Rhaenyra Targaryen, the Male Gaze and How HBO Undermined the Dance;
House of the Dragon, HBO’s prequel to the widely-discussed Game of Thrones, promised a return to political intrigue and emotional depth through the rise and fall of House Targaryen in the Dance of the Dragons.
At its center stood Rhaenyra Targaryen: a character positioned as a feminist figure, a mother, and a queen. But most of all, someone who we can consider to be a challenger to patriarchy within the oppressive institution of Westeros.
However, as the first season unfolded and promotional material for the second gained traction, a troubling pattern emerged: the show is largely told through a male gaze perspective, and in doing so, it has compromised the complexity and dignity of Rhaenyra’s story.
The whitewashing of the Greens as characters within the story, both narratively and literally, further reinforces this distortion, turning what could have been a raw, tragic tale of female power and resistance into another chapter of sanitized palace drama favoring patriarchal narratives, to reinforce the mold that we have seen in society for eons, into today.
In this little thing I’ve come up with, we are going to discuss some things I have thought about for a while and why I think they are important to be pointed out for austerity, peace of mind and of course, discourse.
To define the “male gaze” is to understand it not merely as the act of looking, but as a system of storytelling that positions women as objects rather than agents. As characters whose primary function is to reflect or provoke male emotion, desire, or violence.
The male gaze dictates not just what is shown on screen, but how it is shown: who gets interiority, who is allowed complexity, and whose suffering matters. In the case of House of the Dragon, the male gaze insidiously shapes the portrayal of Rhaenyra Targaryen, despite the show’s premise being centered on her fight for legitimacy in a deeply misogynistic world.
While House of the Dragon appears on the surface to champion a feminist narrative, which to some degree is true, as the plot points are still hit, it doesn’t understand how to tell a story that understands the underlying crux of the story.
Rhaenyra is named heir, challenges gender roles, and occupies the symbolic center of the Dance of the Dragons yet this framing is ultimately superficial. Everything is somehow taken away from Rhaenyra.
The deeper narrative attention consistently drifts toward the men around her: Daemon’s volatile moods are explored with nuance and sympathy; Viserys’ failures are treated as tragic rather than negligent;
Criston Cole’s escalating cruelty is granted emotional justification; even the trauma experienced by Alicent’s sons is shown with more visceral weight than Rhaenyra’s repeated losses.
In this light, the show gestures toward feminism but stops short of actually honoring Rhaenyra’s arc. Her storyline is rarely told from within. Instead, she is filtered through male emotion, often infantilized, occasionally eroticized especially in how her relationship with Daemon is handled.
Rather than the political alliance and shared ambition that Fire & Blood implies, the show presents Daemon as a domineering, sometimes abusive figure whose inner turmoil is given far more attention than Rhaenyra’s own political or maternal grief, when that isn’t even the case in the books.
Scenes such as the infamous choking incident are never followed up with serious narrative reflection; they simply pass, the way women’s pain often does in male-authored media. And perpetuate the need to use pain, especially ones inflicted by men, as a means to put forth a woman towards a path of empowerment.
This is never the case when we first meet Rhaenyra in The Princess and the Queen nor in Fire and Blood. There, she is not a hesitant, whispering figure in the background of her own rebellion.
We witness her go from a child who had just lost her mother, thrust into a position she never wished to be in, into a woman grown, a dragon heiress who would one day be queen with fire in her blood and steel in her resolve.
Of course, as a protagonist, Rhaenyra is not perfect, but that’s what made her so good, so enjoyable. She is formidable. She is politically strategic, at times ruthless, and deeply aware of the cost of power in a world built to resist her.
The show dilutes that presence. Rhaenyra is reduced to a reactive figure, often defined by how she responds or fails to respond to male action. She weeps, whispers, wavers, but rarely acts with the same command of narrative space that her male counterparts are afforded.
The storytelling undermines her claim not just to the throne, but to emotional authority in her own tale. Her grief over the deaths of her children is given fleeting moments, while Daemon’s brooding, Aegon’s volatility, and Aemond’s trauma receive extended screen time and richer cinematographic treatment. This is not a coincidence, of course. It is a re-centering of the male gaze.
The same narrative flattening is applied to Alicent Hightower, who in the source material is as politically ambitious and calculating as Rhaenyra, if not more so, as her greed permits her to do as she wishes.
