house of the dragon viewers who, mostly, are avid shippers of canonical incestuous uncle-niece marriage being so collectively repelled by the mother-son intercourse on-screen they cry and throw up begging for the harrenhal arc to end is so incredibly stupid, i'm not even sorry. daemon's arc this season is the best thing that could've happened to his individual narrative... he's the character who is not very vocal about, or easy with exteriorizing, his inner turmoils and anxieties. what harrenhal haunting does is forcefully dehisces those very intimate things out. although there's an obvious preternatural compulsion toward daemon's more malevolent impulses - as in the horrid compulsion issuing either from the place or the place and alys-entity's converged powers that might as expose and explore as pervert his resentment for rhaenyra and viserys and the simultaneous yearning to be unconditionally loved by them and by his mother into its extreme violent manifestations, - we still get to see way more human aspects of him becoming bare. things unuttered like guilt and sorrow, and regret no one believes him capable of - rhaenyra, laena, and little jaehaerys; fears, vulnerabilities, and the deep sense of emotional disorientation, trauma, and loss that the fandom's manichaean reading aggressively denies him. viserys' favoritism culminates in the decollation of rhaenyra that he himself is perturbed with not because he maniacally harbors harmful deadly intentions on her behalf but because there's an ugly wound that viserys, the family and patriarchal society as inevitability caused him and that alys' (or harrenhal's) influence is exacerbating through manipulation of his tattered psyche.
daemon dreaming his mother - whom he lost at too young age of three to actually establish any substantial proved relationships with - in this sexual role and womb-oriented denouement, in which he is only temporarily full of filial bliss before the ghast at consummation comes over him, is not some sui generis daemon-perversion but a part of his social and psychic character constitution and its study. alyssa's words might as well have been a self-consolatory projection he kept nurturing throughout his life: at least for his dead mother (whom he couldn't really know; dead being void, void being fillable) he was the most beloved, superior, and irreproachable one - the way that he wasn't for viserys and isn't always for rhaenyra, but wishes he was. viserys himself admitting to alyssa favoring toddler daemon most likely fortified this believe and necessity of that believe for daemon.
still, he is genuinely uncomfortable with every single apparition he's been subjected to face so far, and is not deriving a near sexual rapture (as does aemond at having aegon personally maimed) from seeing little rhaenyra accusing him of leaving her and stitching the head of the child he ordered to decapitate, nor rejoicing in the throne room after having her killed. he is not pouncing aroused (albeit he was, at first) on the figment of his bleeding mother to repeat the coitus - even if most of it is psychosexual, daemon is very obviously suffering from the horrors that are self, in situ, but are reflected through the doubles (rhaenyra, aemond) and the other (alys, alyssa).
it's breathtaking what they're doing with daemon this season. his line with alys is on par to the said. it's the best current new pairing in the show, with its own indefinite charm, albeit the pairing potentially being a sinister one. daemon is quite intimately drawn to alys despite the suppressed sense of something eerie in her omniscience. and i find it so interesting and captivating i almost wish it would never end... may daemon targaryen be haunted by his witch-fiend-friend forever!
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