There’s a scene in House of the Dragon where Larys Strong sits in his chair and watches Alicent bathe, and the camera lingers on his face—the way he’s looking at her, the hunger in his gaze, the barely contained desire. And if you weren’t already aware that Larys is one of the most unsettling characters in the entire show, this scene would make it abundantly clear. Larys Strong is creepy in a way that a lot of characters in Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon aren’t. He’s not creepy because he’s violent or explosive or monstrous in some obvious way. He’s creepy because of something much more insidious: the gap between his outward respectability and his actual desires, the way he uses his intelligence and his position to mask something fundamentally predatory underneath.
The thing that makes Larys truly scary is that he’s a representation of something very real and very recognizable. Unlike a dragon or a wildfire or a White Walker, Larys represents a specific kind of predatory power that actually exists in the real world. He’s the intelligent, seemingly harmless man who uses his position and his apparent weakness to manipulate situations to his advantage. He’s the person who can make you feel like you’re complicit in something horrible without actually having the power to refuse. He’s creepy because he’s almost too normal, because he could almost be real, because the things he does make sense even as they’re deeply wrong.
The Performance of Respectability
One of the most important things to understand about Larys Strong is that his entire existence is performance. He presents himself as a dutiful, intelligent, somewhat isolated man—someone whose physical disability has perhaps made him introspective, thoughtful, even wise. People don’t see him as threatening because he’s disabled, because he’s not physically imposing, because he seems to be content to work behind the scenes rather than to openly pursue power. This performance is so effective that people consistently underestimate him and fail to see him as a genuine threat until it’s far too late.
But that performance is a mask. Underneath the respectability, underneath the intelligent advice and the helpful suggestions, there’s something much darker. Larys isn’t content to be a background figure. He’s not accepting of his position. He’s using his apparent harmlessness as camouflage while he pursues his own agenda with ruthless efficiency. He’s willing to do things that most people would find unthinkable—burn down his own family home, kill his own family members—in pursuit of power and influence.
The creepiness of Larys comes from this disconnect between appearance and reality. He’s the person who can sit in a room and look harmless while he’s actually orchestrating terrible things. He’s the person who can offer advice that sounds reasonable and helpful while it’s actually serving his own purposes. He’s the person who can watch you do something and make you feel like you’re the one doing something wrong, even though he’s the one who’s actually manipulating the situation.
The Architecture of Manipulation
What makes Larys particularly effective and particularly creepy is the way he builds systems of manipulation that make people feel like they have agency when they actually don’t. When he blackmails Alicent into showing him her intimate moments, he’s not just engaging in sexual predation—he’s creating a system where she feels complicit, where she feels like she’s making a choice, even though the reality is that she’s being coerced. He’s made her understand that there’s a cost to refusing him, and so by complying she’s trying to maintain some kind of control in a situation where she actually has very little.
This is what makes Larys so unsettling. He’s not someone who overpowers his victims or threatens them explicitly. Instead, he creates situations where they feel like they have to comply, where refusing him would create more problems than complying with him would. He uses information as leverage. He uses his position as leverage. He uses people’s fear and confusion as leverage. He builds architectures of control that are so sophisticated and so subtle that the people being controlled often don’t fully realize what’s happening until they’re already entangled.
The scene with Alicent is deeply creepy not just because of what’s happening but because of how it happens. Larys has positioned himself in a situation where he has leverage over Alicent—he knows something she doesn’t want known, something that could damage her position, something that could cause real problems for her. And then he uses that leverage to get what he wants. It’s calculated, it’s deliberate, and it’s done with full awareness of how it’s going to make Alicent feel. He’s not accidentally creepy—he’s intentionally creepy, and he’s doing it because he knows it gives him power.
The Attractiveness of Danger
One of the most interesting things about Larys is the way he operates with a kind of intellectual confidence that’s actually quite attractive, even though his actions are reprehensible. He’s smart. He’s capable. He understands how power works and how to navigate complex political situations. He offers good advice. He positions himself as someone who can be useful, who can solve problems, who can help people achieve their goals. And for some viewers, this competence is seductive, even as his creepiness is off-putting.
This is what makes Larys genuinely dangerous as a character. It’s not that he’s obviously villainous. It’s that he combines genuine competence and intelligence with predatory behavior and a willingness to do horrible things. He’s the kind of person who can convince people that they should work with him, that his advice is good advice, that he’s someone who can be trusted—and then he uses that trust to manipulate and control them. He’s attractive and repulsive at the same time, which makes him far more compelling and far more unsettling than a character who’s simply evil.
The Disability Question
The way Larys’s disability factors into his creepiness is worth examining carefully. His club foot is a physical limitation that has presumably shaped his entire life. He can’t be a warrior, can’t compete with other men through physical prowess, can’t pursue certain paths that would be available to him if he weren’t disabled. And yet he’s found other sources of power. He’s using intelligence, information, manipulation, and the ability to make himself indispensable to others. In a sense, he’s overcoming his physical limitation by developing other capabilities.