Alicent Hightower is not merely a mother; she is a power broker who plays the court with ruthless precision, leveraging her femininity, religion, and family status to shape the realm. But in the show, she is rewritten through a softer, more palatable frame.
In the show, she is a woman coerced by her father, motivated by fear, and victimized by circumstance. Her ambition is made sympathetic by aligning it with “maternal duty” rather than self-driven power, once again sanitizing a woman’s desire to rule in a way that appeals to patriarchal comfort.
She is not allowed to be vicious or Machiavellian without apology, to be a woman who stands on her own convictions and her own choices, to wield her influence and her ruthlessness and yet the men around her are, constantly.
This reluctance to portray Rhaenyra and Alicent as fully autonomous, politically potent women is not a minor storytelling flaw, when the story is about their identity as women in power, is a fundamental failure of perspective.
The series chooses to reframe its female leads through lenses that diminish their agency, instead giving narrative weight to the emotional journeys of the men around them.
This failure to grant Rhaenyra and Alicent the sharpness, ugliness, and command they wield in Fire & Blood reveals how deeply the male gaze has shaped the adaptation, not just in what is shown, but in whose pain matters, and whose story is truly being told.
One of the most jarring narrative distortions in House of the Dragon lies in its treatment of Daemon Targaryen who is a character who, in the source material, is complex, morally gray, and deeply loyal to Rhaenyra’s cause.
He is a rogue, yes. He is a warrior and a prince who walks the edge of insanity and control, but he is also a devoted partner to her in every way he could be and is her most precious champion of her claim, besides her three eldest sons and the Velaryons.
Their relationship in Fire & Blood is not clean or easy, but it is forged in ambition, shared grief, and political understanding. Yet, the show recasts Daemon Targaryen not as a partner, but as a volatile man whose emotional swings often destabilize the narrative and Rhaenyra’s autonomy in their relationship.
The infamous scene in which Daemon chokes Rhaenyra, an outlandish, outrageous invention of the show, epitomizes this shift from textured political alliance to patriarchal spectacle. It does not deepen our understanding of their bond, but also replaces political intrigue with male rage.
It prioritizes the shock value of gendered violence over the slow burn of strategic partnership. Worse, the moment passes without consequence. Rhaenyra is not allowed to respond, not meaningfully.
Her silence, likely intended to convey strength or shock, is left uncontextualized, flattening her into a passive figure in her own story. This is not a woman in command; this is a woman narratively benched by the men around her.
This sidelining becomes even more egregious when we consider how other key characters, particularly her children are treated. Jacaerys Velaryon (Jace), her eldest son and heir, is perhaps the most underwritten and underappreciated casualty of the adaptation.
His story is one of the most disappointing arcs in the show as they reductively shaped it around insecurity, resentment, and a judgmental preoccupation with his mother’s sexuality.
Unlike his book counterpart in Fire & Blood, who demonstrates early political acumen, a strong sense of duty, and even proposes the pragmatic idea to call upon the dragonseeds in the war effort.
The show reduces Jace to a brooding, petulant figure whose primary emotional beats are rooted in angst over his bastardy and open discomfort with Rhaenyra’s romantic and sexual autonomy.
Rather than portraying a young man shaped by the political machinations of court and the burdens of leadership, the adaptation leans heavily into a shallow depiction of maternal slut-shaming and identity anxiety.
This simplification not only undermines his potential as a compelling political actor in the Dance of the Dragons, but also distorts the more progressive, strategic character originally outlined by GRRM, flattening Jace into yet another frustrated boy lashing out at his mother, rather than an heir trying to unify a fractured realm.
In the books, Jace is the golden son: brave, intelligent, politically adept, and loyal. He is raised with the weight of leadership on his shoulders, groomed not just to inherit a throne but to reshape the realm in his mother’s image. And more than ever, Jace knows that he must step up, in order to raise the claim of his mother in her darkest hours, in her time of need.
During the short time of his life, Jace attempts diplomatic missions, shows compassion, exercises caution, and displays the political instinct his family needs.
He is the kind of character whose goodness makes his later death a profound tragedy for the Blacks. That is why he was the kind of prince that Westeros can only mourn for, the king that could have been greater than any one that could have come before him.
And yet, House of the Dragon has chosen to leave Jacaerys Velaryon almost entirely underdeveloped. His motivations, ideals, and inner life are barely explored, despite his role as heir to Rhaenyra and a key political figure in the coming war.
