With One Line, House Of The Dragon Makes Its Rhaena Targaryen Problem Worse
With a misguided attempt to reference the Game of Thrones spinoff’s controversial character change, House of the Dragon season 3, episode 7 ironically made matters worse for Rhaena. It was never going to be easy for House of the Dragon to follow up Game of Thrones. As much as viewers may have been divided over the original show’s ending, HBO’s seminal adaptation of author George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice & Fire saga was still a massive part of fantasy TV history.
Its run from 2011 until 2019 saw R-rated fantasy become one of the biggest genres in TV and streaming, as the popularity of Game of Thrones had massive, far-reaching implications for TV as a medium. Thus, while the lighter second spinoff A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms was welcome to be its own thing, House of the Dragon came burdened with a lot of expectation. The prequel, viewers hoped, would both fix everything that didn’t work in the original show and also simultaneously bring back the qualities that made Game of Thrones great at its peak.
Credit where it’s due, House of the Dragon has taken an admirable stab at living up to these lofty expectations. That said, the spinoff’s problems are impossible to ignore entirely, and House of the Dragon only drew more attention to one storytelling blunder with a misjudged line in season 3, episode 7, “The Dragon in Winter.” As the hunt for Sheepstealer became increasingly hopeless, an unstable Rhaenyra continued to seek proof that she was destined for the Iron Throne.
House Of The Dragon's "Nettles" Line Highlights Its Rhaena & Sheepstealer Mistake
In a decision that caused controversy at the time, House of the Dragon season 3 cut the character of Nettles from the story of Martin’s source book, Fire & Blood. A dragonseed who claimed a Sheepstealer on Dragonstone, Nettles is a young bastard described in the novel as “Foul-mouthed and fearless.” In the series, Nettles' role is collapsed into that of Daemon’s daughter Rhaena, a change that was already struggling before “The Dragon in Winter” drew extra attention to the canon alteration.
Jeyne Arryn mentions that the villagers are talking about a "wild girl living among nettles and sheep" with regards to Rhaena, in what could only be seen as an overly cutesy, knowing nod to the show’s lore change. It is a strange decision to highlight the decision to merge Rhaena and Nettles into one character, since it isn’t a substitution that has proven popular among viewers so far.
For one thing, cutting Nettles means House of the Dragon has excised a rare instance of a non-royal character claiming a dragon. In any dragon-centric fantasy series, the links between the royal bloodline and the creatures are almost always significant, so Nettles riding Sheepstealer would have been an unexpected subversion if this plot point had not been cut from House of the Dragon.
How House Of The Dragon Can Still Make Its Rhaena/Nettles Change Work
There is a vast gulf between Rhaena’s optimistic post-war fate in the novels, which signifies the hope after the bloody Dance of Dragons comes to a close, and the dark, ambiguous fate of Nettles, who goes into hiding with Sheepstealer and is never seen again. Since Rhaena wants to rejoin her family, it is tough to see the show giving the character Nettles’ fate from the book.
Instead, a reunion between her and Sheepstealer and some kind of redemption seems more likely, even though it seems unlikely that the increasingly paranoid and unhinged House of the Dragon protagonist Rhaenyra would ever forgive Sheepstealer’s rider and welcome her back from exile. The Game of Thrones spinoff could still potentially make this messy amalgamation of two characters work, provided House of the Dragon doesn’t rely on the kindness of Rhaenyra to ensure that Rhaena avoids the dark fate of Nettles.