But here’s where it gets creepy: his disability becomes part of his camouflage. People don’t see him as threatening partly because he’s disabled, partly because he seems to have accepted his limitations and focused on other areas. This allows him to move through spaces and to approach people in ways that someone more obviously powerful wouldn’t be able to. His disability gives him a kind of invisibility that he uses to his advantage. He’s not a threat because he can’t physically overpower anyone, so people drop their guards around him in ways they wouldn’t around someone more obviously dangerous.
The show doesn’t make this explicit, but it’s there in the subtext. Larys is using the world’s perception of him as a disabled man—someone who’s resigned to a subordinate role, someone who’s not a physical threat—to cover for his actual predatory behavior. He’s weaponizing people’s sympathy and their lowered expectations to manipulate and control situations. This is what makes him so unsettling: he’s exploiting not just individual people but entire systems of perception and expectation.
The Pleasure of Power
What’s genuinely frightening about Larys is that he seems to enjoy what he’s doing. He’s not acting out of desperation or out of a need to survive. He seems to take genuine pleasure in manipulating people, in having power over them, in making them complicit in things they don’t want to be complicit in. When he watches Alicent bathe, when he orchestrates the burning of Harrenhal, when he plays complicated political games, there’s an element of actual enjoyment there. He’s not doing these things reluctantly; he’s doing them because they satisfy something in him.
This enjoyment is what tips Larys from being merely morally corrupt into being genuinely creepy. If he were simply manipulating people because he needed to survive, because he needed to gain power to protect himself, that would be one thing. But he seems to enjoy the manipulation itself, to take pleasure in the power dynamic, to get something out of making people uncomfortable and complicit in things they don’t want to be part of. That enjoyment of exercising power over others in a sexual or intimate context is exactly what makes him predatory in a very specific and very unsettling way.
The Effectiveness of Subtlety
One of the things that makes Larys particularly effective as a villain is that his creepiness is subtle enough that other characters often fail to appreciate how serious the threat actually is. Alicent understands that Larys is manipulating her and that the situation with him is uncomfortable, but because it’s not happening through explicit threats or violence, it doesn’t register with the same kind of urgency that a more obvious threat would. She’s being sexually coerced, but it’s happening in a way that’s deniable, that allows her to tell herself that maybe she’s overreacting, that maybe it’s not as bad as it feels.
This subtlety is actually more dangerous than a more direct threat would be, because it allows Larys to operate without anyone taking serious action to stop him. If he were someone who was openly threatening people or openly committing crimes, other characters would band together against him. But because his behavior is subtle, because it operates in shadows and implication rather than explicit statement, people don’t know how to respond. They know something is wrong, but they can’t quite prove it or articulate exactly what the problem is.
The Mirror to Power Structures
In a larger sense, Larys is creepy because he represents something about how power actually works in systems like Westeros. He’s showing us that power doesn’t just come from physical strength or explicit authority. Power comes from information, from the ability to make yourself indispensable, from the willingness to do things that others won’t do. He’s a predator who’s operating in a system that doesn’t have good mechanisms for stopping him, that in some ways facilitates his behavior because it values people who are willing to do dirty work in service of larger goals.
Alicent uses Larys. She benefits from his willingness to act, from his intelligence, from his ability to solve problems that other people don’t know how to solve. And in using him, she becomes complicit with him. She becomes a person who needs to protect him, who can’t openly move against him without acknowledging her own complicity in his crimes. This is how power actually works in feudal systems and in hierarchical organizations more generally: you end up dependent on people who are willing to do things you wouldn’t do yourself, and that dependency creates obligations that you didn’t expect and that you’re not entirely comfortable with.
Why He Matters
Larys Strong matters in House of the Dragon not just because of the specific crimes he commits or the specific power he gains, but because he represents a particular kind of threat that’s often underappreciated. He’s not a dragon. He’s not a bold military strategist leading armies into battle. He’s a quiet predator who’s using intelligence and subtlety and the vulnerabilities of the people around him to gain power. And the show is suggesting that this kind of threat might be more dangerous in the long run than more obvious threats are, precisely because it’s so easy to underestimate and so easy to rationalize away.
The thing that makes Larys genuinely unsettling and genuinely effective is that he’s almost impossible to fight directly. You can’t outfight him. You can’t outmaneuver him because his maneuvers happen in spaces where they’re hard to see and hard to respond to. You can only defeat someone like Larys if you’re willing to acknowledge what he’s doing and take direct action against it, and that acknowledgment itself is uncomfortable and risky. Which is why, in the world of House of the Dragon, Larys continues to gain power even as people around him increasingly understand how unsettling he actually is.
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