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HOUSE OF THE DRAGON 2.08 (2024)

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HOUSE OF THE DRAGON (2022–) Season 2, Episode 8, “The Queen Who Ever Was”

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Rhaenyra Targaryen and Daemon Targaryen HOUSE OF THE DRAGON S02E08 | dir. Geeta Vasant Patel

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HOUSE OF THE DRAGON - 2x08 - The Queen Who Ever Was

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Rhaenyra Targaryen and Daemon Targaryen HOUSE OF THE DRAGON S02E08 | dir. Geeta Vasant Patel

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#if i had a nickel... HOUSE OF THE DRAGON 1x04 // 2x08

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[..] That Prince Daemon died as well we cannot doubt. His remains were never found, but there are queer currents in that lake, and hungry fish as well.

HOUSE OF THE DRAGON 2x08 - "The Queen Who Ever Was"

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Daemon & Rhaenyra Targaryen in House of the Dragon Season 2

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HOUSE OF THE DRAGON 2.02 – Rhaenyra the Cruel

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Any good piece of media written for males: the mindless pursuit of masculine power and dominance leads to abject moral rot and the decay of your very soul. Everything you've been taught to desire, everything you've been brainwashed to covet is empty empty empty. Male audiences: God this guy is cool. His wife is an annoying bitch tho.

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"i'm of you."

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hi! i read your disclaimers, this is a genuine question not an attack. i am just curious to hear your opinion. do you not like people throwing around the term grooming in hotd because you don't think that's what daemon did to rhaenyra? or just because they misuse it? i have no problem with fictional incest, romanticised or not, even when grooming is depicted, i am not asking in order to pass moral judgement on whatever your answer may be. it's just that it has always been my reading that it was implied he did groom her, and i was curious to hear if you had another take.

i appreciate the good faith inquiry! i have made a lot of posts on this subject trying to get at my very complex feelings on this blog. let me see if i can lay them out.

first, the absolute shortest possible version of why i don’t apply it to their relationship i could manage can be found here.

a collection of just generally me being annoyed by how “grooming” is used as a term in fandom and more general questions about its usefulness as a concept: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

why “pedophile” is a useless term for anyone we have met thus far in hotd (thematically related): 1, 2, 3

a collection of posts about how i hate how the concept of “the pedophile” is used more generally: 1, 2, 3

posts that talk about or touch on the real ways i think daemon HAS harmed and traumatized rhaenyra - just because i would not call it “grooming” does not mean i think that is not a huge element of their relationship: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

posts on how this is really a systemic issue rather than daemon’s own personal evil: 1, 2, 3

relatedly, a collection of posts on some of the ways i find how the targaryens’ incestuous marriage practices discussed frustrating: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

but a shorter version is that although i will not disagree with anyone else’s use of the term to describe their own experience, i simply do not like the word at all. i do not think it - a specific term that means “isolating and manipulating a child in order to sexually abuse them” - adequately elucidates the very broad phenomena it is often used to describe, and therefore find its sheer popularity as a descriptor disturbing when you consider the term’s usage in contemporary discourse ie its popularity with the far right to describe queer and trans people. with hotd in particular i think it is ahistorical to use it to describe a society in which child marriage is normative and institutionalized and it thus undersells the scale of the problem and individualizes it as a matter of individual pathology, too often precluding feminist analysis of power which imo is the only path to actually meaningfully analyzing the causes and experience of child sex abuse, in a way that is tedious enough discussing contemporary society but becomes downright absurd in the context of westeros - no historian of the ancient mediterranean or medieval europe, for example, would ever use it, even though those are societies where historians are doing work on how children and girls were hideously vulnerable to sexual violence.

i think we just need more and better words if we are going to have worthwhile conversations about very fraught and painful issues like this, not this one word that is also flung at drag queen readalongs in libraries and people who try to get children access to trans medicine, used indiscriminately. i personally dislike it and really wish i could conduct my fandom life seeing it used so badly at least 80% less of the time because it’s often actively upsetting to me, hence my own boundaries in this area. i think there is reasonable room for disagreement on all these points, and i’m not really interested in arguing about it - again, if it holds some personal meaning for someone in analyzing their own abuse, or if that’s their own read of a fictional relationship, i’m not going to attack them. but i will be maintaining my own peace, and that’s the point of the disclaimer. i am also no sort of expert. i am literally just some guy who happens to think about this a lot because painful stuff in my own life and am invested in trying to work toward better ways of talking about it in relation to fandom in my own space as someone who cares about abuse victims, analyzing narrative, feminist thought, the english language, communicating difficult ideas effectively, etc.

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HOUSE OF THE DRAGON Season 2 Episode 7 - The Red Sowing

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Emma D'Arcy as Rhaenyra Targaryen in HOUSE OF THE DRAGON (2022-) S02E07 | "The Red Sowing"

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HOUSE OF THE DRAGON 2.07 "The Red Sowing"

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HOUSE OF THE DRAGON S02E06 | dir. Andrij Parekh

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He has ever done what suits Daemon.

HOUSE OF THE DRAGON (2022–) Season 2, Episode 6, “Smallfolk”