Spoilers ahead for House of the Dragon's fifth episode of Season 2, called "Regent."
House of the Dragon Season 2 is approaching its finale in the not-too-distant future of the 2024 TV schedule, and while the Greens of King's Landing and Blacks of Dragonstone have been making moves recently, Daemon Targaryen has been all but wallowing in the spooky walls of Harrenhal. Daemon's visions have certainly been interesting from a character point of view, and book readers likely caught some foreshadowing from George R.R. Martin's source material in them. The latest vision crossed a line even by Targaryen standards with an incestuous love scene between Daemon and his mom.
House of the Dragon has delivered plenty of incest over just a season and a half so far, and Game of Thrones delivered its fair share as well, but parent/child is a new one involving a major character. So, I revisited George R.R. Martin's Fire & Blood to see what he said about the Targaryens' – to quote Alicent in Season 1 – "queer customs."
What Happened In Daemon's Vision
Daemon's vision didn't immediately seem like a love scene involving his and Viserys' mother, although her pale skin and light hair certainly suggested that she was probably a close family relative. As the sex scene escalated, I thought that maybe this woman was supposed to be a younger version of Aemma, since the vision was telling him that he should have been king instead of his brother. Then, the woman uttered what I'm guessing will go down as an infamous House of the Dragon line, telling Daemon: "If only you were born first …my favorite son."
Well, now that I've moved past my knee-jerk cringing and wondering if House of the Dragon really went so far to include parent/child incest when Game of Thrones thoroughly condemned that with Craster, I can point out that the love scene wasn't a replay of something that actually happened, since Daemon was very young when his mother died. It's also not a conscious fantasy of Daemon's, but seemingly a vision concocted and implanted in his mind by Alys Rivers, who is nearly as spooky as Harrenhal itself.
But considering that we're talking about a guy whose parents were siblings, whose wife is his niece, whose father-in-law was his brother, and whose sons are also his great nephews, Daemon's vision of a love scene with his mom is reason enough to revisit what George R.R. Martin wrote about Tagaryen customs.
What George R.R. Martin Wrote In Fire & Blood
Warning: spoilers ahead for Fire & Blood through the chapter called "A Time of Testing – The Realm Remade."
Fire & Blood is a fictional history book of the Targaryen dynasty drawing on sources like septons, maesters, and one particularly memorable fool named Mushroom, and House of the Dragon is certainly not following the source material to the letter. Even Blood and Cheese unfolded differently on the show, and that's one of the most pivotal events of the book. So, it was interesting to revisit what George R.R. Martin wrote about Targaryen incest and compare to the show.
As a crash course on the particulars of Fire & Blood in case you haven't read it – incest between the Targaryens was allowed in Westeros due to the Doctrine of Exceptionalism, which basically stated that the Targaryens could marry their own because they weren't part of the Faith of the Seven, while the rest of the realm couldn't marry within their immediate families. The Doctrine of Exceptionalism seemed like an option for Game of Thrones to justify Jon and Dany's relationship after he learned the truth, and tracks with why pretty much nobody other than pre-time jump Alicent on House of the Dragon was disturbed by the "queer customs."
Even Viserys' objections to Daemon and Rhaenyra before the time jump seemed more to do with the fact that Daemon 1) was married at the time, 2) had ruined her while out on the town, and 3) was Daemon, not that they were uncle and niece. Who knew that Season 1 could seem like such a simpler time by this point with creepy visions in the riverlands?
In Fire & Blood, it was specifically noted that mother/son unions were not generally allowed in Westeros. Martin wrote:
The laws of the Seven, as laid down in sacred text and taught by the septas and septons in obedience to the Father of the Faithful, decreed that brother might not lie with sister, nor father with daughter, nor mother with son, that the fruits of such unions were abominations, loathsome in the eyes of the gods. All this the Exceptionalists affirmed, but with this caveat: the Targaryens were different.
The believers in Exceptionalism went with the idea that those rules against incest just didn't apply to Targaryens, and Fire & Blood doesn't get into the specifics of which – if not all – kinds were allowed within the ruling family. But the point remained that the Targaryens were not like the rest of the people of Westeros, down to "their eyes, their hair, their very bearing... and they flew dragons."
Later in the book, a Targaryen ally by the name of Septon Alfyn was recorded saying this to a man in support of Exceptionalism:
One god made us all, Andals and Valyrians and First Men, but he did not make us all alike. He made the lion and the aurochs as well, both noble beasts, but certain gifts he gave to one and not the other, and the lion cannot live as an aurochs, nor an aurochs as a lion. For you to bed your sister would be a grievous sin, ser... but you are not the blood of the dragon, no more than I am. What they do is what they have always done, and it is not for us to judge them.
In this defense of the doctrine in Fire & Blood, the only example of permitted incest was between brother and sister. Uncle/niece was presumably a stretch, but the implication seems clear that parent/child relations were out of the question even among Targaryens. While George R.R. Martin doesn't specifically condemn what happened in Daemon's vision in Fire & Blood, even though the Targaryen family tree has fewer branches out than most, there are no marriages between parent and child.
Basically, everybody would be pretty grossed out by Daemon's vision with his mom, and he might want to vacate Harrenhal sooner rather than later if those are the kind of experiences that Alys Rivers is seemingly planting in his head. He was already enough of a wild card before she was messing with him!
Find out if Alys somehow has anything grosser in store for Daemon with new episodes of House of the Dragon on Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO. If you've missed any of Season 2 so far, you can revisit episodes streaming with a Max subscription. All eight seasons of Game of Thrones are available on the streamer as well.
