2022’s Biggest Fantasy Shows Are Struggling With Sex and Romance
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The post 2022’s Biggest Fantasy Shows Are Struggling With Sex and Romance appeared first on Consequence.
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for House of the Dragon, Season 1 Episode 7, “Driftmark,” and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, Season 1 Episode 6, “Udûn.”]
This week, the newest episode of House of the Dragon picked up some backlash this week, after viewers of the Game of Thrones prequel series complained that a few key scenes were so darkly lit, with so little contrast, that they were nearly impossible to watch on many screens.
Speaking for myself, I initially did struggle to watch that scene, but the low lighting was perhaps a blessing. Because otherwise, my throat might have gone hoarse yelling “That’s your uncle!” at the television.
Right now, we technically have an embarrassment of riches to enjoy when it comes to fantasy television, with Dragon and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power running simultaneously on HBO Max and Prime Video, respectively. For the record, Amazon had announced the Rings of Power premiere date over a year in advance, which means that HBO Max knew exactly what it was doing when it scheduled Dragon to premiere 13 days beforehand; the resulting comparisons have been inevitable, with some people doing their best to frame this as a battle between the two franchises.
Despite those efforts, in so many ways it’s honestly hard to compare the two shows. At least on a creative level, the story being told by Rings of Power Season 1 — the early days of a great epic war between good and evil — is very different from the Game of Thrones prequel series, which is delving into the complex palace intrigues which will eventually lead to a greater conflict between various political dynasties for control over the throne.
But while there’s very little narrative common ground between them, they are unified on one matter: If you are watching either of these shows for romance, you are very much out of luck.
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (Prime Video)
The reasons for this are very different, of course. In the case of Rings of Power, part of the approach was always to keep the series as family-friendly as possible — as Amazon Studios’ Jennifer Salke recently told Variety:
“The line we’ve been using is ‘If you’re old enough to read the books, you’re old enough to watch the show.’ We knew from the beginning that this was not our Game of Thrones. In fact, the fans spoke up from the minute the deal was closed, saying, ‘Please don’t try to insert sex and a level of provocative violence,’ things that don’t feel true to the stories that Tolkien wanted to tell.”
True to that declaration, the romantic moments of Rings of Power have been… limited, and decidedly non-sexual: We have a lovely example of a strong loving marriage with Dwarven Prince Durin (Owain Arthur) and Princess Disa, a whole lot of lingering looks between Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) and her new human friend Halbrand (Charlie Vickers), and one battle’s-eve kiss between another human-elf pairing, Bronwyn (Nazanin Boniadi) and Arondir (Ismael Cruz Córdova), where the editor full-on cut to a very wide shot of the two characters just as their lips met. God forgive we get any glimpse of tongue action!
To be fair, nearly everything about Rings of Power has been a slow burn up until just recently, and perhaps things will get a little more explicit (well, per Salke, not that explicit) as they go. Meanwhile, House of the Dragon could certainly not be described as chaste, but seems even more committed than Game of Thrones ever was to putting its characters in exceptionally awkward/uncomfortable/morally icky situations.
Spending any time reading House of the Dragon-related Wikipedia entries has been a very easy way to get spoiled on future plot developments for the show, such as Episode 7 ending with Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy)’s marriage to Daemon (Matt Smith). So I personally had time to brace myself for it — but it still didn’t make the experience any more comfortable, even given the fact that it wasn’t easy to see what was going on.
While there have been multiple sex scenes over the course of the last seven episodes, only one of them could be argued to be uncomplicated by modern-day standards — specifically in Episode 4, “King of the Narrow Sea,” when a younger Rhaenyra (Milly Alcock), after coming dangerously close to crossing a line with Daemon, brings Ser Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel) into her bed.
As we see in subsequent episodes, Rhaenyra choosing Ser Criston as a lover has some pretty dire repercussions down the line, but at that time, both participants in that scene are of age, not directly related to each other, and capable of enthusiastic consent… Well, actually, in that scene, Criston is initially the reluctant one and is also relatively powerless compared to Rhaenyra — the relationship wouldn’t be seen as a great one in a post-#MeToo era, with present-day policies looking down on relationships between employers and employees.
House of the Dragon (HBO)
But it’s still a lot more enjoyable to watch Rhaenyra and Criston together than it is to watch Allicent (Emily Carey) perform her wifely duties with the decades-older Viserys (Paddy Considine) in the same episode. And, as stated above, Rhaenyra and Daemon’s love scene in Episode 7 is hard to watch for so many reasons: Even when rewatching the sequence under optimal lighting, you can see some measure of happiness on Rhaenyra’s face — almost enough to make you forget that Daemon was grooming her for this for years.
Does House of the Dragon want viewers to look past Rhaenyra and Daemon’s genetic connection and just be happy that they’re together? Or is this (like Rhaenyra’s dalliance with Criston) a portent of doom? Traditionally, love scenes on screen are about more than knowing that two characters have recently mashed their bodies against each other — they’re a way of understanding, in a non-verbal way, what these characters mean to each other.
It all speaks to a bigger unresolved question about House of the Dragon, which is whether or not the showrunners even want us to like any of these characters. Rings of Power is all about good versus evil, but Dragon eschews the idea of those extremes, focusing on the idea that everyone’s at least a little bit tainted by the struggle for power and/or survival. The moral uncertainty that’s unfolded over the last seven episodes, as we watch all these characters tarnish their souls in that struggle, has been fascinating. But it hasn’t done much in the way of creating relatable protagonists to root for.
Maybe it’s an overly simplistic viewpoint, but one definition of great stories is that they give us characters that we at least care about. Plenty of folks on Game of Thrones did horrible things while still eventually managing to gain some of the audience’s sympathy — Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), for example, started off as someone truly reprehensible, ending the show’s pilot with a one-two punch of committing incest with his sister Cersei (Lena Headey) and attempting to murder young Bran (Isaac Hempstead Wright) after being caught. A few seasons later, though, he had become humbled enough by circumstances, and people were avidly shipping him and Brienne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie).
And while Jaime was introduced pushing kids out of towers at the beginning of the series, Thrones launched with flawed but still likable characters to cheer on, like the Starks and Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage). House of the Dragon is of course telling a different kind of story, and the point here is not to complain about the shows not being identical in their approach. But by working so hard to create a narrative where no one is safe and everyone is capable of terrible things, Dragon is struggling to ensure that the audience stays invested in these people.
Nothing humanizes a character like seeing them in love (or at least in like) with someone else. Maybe that’s what happened when Rhaenyra and Daemon finally consummated their attraction for each other. But that remains as hard to say as it was to see, at this stage. Dragon might be attempting to realistically reflect medieval attitudes towards love and relationships in its storytelling. But it’s perhaps taking that commitment a bit too far.
In the meantime, as these two fantasy tentpoles continue to roll out new episodes, we can hope this genre can find a middle ground between extreme chasteness and hardcore incest in the future. Because thanks to recent shows like Outlander, The Magicians, The Wheel of Time, Carnival Row, and so many more, we know this much — it’s possible.
New episodes of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power premiere Fridays on Prime Video. New episodes of House of the Dragon air Sundays at 9:00 p.m. ET on HBO.
2022’s Biggest Fantasy Shows Are Struggling With Sex and Romance
Liz Shannon Miller
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