His intelligence, compassion, and diplomatic skill, all central to his character in Fire & Blood are scarcely given narrative room to breathe. In contrast, we’re already seeing those same qualities being quietly reassigned to characters on the Green side, particularly Alicent’s sons, Aemond and Daeron Targaryen.
Jace’s defining achievement in the source material, his diplomatic mission across Westeros to secure support for his mother’s claim, is one of the few moments of true political success in the early war.
He is strategic, persuasive, and deeply aware of the realm’s fragile loyalties. Yet the show has given Aemond far more screen time, stylized presence, and emotional layering, allowing him to dominate the narrative space.
Aemond, who in the book is characterized by cruelty and warmongering, is repackaged onscreen as a calculating, tortured antihero. His smirks and stares are filmed like tragic poetry, while Jace, whose choices actually shape the course of the war is left in the background.
The political weight and emotional significance that should belong to Jace’s arc are instead redirected toward framing Aemond as a compelling rival, rather than a dangerous provocateur.
Meanwhile, Daeron, who has yet to appear onscreen, has been cast as a soft-featured, unassuming young boy, which is a creative choice that points toward a sanitized portrayal. One which does not make any sense whatsoever.
In the source material, Daeron is a dragonrider responsible for one of the most horrifying acts of the war: the burning of countless civilians in the Riverlands and the Reach. And yet everything about the show’s setup suggests a rebranding from war criminal to misunderstood golden boy.
Jace’s honor, his capacity to unite lords, his promise as a future king, these are being quietly lifted from the Blacks and repurposed to create a more emotionally balanced (or morally confused) version of the Greens.
The effect is not just revisionist, but it actively undermines the narrative of a woman and her son fighting to preserve legitimacy in a world that is built to deny it to them, a world which claims that they cannot rule because they are “tarnished” by womanhood and their appearance.
This reallocation of virtue is no coincidence. Jace’s integrity, empathy, and diplomacy traits that should make him central to the Black cause and deeply beloved by the audience are being withheld from him and redistributed to Green characters in order to balance audience sympathy.
Aemond receives more screen time, character nuance, and emotional grounding; Aegon is given trauma to justify his depravity; and Daeron, it seems, will be handed the nobility that rightfully belongs to Rhaenyra’s heir.
This erasure is not limited to individuals, it is structural. Rhaenyra’s camp, the Blacks, are portrayed as increasingly unstable, volatile, or sidelined. Which misses the entire point of the story that has been expressed as a story against patriarchy’s greed and violence.
Yet this is what we have. Daemon is violent and unpredictable. Rhaenyra is passive and grieving. Jace is barely present. The rest of the Blacks are considered NPCs who can just be rewritten out whenever the writers want to.
Meanwhile, the Greens are made legible and sympathetic: Alicent is a victim, her sons are misunderstood, and her cause is painted as a tragic miscommunication rather than a coup.
The writers have actively softened their crimes, rewritten their motivations, and blurred the lines of accountability all while depriving the Blacks of their emotional and political center.
In doing so, the show has not only distorted the source material, but gutted the emotional heart of the Dance of the Dragons. It has taken a story about female resistance, familial loyalty, and political tragedy, and filtered it once again through the familiar lens of male dysfunction and patriarchal storytelling.
Daemon is no longer Rhaenyra’s sword, he is her burden. Jace is no longer her light, he is fading into narrative irrelevance. And Rhaenyra herself is no longer a dragon queen with fire in her voice.
Instead, she is rendered voiceless, watching the men around her shape her fate and steal her story. And the Blacks and her movement against the patriarchy is no longer about her rights, it's about the Greens continuing the male gaze and institutions of patriarchy.
In parallel to the diminishing of Rhaenyra Targaryen’s complexity is the glaring whitewashing of the Greens, both visually and thematically.
From casting to characterization, the series makes a series of aesthetic and narrative choices that reframe the Greens not as antagonists or political usurpers, but as fragile, sympathetic victims of circumstance. This is a shift that subtly reinforces white Eurocentric, patriarchal values under the guise of moral nuance.
Visually, the show casts Alicent Hightower and her children as far more pale-skinned, delicate-featured, and conventionally attractive by Western standards. This immediately aligns them with traditional cinematic codes of innocence and legitimacy.
They are framed in soft lighting, draped in modest greens and golds, often filmed in moments of prayer or quiet vulnerability. These aesthetic choices prime the audience to feel for them, to perceive them as human first and political actors second.
