The opening scene of House of the Dragon episode 6 features Emma D’Arcy’s adult Rhaenyra shortly after giving birth. Due to a time jump of 10 years, there will be significant recastings in House of the Dragon episode 6. The time jump occurs after Rhaenyra wed Laenor Velaryon in episode five of House of the Dragon. Despite the fact that she had a number of suitors, including her uncle Daemon, it was ultimately agreed that Rhaenyra’s route to rule would involve marriage with the Velaryon son in order to strengthen both houses.
This is my House of the Dragon Episode 6 article, all about the Dance of the Dragons scene with Alicent and Rhaenyra going at each other. There are a couple of different clips that HBO released with the older versions of the actresses really going at each other in different creative ways, like very creative. So, there’s a lot of stuff going on here, I’ll explain what’s going on. There’s a bunch of easter eggs.
Here Is House Of The Dragon Episode 6 Dance Of The Dragon Scene Breakdown:
Rhaenyra’s Third Childbirth
In the first clip, Alicent has demanded to see Rhaenyra’s brand new baby, Joffrey Velaryon, because of the rumors swirling all the gossip the tea that’s being poured by Larry Strong, and all the other people at court for that matter. About Rhaenyra’s other two sons Jacaeyrs and Lucerys being the bastards of Harwin Strong, who’s kind of replaced Criston Cole as her protector and lover so to speak.
In the whole idea that like she’s literally just given birth, so the older version of Laenor Velaryon, that’s who this is it’s the older version of Laenor. I didn’t expect them to switch actors so this is kind of a surprise. Laenor comes rushing in to meet her like “oh I heard that you just gave birth this is so amazing, you’re doing so well, you look great congratulations” and he just seems like a very supportive nice husband.
They have that arrangement between the two of them and it seems like it’s been going well for them for the past 10 years. Like because he’s gay he’s been free to pursue all of his lovers and do whatever he wants on his side of the marriage and she’s been free to have lovers do whatever she wants on her side of the marriage.
So the whole joke here with Rhaenyra trying to make it up the staircase inside the red keep with her baby, is like she literally just gave birth and Laenor’s like “what are you doing I took a lance to the shoulder and I still don’t want to have to do something like this”. Like he’s so happy to not have been born a woman, to not have to experience the pain of childbirth.
Why Only Alicent Have To Follow The Rules
And that’s the problem because she’s having all these children that look nothing like him. And it seems like Alicent’s big thing that she’s leaning on in all the trailer footage we’ve seen of her, is complaining to Viserys about them being bastards. Like “how dare she sully the good name of the Targaryen household with this”. She’s upset at Rhaenyra for a couple of different reasons, not just because she wants her son Aegon II to sit on the iron throne like it’s not all just a power play.
In the previous episodes, the reason why she really got mad at Rhaenyra was that she was flaunting the rules so much and Alicent was beholden to the rules so much more than anyone else. She felt kind of like a slave inside her marriage like she had fewer rights than the commoners did. Clearly, she did not enjoy having sex with Viserys as you could just see her lying there like “oh god please let this be over”.
And keep in mind that she’s had a couple more children since then so like if Viserys is getting worse and worse and worse she’s continued to have to deal with that, like that side of the marriage, like “you’ll have to lay with him in bed a couple of different times so that you can have these other children”. And the way that it’s sold to her is that it’s just her duty and she has to do it because she’s supposed to do it.
So in her head, she’s thinking if I have to follow the rules this way, why doesn’t Rhaenyra also have to follow the rules, why aren’t their consequences for her? Because at least in her eyes it feels like Rhaenyra has been getting away with this for the past 10 years and potentially like if nobody does anything about it one of her sons like Jacarys, her oldest son, could potentially become the next king of Westeros and he would be a bastard.
Alicent Is All About Rules
So when we talk about Alicent being the leader of team green, during the dance of the dragons. Really she’s more like team rules, everybody needs to follow the rules, she’s like hardcore about them following the rules. In the way the showrunner said that they wanted to play Rhaenyra in Laenor’s marriages, it was meant to be a very modern understanding like a modern type of marriage, like “okay we clearly don’t love each other, we’re not going to have the kind of relationship that a normal husband and wife would have, so let’s just make the best of a bad situation”.
But Alicent doesn’t want to have anything to do with that. She’s like “how dare you to flaunt the rules”. So that’s why she’s asking to see this third child, which presumably also looks kind of like Harwin Strong, and has brown hair like her other children. So that’s probably why you see that scene of her in the trailer talking to Viserys, saying ‘how dare she do this”.
In fact in the books when they present the baby to her, there’s this line of dialogue she has where she’s basically telling Laenor “keep trying, eventually you’ll have one that looks like you”. Which is like her version of throwing as much shade at him as possible, saying “I know exactly what the two of you are doing”.
Larys Strong’s Motives
It also seems like it doesn’t help that Larys Strong has been her advisor for these past 10 years. And you have to imagine all the gossip that he’s been telling her about all these rumors and most of it is probably true. It seems like what’s going on with Larys Strong is that he’s just trying to secure as great a position as he can with the potential heir and he’s backing the green, so to speak like he thinks that Aegon is going to become the heir. So that’s why he’s been ‘helping Alicent’ all these past 10 years throwing Rhaenyra under the bus every chance he gets.
