I've been catching up with season 2 and honestly it's not half bad. It has cut out the worst shitty (often gross and misogynistic in nature) excesses of the original show while still retaining most if not all of the great character writing and great dialogue that the first four seasons of GoT had.
There's all this great early GoT style political intrigue retained to it as well. All of these lords and ladies and queens and kings are just terrible, awful people for most of the runtime while we've been getting increasing focus on how badly the very concept of monarchy forces the dirty laundry of one inbred family with pet nukes to take shape and brutalize not only the slowly starving smallfolk of King's Landing, but also the smallfolk throughout most of the surrounding empire.
The Lords of the Seven Kingdoms all exist in this web of familial ties that ensures their ultimate class solidarity, eventually dragging most of the continent into dragon war the aftermath of which resembles that of atomic bombs. Now we find two desperate peasants given dragons because Queen in Exile Rhaenyra needs to find someone capable of vibing with Vermithor and Silverwing, the second and third largest war dragons in existence. She ends up burning to death dozens of claimed Targaryen bastards to do this by locking them all in the Dragonmont and letting the dragons sort the rest. She watches this happen with bored disinterest, in contrast to the horror on her face when her highborn Queensguard Steffon Darklyn dies in a previous attempt to claim the dragon Seasmoke.
[Brief Spoilers for book events in this paragraph]
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In the book, after Hugh Hammer and Ulf White risk their lives to be her attack dog dragon riders, they never receive the kind of social elevation you'd expect for the people with the largest dragons on the continent. Rhaenyra does not want to deal with the political fallout of there being legitimized Targaryen bastards with bigger dragons than those of her sons, whom are also legitimized Targaryen bastards. Thus Hugh and Ulf plausibly retain some amount of class solidarity to the average smallfolk's plight and betray Rhaenyra to declare themselves Kings. I'm hoping the show has them join some Riverlander anti-Targaryen guerilla movements once they see the kind of atrocities they are expected to commit.
It feels like early GoT without the violence and gratuitous titty scenes. So far I'm really enjoying it.
Also Emma D'Arcy is an amazing actor, a beautiful human, and enby goals, love that they're doing such a great job as Rhaenyra
EDIT: the cast is really rocking it. Paddy Considine was amazing, but also Rhys Ifans, tons of people
Definitely, their Rhaenyra is an excellent take on the character because they portray her without the flaws attributed to her by this deeply misogynistic and patriarchal society in a history book written centuries after the fact. Instead, they portray Rhaenyra as this regal women who clearly takes her position as Queen seriously and genuinely seeks to avoid starting a full scale war until a series of unfortunate escalations makes it inevitable whether she renounces her claim or not. Instead Emma D'Arcy's Rhaenyra has the shortcomings you'd actually expect of a crown princess. Rhaenyra clearly does not care much for the smallfolk, a massive and continuously relevant blind spot that Emma portrays perfectly.
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Yeah, that's why i'm curious to see where they go with the whole Mysaria plot line. I feel it's not that Rhaenyra doesn't have any compassion for people who are not royal, she just doesn't think about them, but she seeks to avoid loss of life anyway, and Mysaria is very much the representative for all the downtrodden people of the 7 kingdoms, reminding her that they're important, and also powerful.If the story is anything like the books (which I think it will pretty much cover the main beats), the smallfolk (starting with Ulf and Hugh) will turn on Rhaenyra as soon as she gets King's Landing, but the devil is in the way this is portrayed: