History is a funny but weighty thing

There's a lot that goes into the very concept of history. You'll hear all kinds of aphorisms about it as a concept, such as "history is written by the winners"; an assertion that suggests that the way things are remembered is determined by those who are in control. The modern Republican party is very eager to (pun intended) whitewash many things out of the historical record, thus creating a common wisdom that will work against the idea of what actually happened. Both of these approaches play into my favorite Orwell quote: "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." Humans are creatures of habit. If something becomes "tradition", then it will tend to stay that way and, just as importantly, be thought of as if it were always that way. This is why the modern discipline of historiography exists (and why the politics of base motivations is almost always awful.)

House of the Dragon, as just one element of A Song of Ice and Fire (neither of which are actual elements for the non-alchemically-inclined among you), is suffused with history. George R. R. Martin began writing the novels because he was inspired by the history he'd read about the power games between the city-states of medieval Italy and other locales of that period. In many, many cases, the idea that "truth is stranger than fiction" is quite accurate. Yes, they really did do things like that back then and so neither Game of Thrones nor House has shied away from presenting the realpolitik of the Middle Ages. After the latest episode of House, a friend mentioned that he was almost repelled by the idea that Viserys was being encouraged to marry a 12-year-old. But that's what happened among the upper classes of earlier times. Marriage was a contract for money and power. Women were the property exchanged in said contracts. Families were sometimes outraged at the emotional attachments of their children, not just because the prospective spouses were seen as beneath them, but because emotion often forestalled the opportunity for the family to gain more money and prestige. This is that "family loyalty" that Tyrion always struggled with in GoT. But, pick up most books about medieval Europe and you'll get a ton of this, if you hadn't already seen or read enough examples in the earlier show or Martin's books. And that's something to consider when watching House.

There's no arguing that the second episode was better, overall, than the first. Pilots are often difficult because they spend a lot of time setting up a story rather than progressing one. It's world-building instead of storytelling. In this latest episode, we got a lot more of the latter, as the various factions displayed more texture and some of the essential personal conflicts were introduced. We have Daemon's outrage at being replaced mixing with his love for his brother and loyalty to his house (and the realization that he'll be deemed a traitor for the rest of time if he fails; there's that history thing again.) We have Rhaenyra's frustration with being treated like a dilettante or a placeholder just waiting to be returned to the status of property, now compounded by the realization that her father is going to marry her best friend in order to produce an heir to replace her. We have the scheming of houses Velaryon and Hightower to affect those events and more. And we have some guy who likes feeding people to the crabs. (Everybody's gotta have a hobby.) This is all better and more interesting that watching the rich laugh at the death and dismemberment of those sworn to serve them, certainly. But it's also pretty typical of what the previous show was and it still lacks anyone that could even vaguely be considered compelling.

Again, Martin developed ASoIaF with a strong sense of history(!) In the same way that Ridley Scott discovered that test audiences wouldn't believe that gladiators pitched products from the floor of the arena just like modern commercials, Martin knew that there was plenty of material about stuff that actually happened to inspire a fantasy series where it could take place and people could feel comfortable about being one step removed from it. But House, so far, isn't removed enough from what we've seen before. It's a step forward in some respects in that there are no obvious "bad guys" like the Lannisters or the White Walkers. But one of the best parts about having the Lannisters be the "bad guys" was how interesting and entrancing their central figures- Tyrion, Jaime, Cersei, Tywin -all happened to be. Tyrion was never a "bad guy." Jaime was but then became a nominal "good guy." Cersei and Tywin stayed "bad guys" the whole way through, but you always really wanted to see all of them on the screen because they were almost always going to do something interesting. There is no one like that who has yet appeared in House. Due credit to actors like Milly Alcock as young Rhaenyra and Paddy Considine as the eternally self-conscious king, Viserys, but those people just aren't that interesting. Perhaps it's a matter of the characters in GoT being already familiar with the game (win or die) and given roles that emphasize that knowledge? But then you'd expect people like Otto Hightower (Rhys Ilfans) and Corlys Velaryon (Steve Touissant) to fill roles other than "person who looks at everyone like a dog just pissed on the rug" and "performative but still subdued outrage every time I don't get what I want", respectively. (One could easily imagine Corlys kicking the dirt every time he gets told that Viserys won't do anything about the Stepstones.)

The basic plot is still missing some of the heroic themes of GoT, which is always going to be a bit harder to sell in Western storytelling (see: Joseph Campbell.) But I'd actually appreciate a step away from that, if only everything happening in House right now didn't feel so... tired. It still feels like we've seen it all before because, in a way, we really have. I might be more subject to the bias of someone who's been repeatedly exposed to precisely this story in Martin's canon (How much more interested would I have been in a story rooted in the commoners' perception of the world around like, say, Dunk and Egg? Very.) But we've all been exposed to it, to one degree or another, if we watched GoT. How much better or different can it get than what's gone before (minus the last two seasons, at least)? It seems odd to say this, since this kind of Machiavellian competition stuff is usually right in my wheelhouse of interest. But, so far, I can't say that there's a whole lot of draw to Sunday nights outside of morbid curiosity. We'll see how long it lasts or if it changes.