The ‘House of the Dragon’ Season 2 Trailers Show Greens Vs. Blacks—and a Forthcoming War
The ‘Game of Thrones’ spinoff will premiere its second season on June 16. And while the new episodes will feature plenty of Alicent and Rhaenyra, they’ll also showcase a wider Westeros world.
Thursday morning, HBO gave us our first look—well, looks—at House of the Dragon Season 2, dropping not one, but two trailers and revealing a much-awaited premiere date: June 16. The trailers portray the two sides of the show’s upcoming civil war, known as the Dance of the Dragons: One contingent is the Greens, led by King Aegon II and his mother, Alicent Hightower; the other is the Blacks, led by Queen Rhaenyra and her uncle-husband, Daemon.
The first season of House of the Dragon ended a year and a half ago, and it spent 10 episodes essentially setting the stage for the fight to come. The splintering between the sides reached a point of no return when Alicent misinterpreted King Viserys’s final words, thinking he intended to crown their son Aegon upon his death. Viserys’s daughter Rhaenyra, meanwhile, wasn’t in the room for this but had been his named heir for decades—and she could not imagine her father changing his mind when he’d refused to do so many times before.
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In the political maneuvering that followed, Rhaenyra sent her son Lucerys to Storm’s End to appeal for support from Borros Baratheon. But Alicent’s son Aemond beat him there and had already secured Borros’s backing. After Lucerys left on his dragon, Arrax, Aemond followed him on Vhagar—the largest dragon in the realm. And, hey, it turns out dragons are wild beasts: In the scuffle that followed, Aemond lost control of Vhagar, and the dragon killed Arrax and ate Lucerys whole. That ended Season 1 and kicked off an inevitable path toward war.
In the trailers, we see that war picking up again. Aegon II is probably a little too eager to welcome it; when an adviser tells him, “The path to victory is one of violence” in the Greens trailer, he responds: “Good! To war then.” Rhaenyra is shown laying out her plans for the conflict with her children. Alicent is in mourning—when she’s not scheming. Ser Criston Cole rides into battle (sans helmet!). Troops are rallied, crossbows are loaded, swords are drawn, and dragons fly. Lots of dragons.
And those are just the principal players in this conflict.
Where Season 1 of HotD focused almost exclusively on the greatest noble houses of the day—the Targaryens, the Velaryons, and the Hightowers—Season 2 will expand the scope. We got a hint of this in the trailer for Team Black, with a first look at Lord Cregan Stark, the Wolf of the North, on the left here:
In the final episode of Season 1, Rhaenyra sent her eldest son, Jacaerys (on the right, with a new hairdo), to the Eyrie to try to win over Jeyne Arryn. He was instructed to continue to Winterfell to forge an alliance with the Starks. We never saw Jace make it to the North, as the camera turned to Lucerys and the tragedy at Storm’s End. But after a season spent in the south, it looks like winter is back! There is so much snow in this screenshot that this may not be Winterfell, but the Wall.
In the trailer for the Greens, we get a close look at … someone with a House Bracken sigil drawing a sword on unidentified characters:
It’s unclear exactly what is happening here, as House Bracken plays only a small role in Fire & Blood, the George R.R. Martin novel that serves as the basis for this series. But do you remember when various houses were courting Rhaenyra back in Season 1? There was a scene in which a Blackwood boy—another house from the Riverlands—killed an unruly member of House Bracken as the two competed in vain for Rhaenyra’s hand. As I detailed during Season 1, the Brackens and Blackwoods have a feud that goes back millenia. It’d make sense if the red-draped figures here are Blackwoods—and the glimpse at this scene could serve as a first taste at how wide this conflict will spread. Showrunner Ryan Condal gave an insightful quote to Entertainment Weekly to essentially that effect:
“The first season was so much about the royal family, that 1 percent of the upper 1 percent that rules this world. All the people in the show that had POVs essentially had silver hair,” Condal says. “What I think was missing from Season 1—not by omission, it was simply because it was not relevant to the story—is more common folk, the small folk of this world, that bring a certain color and texture. A lot of the fun and the conflict and the humor that came out of the original Game of Thrones was thrusting high nobility into a room with Bronn [Jerome Flynn] or the Hound [Rory McCann].”
So, which side are you on, the Greens or the Blacks?
The good news is, viewers don’t necessarily have to choose. (Spoiler alert: They’re both bad!) The rest of the realm does, though. And what happens if a house in Westeros picks the wrong side? Daemon Targaryen has the, rather succinct, answer: “Your house burns.”
