Fire & Blood offers up both rosy and cynical takes on Daemon and Laena’s union—they loved each other, and Daemon used her to stay relevant and powerful. But these reads aren’t mutually exclusive and, by all accounts, their marriage was pretty functional, which the show more or less agrees with. But what the show leaves out is that Rhaenyra was a huge presence in their lives the entire time.
See, there is a great girl power, sapphic-coded friendship in the text. But in Fire & Blood, it’s Laena and Rhaenyra who are best friends. No Rhaincent at all! In the book, Games of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin writes, “Whilst Princess Rhaenyra misliked her stepmother, Queen Alicent, she became fond and more than fond of her good-sister Lady Laena.”
Sorry but “more than fond”??? I know what that means. I know subtext when I read it!
The book then chronicles how Daemon, Rhaenyra, and Laena all flew on their dragons together—one big, happy, incestuous, terrifying family. They betrothed their children to each other and, when Laena went into labor with her and Daemon’s third child, “the princess was at her good-sister’s side.” When Laena needed a better maester after the traumatic childbirth, Daemon flew to get Rhaenyra’s own maester. And when Laena died shortly after, “Princess Rhaenyra sat vigil with [Daemon] over Lady Laena’s corpse, and comforted him in his grief.”
The entire time that these three are flying around on their dragons, Rhaenyra is fully married to Laena’s brother, Laenor. (He’s a dragonrider but he’s not a cool dragonrider so he’s not invited to their little sky parties.) He’s in another relationship with a man back home; both spouses are free to participate in whatever extramarital activities they want.
Fire & Blood is a textbook and it invites many readings. One reading of this three-way friendship is that Daemon and Rhaenyra were an ever-scheming, ruthless, and fated pair who used the Velaryon siblings to solidify their own strength, then discarded them when it was convenient. Another reading is that these three were just besties, nothing more!
But I’m not sure how you can read those descriptions and not see at least the possibility for polyamory. And that possibility is so much more interesting than the sexual scraps the House of the Dragon throws at viewers. For all its willingness to look at literal T&A, the show won’t take a critical look at sexuality and the moralizing of it. The viewer gets dicks and snippets of sex but not any perspective on the questions they raise.
We got whiffs of some real sexual worldbuilding in Season 1. There are hints that suggest the rest of Westeros isn’t down with incest, a practice the Targaryens had carried out for generations. Young Alicent sniffs at Rhaenyra about her virtue, disgusted at the rumors she’d boned her Uncle Daemon. Later, when Rhaenyra gives birth, both her husband (Laenor) and her children’s biological father (Ser Harwin Strong) are present, indicating that the three might be happy with this arrangement. And of course, there’s the super hot chemistry between Rhaenyra and Daemon—viewers actively root for this bonkers couple to work! It’s what Game of Thrones did at its best: Engender pity for monsters, invert your sense of justice, and force us to question whether our own morals are situational and subject to compromise. But it hasn’t lasted into Season 2.
I suspect the Daemon-Laena-Rhaenyra plotline was a victim of outrageously fast pacing; you can almost hear HBO execs telling writers: “Get to the dragon war faster.” But in losing this relationship, we lost such a cool (and potentially very hot) opportunity to do what fantasy is supposed to do: take us out of our own reality so that we might look at it more closely, free of constraint and judgment. But that refusal to really think about the topics it raises around sex, marriage, and class are a pervasive issue this season. So instead we’re left furiously reading glances as “sapphic” and salivating over individual (and I’m guessing one-time-only) kisses.
Sure, whatever, rah-rah Rhaenicent, full frontal, etc. Wake me up when the interesting sex begins.
