Spoiler-free answers to questions raised by the eighth and final episode of the ‘Game of Thrones’ prequel’s second season, concerning Season 2 in review, the pacing of the series, and insights into Targaryen armies, Admiral Lohar, dragon excrement, and more

HBO/Ringer illustration

Another House of the Dragon season has come and gone, and so too has another set of House of the Dragon mailbags. Thank you to everyone who submitted questions throughout this season—after the finale most of all, as I received a record number of tweets and emails this week.

For today’s mailbag, I’ll get through as many questions as possible before reaching my word count, touching on expectations for Season 3 now that Season 2 is over, Westerosi armies, dragon bathroom habits, and more.

Charlie asks, “Are you slightly worried about HotD’s future now that your prediction of S2 HotD being closer to peak GoT was clearly off and it was much closer to bottom half Thronesverse than top?”

The Season 2 finale was a disappointment; I wrote as much in my review of the episode. But I think some of the negative reactions since Sunday have been overblown. This was not a disaster in the vein of Game of Thrones Season 8—not least because the rest of the season before the finale was a step up in quality.

So I actually disagree with the premise of this question. I understand opinions may differ, but for me, Dragon Season 2 was closer to Thrones’ peak than its nadir. Even an underwhelming finale can’t take away from the splendor of Season 2’s best moments, such as the Sowing and the first exemplary dragon vs. dragon battle we’ve ever seen from the Thrones franchise. (Sorry to undead Viserion’s fight against his brothers in “The Long Night.”)

In my preseason piece headlined “Why Season 2 of House of the Dragon Will Be ‘Thrones’ at Its Best,” I listed five reasons I expected an improvement in Season 2. And the show fully followed through on four of them: more battles (one is more than zero!), more places, more people, and no more time jumps or recasts. (I’m not counting the fifth item on that list—more Starks—because Cregan was present only in the season’s first scene.)

Dragon’s second season didn’t just offer more spectacle than Season 1; it also expanded its world—look at all the smallfolk now populating the screen after a noble-heavy first season—and deepened its characters. Those factors amount to a considerable improvement, from my perspective.

The worst aspect of the finale is that it will leave a bitter taste in our mouths for two years, until Season 3 airs (probably in 2026). But thus far, Dragon has made mostly solid contact on its biggest swings. (I say “mostly” because I was expecting a bit more from the Blood and Cheese affair, which had the potential to dominate the discourse for weeks but quickly faded instead.) That’s encouraging because there are plenty more big swings coming, in part because Season 2 ended before it could take them. Which leads right into the next question in this mailbag.

Ryan asks, “A lot of the conversation online after the Season 2 finale was how we’ve, for the most part, sat through two seasons now of essentially buildup to the war. As a book reader, does this pacing make sense to you? Is there so little action to come that holding off any battle beyond Rook’s Rest until Season 3 is actually a smart decision for a four-season show? Or is this pacing as frustrating/baffling to book readers as it is to show-only watchers?”

Let’s do some quick math. Dragon’s writers included two major set pieces in Season 2: the battle at Rook’s Rest and the Sowing. If that’s their baseline for the next two seasons—showrunner Ryan Condal confirmed this week that the show will end after Season 4—then they have the budget for four more action tentpoles.

Yet going by the book plot, I count roughly 10 to 12 major action sequences (battles and otherwise) still to come. I’m sure the writers can figure out a way to condense that number somewhat—such as by combining several different Riverlands battles into one—but at least six are, in my mind, completely and utterly necessary to the fabric of the story. And some of those scenes could make Rook’s Rest look relatively tame, in terms of their scope and CGI requirements.

“There is a tremendous amount of resources, construction, armor, costumes, and visual effects needed” to stage one such upcoming battle, Condal said.

So not only is Season 2’s pacing frustrating, knowing how much more action is still to come, but it makes me wonder whether the rest of the series will be able to do justice to every one of the book’s remaining highlights or whether Condal and Co. will need to pick their spots. Hopefully HBO’s parent company can send some more dollars to Westeros now that it won’t be paying for NBA rights much longer.

