In the latest installment of HBO’s House of the Dragon, Lord Otto Hightower confronts the king with a bit of discomforting news. Princess Rhaenyra and Prince Daemon were spotted in the bowels of a pleasure den, engaging in some unbecoming behavior – coupling, to be exact. What his report doesn’t mention, however, is that the pleasure den is no source of pleasure at all. It’s a dismal tomb of anonymous, naked bodies, where Daemon, struck by a recurring bout of erectile dysfunction, abruptly abandons his niece.
Alicent Hightower, meanwhile, shows us what it means to “serve the realm”, as a late Aemma Targaryen would say: It’s a duty that entails staring listlessly at the ceiling, waiting for one’s elderly husband to climax. Here in the most sexually charged episode of HOTD to date, sex among the Westerosi elite is a remarkably depressing affair, where even Rhaenyra’s seduction of a reluctant Ser Criston Cole is terribly unsexy. She lures him into her room with a protracted game of keepaway the helmet, the courtship of paramours with absolutely zero chemistry.
