One of the most striking things about House of the Dragon is how aggressively it focuses on the nobility. The show is about kings and queens, princes and princesses, lords and ladies, and the intricate web of alliances and hostilities that bind them together. When we watch House of the Dragon, we’re watching an intimate portrait of how power is wielded at the highest levels, how thrones are won and lost, how the great houses maneuver against each other in pursuit of advantage. But if you stop for a moment and actually think about who’s missing from this portrait, you’ll realize that the show has made a very deliberate choice to almost completely exclude the perspective of the ordinary people whose lives are directly affected by all of this scheming. The smallfolk—the farmers, the merchants, the soldiers, the common people who make up the vast majority of the population—are almost entirely absent from House of the Dragon’s narrative, and that absence tells us something really interesting about both the show and about how power actually works in the world of Westeros.
This is a fascinating departure from the original Game of Thrones series, which at least occasionally bothered to show us the human cost of aristocratic ambition through the eyes of ordinary people. We saw the destruction of the Riverlands through the experiences of commoners. We watched what war actually looked like to regular people. We got moments where the show would pull back from the throne room and show us a villager or a soldier processing the consequences of a king’s decision. House of the Dragon, meanwhile, is so focused on dynastic intrigue that it seems to regard the smallfolk as essentially irrelevant background extras rather than as actual people with lives and agency.
The Invisible Majority
Let’s start with the most obvious observation: the smallfolk are everywhere and nowhere in House of the Dragon. They’re the servants in the castle, the soldiers in the armies, the sailors on the ships, the farmers in the fields. They’re the people who actually do all the work that makes the realm function. And yet they’re almost completely unseen and unheard. When we watch a scene in House of the Dragon, we might see a few extras in the background, some castle servants going about their business, some soldiers standing at attention, but we never actually spend time with them. We never get a sense of who they are or what they think about the chaos unfolding above their heads.
This is a deliberate creative choice, and it reflects a particular vision of what the show is about. House of the Dragon is essentially a show about aristocratic power dynamics. It’s designed to make us care about whether Rhaenyra or Alicent wins, whether the Greens or the Blacks maintain control of the throne. The show invites us to become invested in these dynastic struggles, to pick sides, to root for certain characters. But that investment requires that we view the world through the eyes of the nobility, that we accept their values and priorities as the ones that matter. And if the smallfolk are going to appear at all, they need to appear in a way that serves the story of the nobles rather than as people with their own narratives.
The problem with this approach is that it creates a distorted picture of what power actually means in Westeros. Yes, the nobility holds the formal power, and yes, the throne is technically the most important position in the realm. But the actual machinery of the realm—the economic system, the military force, the basic functioning of society—depends entirely on the smallfolk. Without them, the nobles are just well-dressed people with fancy titles. The show’s focus on nobility at the expense of the common people creates an implicit argument that the common people don’t matter, that the only interesting story to tell is the one about the people at the top.
The Rare Moments of Visibility
There are a few scenes in House of the Dragon where the smallfolk actually get to have some presence and agency, and these scenes are genuinely interesting precisely because they’re so rare. There’s a moment in the second season where the Shepherd gives a speech to a crowd of common people, inflaming them against the nobility and the dragons. This scene is significant because it’s one of the only moments where we see the smallfolk actually do something consequential, where they actually shape events rather than just being shaped by them.
But even this scene is notable primarily for how it serves the larger story of the nobility. The Shepherd matters because his mob is going to affect the civil war, because he’s going to contribute to the destruction of one of the dragons, because his movement has consequences for the people who actually matter in the show’s narrative. He’s not important in his own right; he’s important because he’s a force that the nobility has to reckon with. The show still isn’t really interested in the Shepherd as a person, in his motivations beyond vague resentment of dragons and nobility, in what his life was like or what he actually wants.
Similarly, when we see soldiers going into battle in House of the Dragon, we’re watching scenes designed to thrill us with the spectacle of war rather than to communicate what it actually feels like to be a common soldier about to die for someone else’s dynastic ambitions. The show occasionally gives us glimpses of suffering—peasants fleeing villages as dragons burn them, the physical devastation of war in the Crownlands and the Riverlands—but these images are largely presented as backdrop rather than as the primary story. We see the destruction, but we don’t see it through the eyes of the people experiencing it.
The Economics of Invisibility
One of the most interesting things about the absence of the smallfolk from House of the Dragon is how it affects our understanding of the actual logistics of power. The show presents the civil war as primarily a question of who has dragons and who has loyal nobles. But realistically, a civil war would be determined far more by questions of logistics, supply lines, the ability to feed and equip armies, the cooperation of the people in the territories you control. The Blacks have Dragonstone and some support from the nobility, but can they actually supply an army? How are they feeding their soldiers? Where are they getting weapons and horses and armor?
The show doesn’t really engage with these questions in any serious way, partly because they would require giving actual attention to the people who would need to do the work of supplying armies. It’s much easier to just cut to scenes of nobles discussing strategy and then show us the resulting battles rather than show the actual economic and logistical work that would need to happen between those planning sessions and the actual fighting. But that choice means we’re not getting a complete picture of how power actually functions.
Think about what we see of King’s Landing: it’s primarily the Red Keep and the throne room and the elite areas of the city. We occasionally see some more common areas, some merchants and sailors and regular people going about their lives, but we’re never really invited to care about them or understand them. We see King’s Landing as a backdrop for aristocratic drama rather than as an actual functioning city where hundreds of thousands of people live out their lives. The smallfolk of King’s Landing have to eat, they have to work, they have to exist within whatever political and economic system the current ruler is establishing. But House of the Dragon treats them as essentially irrelevant to the real story.
