The season finale of ‘The house of the dragon’ has been impressive and has made it clear that war between the Targaryens is inevitable. It is true that there were movements to see if it was possible to solve everything peacefully, but the last minutes of ‘The Black Queen’ have made it clear that there is no going back.
Beware of spoilers from here.
It’s clear that Lucerys’s death has changed everything forever, but also that Aemond’s goal was not for everything to end that way. Ryan County, showrunner of ‘The house of the dragon’, has thus explained everything related to that tragic sequence, in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter:
Aemond is definitely not blameless in what happened to Luke. But Aemond was also a kid who was bullied and teased for part of his life for not having a dragon. He now he has it, and he rides the biggest dragon in the world. I think showing his rival that he won’t be intimidated or played with is probably more important than trying to become a kin-killer – that would be very ill-calculated and stupid of Aemond early on, when the pieces are moving around. the board and they’re setting loyalties and figuring out who’s going to make a marriage pact to guarantee whose army… for Aemond to drop the nukes right out of the gate and launch into an all-out dragon war would be very insane, but that it’s exactly what he ends up doing because things get out of hand and out of control. It is a complex scene. Aemond isn’t blameless, but he’s not a psychopath without a logical train of thought, either.
Why Rhaenyra resisted the inevitable
Obviously, Lucerys’s death has not sat well with Rhaenyra, who until then seemed to be doing her best to resist the war. The final moments of the episode make it clear that pacifism has been left behind and that the time for revenge has come, but Condal thus clarifies why Rhaenyra decided to try a more diplomatic solution first:
Rhaenyra focuses on the fact that she sees herself as the only one capable of ruling without fueling war and keeping the kingdom together. It is what her father educated her all her life so that she would know and persecute her as her sovereign. And she doesn’t think Aegon is capable of that. And on a more personal level, this is her birthright that her father gave her. That’s what you see in her fight throughout the ending. She doesn’t immediately turn around and say, “You know what? I’m going to war.” Because her father entrusted him to keep the united kingdom in peace. But at the same time, this thing my father gave me, my birthright, was stolen. Then what should I do? How can I serve both purposes? The answer is a bit paradoxical. And Daemon is frustrated with her because he doesn’t want to go to war right away. She believes that she can muster enough support from the other kingdoms to make them surrender without dropping nuclear bombs.
Now we will have to wait until the second season to see how everything evolves, but one thing is clear, Lucerys is not going to be the only fatality in all of this.