The Women of House of the Dragon and the Question of Power in Westeros

If you’re looking for a thematic core to House of the Dragon, you could do worse than to focus on this central question: what happens to power structures when women claim authority in a society built to prevent them from doing so? The entire civil war that tears the Targaryen dynasty apart is fundamentally rooted in the question of whether a woman can sit on the throne of the Seven Kingdoms, whether a woman can hold power in her own right rather than as a regent or a wife or a queen consort. The show doesn’t shy away from this — it puts it front and center and then explores all of the complicated consequences that flow from that central conflict.

Rhaenyra as a Crisis of Legitimacy

Rhaenyra is a woman trying to claim a throne in a society that has been structured since the beginning of Targaryen rule on the assumption that men hold power. Her father broke with tradition to name her as his heir, but that one decision doesn’t change centuries of precedent and assumption. The moment Viserys dies, everyone around Rhaenyra suddenly remembers that there’s a man available to be king, and there’s a long history of laws and customs that suggest men should take precedence over women when it comes to succession.

What’s fascinating about Rhaenyra’s story is that she’s not trying to overthrow a legitimate king or make some revolutionary claim that the nature of power should change. She’s trying to claim what was promised to her by the sitting king. She’s trying to be the rightful heir to the throne that everyone swore oaths to support her for. Her claim is legitimately stronger than Aegon II’s by any reasonable standard — she was named first, she was older, and she had decades of people acknowledging her as the future queen. And yet, the moment it’s convenient to do so, half the realm decides that all of that doesn’t matter because she’s a woman and there’s a man available.

The tragedy of Rhaenyra is that she’s trying to work within a system that fundamentally doesn’t want her to succeed. She makes reasonable decisions. She tries to hold her coalition together. She tries to be a good ruler even as her world is falling apart. But she’s always going to be at a disadvantage because she’s a woman in a world that assumes men should rule. And the more she tries to appeal to the established order, the less effective she becomes at actually wielding power.

Alicent and the Trap of Political Femininity

Alicent’s story is almost the inverse of Rhaenyra’s. She was never supposed to claim power in her own right. She was supposed to be a wife and a mother and use the limited influence that those positions gave her. And for much of her life, that’s what she was. But when it becomes clear that her family is being sidelined in succession, she decides to fight back — not by trying to claim power for herself, but by supporting her son’s claim to power. She’s using the traditional female tools of manipulation and influence to try to secure power for her male relatives.

What’s devastating about Alicent’s arc is that she’s trapped in a system that gives women power only when they can pretend that they’re not actually seeking power. The moment Alicent starts openly maneuvering for advantage, the moment she starts openly advocating for her son’s claim, she becomes controversial and unreliable in a way that male politicians maneuvering for advantage would never be. Men can be ambitious and powerful, and people accept it as part of the natural order. Women who are ambitious and powerful are seen as ambitious and powerful in a way that’s somehow corrupt or illegitimate.

Alicent is also trapped by her relationship to the men around her. She’s the queen, but she’s not the king. She can advise the king, but his decisions override her preferences. After his death, she’s in an even more limited position. She can support her children’s claims, but she can’t claim authority for herself. She has to work through male relatives and male allies, and that fundamentally limits her effectiveness. The show is very clear that Alicent is an intelligent political operator, but her intelligence can’t fully compensate for the structural limitations placed on her by her gender.

Rhaenys and the Woman with the Dragon

Rhaenys is interesting because she’s a woman who has access to real power — she’s a dragon rider, she’s a princess of the realm, she’s respected as a warrior and a strategist. But even with all of that, when it comes time to claim the throne, her gender is used as a reason to pass over her in favor of her younger cousin. She’s capable and powerful, but not quite powerful enough to override the assumption that men should rule.

What’s tragic about Rhaenys is that she could have been queen. Her claim was reasonable. But she was a woman, and there was a man available, and that was enough to pass over her. That experience shapes everything she does in the show. She supports Rhaenyra’s claim partially out of sisterhood, partially out of principle, but also partially out of a sense of personal justice — if she couldn’t be queen, then another woman shouldn’t be excluded either. Her choice to support the Blacks is politically sophisticated, but it’s also deeply personal. She knows what it’s like to be rejected for the throne because of her gender, and she’s not going to let that happen to Rhaenyra without a fight.

Laena and the Sacrifice of Motherhood

Laena’s story is brief but devastating in what it says about women and power in Westeros. She’s a dragon rider, she’s powerful, she’s married to a man she loves, and then she becomes pregnant. And pregnancy, in this world, is a death sentence for high-born women who take it seriously. Laena wants to live — she wants to keep riding her dragon and being powerful — but she’s caught in a biological reality that makes power and motherhood incompatible. She can’t be both a mother and a powerful woman in her own right because pregnancy will kill her.

