Increasingly, Rhaenyra is seeing her victory as divinely ordained. Those pesky prophecies can go to your head, but it may bite her in the end.

House of the Dragon season 2

The second season of House of the Dragon ends with Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen ascendent. She has a new dragon air force staffed with Targaryen bastards, her enemy Aemond Targaryen is running scarred, her estranged husband Daemon recommitted himself (and his army) to her, and even her best frenemy Alicent Hightower agreed to help her take over the city of King’s Landing, even though Alicent is the mother of King Aegon Targaryen, Rhaenyra’s main rival for the Iron Throne. Alicent even said she’d be okay with Rhaenyra executing Aegon if it means the realm could be at peace!

If I’m being honest, I found this all a bit much. The show seemed to be choosing a side in the Dance of the Dragons civil war. Rhaenyra is partly inspired to rule the Seven Kingdoms because of the Song of Ice and Fire prophecy her father shared with her in the series premiere: that a Targaryen must unite the realm if there is any hope for humanity to withstand a coming dark age, which we in the audience know to be the White Walker invasion from Game of Thrones. She thinks she might be the chosen one and I’m starting to think the show thinks so too. When Daemon saw a vision of the future, it included a shot of Rhaenyra sitting on the Iron Throne bathed in heavenly light. Not exactly subtle:

This concerns me because I think Rhaenyra is a more interesting character if she’s a conflicted and flawed human being rather than a literal messiah. But maybe she can be both? Speaking to reporters, showrunner Ryan Condal hinted that belief in Rhaenyra’s great destiny may be more of a hindrance than a help, saying that the team is “very interested” in “the idea of how prophecy and these ideas of these messianic ideals that we always see interpreted in stories like this and in Harry Potter, in Star Wars, the ‘chosen one,’ the ‘one,’ the one who’s going to save us from everything, the Lightbringer, the Prince Who Was Promised/Azor Ahai, how those ideas are interpreted in George’s world, which is, as we know from all of the storytelling that he has taken us through to date, that these things are very rarely black and white and one thing or the other, and often can be cautionary tales for how ideas like this are interpreted by people in power.”

“Remember that Game of Thrones, A Song of Ice and Fire, House of the Dragon in many ways, or Fire & Blood in many ways, are warnings about the perils of power and people in power, and particularly, I think, in this world, absolute power. I will just say that we’re very interested in how those things play out in this world, and how once somebody, as we’ve seen Rhaenyra [Emma D’Arcy] be given this football to run with, that, ‘My father chose me. I was the one. There is a Prince Who Was Promised, it must be me. This dragon rider was delivered to me,’ and how that is going to see itself manifested over the course of the rest of this war.”

We have seen Rhaenyra engage in more openly gradiose rhetoric lately, like when she dismissed her son Jace’s concerns about allowing untested peasants to ride dragons by saying she could not “gainsay what the gods have laid before me.” Maybe the show is lulling us into a false sense of security so it can blindside us with a delusional Rhaenyra down the line. “You’re seeing growth — growth sometimes does not necessarily mean all positive,” Condal said, per Entertainment Weekly. “You’re seeing her throw more and more into that idea of, ‘My father believed that to be me. He thought I was the one.’ She starts looking for signs and portents that seem to indicate Viserys was right. We know that that’s potentially a dangerous path for somebody in a position of power.”

And then there’s the fact that, without spoiling the end of House of the Dragon as laid out in George R.R. Martin’s book Fire & Blood, we know that there are no dragons at the start of Game of Thrones. But there are a ton in Rhaenyra’s time. What happens to them all? Well, nothing good, that’s for sure.

We won’t find out the specifics for a good long while. A third season of House of the Dragon is on the way, but likely won’t come out until 2026. A fourth and final season will wrap things up after that. In between, we can look forward to the new Game of Thrones prequel show A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, which premieres sometime in 2025.