After a first season full of time jumps and questionable wigs, HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel series House of the Dragon is finally delivering the lesbian situationship we deserve – at least in our minds.
Based on a sliver of Fire and Blood, George R.R. Martin’s fictional history of the incestuous Targaryen clan, HOTD tells the tale of the fabled “Dance of Dragons,” a bloody civil war that tore the realm apart. It has much of the same fantastical court intrigue that made Game of Thrones a sensation, but this time with way more dragons and some deeply sapphic-coded interactions.
No, the core relationship between the Iron Throne’s heir-apparent Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D’Arcy) and her best friend-turned-enemy Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke) isn’t canonically queer. But that hasn’t stopped viewers from latching onto the erotic undertones between them, which I would argue only enhance the show’s central conflict as it enters its second season.
Unlike Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels, Fire and Blood reads like a cobbled-together history told from the perspective of multiple unreliable narrators, each of whom has their own seedy motives. This set-up gives the HOTD showrunners plenty of creative freedom to come to their own conclusions about major plot points and even rework entire character arcs, most notably through their reframing of Alicent and Rhaenyra.
In the original book, the pair are at odds from the jump, positioned as a power-hungry stepmother and much younger stepdaughter pursuing their own ambitions within a medieval-inspired, deeply patriarchal fantasy world. Told long after the events in the story take place through Fire and Blood’s myriad sources, their involvement in the Dance of Dragons is depicted as the destruction of the Targaryens’ long-standing legacy. (Granted, those sources are a bunch of dudes who have their own agendas, but casting the few women in power in such a disparaging light isn’t great!)
In a welcome change, the HBO show reimagines Rhaenyra and Alicent’s relationship, introducing them as inseparable childhood friends. During one memorable moment from the pilot, a 14-year-old Rhaenyra (played as a teen by Milly Alcock) lays with her head in Alicent’s (Emily Carey) lap, declaring that she’d much rather explore the world on dragonback with her best friend and eat only cake.
“You’re not worried about your position?” Alicent asks.
“I like this position, it’s quite comfortable,” Rhaenyra replies cheekily.
If you also survived a homoerotic formative friendship as a queer teenager, I’d wager that the unabashed intimacy between Rhaenyra and Alicent will also strike a chord with you, in the same way that many queer fans latched onto Jackie and Shauna’s deteriorating friendship in Yellowjackets. If you got queer vibes from Rhaenicent, it’s not just you, either — the actors saw it, too. In a 2022 interview with Variety, Carey shared that although they and Alcock didn’t put a label on the characters’ dynamic, their potential queerness came up organically during rehearsals.
“We were doing [a scene in Season 1, Episode 4], and Milly and I looked at each other like, ‘It kind of felt like we were about to kiss? That was really weird!’” they recalled. “Being a queer woman myself, [that reading] was something that I was conscious of… They’re 14-year-old girls, they don’t know the difference between platonic and romantic. They don’t even know what the words mean, let alone what the feelings mean.”
Just as these intense friendships often crash and burn in real life, the characters’ relationship eventually sours — though in their case, it’s because Alicent’s father Otto (Rhys Ifans) grooms her to become Rhaenyra’s father Viserys’ (Paddy Considine) new bride.
Understandably, there’s plenty of hurt on both sides, compounded by the wildly different roles they suddenly find themselves slotted into. Alicent is forced to birth new heirs to the throne and serve as the young queen to the ailing Viserys, whose body parts are literally rotting off throughout the first season. Meanwhile, Rhaenyra craves the freedom her male counterparts take for granted, from going to battle to fucking who she likes.
Even as Rhaenyra worries about her half-brother Aegon taking her place as the rightful heir to the throne, her sexual freedom and blatant disregard for the rules leave Alicent feeling resentful. As she’s pressured to seek some semblance of control through the men around her, a repressed Alicent grows more and more pious, cleaving to conservative ideals of duty as Otto whispers in her ear about how Rhaenyra could threaten her own children’s futures if she becomes the first female heir. If that doesn’t sound like a closeted queer woman grappling with her jealousy at an unrequited crush living their life openly, then I don’t know what does!
Needless to say, a few decades and one iconic knife fight later, the two women’s relationship has seemingly been strained to the point of no return. But just as the two seem to reach a truce during a family dinner, Alicent misunderstands Viserys' dying words and comes to believe that he really was on board with Aegon usurping the thrown from Rhaenyra. If that weren’t enough, a longstanding feud between their children leads to the accidental death of Rhaenyra’s son Luke (Elliot Grihault) at the hands of Alicent’s son Aemond’s (Ewan Mitchell) out-of-control dragon. Never before has a disastrous queer situationship had this many geopolitical consequences!
Given how concerned House of the Dragon is with ambition and fractured legacy, it’s feasible that the vastly different ways in which Rhaenyra and Alicent contend with misogyny aren’t inherently queer. But in that heteropatriarchal setting, it’s powerful to interpret their rift as a side effect of their struggle to secure autonomy within a world where gender and sexuality can only exist in a stifling binary. There’s a reason why there are multiple viral Rhaenicent fancams set to Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!”
Through this lens, Alicent’s conservative resentment of Rhaenyra’s freedom certainly isn’t excusable, but it’s perhaps understandable if it’s coming from a repressed queer woman using her faith system to cope with being a tool for the men around her. When she begins sleeping with Rhaenyra’s ex-lover, Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel) in Season 2, in the same bed where he hooked up with Rhaenyra, well… the subtext writes itself. Likewise, Rhaenyra’s boundless curiosity and desire for others, regardless of gender, make the forces conspiring to curb her future all the more devastating.
This reading also allows queer viewers to imagine themselves in central roles, a departure from the often-doomed supporting roles that queer characters have historically played in Thrones and HOTD. In the original series, queer male characters were often sidelined before meeting deaths that were grisly even by Thrones’ blood-thirsty standards. Alternatively, queer women were mainly shown as sex objects catering to men within brothels, in line with the straight male gaze for which the show was often criticized. HOTD Season 1 rewrote the events of Fire and Blood to give Rhaenyra’s gay first husband Laenor a semi-happy ending, but not before showing Criston graphically beating his lover to death a few episodes earlier.
This isn’t to say that I expect HBO to suddenly confirm House of the Dragon as a tragic lesbian epic complete with flowery declarations of love from D’Arcy and Cooke (although, after the great “negroni sbagliato” meme of 2022, there’s no shortage of fanfiction with this exact premise). Nor should queer readings of giant IP properties eclipse canonically queer art. But as Thrones regains its chokehold on pop culture, why not add some lesbian dyke drama to your life?
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