Because if you think about it he’s really working counter to his family’s best interest, the Strongs. Because his father’s already been handed to the king, that’s like the most powerful you can get in the realm, next to being in the royal family in the line of succession. And his brother is Rhaenyra’s lover, like potentially one of his relatives could make it onto the iron throne so wouldn’t he want that? So maybe he has a very Tyrion-like relationship, just even darker with his family. Maybe they mistreat him and that’s why he’s throwing his family under the bus so to speak.
Nobody Supports Alicent
Then we have the scene of Alicent and Larys Strong, sharing some tea there over a meal, saying that Larys’s father Lionel Strong is no longer giving impartial advice to King Viserys as the hand of the king, because it’s his son Harwin Strong that they think is having the affair with Rhaenyra with these bastards. So Viserys kind of sounds like he doesn’t want to hear any talk of bastards like he doesn’t have anything to do with this.
Because of the way she talks about it, nobody in the king’s landing supports her the way that she wants them to support her. That was kind of the case in the earlier episodes too when she was younger and she was telling Rhaenyra “it feels like nobody is my friend here because I’m too powerful, they don’t want to upset me”. So she really doesn’t have people to confide in the way that she did with Rhaenyra when they were good friends before they had their big falling out.
And Alicent is saying she wants her father to come back to King’s Landing and be the hand again, even though Larys also calls her out on this, saying that he as well as Alicent’s father would also give impartial advice, o he’d be just as bad as Larys Strong. But the funny thing about this is that Alicent acknowledges that and says that she doesn’t care, at least he would support me basically.
Like it sounds like nobody at court really cares about her, they’re just thinking about Aegon The Second. Like obviously there’s still the question of whom the heir is going to be, but it seems that because Viserys is still alive, most of the realm the other lords support Rhaenyra’s claim, and now that she’s had a child, Jacaerys Velaryon, who could potentially take the iron throne.
They’re thinking more about him than they are about Aegon The Second. Because that was the whole idea, they wanted a man on the iron throne and at the time a couple of episodes ago there was only Aegon II. So even though it sounds like nobody supports Alicent at court right now and she kind of bemoans that.
Blackfire Rebellion
It’s really not all that better for Rhaenyra. Like the realm isn’t supporting Rhaenyra, they’re mostly thinking about her son eventually taking the iron throne. But the whole idea, as i said, is that Alicent thinks that this child of hers that would take the iron throne is a bastard and she doesn’t want to have that.
The funny thing about bastards taking the iron throne is this will remind you of the Blackfire Rebellion that winds up happening later in the timeline. A very similar situation winds up happening, where the ruling king at the time Aegon IV had many bastards like a Robert Baratheon level of bastards. Most of them lived to adulthood and he loved one of them so much that he gave them the Blackfyre Sword, Aegon’s ancestral Valerian blade, the one that you see Viserys wielding during all the episodes.
Typically that sword was given to the future King of Westeros, so you gave it to whomever the heir was. But this time Aegon IV broke tradition and instead of giving it to his legitimate heir who was supposed to take the iron throne, he gave it to one of his bastards outside the line of succession. That particular bastard’s name was Daemon, he gave him the right to choose his own name and he chose the Blackfyre name, that’s why they call it the Blackfire rebellion, because he sort of created the Blackfyre household.
And eventually, a bunch of people rallied to his cause and supported him and a bunch of the other royal bastards of the time in sort of this giant conflict that was similar to the Dance of the Dragons. But instead of the princess versus the queen within the line of succession, it was the male bastard versus the male legitimate heir.
They said in future seasons of House of the Dragon after they cover the Dance of the Dragon’s events, they’ll move to a different time period. So it’s totally possible that eventually, we’ll get the Blackfyre Rebellion as a series in several years.
Children Everywhere
One of the other cool details here too that you see in the trailer is Laena and Daemon’s daughters pulling a dragon egg from the fire. She talks about how they’re both from the blood of ancient Valyria. This is meant to be an easter egg for the Targaryen’s customs of putting the dragon eggs in their baby’s cribs. They had this belief that it would foster a stronger bond with their eventual dragon once it hatched and if the dragon egg wouldn’t hatch it would eventually turn to stone and it would be sort of like this really I’ll omen.
And because we’re skipping over 10 years of history, Rhaenyra did that same thing with her two first sons and what we’re seeing in the trailer is her oldest son Jakirus claiming his dragon Vermax inside the dragon pit, like this, is taking place inside the dragon pit. So the whole idea is that Alicent kept thinking that these sons were bastards, ‘there’s no way they could be dragon seas, they won’t be dragon riders, those dragon eggs that you put in their cribs they won’t hatch.
But what wound up happening obviously we skipped this because the 10-year time jump is that both of those dragon eggs wound up hatching. And I talked about this in my House of the Dragon Episode 6 trailer explanation too. But even though there’s all this talk about the drama going on with the father of her sons, you have all these children being born from these three different big power players. Like Daemon has children now, Rhaenyra has children now and Alison has even more children.
So there’s like a ton of kids running around inside the royal family. In every single one of them is a dragon rider, so hopefully, we’ll get to see all their dragons by season two. We’ll see some of them before the end of season one though. So when Rhaenyra’s bastard children or supposed bastard children wind up riding dragons it just hurts Alicent’s claim, it makes it harder for her to prove that they shouldn’t be on the iron throne.
Also Read: House Of The Dragon Episode 5 Easter Eggs: Dance Of The Dragon And Changes Form The Book