What the Absence Reveals
The decision to almost completely exclude the smallfolk from House of the Dragon actually reveals something interesting about the themes the show is exploring. The show is fundamentally a story about how family and bloodline and dynasty operate at the highest levels of a feudal society. It’s a story about people for whom power is almost a birthright, for whom fighting for a throne is a natural extension of their identity, for whom war is an acceptable solution to succession disputes because they themselves will not have to bear the costs.
By excluding the smallfolk, House of the Dragon is implicitly endorsing this perspective. It’s saying: this is the perspective that matters. This is the story worth telling. The struggles of nobles for power and prestige are interesting and worthy of sustained attention. The lives and concerns and suffering of ordinary people are not. They’re background, they’re setting, they’re consequences that we might occasionally acknowledge but ultimately don’t need to spend much time on.
This is a very different statement than saying that the smallfolk don’t exist or don’t matter in the world of Westeros. They obviously do exist and do matter. But the show is making a choice about which perspective to center, which stories to tell, whose interests and concerns to treat as primary. And that choice has real consequences for how we understand the world of the show and the events unfolding within it.
Comparison to Game of Thrones
It’s worth noting that the original Game of Thrones series, despite its many flaws, at least occasionally bothered to show us the perspective of ordinary people affected by aristocratic ambition. We saw the destruction of the Riverlands and what it meant for the people living there. We watched what happened to Wildling communities when they clashed with the Night’s Watch. We spent time with soldiers and saw how they experienced the consequences of their lords’ decisions. Game of Thrones wasn’t always great at this—the show probably should have spent more time showing ordinary people—but it at least acknowledged that ordinary people existed and had experiences worth showing on screen.
House of the Dragon seems to have decided that this approach was a mistake, that the story is clearer and more interesting if we stay entirely in the elite spheres of power. There’s an argument to be made that this produces a more focused narrative, a more intimate portrait of how power operates at the highest levels. But it also produces a portrait that’s fundamentally incomplete, that leaves out the people who would actually bear the largest costs of the civil war that’s the show’s primary focus.
The Cost of the Smallfolk’s Invisibility
What makes the invisibility of the smallfolk particularly interesting is how it affects our investment in the conflict itself. House of the Dragon wants us to care about whether the Blacks or the Greens win the throne, to feel the weight of the dynastic struggle. But if we’re never shown the actual human cost of this conflict from the perspective of the people bearing it, it becomes harder to feel the genuine moral weight of what’s happening. We can see that the show is presenting spectacle—dragons burning villages, armies clashing, fortifications being destroyed—but without the perspective of ordinary people experiencing that destruction, it remains somewhat abstract.
The Targaryen civil war, in the original source material, is genuinely devastating to the realm. It kills hundreds of thousands of people, destroys the economy, sets back the progress the realm has been making for decades. It’s a catastrophe that nearly destroys the realm completely. But if you’re watching House of the Dragon and never really getting to see what that catastrophe looks like from the perspective of ordinary people trying to survive it, the weight of it is diminished. It becomes a story about ambitious nobles making decisions rather than a story about civilization-threatening catastrophe.
What Could Be Done Differently
It’s worth imagining what House of the Dragon could be if it gave the smallfolk even a modest amount of screen time and narrative attention. You could follow a common soldier through the civil war and see how his experience differs from that of the nobles making the decisions that put him in danger. You could spend time with a merchant family trying to navigate changing political circumstances and economic disruption. You could give us a village that gets caught in the path of the conflict and show what it means for ordinary people to have a war literally destroy everything they’ve built.
None of this would require massive changes to the show’s structure. It would just mean that some of the screen time currently devoted to court intrigue and noble scheming would instead be devoted to showing ordinary people experiencing the consequences. It would make the civil war feel more real, more consequential, more genuinely devastating. And it would complicate the moral calculus in interesting ways—it’s easier to root for your preferred noble house when you’re not being constantly reminded of the real human cost of their ambitions.
The Uncomfortable Truth
The real reason House of the Dragon doesn’t seriously engage with the perspective of the smallfolk is probably that doing so would undermine the show’s primary project. The show wants us to be invested in dynastic struggle, to care about the intricacies of noble politics, to feel the drama of competing claims to a throne. If we were constantly being reminded that the outcome of this conflict will devastate the lives of hundreds of thousands of ordinary people, it would be harder to maintain that investment. It would be harder to cheer for Rhaenyra or the Blacks if we were regularly being confronted with the suffering of the common people caught in the middle of their ambition.
So the show makes a choice: render the smallfolk invisible, or nearly so. Treat them as background, as setting, as a force that occasionally needs to be acknowledged but ultimately doesn’t need to be understood or empathized with. This choice allows the show to tell the story it wants to tell without constant moral complications. But it also means we’re getting a fundamentally incomplete picture of what’s actually happening in Westeros, a portrait of power that ignores the people who actually make the realm function.
In the end, the question of whether the smallfolk matter in House of the Dragon is answered not by the show’s content but by its structure. The smallfolk matter to the show only to the extent that they affect the outcomes that the show cares about. As people with their own narratives, their own concerns, their own experiences—they barely matter at all. And that’s probably the most revealing thing about the show’s values and priorities.
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