Spoilers for House of the Dragon episode ten, “The Black Queen,” below.
The dragons finally danced — with or without their riders’ permission.
In Sunday’s season finale of House of the Dragon, the brewing civil war between the Blacks and the Greens finally erupted in blood, as Prince Lucerys Velaryon met an unfortunate end in the skies above Storm’s End at the hands of his evil uncle’s dragon. Prince Aemond’s “Whoops!” face said it all: There’s no coming back from this.
Was there ever a path in which this war could have been avoided? Rhaenyra, crowned queen in what felt like the backyard-wedding version of Aegon’s coronation last week, spends much of the finale pondering this question. Lucerys’s death destroyed the possibility of a peaceful resolution, but I’m tempted to agree with Rhaenyra’s more bellicose advisers: From the moment Alicent Hightower gave birth to a healthy, true-born son, war was going to erupt — Rhaenyra’s only decision was to be ready or not. Though the late King Viserys spent his final hours decrying the factionalism bedeviling his royal court, he bore as much responsibility for the inevitable outbreak of arms as anyone. He could name Rhaenyra his heir or he could marry the daughter of Otto Hightower — but when he tried to do both, the two sides were set on a path to war.
But what if Viserys hadn’t married into the hyper-ambitious Hightower family? What if, as the lead of The Bachelor: Westeros, he’d made a different choice with the final rose? Could war have been avoided if Viserys the Peaceful married Laena Velaryon? Let’s take a cue from the all-seeing Helaena Targaryen and game it out.
The main downside, dynastically speaking, of Viserys marrying Laena was her age: She was only 12 years old when the king started searching for wife No. 2. What if Viserys, who was not exactly the picture of health, had died before siring more heirs? We now know with a few time jumps’ worth of hindsight that he needn’t have worried; though the king seemed to spend decades lingering at death’s door, he lived long enough to beget four more children, and for two of those children to have children. (With each other! Gross.) Viserys would’ve had to wait a bit longer to fill out his family in the Laena timeline, but with Rhaenyra nearing adulthood simultaneously, starting a new family would not have been his most pressing concern. Officially, his kids with Laena would be spares, not heirs.
In the real (Alicent) timeline, Laena married Viserys’s brother Daemon after a brief flirtation at Westeros’s third-bloodiest wedding. I don’t think Laena would’ve necessarily been happier married to Viserys, since she and Daemon had more in common, but as queen she still would have had plenty of opportunities for dragon riding, which is not only a hobby but a crucial propaganda exercise for Targaryens. Also, she would’ve been much closer to her parents, something she explicitly wished for before her death. It’s safe to say Laena would’ve been happy in some capacity, though whether that would be enough to stop her from joining a coup against her stepdaughter is impossible to know.
As we’ve seen, Laena bore Daemon two daughters, twins Baela and Rhaena, before taking her own life via dragon during a fatal childbirth. There’s no guarantee any of this would have happened if she’d married Viserys, but it’s worth noting that a Viserys-and-Laena marriage producing only girls would be ideal from a succession point of view — more children to bolster the house, but no question of any of them supplanting Rhaenyra as heir to the Iron Throne. In this event, the hopes of Westerosi misogynists would land on Daemon as the sole male heir, but he probably would’ve had fewer supporters than Aegon in the Laena timeline, since he is a wild card with no natural allies.
But what if Laena had borne Viserys a son? Would there still be a Dance of the Dragons, but this time the Blues versus the Blacks?
Much depends on whether the Velaryons want one. As we’ve seen, Corlys Velaryon is just as ambitious as Otto Hightower, and in the Stepstones, the Sea Snake did not hesitate to use martial force to feather his own nest. Waging war on behalf of Viserys and Laena’s son offers a chance to get justice for the Great Council at Harrenhal passing over his wife, Princess Rhaenys. And Laena’s son would present as a powerful candidate for the throne: Targaryen heritage on both sides, two dragonriders as parents, plus the symbolic benefit of healing the rift caused by the Great Council. In the face of such a compelling alternative, Viserys and Rhaenyra would surely be pressured to give up her claim. Since the Velaryons are family, does Viserys bend to their will the way he didn’t with the Hightowers? If he doesn’t, it’s unlikely Rhaenyra would back down after his death either.
In that event, the Velaryons could very well choose war. Besides their strong claim, they have the most powerful navy in Westeros and three dragonriders in Rhaenys, Laenor, and Laena, the latter of whom rides the largest dragon alive. Things would surely get as bloody as they’re shaping up to be in the Alicent timeline. The best thing for Westeros might be for all the major houses to rally around the Blues, ensuring an isolated Rhaenyra loses the war quickly, before too much of the realm can be devastated by dragonfire.
With that state of play, most Song of Ice and Fire fans who considered this counterfactual before House of the Dragon aired agreed that a Blacks versus Blues civil war was pretty much inevitable. However, the show’s creative decisions open up a possible path for peace. One thing Dragon viewers have seen that book readers did not is that House Velaryon is not always a united front. Rhaenys harbors less resentment over the Harrenhal decision than her husband does, and we know she’s not afraid to stand up to Corlys. A Targaryen herself, she might have the foresight to see that a dragon-on-dragon conflict hurts everyone involved, and as we saw in “The Green Council,” she’s not the type of dragonrider to murder a bunch of people in cold blood. Perhaps in the Laena timeline, she would counsel her husband to play the long game, getting a Velaryon on the Iron Throne through political maneuvering instead of all-out war. One possible solution: Betrothing Viserys and Laena’s son to Rhaenyra lets everyone get what they want. That is contingent, of course, on Rhaenyra being prudent enough to accept — with her father having set a good example, is she more likely to go with a savvy political match when her reputation isn’t on the line?
And then there’s Daemon. The show has emphasized the romance between Rhaenyra and her uncle. With no need for Viserys to placate the Velaryons by marrying Rhaenyra to Laenor, the princess might’ve gone ahead and married Daemon a few decades earlier. This takes the option of her marrying Viserys and Laena’s son off the table, and since Daemon is hardly well liked in court, it doesn’t bolster Rhaenyra’s claim either. In this case, maybe this couple, who spends their prime galavanting around Essos, having freaky sex and complaining that they never got any respect back home. Their trueborn incest-babies would likely become a thorn in the side of their Velaryon relations, the Westeros equivalent of the Jacobite pretenders. It’s also possible that Daemon would simply try to have Viserys and Laena’s son assassinated, though that seems more like something book-Daemon would do instead of the considerably softened show-Daemon.
All things considered, a future where Viserys kept it in the family seems like a marginally better future for Westeros. And it’s a much, much better future for Alicent Hightower, who in the Laena timeline is spared a life in which she bears some absolutely horrible sons. No matter whom she marries in an alternate scenario, those children could not be worse.