This becomes even more problematic when contrasted with Rhaenyra’s children by Laenor Velaryon, who are not only different in looks and in heritage, but are also repeatedly subjected to suspicion and ridicule for their appearance.
Even as they themselves are white, they are subjected to suspicion, because they do not meet the standards, which Alicent’s children do have. Even at the likely notion that they could have been bi-racial and claimed more features from their mother, they are viewed as someone else, rather than the princes they are.
Despite even Fire & Blood suggesting the possibility that Laenor may still be their father or at the very least, that Westerosi gossip may not be the truth , the show plays into the optics: the boys are visibly coded as “other” and that being used against them, children, marked as evidence of illegitimacy. One which Alicent and co., use to their advantage greatly.
The camera lingers on their faces in scenes of tension. Their paternity is a punchline, a political liability, a weapon used against Rhaenyra again and again. The implicit message is unsettling and familiar: specific features are equated with truth and purity and any sense of them being the other is viewed with deception, scandal, and instability.
The implications deepen when we factor in how the show treats Daemon’s daughters, Baela and Rhaena Targaryen. In the books, Daemon is deeply affectionate toward them. He is proud of their potential and mindful of their status.
Baela, in particular, plays a central role in the war, a dragonrider and political force in her own right. Yet the show sidelines them almost entirely, relegating them to the background, barely granting them dialogue, agency, or emotional depth.
Their Targaryen lineage is not centered. If anything, the show uses their Velaryon identity and weaponizes it against the Velaryon boys by the fandom and in effect against them, to cancel out their Targaryen identity.
Most critically, their Blackness, as young women of color descended from two powerful houses is visually present but narratively erased. That erasure is not incidental, of course.
If anything, it reflects a broader discomfort within the show’s framework when it comes to fully centering Black or brown characters as agents of political power and personal complexity.
Moreover, the show softens the political sharpness of Alicent Hightower, reimagining her not as the shrewd, calculating figure of Fire & Blood, but as a passive, pious woman coerced into power plays she never truly wanted.
The onscreen Alicent is forced to be a victim first to her father, then later a wife first and then a mother first, a queen second which is defined more by her Catholic-coded modesty and maternal anxiety than by ambition or strategic intelligence.
Her feud with Rhaenyra is framed less as a struggle for power and more as a tragic misunderstanding rooted in hurt feelings and miscommunication, in desire to be more than what Rhaenyra is.
This portrayal culminates in the infamous “misheard” deathbed whisper which is a transparent invention of the show in which Viserys allegedly names “Aegon” without clarity, thereby allowing Alicent to believe he was reversing his line of succession.
This moment is not just historically inaccurate within the world of Fire & Blood; it is politically dishonest. It transforms a deliberate act of usurpation. This is a coordinated, months-long conspiracy to crown Aegon over Rhaenyra into an emotionally ambiguous accident.
It allows Alicent to become a woman caught in grief, clinging to what she believes is a final wish, rather than a political architect of treason. In doing so, the show absolves her of true culpability and redirects narrative tension toward emotional confusion, not ideological conflict.
What was once a power grab becomes a soft, tragic fumble that is caused by someone’s bad decisions, calculations, a fib, a misunderstanding. The Greens, once usurpers, become mourners. Rhaenyra, once betrayed, becomes melodramatic.
This kind of narrative restructuring matters. It reshapes the viewer’s sense of justice and accountability. It tells us that Rhaenyra’s outrage is excessive, that her losses are personal but not political, and that the true story is not about a woman wronged, but a world misunderstood.
It flattens the raw, fiery heart of the Dance of the Dragons into a drama about feelings, not systems. And crucially, it does so by centering white pain, white beauty, and white innocence while sidelining the underlying issue of imposing the othering of many identities including that of Black and brown characters and punishing them for simply existing in defiance of it.
What’s most disheartening is that House of the Dragon had, at its foundation, the raw material for a genuinely feminist tragedy. Not one defined by hollow girlboss aesthetics or sanitized empowerment arcs, but a brutal, emotionally rich story about a woman born into a system designed to destroy her.
Rhaenyra’s arc in Fire & Blood is not about being flawless, nor is it about easy victories. It is about endurance. About the slow, devastating erosion of a woman’s power, not because she was weak, but because the world would not allow her to be strong on her own terms. Her tragedy is not that she failed, but that she was never allowed to be fully human: ambitious, flawed, grieving, angry and still worthy of the crown.
