Queue the vengeance monster…

Where did all the blood go??? While the new intro is cool and all, I miss the old one. The iron, stone, fire, and bloodlines have been replaced with a tapestry being embroidered. It’s telling the story of everything happening within the show, just like the old Game of Thrones intro did, but you have this badass battle cry theme song and then, what? A blankie??? The flip between the hard stone and the soft tapestry just feels like too far off the tracks for the feel of the show. Like I said, cool concept but bring the blood back, dammit. 

Okay, that’s the only complaint you’re going to get out of me because I loved this episode. 

As with all of my Game of Thrones world posts, there will be spoilers in abundance so ye be warned.

And don’t forget, at the bottom of this post, you will find the link to read the prologue of my upcoming dark romantasy Cursed Monarchs. It’s like Game of Thrones but with vampires, terrifying magick, and the humans are food. 

Okay, no recaps needed. I’m just going to assume if you’re reading this, you’re all up to date on the latest House of the Dragon drama. If not, see the season one finale recap here. The biggest thing to remember is that we left off with Lucerys and his dragon being chomped right out of the sky by Vhagar while Aemond yelled ordering-slash-begging the dragon to stop. She didn’t. It was awful.

….and also totally awesome. 

Admit it! You thought that scene was the balls, bloody chunks of dragon wings and all. 

Okay, so S02E01 Son for a Son kicks off about ten days after the death of her son….

The opening scene is a love letter to GoT fans, especially if you spent that show pulling for House Stark. I’m convinced of this. First, they’re playing the music you usually hear in The North, particularly the score used in a lot of Sansa scenes during the time that she escaped Ramsey and ran with Theon for the Wall. Second, you’re taking in the surroundings flying with a raven and it feels very much like the times Bran would warg into a bird to spy on the army of the dead. You don’t see the bird’s face so you don’t know if it’s him but in that moment, we could be flying with Mr. Three Eyes himself. Third, you’re greeted with a postcard view of Winterfell in all its cold, stony glory. Fourth, when you get to the Wall, we see Jacaerys Velaryon and Lord Cregan Stark walking side by side. When the camera pans to a view from behind of them walking the top of Wall, dude….. You could swear you were looking at Ned Stark and Jon Snow walking together. Cregan is even sporting Ned’s ancestral sword Ice (the one you see him use to behead a Night’s Watch deserter in GoT S01E01). 

I immediately teared up. Couldn’t help it. In that scene, we get a few tiny nuggets of information, one of which being that at that time, the Starks knew full well what was waiting beyond the Wall. Cregan walks Jace to a lookout to see beyond the Wall and says this:

It’s long forgotten by Ned’s time. Wildlings and weather are their concern by then. The more supernatural stories about what lurks up there are considered to be just that. Stories and nothing more. But in Rhaenyra’s time, the Night’s Watch is considered a dire need of the realm and a great honor to all those who serve, not the punishment it’s viewed as in the GoT time. The Wall already existed when Aegon the Conqueror came to Westeros. The sheer size of the North aside, there is a reason the Targeryen line is so insistent upon maintaining an alliance with the Starks. It makes me wonder if Aegon confided in Torrhen about his vision. Meeting the Starks must have at least partially confirmed his vision for him because they were already guarding against the darkness he saw. Food for thought.  

All the nostalgic reverie is brought to a screeching halt when a raven arrives with news of Lucerys’s death. The scene is cut away before you can see Jace’s reaction. That gets saved for later (grab you tissues). 

The next scene shows us one of my favorite takeaways from this episode and it’s got nothing to do with war. When Princess Rhaenys arrives back at Dragonstone from her patrol of the Gullet, she flies into a hole in the side of the mountain.

This is when we learn that the Targaryens have valet parking for their dragons. 

I busted out laughing when I saw that. It’s just another blatant difference between the opulence from the height of the Targaryen dynasty (when they were “real” dragon riders) to Dany’s savage, self-taught method of being a Targaryen 172 years later. In Rhaenyra’s time, Westeros is built around the fact that dragons are involved in their daily lives, whereas Daenerys and her dragons really don’t belong in the world anymore. There are no places for dragon landing pads or dragon houses carved into volcanoes. The dragon pit was in utter ruin the first time we saw it in Game of Thrones and it’s this gorgeous enclosed arena with classic Roman stylings on House of the Dragon. It’s a main part of King’s Landing then. It’s where they usurped Rhaenyra and held Aegon’s coronation. 

As I said when S1 ended, my absolute favorite thing about this show is that we are seeing their version of a world with dragons. It’s so much better than Dany’s world with dragons. 

Okay, back to Princess Rhaenys, she rides into the dragon valet parking like a BAMF and strolls up looking like a badass warrior. Daemon is there to greet her with plans to ride back out to kill Vhagar and Aemond and this is when we find out that Rhaenyra has been flying dragonback for days looking for Luke’s remains. 

Daemon has another moment in this scene that reminds me that no matter how much BDE he has, Daemon Targaryen is, in fact, a world class asshole at times. When the greens usurped the throne, they did so by locking up all of Rhaenyra’s potential allies so they could crown Aegon before anyone could get away to warn her. Princess Rhaenys was one such person. You remember her epic escape scene. It’s the one where she finds her way down into the underbelly of the Dragon Pit and is dragonback when Meleys busts up through the Dragon Pit floor. It was aaaaaaaweeeesome. 

I think Meleys is the most beautiful of all the living dragons right now, with Syrax coming in at a close second. Meleys is a scarlet red dragon and according to some side info I saw on the Wiki of Thrones X account, her nickname is the Red Queen. Well, in that moment, right there in that very image, she could have ended Aegon and the greens and that would have been that. Daemon couldn’t just let that fact be.

