House of the Dragon’s dragon storylines are teeing up important themes

Midway through season 2, Ser Criston Cole awoke on the battlefield near Rook’s Rest bruised, battered, and probably concussed. He sought help from a nearby soldier, nudging his fellow man’s armor… only for the camera to reveal nothing inside but a skeleton that crumples under Cole’s touch. The soldier had been obliterated by dragonfire, his appearance reminiscent of victims who were vaporized by atomic bombs.

It’s a striking visualization for House of the Dragon season 2, which often presents its titular dragons as being analogous to weapons of mass destruction. The show stresses, however, that they are not only used as weapons against external enemies. After all, the dragons grant House Targaryen legitimacy and shore up their right to rule with the implicit threat of violence for those who step out of line. And yet, despite being used as fearsome weapons against enemies from both within and without, the dragons can also be read as tools of House Targaryen themselves. House of the Dragon wants us to feel for the creatures when they are killed in battles they did not choose, and there are parallels to real-world environmental collapse in this story about a species on the edge of extinction.

To begin, though, the nuclear analogy is vital to understanding the show, and much of the current season features the various players in the Targaryen civil war concerned with who has the most dragon power. Numerical advantage is presented as important, but so is the quality and scale of the dragons in Teams Green and Black’s respective arsenals. Having a dragon ensures strength and protection… until somebody finds a bigger dragon.

And that was a major issue for Rhaenyra this season. As the war that will be known as the “Dance of Dragons” broke out, the show played out its nuclear metaphor by presenting her as severely behind in an arms-race with Team Green, with her in-play dragons out classed by Aemond and his massive beast, Vhagar. Worse still, the powerful dragons Rhaenyra did have access to did not have dragonriders and, thus, could not be harnessed as the living weapons that the Targaryens use them as.

Photo: Theo Whiteman/HBO

This is why she took the measures she did to find dragonriders. In a move that will have serious political ramifications for the Seven Kingdoms, Rhaenyra accepted dragonseeds, bastards and “lowborn” all, to furnish her ranks. With her call to her extended, “illegitimate” family, she proclaimed that, in raising up dragonriders from their midst, she would be able to bring about peace and the end of suffering and bloodshed. That is the logic of nuclear deterrence and its Westerosi, dragon-backed equivalent: whoever has the biggest stick makes the rules and ensures “stability.”

This logic, however, reveals the lie at the heart of Rhaenyra’s proclamation. Even if the Greens surrendered in the face of her dragons, it would not mean the end of violence. It would simply mean that Rhaenyra would have a monopoly on violence. With the power of the dragons on her side, she hopes to be enshrined as the unquestionable monarch. And the thing about monarchs is that they get to decide what is considered to be violence, as well as what ends justify what means. As we see in “The Red Sowing,” endangering dozens of smallfolk — and forcibly preventing them from fleeing as they are devoured by the dragon Vermithor — is completely justified if it means getting a single dragonrider out of them. She may feel some remorse about it, but any tears ring hollow in the face of these innocent civilians being burned to death at the hands of dragons that (seemingly) only Targaryens can control.

It is through this apparent control that the royals of Westeros have convinced the peoples of the Seven Kingdoms to accept Targaryen domination. They have done so through intimidation and by, at least tacitly, allowing the smallfolk to see the dragons as gods (a widespread belief that has only recently been brought into question now that the smallfolk have seen that dragons can die just like anything else). House of the Dragon reminds us that the elite (real and fictional) will always find ways to portray themselves as especially worthy, as touched by the divine.

Photo: Ollie Upton/HBO

This is why most Targaryens on either side of the war chafe at the idea of enlisting the lowborn to be dragonriders. “They are an insult to us,” Jace cries during the season finale, “To what makes us Targaryens!” In a sense, he’s not wrong; their existence destroys the idea that the official Targaryen line is anything special, and it brings into question his own status as Rhaenyra’s heir. Acknowledging the existence and abilities of the other bastards (like himself) would explode his claim to the throne. If the dragons aren’t gods, and if dragonriders don’t have to be divinely chosen, legitimately-born royalty, then he wouldn’t be important anymore. He would be just like anyone else.

