The Glaring Flaw at the Heart of <em>House of the Dragon</em>
In the lavish <em>Game of Thrones</em> prequel, no one is immune to the toxic dynamics of the Targaryen family.
This article contains spoilers through the first episode of House of the Dragon.
While I was parsing how I felt about , HBO’s lavish, sweeping new entry in the universe, I came across given to the by an alleged “Hollywood executive” connected to the series. What was striking was the bifurcated way the person described the show’s framing for a post-#MeToo moment: conceding that there was “way less sex” in than there could be in the good old tits-and-trebuchetsdays of yore, but also boasting that producers had cleverly adapted to the times by replacing sexual violence with barbaric renderings of childbirth. “The child bed is our battlefield,” the source said, quoting a line from the first episode. (Onscreen, the line is spoken by the
