‘House of the Dragon’ Keeps Noticing It Sucks to Be a Woman

Warning: This publish accommodates spoilers for Episode 5 of Season 2.

You wouldn’t need to be a girl in Westeros. For anybody who didn’t glean as a lot from , , and in , made it extra apparent than ever in a primary season the place each different episode featured . In , we’ve seen the royal descend into civil struggle as an alternative of accepting the late King Viserys I’s named inheritor, his daughter Rhaenyra, as sovereign.

As that struggle started to take form, within the season’s first half, Dragon gave us a quick reprieve from the fixed reminders that it sucks to be a girl on this alternate-universe Center Ages. It wasn’t that the feminine characters have been relegated to the background or that gender ceased to play a task of their fates; the present merely stopped clobbering us over the top with an thought it had already exhausted. However that concept got here roaring again with the pressure of in Sunday’s fifth episode, “Regent.” And whereas I hate to complain a couple of collection making an earnest try at feminist consciousness, the heavy-handedness with which it incorporates that ethos has yielded some fairly tough TV.