong hand of his grandfather in court by making his own strategic promise, one that unites the good of the throne with the people. His promise fails and it makes a new dragonriding enemy, but this actually highlights how Aegon had made the right decision; it was the bureaucracy of his so-called wise court that fails.
Aegon seizes on advice from the one person willing to give it to him, Larys Strong. Larys doesn’t just save Aegon by sneaking him into exile, he saves him by helping reconstitute the fantasy frame that would give Aegon a reason to keep living. Aegon ends up crippled and castrated, but he clings to the fantasy of being a beloved king.
Now, this is where Hegel comes in. Hegel basically says that what monarchy provides is a stand-in who keeps the functioning of social order together. There’s an inherent madness to the state’s interworkings, an unbearable arbitrary brutality, and a king/queen ties this madness up with the gesture of a seal of approval. They’re a screen for social order.
So when Alicent tells Aegon that he should do exactly what is expected of him, absolutely nothing, this is a Hegelian point. The king’s role isn’t to act like a psychotic who knows at all times what to do, the king’s role is to give a seal of approval (ceremonial or engaged) to the well-oiled functioning of the state. Without the body and personhood of the king filling things in, the idiocy of thinking that one knows it all stays in the body of the state. The state itself becomes the bad monarch who really believes he’s divinely chosen, right, etc.
When Alicent tells Aegon to do nothing, Aegon should. But that void isn’t something he can adhere to—it shatters his illusion of being a king, of leading a people and making decisions like his famous ancestors. Aegon needs a reason to live but his role is to be the void, and tragically he finds this unbearable. It’s unbearable not to succumb to one’s own royal idiocy.
Aegon rushes off to battle and is maimed by his brother. But his Icarus rush into the sun presents him with the opportunity to reset his relation to his king fantasy, even if at this point it seems all illusion. Rhaenyra’s own way out from being pegged to a void is through the self-questioning of lineage and her own fantasmatic frame of destiny. It provides a more effective course of action than Aegon’s, but neither is fooling themselves any less.
EYE PATCH
Aemond somewhat accidentally kills his cousin, Luke, in S1’s dragon fight finale. Aemond’s intent was to harass, but his ancient dragon Vhagar answered Aemond’s dark desire (just like Daemon did Rhaenyra’s) by killing his cousin and setting the civil war in motion. Consciously, Aemond did not want to kill Luke, but his unconscious desire found its expression through Vhagar. And this stays a shock for Aemond. He becomes a kinslaying villain, but he embraces it as armor.
Aemond moves in line with his own desire in S2’s only actual battle at Rook’s Rest. He gets the opportunity to cast friendly dragon fire on his brother, and he does, seizing on the same desire that he had just fallen into with Luke.
Aemond is cold and strategic and ignores the softer side of politics that would keep the smallfolk from rebellion. Aemond is on top of the world, but his supremacy gets shattered once Rhaenyra finds more dragonriders. He slaughters a nearby city in the same impotent rage as Aegon, and he’s left with a prophecy of doom. For Aemond, adhering to his Taragaryen badass role is a complete dead end, or so it seems for now.
GIVING IT ALL UP
Alicent is defeated by the very war that she set in motion. Involving her sons undoes her power in S2, and this leaves her aghast. But it’s the subsequent embrace of defeat that makes Alicent interesting (only Daemon does the same). Rather than standing against finitude and betrayal, it’s here that she grapples with her own self-defeating actions.
When Alicent realizes that she misinterpreted Viserys’s last words, the fatal step that had led her into betraying Rhaenyra, she coldly dismisses the truth as too late—war is already set into motion and her political power gone. She says the importance of Viserys’s words had died with him, but the meaninglessness of words quickly becomes her own as her political power goes up in smoke.
Alicent gives up her identity as queen. She clings to her daughter by giving up both her sons as well as her lover. Alicent is the only person in the story smart enough to see that all of this clutching onto identity (which allows for masculine modes of heroism like dying for a cause) is still just fictional, an empty form. There’s no hard inner core, only the retroactive illusion of one.
And this runs directly at odds with the role of prophecy in the show. There is freedom within these masculine modes of clinging—Rhaenys is intensely free when she chooses to fight and die for Rhaenyra—but Alicent enjoys a deeper sort of freedom by giving up the form itself. Which isn’t to say what Alicent is undergoing is at all enjoyable. Alicent lets go of her name and leaves its negative interpretation to history. And perhaps her story could cut off right there.
IN SUMMARY
Keep what you have, seize what you could become, or struggle to become what you already are…that’s the core structure of HotD S2. Only Alicent offers the outside possibility of giving it all up. Daemon gives up his own structure too, but he immediately rebuilds (or is given) another one.
What HotD really lays out is what’s to be done with the coordinates of one’s life. These are the ethical stances that determine who we are and our engagement with the world, how we ascribe it meaning. What makes HotD interesting is that its conflicts are not external sparring but the playing out of each character’s subjectivity. We see the necessity of how one clings to desire. It’s as though the conflict in HotD doesn’t involve the outside world at all. These are just personal struggles that do or do not involve change. Humanity itself is what’s at work here, and we see the freedom that’s to be found in form itself.
Rhaenyra couldn’t become the ethical queen and Aegon couldn’t become the good ruler…Daemon and Aemond both try to be “the man”—the male figure that upholds social order itself—and it’s this attempt that makes them fail. It’s all a working through of what they already are. Only Alicent is brave enough to fully walk away from what she is while others go down like ships.
So as much as the show disappoints fans by building up a finale of charging into war with no war, what S2 really displays is the manner in which the war is always within, that violence is the self-directed cut of subjectivity. And that’s the stuff worth playing with.