The dragons are not gods, of course. Nor are they actually, literally nuclear weapons in the world of the show. Despite their fearsome powers, they’re just… animals. They are particularly intelligent animals, shown as capable of forming deep emotional bonds with their riders and as able to understand human language. But they are animals nevertheless.

The magic of George R. R. Martin’s world makes it unclear why this one bloodline alone (again seemingly) can ride them. But it’s clear that centuries of viewing themselves as the only possible dragonriders has warped House Targaryen. Obsessed with “blood purity,” they are inbred and incestuous, and they are supremely guilty of believing their own hype; the books even portray them as convinced that they are immune to sickness and disease.

No wonder, then, that they hold that they have a divine right to the Iron Throne. This is, moreover, a belief that has hardened Rhaenyra and the other Targaryens against the suffering of the smallfolk. For the royals, everyone else exists to serve them and maintain their “proper place” in the class structure of Westeros. The people are pawns and faceless nobodies. They may be momentarily mourned when mass slaughtered — like when Aemond burns Sharp Point — but their deaths cannot possibly be expected to dictate policy or war tactics. As Rhaenyra retorts steely when Baela is shocked at the idea of killing innocents, “We must break the will of the enemy.”

The Targaryens can behave like this because their dragons effectively shield them from most consequences. In this way, along with being stand-ins for nuclear weaponry, the dragons of House of the Dragon are also the physical embodiments of class warfare. The Targaryens rule, and insist that they have the right to rule, because of their dragons. In being chosen by these creatures to be their riders, the Targaryens lift themselves up on dragon-back and beyond the reproach of the “commoners.”

Unfortunately for them, their civil war threatens to destroy not only themselves, the land, and the people of Westeros, but the very source of their power: the dragons.

[Ed. note: Potential spoilers for future House of the Dragon plot lines, definite spoilers for its source material, Fire & Blood.]

Image: HBO

Perhaps one of the worst aspects of all of the carnage presented this season is that the dragons themselves are made to fight by their human riders. Again, these are thinking and feeling creatures, and they are forced into violent confrontations where one or both of them will die. Some of these dragons have a taste for bloodshed — Vhagar especially — but there are only 20 of these animals left in the whole world. Every time one of them is killed, the species is brought closer and closer to dying out. In Fire & Blood, it’s even said that by the time the war is over, only four dragons will have survived. During an era of climate crisis and species death, it’s hard to watch this fictional species be made to fight and die at the whims of the elite and not think about our modern ruling class’ complicity in the destruction of the natural world. This is clearly an intended parallel, at least in George R. R. Martin’s source material; when the last dragon dies in Westeros, the climate is said to take a turn for the worse, with summers getting shorter and winters getting colder and longer. Magic leaves the world, as Game of Thrones put it.

Even if the Targaryens knew this would happen, it’s not clear that they would care, outside their affection for their personal dragons and the attendant power they bring. After all, whether they be royalty like the Targaryens or capitalists like the shareholders of ExxonMobil, the elite will always look out for their bottom line, even to the complete detriment of the rest of the world. Such elite caprice is a central theme of House of the Dragon, but season 2 has also highlighted acts of resistance and populism; the smallfolk have started to rise up. Some have even claimed dragons. When the Targaryens are foolish enough to allow all their dragons to die out, they will find themselves more vulnerable than ever before. This will eventually contribute to the destruction of their house, the fallout of which was explored in Game of Thrones. Viewers of House of the Dragon would do well to remember that the Targaryens do not last forever, and, just as they will fall, so too can any oppressive ruling class. It’s just a shame the dragons have to die before any change can take place.

What showrunner Ryan Condal and his team of writers have done with the dragons this season has been deeply fascinating. At once, the creatures are portrayed as terrifying and monstrous and yet also beautiful and tragically, devastatingly doomed. They are fantasy-flavored nuclear weapons, tools of violent class warfare, and majestic, emotionally-complex creatures that are deeply endangered. Westeros would be better off without the presence of the dragons propping up a hereditary monarchy and posing the risk of total war, and, yet, there is also something heartbreaking about the idea of them being wiped from the face of the planet. They can be awesome and awful, but, regardless, when they are gone, there will be less awe in the world of ice and fire.