Welcome to House of the Dragon MVP, our series highlighting each episode’s Most Valuable Player in the game before the Game of Thrones.
There are two kinds of people in House of the Dragon: players and pieces. In the players category there is the king, great lords, and dominant individual powers like Rhaenyra, Daemon, and Corlys. In the pieces category are the smallfolk, most women, and “extra” members of the nobility whose blood guarantees them position, but no real power.
Discerning the players from the pieces is a key component of the game of thrones, where mistaking a player for a piece can have dangerous consequences. This is the mistake Queen Alicent makes in “The Green Council” — why, after all she did “right” to ensure her son Aegon usurped the throne from Rhaenyra, her best laid plans ended with episode 9 MVP Princess Rhaenys erupting from the floor of the dragonpit on her dragon Meleys and going full Godzilla on Aegon’s coronation.
How does episode 9 of ‘House of the Dragon’ compare to the episode 9s of ‘Game of Thrones’?
Earlier in the episode when Queen Alicent asks Rhaenys for her support in betraying Rhaenyra, she assumes that she and Rhaenys have something in common. On the outside, they do: They’ve both been screwed over by powerful men. But that’s where the similarities end. Alicent views the path to power as one inevitably marred by sacrifice to those powerful men. She sacrificed her youth and body to Viserys on behalf of her father’s ambition, sacrificed her dignity to satisfy the agenda of sexual predator Larys Strong, and is now sacrificing her morals to put a known rapist, her son, on the throne. She sees Rhaenys alone in the chaos of the usurpation, and assumes that the princess is powerless and abandoned.
Credit: Ollie Upton / HBO
Rhaenys is none of those things and she lets Alicent know it. The queen barely gets a word in before Rhaenys reminds her who the hell she’s talking to. “I will do you the considerable courtesy of assuming there is a good reason for the outrage of my treatment here this morning,” Rhaenys says. She deserves better and she knows it!
“We [women] are not meant to rule,” Alicent argues, to which Rhaenys delivers a smackdown worthy of the old gods and the new. “You toil still in service to men,” she tells the queen. “You desire not to be free but to make a window in the wall of your prison.” Damn.
The difference between Alicent and Rhaenys is that Rhaenys has something familiar to Targaryen women — an iron will and boundless self-worth. To Rhaenys, the Great Council denied her the throne, not the reality that she was better suited to rule. She was not insulted when Viserys passed over Laena for marriage because she valued her daughter more highly than whatever a husband could give her. When in her grief for her dead (as far as she knows) children, she quarrels with her ambitious husband Corlys, it is he who leaves Driftmark and Rhaenys who rules the island in his stead. She is Princess Rhaenys of House Targaryen and she will never be powerless.
It’s the ignorant sting of Alicent’s “We are not meant to rule” that carries Rhaenys through the rest of the episode. When Ser Erryk Cargile breaks her out of her room, her only priority is getting to her dragon, presumably while muttering “Who is we?” and “Y’all gonna learn today” under her breath. And learn they do. Dragons do what they want, when they want, and at that moment Rhaenys wanted to remind the Greens exactly who they’re playing against.
And that is how Princess Rhaenys wasted decades of House Hightower’s time, effort, and money by busting out the basement like a fire-breathing Kool-Aid man, resplendent in battle armor and astride her dragon — who, by the way, has an amazingly apt nickname. Rhaenys’ dragon Meleys is also known as…the Red Queen.
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