Why Am I Obsessed with Daemon and Rhaenyra?

House of the Dragon is one of the biggest shows in recent memory. The watch numbers are astronomical. And honestly, it’s not like it’s so disproportionately good as to warrant that in comparison to other shows, so I was initially extremely baffled at why people kept tuning in. But, I was tuning in every week, too, desperate like some kind of GOT junkie who OD’d after the end of the previous series but is now volatile in her desperation for just one more hit. That’s when I realized that there is something extremely addicting about this content, even when the storytelling, as it was for the first half of the season for sure, is so poor. I enjoyed myself through every episode, even if I was left scratching my head at character choices and absolutely baffled by the plot structure that is haphazard at best. Yet I was back, over and over again.

I think the reasons people come back to it each week are varied, but I can speak for some segment of the population when I say our reason is Daemon and Rhaenyra. I was fully prepared to hate them as it stank of grooming to me (it still does, but, for some unknowable reason, I am able to roll with it). I didn’t lose my mind over Matt Smith like many others did in episode one. I was fascinated by him as a character, complex masculinity as part of that, including his inability to hold an erection and his indiscriminate violence. Rhaenyra didn’t capture me from the first either. I enjoyed her scenes, but I think her writing left something to be desired.

However, what was there was the chemistry between the actors and the characters. The charged interactions as he gives her the necklace, when they see each other again after periods apart, even when Daemon can’t finish and Mysaria asks him if he wants someone blonde…it all seems extremely set up to push these two together, this idea that they’ve always belonged. And here, I think, is where the seeds for my obsession were planted, and where everyone that ships them started getting all crazy for these two. We love an air of the forbidden, and incest being one of our modern universal taboos, fiction gives us a safe way to explore some kind of dark fascination with the thing that cannot be named.

In a world where women are actively renegotiating our place in the world, where power dynamics are being called into question, where problematic things we were taught to just roll with as little girls are being acknowledged as damaging, there is something empowering about looking all those things in the face and taking back the control. There’s something psychologically freeing in taking the weird grooming so many young women experience, in taking the desires many if not most young women have to be paid attention to by older men, of strange, confusing, often contradictory feelings about control and the loss of it, of power and the lack of it, and turning that into what we see in House of the Dragon.

We want to be Rhaenyra. We want to be the one in charge, given all the history, given the complex dynamics that likely did some damage to her psyche and her love map (welcome to the club). But we want to look all that in the face and say it doesn’t control us, we control it. It’s why when Daemon first kisses Rhaenyra, and she pushes forward, it upends the situation. Rhaenyra is in control, even when Daemon’s motives are confusing and muddled, she owns her own sexuality.

And when she finally does get together with Daemon, it’s on her terms. She pushes. She acknowledges that she was a child when they had that incident in the brothel, but she isn’t one anymore. Rhaenyra knows what she wants, and what she wants is Daemon. Complex history, family relations, power politics aside: she wants him. They were always meant to burn together.

That, I think, is the essence of the fantasy, the essence of the obsession I am starting with these two. It’s complex and it’s dark, and yet, there’s something extremely comforting in the conquering of that. There’s something powerful and, weirdly, kind of feminist in Rhaenyra’s journey that ends her married to a man who arguably groomed and molested her. He’s an older, experienced, family member who, with some level of forethought, exposed her to sexual situations then initiated her first sexual experience. There’s perhaps a bit more nuance given the time and place, the Targaryen traditions, etc., but the effect on us is fascinating and even a little baffling with that as the setup.

Yet here I am, loving these two, wanting to write fan fiction about the six years we missed in the last time jump, dying for the little moments of love we get between them, desperate to see how this marriage, this relationship, is special and different than any other they’ve had. And honestly, we did get to see it as that in episode 8. They don’t hit us over the head (which has previously been a problem in the writing of this show) with the way Daemon and Rhaenyra are together. We see, we aren’t told.

He finds the dragon eggs, three for their children. He touches her belly. She holds his hand, calls him “my love.” They have three children in six years.

But the most marked thing, the thing that makes me love this couple on par with some of my favorite ships of all time, is the change in Daemon. Some of it is just him growing up and getting older, but he knows this is Rhaenyra’s world, and he’s here to support her. Rhaenyra is the one to propose. Rhaenyra walks first. Daemon is the support. And when she’s insulted, called a whore and her children called bastards, Daemon doesn’t rage. It’s not pomp and circumstance and “look at me and how badass I am” like he used to be. He calmly, coolly, violently, kills the man who insulted the woman he loves, her children, the future Queen. It’s extremely powerful.

So, what is it about Daemon and Rhaenyra? I think it’s a lot of things, but when it comes down to it, I think it’s a female power fantasy. I think we all are struggling with the reality that bad things have happened to us, and sometimes our feelings about the people who did those bad things are complicated. Sometimes it’s even people who loved us, or said they did, who hurt us. And being able to flip the script, to turn the idea of victimhood on it’s head and say no, I always did want this, to say it gave me power when everyone thought it would reduce me, that’s no small thing. To see the evolution from a power struggle, a confusing bout of desire and ambition, turned to support, care, love, with a woman at the head, that’s unique.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a relationship like this, and maybe that’s a good thing. I’m not sure that the way these two are isn’t actually damaging. I’m not sure what the full ramifications of this couple are, but I do know that, for me, it’s strangely cathartic. At the core, I think that’s why we’re showing up for Daemon and Rhaenyra and their relationship, and why I’m going to continue showing up for them, problematic and all.