That was really shitty of him. To her credit, Rhaenys just walks away rather than giving in to the fight he so clearly wants to pick with her.

Side Note: If you were wondering about the sizes of the dragons in comparison to one another, I snagged this cool chart from the Wiki of Thrones account over on X. Of course, we all know that Vhagar is massive but Balerion the Black Dread was gargantuan. Vhagar and Balerion both make Drogon look downright puny. 

Back to the episode.

In our first glimpse of what Rhaenyra is up to, we see her on a cliffside staring at Storm’s End, which sits on an opposing cliff. That’s where Luke was flying away from when Aemond and Vhagar started fucking with him. No words. Just a shot of her staring at the castle.

The next time we see her, she’s on another cliffside further up the coast (you can see Storm’s End in the distance) watching some fisherman yelling about a dragon wing in their net. She flies in on Syrax like a mad banshee and stops them from disposing of what they found. She jumps down off her dragon and runs down to the net. There is a moment where you see her not just upset about her son but his dragon Arrax too. Looking at the tear marks, she gets all teary. Then she untangles the net and finds Luke’s red cloak inside.

Queue the flood gates, ladies and germs.

With confirmation that her son is really dead, she breaks down hard. To make the moment way worse, Syrax lets loose an awful mourning cry as the fishermen watch Rhaenrya sobbing from a distance. It’s a heartbreaking moment.

Aegon seems like a different guy than the drunken fuck up they literally had to wrestle to the coronation. It’s not like he’s sober or anything but he at least seems to have pulled his head out of his ass. Given what he was like last season, I kind of just expected Joffrey 2.0 on the throne. A cruel moron. I don’t think that’s what we’re going to see with Aegon. I mean, don’t get me wrong. He’s a usurper. This isn’t going to see him come out in a good light. But he’s not a monster and by the end of the episode, I really like his character. He’s far more humanized now. The first time you see him hold court, when supplicants ask him for things, much to Otto Hightower’s chagrin, he really does try to help out. Otto steps in and “advises” him on why he can’t and Aegon lets that fly exactly once. The second time he tries, Aegon stares him down while agreeing to the subject’s request, making it clear that just because Otto helped put him there, he won’t be Otto’s puppet. 

On the flip side, he’s also got a softer side. He’s got a sense of humor and he seems to adore his kids. And he’s not cruel to his sister-wife-queen in this episode. A little condescending but not cruel. He was an asssssssssshoooooooooooole to her last season.

Speaking of Otto Hightower, I don’t think he’s going to last long. Alicent is expressing concerns about him undermining her. Larys is also whispering in Aegon’s ear about Otto being a problem. And that was right after the tense moment between Aegon and Otto while he was holding court. I think his days are numbered and I kind of can’t wait. I don’t remotely trust him. 

Oooh, and ALICENT. Anyone else grossed out by her escapades with Ser Criston Cole??? Or find it hilarious that Alicent is doing to him the exact thing that made him hate Rhaenyra with the passion of a thousand fiery suns??? Since he has such a bug up his ass about honor and all that, I would imagine being Alicent’s shame bang long enough is going to land him in the garden again with a sword to his gut.

We finally see Rhaenyra return to Dragonstone. She marches from her super-cute dragon valet parking up to the war room where her council is waiting. Daemon approaches her and in a rare mushy moment for him, his leans his forehead to hers and softly asks her if she found what she needed.

She nods and then proceeds to the head of the Painted Table. She says four words the entire episode:

And I want your awesome fireplace….

Her only line for the entire episode and I can’t decide if it’s more of a snap reaction to grief or the revenge-fueled battle cry of her entire war (probably the latter). I’m sticking with one of the things I said in my last post. I really hope that we see a more warrior-esque picture of a queen than we got with Daenerys. Yes, Dany was good at burning things but that’s really about it when it comes to fighting. As we covered in the Mad Queen post, if she had any sword or knife training at all, she may have had a different ending. In this episode, we got to see Rhaenerya showing off just how much better of a dragon rider she is than her descendant ends up being. When Rhaenyra swoops down onto the beach where she finds Arrax’s wing and Luke’s cloak, the way she moves looks far more confident. More agile. More controlled.

Dragon riders are fighters, regardless of gender. Princess Rhaenys has armor for a reason and it’s not because it’s pretty (although it really is). But you’ll note in the picture, it’s also well used. It’s not just for appearances. I want to see that Valyrian blood fierceness manifest on the battlefield(sky?).

Rhaenyra’s command is all the greenlight Daemon needs to take action. He sets off what I’m hearing is an infamous event involving two fellas by the names of Blood and Cheese. Because I haven’t read Fire & Blood yet, I know nothing about them beyond what I just saw them do Sunday night. Or didn’t see, as the case may be. The camera work was done so you don’t actually see them murder and decapitate a child. Even for the Thronieverse, that’s a step or twelve too far.

Oh! And for those of you concerned about the dog that took a hard boot when Cheese got his bitchy on, that was Hollywood magick. No one actually kicked a dog. Watchdog (ha!) groups have already done the due diligence of checking into it. I admit that it looks convincing in the final cut but SO DO THE DRAGONS. The folks at HBO would all have to be suffering from a severe head injuries and higher than any human being has ever been to actually kick a dog, film it, and then voluntarily broadcast it on national television. The level of stupidity involved in this even being questioned is bananas…..

What did you think of the first episode back???

Eryas awaits…

Game of Thrones but with vampires, absolutely terrifying magick,
and a world in which humans are food.

Click Here to Read the Prologue

More for the Thronies Out There