Milly Alcock returned to the role of Rhaenyra Targaryen (via a Harrenhal-induced vision) in the final few episodes of House of the DragonAnd so it happened with what the Australian actress once called the most surprising bit House of the Dragon set design: the pornographic frescoes in the Red Castle.
“We’re walking around. We (Alcock and co-star Emily Carey) look up and think: Huh…that’s interesting,” Alcock said in a 2022 roundtable ahead of the first season. “The tapestries of men and women making love; women and women making love — dragons making love, also in the mix, with humans. But like everywhere.”
If you watched season 2 (or even season 1) of House of the Dragon didn’t feel like a nonstop parade of dragon sex frescoes, don’t worry; surprisingly, they scan the show as fairly subtle when they do appear, which is becoming increasingly rare. Production designer Jim Clay said this was a deliberate choice, in an attempt to make it seem as though the Shining has left the Red Keep during Aegon’s (and Alicent’s) tenure.
“The Targaryens are a family of immense power and control and incest,” Clay told Polygon. “The Red Keep — it was kind of a decadent place under (Viserys). And then his wife died, and (…) Alicent’s influence was a little more puritanical and monastic (despite her own activities).”
Image: HBO
The style was like the rest of House of the Dragon‘s art, which Clay calls “essentially medieval.” (Though he notes that he’s “trying to introduce elements that aren’t purely Renaissance, just to change it up a little bit so that it’s not familiar British or European Renaissance buildings.”) He credits Season 1 showrunners Ryan Condal and Miguel Sapochnik with coming up with the idea for the pornographic art as a way to show how indulgent and even mellow life was under Viserys’ rule. But it was Clay who hired artist Steve Mitchell to create the artwork for the show.
“Steve can do anything from a small fresco to a huge, 200-foot-long set,” Clay says of Mitchell’s work (which can also be seen behind Harrenhal’s round table). That’s a good thing, because they had a lot of ground to cover to make King’s Landing feel opulent. “It’s pretty hard to make a building like that feel decadent because we don’t have any art to put up, except for the pornographic frescoes.”
Still, even that kind of background “soft furnishings” counts—and its absence has helped make the castle feel more like what it is, and what Clay and his team were initially trying to avoid: “a cold, stone castle.” Tellingly, most of the rooms in the Keep are starting to resemble Otto Hightower’s austere living quarters, down to the Seven-Pointed Star of Seven gracing the walls more prominently than before. It’s his tastes that dictate much of the feel of the Red Keep, whether or not he’s Hand to the King, with Aegon only on the throne through his manipulation. Even Alicent’s own reclusive style is a product of her father’s manipulation and influence, and the castle’s feel follows suit, making it plainer and drab. And as a result, King’s Landing feels much colder—from the art on the walls to the rat catchers hanging outside to the light filtering in through the windows.
Such details can be considered a trifle in the background House of the Dragon‘s larger war plot. But losing them tells us a lot about how the Hightowers run this regime, and how they want to advance the family. This is a lineage erasure, erasing the complexities (bizarre, commanding and otherwise) of the Targaryen line in the same way that King Robert in Game of Thrones hid all the dragon skulls when he captured King’s Landing.
It makes sense, then, that we see the art hanging in one conspicuous place in the most recent episodes of Season 2, hidden as it is behind empty bookshelves: in Aegon’s chambers, formerly Viserys’. There’s still a bit of the old ways left in King’s Landing – but unfortunately, as the battle in Episode 4 shows, it’s not enough to win a war.