This article contains spoilers for the first three episodes of House of the Dragon Season 3.It was never going to be easy. Right down to its last crimson-stained step, Rhaenyra Targaryen’s journey to the Iron Throne—a seat which according to the oath every great house in Westeros swore was hers by rights—could never be anything less than a bloodbath. The lords, armies, and especially a fractured Targaryen family insisted upon it, snuffing out whatever luminescence likely remained in the Realm’s Delight before she claimed her father’s chair.Yet in the second episode of House of the Dragon’s third season, claim it she did in a sequence that was so immediately gratifying for longtime fans of Westeros, Game of Thrones, and the wider world of George R.R. Martin, that it did the rare thing for a television show in the 2020s: it broke through the pop culture white noise to be a genuine watercooler moment toasted by memes and reported as alleged news on pop culture social media channels. Obviously the latter bit was done with its tongue in cheek, but it reflected a catharsis that was palpable both on and off the screen.In the context of the TV show, it’s the transgression House of the Dragon has been building to ever since a 2022 cold open staged the Great Council of Harrenhal, a political summit wherein all the noble houses of Westeros came together and forcefully declared that no woman should ever sit the Iron Throne. Despite Rhaenyra and her father King Viserys attempting to reverse that precedent a scant decade and change later, it probably was inevitable that for Rhaenyra to succeed Papa Viserys, she’d have to wade through a pool of blood. Albeit, one imagines Ser Otto Hightower, Viserys’ scheming and manipulative second-in-command, never entertained it would be literally his own that she’d make tracks in on the fateful day.For the audience at home, however, the wait was almost as long when you factor in the time since the original Game of Thrones season 1 promo premiered more than 15 years ago in 2010. Aye, that was the first and last time viewers ever saw Emilia Clarke’s Daenerys Targaryen in the same seat now claimed by her direct ancestor Rhaenyra in House of the Dragon. Granted, that brilliant piece of early Game of Thrones marketing showed a lot of possible futures for Westeros, both likely (look out for Cersei Lannister in her husband and sons’ chair!) and impossible (sorry, Robb Stark stans).cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});But the image of Dany on the Iron Throne stuck in the cultural imagination for the entire run of Game of Thrones, with the character becoming something of a pop icon who transcended the textual narrative of her series to become a metatextual idol. One imagines many viewers in the 2010s were so swept up in the hype and majestic trappings of Dany’s stylings—Mother of (Cinematic) Dragons, Breaker of Chains, Fashionista of Meereen—that they likely missed the telltale signs and heavy foreshadowing of a possible fall from grace.Yet for so much of Game of Thrones’ run, that is all they were. Hinted at and teased shadows on the wall of one possible future for Dany. When it actually came time for that original series to lay its cards on the table and reveal Dany’s tragic fate to die mere feet from her family’s reclaimed seat of power, and then only to be slaughtered a tyrant, the execution was near as catastrophic as Dany’s final choices to raze King’s Landing.There was always the possibility Dany would indulge her dynastic instincts, but they were superseded by the qualities that made her such a compelling leader to so many viewers: her sense of sweeping vision, compassion for the weak and vulnerable, and her demands for justice. In the final three episodes of Game of Thrones, though, the series infamously rushed what is meant to be a tragic hero’s final descent into, ultimately, “Dragon Lady got too emotional and did an oopsie.” And then, in the epicenter of her family’s legacy, Dany could only just touch her father’s chair, brushing her fingers over what was supposed to be her birthright, before it and everything else was taken from her in a treacherous red gush.Deserved or not in the context of the series, this released in the grander cultural landscape of a world not yet three years removed from the 2016 U.S. presidential election. And it all amounted to yet another woman being declared mad and denied even the opportunity of even attempting national power. And they called it justice.So the sight of Rhaenyra Targaryen sitting the Iron Throne is its own kind of therapeutic healing. After being teased a Targaryen restoration for nine years in Game of Thrones before it was as rudely (and clumsily) snatched away, the ostensible heroine of House of the Dragon claimed a seat that was far more her own. Unlike Dany, Rhaenyra is the eldest child of the last uncontested ruler, her father King Viserys. Yet due to Viserys’ own ineptitude and fecklessness as a monarch, and the scheming treachery of the men on his Small Council and the wife in his bed—plus, to be honest, Rhaenyra’s own shortsighted choice to brood far from court on Dragonstone while the Queen Mother and Rhaenyra’s half-brother plotted—her rule was usurped. Her opportunity to govern was stolen.There is thus great catharsis, indeed, in Rhaenyra finally sitting in that chair. But also for the writers of House of the Dragon, opportunity as well to expand on George R.R. Martin’s larger thesis about the inherent unreliability of rulers and those who seek power, even sympathetic ones who do so out of a sense of fairness.While House of the Dragon has at this point infamously made more changes than Martin likes, writer Sarah Hess in particular has zeroed in on both Rhaenyra’s vulnerabilities and her blindspots in a way that can continue the Dance past Rhaenyra’s ascent. Even the way Rhaenyra haphazardly beheads her late father’s best friend sows seeds of danger. Viewers can rationalize a scene by considering the sorrow a woman would feel after just losing her third child in this war over her sex, just as we know the emotional knots that would come with condemning a paternal figure from your youth, even a duplicitous and treasonous one. But in a feudal and highly patriarchal society, her shaky swings of a sword between teardrops will read as weakness.And in any context, Rhaenyra’s complacent trivializing of the requests of Corlys Velaryon—a staunch ally who has given Rhaenyra’s claim everything over the past 20 years and now asks her only to legitimize bastard sons who already demonstrated fierce loyalty—is arrogant and, again, shortsighted.Similarly, it is easy for viewers to cheer on a self-styled Queen of the People humiliating and demoralizing the wealthy elite of King’s Landing by serving them a dinner of rats, but any passing study of history shows the danger of alienating the ruling class. Taxing their assets during a time of want and war? Necessary. Heroic, even. Taxing their pride and self-regard? Unnecessarily risky.By taking the extra time to really wallow in the satisfaction, and also the agonies, of the character you root for getting everything she wants, House of the Dragon is taking the opportunity to explore the nuance—and mayhaps the tragedy—Game of Thrones so hurriedly stumbled through and threw away.House of the Dragon is playing on HBO now.The post House of the Dragon Season 3 Is Therapeutic for Game of Thrones Fans appeared first on Den of Geek.