(Warning: Spoilers ahead.)
There’s a lot of lust on House of the Dragon, but very little affection. Instead, these scenes have often hinged on unequal power dynamics and heavy emotional baggage, with characters who squirm with guilt and shame instead of pleasure.
Think back to the sight of Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke) having to indulge the slimy lord Larys Strong’s (Matthew Needham) foot fetish in exchange for news of strategic importance in Season 1, a scenario that pivoted on her clear powerlessness despite her rank as queen. Even when Alicent finally engages in a consensual encounter with the knight Ser Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel) in Season 2, what should be a reclamation of her sexuality is reframed as her enduring horror at being caught.
And last week’s episode took incest, an established tradition within the show’s titular dynasty, and rendered it deeply disturbing again with a dream sequence depicting Daemon Targaryen’s (Matt Smith) horrified realization that the woman he’d been having sex with was his mother.
All of which makes that kiss between Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D’Arcy) and Mysaria (Sonoya Mizuno) at the end of Season 2, Episode 6 so special, a rare tender moment between two characters who recognize that they’re equals. Mysaria might be serving at Rhaenyra’s court, but she’s there by choice. Having secured the freedom she craved earlier this season, she returns to the queen’s side of her own accord. “You have seen me as worthy, as an equal, even. Because of that, I will serve you,” she tells Rhaenyra in this episode, an affirmation of her status as ruler that the queen has been so desperately seeking.
All throughout this season, Rhaenyra has been stewing with agitation. Her husband, meant to be raising an army for her, has instead disappeared without a word. Her (all-male) council of advisors repeatedly display signs of insubordination. She’s lost her largest dragon and its rider, one of her closest allies. In “Smallfolk,” the big plan to secure more dragonriders for her side goes up in flames, resulting in the death of a knight. Even her son, who otherwise defers to her, ventures that perhaps it’s really Daemon they need to rely on now.
It’s only Mysaria’s cunning schemes—first sowing strategic rumors of the Hightowers’ callousness among the people at King’s Landing, then sending them a reminder of Rhaenyra’s benevolence—that secure her a win. It’s Mysaria who builds her up when she feels like everyone else is letting her down. And it’s Mysaria who keeps reminding her what she has instead of what she’s lost.
Towards the end of this episode, the two women share an unguarded, honest conversation about the cruelty they’ve endured from men. Mysaria speaks of her abusive father, Rhaenyra of Daemon’s abandonment. Rhaenyra then crosses the room to hug her advisor, eyes closed as they hold each other for a beat too long. Then, Mysaria begins nuzzling her neck. When the two finally kiss, it’s a frank embrace of their sexuality and desires on their own terms, a reclamation of their bodies from the men who’ve exerted ownership over them before.
Daemon’s betrayal of Rhaenyra is only the most recent in the long list of ways he’s toyed with her. He grooms her when she’s a child, taking her to a brothel, kissing her and then abruptly retreating, leaving her confused. Later, he marries, leaves for Pentos and only returns after a decade, establishing a pattern in which she must constantly seek his affection and reassurance as he withdraws.
Rhaenyra has also been left wanting in her relationships with the other men. She initiates her sexual encounter with Criston, but her spurning of his offer to abandon her claim to the throne and run away with him transforms the knight into an embittered man fixated on smearing her character. Her marriage to Laenor Velaryon (John Macmillan) is one of political strategy, arranged by her father. As Laenor is queer, she proposes that they view their relationship as one of duty, seeking true companionship outside it—a concept first introduced to her by Daemon. And while she and Ser Harwin Strong (Ryan Corr) share a loving equation that results in three children, the show relies on implication rather than outright depiction. Instead, their affair is a transgression for which she’s repeatedly punished with taunts of her kids being bastards.
Viewers have long read queer undertones into Rhaenyra’s relationship with Alicent, characters whose loving childhood friendship has since curdled into fraught unease as a civil war rips apart the realm and their families. In the show, a teenage Rhaenyra envisions a life in which the two ride “on dragonback, see the great wonders across the Narrow Sea, and eat only cake.” Years later, Rhaenyra keeps an unopened letter from Alicent in her lockbox, a parallel to Alicent keeping a ripped-out page from a book they read as children.
According to House of the Dragon writer Sara Hess, Olivia Cooke believes that “at some point [Rhaenyra and Alicent] kissed or made out or had some kind of physical interaction that Alicent’s mother found out about and forbade.” While the show has never explicitly confirmed their relationship as romantic, the Episode 6 kiss makes Rhaenyra’s queerness canonical and lends weight to that possibility. The queen has been caged within the confines of Dragonstone this season, but framing her encounter with Mysaria as an outburst of passionate emotion indicates that she’s been chafing at her restraints for far longer.
The moment is also a sharp contrast to the other kiss this episode—Aemond Targaryen (Ewan Mitchell) brushing his lips against his brother’s forehead after burning him in combat, threatening the immobile king into silence and submission. A loving gesture is weaponized into one of intimidation, a Judas kiss of betrayal. The parallel drives home how the Greens view cruelty as strength, unlike Rhaenyra who finds hers in a moment of vulnerability this episode.
Earlier in “Smallfolk,” Rhaenyra practices her stance with a sword in the privacy of her chambers, pausing when she’s interrupted by Mysaria bringing her news about the discontent brewing at King’s Landing. When the conversation ends, she absentmindedly leaves with the sword still in hand. “This becomes you,” says Mysaria, seeing Rhaenyra as the queen has long wished to see herself—a warrior.
Rhaenyra, thrown off kilter, awkwardly puts down the sword and leaves, but it’s clear that Mysaria’s words are what embolden her to pick it up again at the end of this episode. When she’s told that one of her dragons has been claimed by an unidentified rider and presented with the option of conferring with her council, she instead heads straight for the dragonpit and takes off, intending to confront the potential adversary herself. Having spent this season pacing the halls of Dragonstone while men march off to war, it’s Mysaria that finally gives her the push she needs to set off.
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