Richard asks, “How come the Targaryens (both the blacks and greens) have no standing army of their own? If there is a Targaryen army, why didn’t part of the army defect to Dragonstone with the blacks or at least station themselves on black-allied territories? It’s strange that Daemon has to roam the country in search of swords.”

House Targaryen doesn’t have a standing army for two reasons. The first is that the royal family doesn’t need one. Only the Targaryens have dragons; ground troops would be unnecessary to defeat any opponent other than themselves.

The second, broader reason is that George R.R. Martin’s world is modeled after medieval Europe, whose nation-states didn’t have standing armies. It wasn’t until the late Middle Ages that Europe’s first modern standing army—the janissaries, established in Turkey in the 14th century—appeared. England didn’t have one until its civil war in the mid-17th century.

Supporting a professional class of soldiers requires money to pay them, food to sustain them, and enough surplus population to compensate for the loss of thousands of able-bodied men who would otherwise be producing goods (as farmers, smiths, and so on). European feudal society wasn’t built for such abundance.

Instead, monarchs relied on their vassal lords to provide levies when necessary, or else turned to mercenary companies in the event of a conflict. Leaders in Martin’s world tend to follow this plan as well, by either scouring their lands for soldiers or hiring sellswords, such as the Golden Company and Daario Naharis’s Stormcrows (in the books) or the Second Sons (in the show).

This strategy might not be the best to win wars: Mercenaries can be unreliable, and random peasant conscripts are inferior fighters compared to trained troops. (See: Septon Meribald’s “broken man” speech.) But it’s the best option available given the contextual challenges of living in such a stratified society.

Kate asks, “I’m curious about badass but goofy Admiral Lohar and women in the Triarchy. She has wives! She mud wrestles! She jokes about names! With so few women in power, what does this tell us about their views—or is it a special case?”

We know very little about the Lysene pirate Sharako Lohar from Fire & Blood: That version of Lohar uses he/him pronouns, is described as an “arrogant admiral,” and has an affection for a courtesan called the Black Swan. (Do you remember when the ladies gossip during the royal hunt in Season 1? One character says, “Lady Johanna was reported to have been abducted when one of Lord Swann’s ships sailed through the Stepstones. She’s to be sold to a pillow house in the Free Cities, if you believe the rumors.” Lady Johanna Swann, using some wordplay and going by the Black Swan, made the best of a bad situation and eventually became an extremely powerful political figure in Lys—so alluring that she drew the eye of the admiral.)

But I suspect the show is combining Lohar with another Triarchy pirate with the delightful name of Racallio Ryndoon, who shares many of the character traits that Lohar exhibits in “The Queen Who Ever Was.” Ryndoon is unpredictable yet beloved by his men, likes to mud wrestle, and takes a dozen wives. At one point, impressed by another character’s willingness to play along with an outrageous request, Ryndoon “was so delighted with him that he sent two of his wives to [the character’s] bedchamber that night.”

And while Fire & Blood doesn’t use such terminology, Racallio is fluid with gender expression. He likes to wear dresses, is fond of perfumes, and cares for his “long curling purple hair.”

Lohar’s gender expression and pronouns in the show play an important role in conveying a point about women in power in this world. On The Official Game of Thrones Podcast: House of the Dragon, Condal refers to the show’s version of Lohar using she/her pronouns (as does actor Abigail Thorn) but notes that the character has “a bit of androgyny” to her, and the men around her use “he” when referring to Lohar.

Condal continued, “What we’re really trying to say is in this time, all these salty sea dogs that she’s surrounded with, all these men, their brains cannot process the idea that they’re saluting a woman who’s leading this massive—you see that fleet of ships at the end. So she presents herself as a masculine character in the classic sense, and then they sort of just accept it, and that’s why they all follow her.”

On the one hand, the Free Cities of Lys, Tyrosh, and Myr (which constitute the Triarchy) are extremely capitalistic. The World of Ice & Fire describes them as “dominated by wealth rather than birth, cities where trade is considered a more honorable profession than arms”—so as long as Lohar helps pad their coffers, the merchants can’t help but respect her. On the other hand, she is still a woman, which causes cognitive dissonance in their language to and about her.

Kris asks, “Do you think we’ll eventually see the Cannibal in this series, even if it’s a departure from the books? Would be a lot cooler if we did.”

