A Missed Chance at Political Storytelling

I wanted to rant about how the show initially created an interesting commentary on political styles, but then dropped it in favour of a basic morality tale. I was sceptical of the show from the beginning because, for me, the whole point of the Dance is the tragedy that House Targaryen destroyed its greatest assets over two people who were not particularly worth fighting for.

Season 1, however, showed an interesting angle on the conflict: the Blacks are charismatic but poor politicians, while the Greens are the opposite.

Daemon is obviously charismatic, but his rash decisions make just as many enemies as admirers. Rhaenyra is similar. Take the hunt in Season 1: on one hand, she is the “girlboss” who emerges victorious from the boar hunt; on the other, she spends two years sulking after the birth of her brother, insults the leading ladies of the realm (people whose houses she desperately needs for the crown she believes is being denied to her), has a public fight with her father and king, and storms off with a male companion. Yes, he’s a Kingsguard knight, but rumours would still spread. She then returns late, missing her brother’s birthday, covered in blood like a peasant girl. Some lords might admire the moxie, but many would be turned off.

This behaviour, along with marrying Daemon too quickly and spending nearly a decade on Dragonstone, politically isolated and without building alliances, shows the Blacks’ weakness in the actual art of politics.

Compare that to the Greens. Otto isn’t as charismatic as Daemon, and their warriors, like Aemond, lack charm, but Otto writes letters. He does so effectively enough that the Green seizure of the throne is seamless, because he didn’t spend the last decade of Viserys’s rule doing nothing. Alicent consistently shows better political instincts than Rhaenyra. At the hunt, she does exactly what Rhaenyra should have done: making friends with powerful people. If she wanted to, she could have persuaded Lady Redwyne and others to support Aegon, instead of behaving like someone who insults them and storms off. This demonstrates a form of power that patriarchal Westeros allows women, a form that the show entirely dismisses instead of properly criticising.

No one loves the Greens, but no one truly hates them either, which is why they can cast a wider net of power. The Blacks, by contrast, rely on the charisma of a few key relationships (Jace and the Starks, Daemon and the Velaryons).

The show could have been an interesting comparison between these two political styles. Instead, by obviously siding with the Blacks, it degrades into a much smaller story about how sad Rhaenyra’s situation is. Her charisma becomes untouchable, her clear political mistakes are framed as the result of others’ bigotry, and the Greens’ clever politicking is portrayed as crass and fundamentally unjust. As a result, the fact that both sides ultimately lose becomes uninteresting, not because they held flawed political models, but because the world was supposedly too cruel to “fair” Rhaenyra. That only works if you’re already in love with her the way the show is.