The story of Rhaenyra is one of resistance: a woman hemmed in by expectations, reduced by rumors, slandered for her sexuality, scrutinized for her body, and eventually broken by a society that demanded either perfection or silence from its women.
Her power was conditional. Her motherhood weaponized her. Her grief, politicized. She is not a tragic heroine because of her own moral collapse, but because no matter how hard she fought, no matter how much legitimacy she held, the weight of patriarchal tradition was always heavier.
And yet, the show resists this reading. Rather than lean into the complexity of female rage, such as Rhaenyra’s seething anger at her usurpation, the fury of a mother who has lost child after child, the righteous violence of a woman tired of appeasing a world that will not bend. The series sands down those edges.
It reduces her to silence, softness, and strategic restraint. Her pain is aestheticized, her decisions dulled. She becomes not a fire, she is not the dragon, but a symbol of how patriarchy views a woman, how they want a woman to be.
Patriarchy views women to be what they never are. And it is insulting. Women are expected to be mournful, quiet, and narratively submissive. They force Rhaenyra’s internal fire to be suppressed in favor of palatable, male-approved grief.
Moreover, another glaring imbalance in House of the Dragon is the way maternal nuance is afforded to Alicent Hightower but withheld from Rhaenyra Targaryen. While Alicent is allowed to be both a mother and a political player, framing her actions as rooted in maternal devotion, Rhaenyra's motherhood is often sidelined, weaponized, or stripped away entirely.
Alicent and her confidant Criston Cole are directly responsible for instilling the very insecurities in the Velaryon boys that the show later pins on Rhaenyra’s failure to coddle him or maintain a spotless reputation.
Yet Rhaenyra is never granted the emotional space to confront this; instead, she remains strangely empathetic toward Alicent, still haunted by the memory of a broken friendship while Alicent is permitted to nurse her grudges with righteous conviction.
If the roles were reversed, if Rhaenyra had emotionally manipulated or undermined Alicent’s children, the writing would almost certainly validate Alicent's anger as maternal instinct.
But in contrast, Rhaenyra is expected to endure betrayal, slut-shaming, and political sabotage without letting it define her, because her own personhood is repeatedly subordinated to the emotional arcs of others.
Alicent, who often functions as the fantasy of the ideal victim, one who is chaste, wounded, loyal, gets to be human. Rhaenyra, meanwhile, is left to carry the crown without ever being allowed to fully carry her own narrative.
Therefore, in parallel, the agents of the patriarchy, such as Alicent and her sons are recontextualized as sympathetic, misunderstood, and in many cases, victims themselves.
Alicent is no longer a woman actively playing the game of thrones, manipulating alliances, and orchestrating a coup; she is reimagined as a pious, regretful mother just trying to protect her children.
Her sons are not power-hungry usurpers, but traumatized boys lashed by a system they never asked for. In stripping them of their culpability and agency, the show doesn’t complicate them in any plausible way that GRRM had, if anything, it excuses them. Their decisions are softened, their violence sanitized, their betrayal turned into miscommunication.
In doing so, the show fails to deliver on its central thematic promise: to show how the patriarchy devours women in vastly different ways, how it forces some into monstrous ambition and others into saintly self-sacrifice.
It had the opportunity to interrogate how the structures of inheritance, motherhood, marriage, and power crush the women caught within them. Instead, House of the Dragon recycles the tired dichotomy we’ve seen too many times: the good mother vs. the mad queen.
It refuses to allow Rhaenyra to be both powerful and broken, both grieving and wrathful. It narrows her into digestible shapes, denying her the emotional contradiction that makes great female characters unforgettable.
What should have been a generational war shaped by ideology, betrayal, grief, and resistance is instead reframed as a tragic misreading. Somewhat of a petty feud between two women misunderstood by a dying king, which they magically transfer into their children.
The larger machinery of misogyny is blurred, the political stakes reduced to familial missteps. And in reorienting the audience’s empathy toward male characters invented by the show.
Aegon’s torment, Viserys’ suffering, Aemond’s resentment, the show sidelines the very woman whose name would one day inspire revolution in the dynasty and lead to countless women, who would inspire the birth of Daenerys Targaryen.
Rhaenyra Targaryen was never meant to be a martyr of miscommunication. Rather, she was meant to be a symbol of what it costs to challenge the patriarchal world as a woman who dares to lead.
And yet, in House of the Dragon, her legacy is not ignited, but dimmed. Not by fire and blood but by caution and compromise. A compromise which perpetuates, and keeps the patriarchy alive and well.