Unfortunately, I doubt we’ll ever see the oldest, largest, and coolest-looking of Westeros’s wild dragons. The Cannibal is a loner who scarcely appears in the source text; his only role in the Dance of the Dragons is to partake in the carnage of the Sowing, when he’s attracted by the bloodshed—at least some of the Sowing happens outdoors in the book—and shows up for a quick snack.

Even then, none of the prospective dragonriders are foolish enough to try to claim him. The Cannibal has a fierce reputation, and previous efforts had culminated in catastrophe. “Would-be dragontamers had made attempts to ride him a dozen times; his lair was littered with their bones,” Fire & Blood says.

His absence makes sense, given his lack of direct involvement in the plot and the show’s aforementioned budgetary constraints. But it’s still a shame. I’d love to see this dragon’s design, because the Cannibal is described as “coal black, with baleful green eyes”—like a more violent, live-action version of Toothless, I imagine.

Patrick asks, “How do Dragonstone and King’s Landing deal with dragon dumps? Like it’s an annoying inconvenience when a pigeon shits on your car, but what do you do when Vhagar drops a 300-pound deuce on your hovel in Gin Alley?”

We know that dragons’ digestive tracts produce excrement. In Fire & Blood, the battle between children that costs Aemond his eye starts when “Prince Aemond shouted at [a then-3-year-old Joffrey] to be quiet, then shoved him backward into a pile of dragon droppings.”

But in the absence of any other concrete information about dragon dumps, I’ll direct you to this exquisite Reddit post that theorizes that they are actually the source of dragonglass—the valuable material that can kill White Walkers. (Hey, in A Storm of Swords, Lord Commander Jeor Mormont says the smallfolk believe dragonglass is “made by dragons.”) Perhaps in the Song of Ice and Fire, our heroes need the poop of the representatives of fire to defeat the representatives of ice.

Kirk asks, “As of this point in the story, what element of difference/conflict between the written history and the show do you find most interesting?”

House of the Dragon is centering its leading women much more than the source text, even though Martin initially titled his story of the Targaryen civil war The Princess and the Queen.

Throughout Fire & Blood’s telling of the events that compose Season 2, Rhaenyra is confined to Dragonstone because she’s still recovering from her stillbirth at the end of Season 1 and is thus unable to mount and ride Syrax. In the show, she wastes no time searching far and wide for Luke’s corpse, secretly infiltrates King’s Landing for a meeting with Alicent, and flies to Harrenhal to affirm Daemon’s support.

Alicent is similarly inactive during this stretch of the book, other than caring for Helaena’s surviving children after the queen is traumatized by Blood and Cheese. In Fire & Blood, Alicent isn’t listed as a participant in the Small Council’s military meetings, doesn’t take Criston Cole for a lover, and certainly doesn’t appear to express any remorse for her role in helping Aegon usurp Rhaenyra’s throne. (The finale winks at this dismal book portrayal when Rhaenyra tells Alicent, “History will paint you a villain, a cold queen grasping for power and then defeated,” and the queen regent responds, “Let them think what they must.”)

This thread interests me for two reasons. The first is meta and carries special appeal for ASOIAF nerds because it offers a commentary on the distorted viewpoints and remembrances of the male historians who narrate the Dance in the books. For a show that cast itself early on as an exploration of feminism in this medieval world, that’s an additional angle worth scrutinizing, particularly because it enables the series to sidestep the stereotypical trap of ignoring women once war begins.

The second reason is that Rhaenyra and Alicent are both complicated characters played by excellent actors, so their greater inclusion is a boon to the show’s entertainment value. Every time Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke share the screen, their chemistry crackles—I don’t necessarily mean romantic or sexual chemistry, but I see you, Rhaenicent shippers—so much so that Dragon invented two clandestine conversations between the friends-cum-rivals to manufacture more time together. (And, connecting with the first point, it’s possible that these meetings don’t appear in Fire & Blood because they were secret and the narrators didn’t learn about them.)

Many of Dragon’s new characters in Season 2 are welcome additions to the cast, but none of those peripheral men and women bring as much emotion or backstory or audience connection as Rhaenyra and Alicent. Their relationship is at the core of this story, and I’m glad the show knows that about itself.