The Heirs and Their Hair

“None of my friends are watching.

But I did watch it, all of it, including the whiny party scene, the other whiny party scene, multiple whiny kid scenes, the leprosy sex scene, the weird bullshitty birth scenes, and the couple of really good scenes, one of which may or may not have been when a princess’s postpartum breasts started leaking milk in the middle of a small council meeting”

“I watched because I spent eight years being compelled and disappointed, writing thousands of words about everything I found compelling and disappointing about it, and I was curious: this new show, had it figured out what went wrong?”

“Could House of the Dragon be not only a good heir to Game of Thrones — recognizing and fixing its mistakes, moving us forward — but also a good heir to the Game of Thrones viewing experience I so missed?”

“Watching the show systematically dismantle House Velaryon is narratively lame and also somewhat eyebrow-raising, since doing so means killing off the show’s only powerful Black family”

“Finally, in not just one, and not just two, but actually three episodes of the first season, a grown and badass woman is introduced only to die a bloody death by the episode’s end so that the show can explain something about someone else’s character. This fucking sucks”

“Within House of the Dragon, there’s a clear legitimacy problem that everyone can point to: the heir’s hair. Rhaenyra’s sons were not fathered by her husband, which everyone can see because they do not have the platinum blond hair of old Valyria (also because of their skin color, but within the show, the hair is the real signifier of the “bloodline,” and if you would like my five million words about how this hair-skin-blood-race nexus interacts with the last 200 years of American cultural production, please text me)”

“Anyway: the boys are brunettes, they have these really thick brown mops of hair, and it doesn’t take an advanced degree in #hairstudies for you or me or anyone in Westeros to realize that a brunette Targaryen is a problem for the legitimacy of Targaryen succession. Everyone keeps pointing at the kids, being like: Look at them! We can see the legitimacy problem, right there!”

“For those of us watching House of the Dragon at home, the problem of the show’s legitimacy, I think, is more amorphous: What’s the equivalent of the hair? Can we diagnose so clearly how the show fails to live up to what it sort of promises and certainly promotes, a feminist succession plot fantasy?”

“It’s true that, as a manifestation of feminist failure, you could easily point to the birth trauma scene of the first episode and call it quits on this show right there: I would support you”

“The real problem for me is how, despite being a show about women’s desires for power, the two main characters so rarely have anything to say about power, why they want it, or what they would do with it, or even why they are scared or worried about it. They have no schemes or agendas. There are no “I’m going to break the wheel!” speeches here, nor is there any “I choose violence,” nor is there anything like Sansa striding elegantly around Winterfell worrying about where to get and store the wheat”

“I do genuinely applaud the show for the moments (such as the breast milk one I mentioned) when the realities of parturition get airtime”

“But if that’s what the show is banking on, it needs to be more convincing about those realities, rather than just making a historically or physiologically inaccurate spectacle of childbirth’s many dangers. Here I am biting back my own long rant about the first episode: I am not a medical expert, but I did have a vaginal breech birth, and let me tell you how biologically wrong that episode seemed to get that experience. The birth itself is a problem, but the bigger issue is how the show both engages women’s medical health and doesn’t: as a reality, it seems to go in and out of focus”

“Sometimes this show seems able to capture what ideological pressure does to its characters, particularly women. There are instances when we see women, Allicent as well as her daughter, wrestling with what Virginia Woolf, my favorite Westeros critic, called the “strained and morbid imagination” that emerges when sexist ideologies like chastity get wrapped around the “nerves and instincts.””

“I think the problem is that the show uses my feminism to try to make me root for Rhaenyra’s succession, instead of taking my feminism seriously enough to really write a show about why feminism matters”