The cruel irony of Laena’s death is that she chooses to die on her own terms rather than have a maester cut her open and take the baby. She chooses to have some agency in her own death rather than having her death chosen for her. It’s a deeply unsettling scene, and it says something profound about the way that biological reality limits women’s power and agency. Men can be warriors and fathers without having to choose between the two. Women have to choose, and often the choice is between motherhood and power.

Helaena and the Cost of Silence

Helaena is one of the most tragic figures in the show because she’s doing everything she’s supposed to do — she’s a dutiful daughter, a dutiful wife, a dutiful mother — and it’s still not enough to protect her. She’s married to her own brother, she has children by him, and she’s deeply isolated in that experience. Nobody seems interested in asking her what she wants or how she feels about any of it. She exists to provide heirs and to maintain the dynasty, and when she fails to do that in the way her family wants her to, the consequences are devastating.

What’s particularly striking about Helaena is her isolation. She’s a woman in a position of power — she’s a queen — but that power is completely hollow. She has no real agency, no real ability to influence events, no real voice in the decisions being made around her. She can advise, but nobody listens. She can protest, but nobody cares. She’s powerful on paper and powerless in reality, and the show doesn’t shy away from how painful and isolating that experience is.

Collective Female Power and Its Limits

One of the most interesting aspects of the show is how the women try to create collective power to compensate for their individual powerlessness. Rhaenyra builds a council. Alicent builds a coalition. They recognize that as individual women, their power is limited, but working together, they might be able to accomplish something more. And for a while, it works. The Black Council and the Green Council both operate as relatively effective power structures, even though they’re led by women in a male-dominated society.

But here’s the thing: both councils ultimately prove insufficient. Rhaenyra’s council is undermined by male courtiers who don’t respect her authority. Alicent’s council is constrained by the fact that she’s supporting her son’s claim rather than claiming power for herself. The collective power that women create in the show is always limited by the larger structural reality that women aren’t supposed to hold power. And when it becomes a question of actual warfare, of actual military might, both women are dependent on male warriors and male commanders to actually execute their policies. Power, ultimately, derives from force, and force is primarily wielded by men in this society.

Subversion and Submission

There’s a constant tension in House of the Dragon between female characters trying to subvert the system and female characters accepting and working within it. Rhaenyra subverts the system by refusing to accept that a man should be king just because he’s a man. Alicent works within the system by supporting a male heir while trying to maintain influence over him. Rhaenys subverts it by fighting for a woman’s right to rule. Helaena accepts it by performing her duty even though that duty is constraining her. And the show is complex enough to not declare one approach superior to the other.

Both subversion and submission have costs. Rhaenyra’s refusal to accept the patriarchal order is noble and principled, but it also leads to a devastating civil war that destroys everything. Alicent’s willingness to work within the system is pragmatic and allows her to maintain some influence, but it also means she’s complicit in perpetuating the very system that constrains her. The show doesn’t offer easy answers or declare that one approach is clearly better than the other. It just shows you the consequences of different choices in a world built to limit female power.

The Larger Question

What House of the Dragon ultimately seems to be asking is not whether women can hold power — it’s demonstrating that they can and do. Rhaenyra is a capable ruler. Alicent is a skilled political operator. Rhaenys is a warrior and a strategist. These women are powerful and capable, and the tragedy of the show is that their society structures power in ways that prevent them from fully utilizing that capability. The tragedy is not that women are weak — it’s that the systems are built to prevent women from wielding the power they actually have.

This connects to the larger Game of Thrones saga in interesting ways. That series was also fundamentally about the question of power — who has it, how they use it, what it costs them. But House of the Dragon is more explicitly about how gender shapes and constrains the ways that people can pursue and wield power. It’s saying that the same ambition, the same intelligence, the same capability for leadership looks different depending on your gender, and can face different obstacles and opposition depending on your gender.

Conclusion: Power, Gender, and the Dance

The women of House of the Dragon are not victims of the show — they’re central to its narrative. Their choices, their ambitions, their struggles to claim and maintain power are what drives the story. The show is asking what happens when a society built on the assumption that men should rule encounters women who refuse to accept that premise. And the answer, it turns out, is complicated, tragic, and deeply human. The women of House of the Dragon are powerful, they matter, and their struggle to claim authority in a world built to deny them that authority is the heart of what makes this show so compelling to watch.