- Criticism of ‘The House of the Dragon’, 1×02: question of eggs
- How old are Rhaenyra and Alicent in ‘House of the Dragon’?
*This article contains spoilers for the first two chapters of The House of the Dragon
The skin covered with pustules, the hidden face in the style of The man in the iron mask o The Phantom of the Opera. He seems to exert some control over the plague of crabs that devour the dying bodies of sailors boarded by pirates. What a shame, what fear, what a desire to know more than he is drawn as the first great villain of The House of the Dragon. Who are you, mysterious Benefactor of the Crabs?
The question has already been answered between the first two chapters. The one named Benefactor of the Crabs, which is a deliciously gory euphemism, is, according to Lord Corlys, a prince of Myr. Which is one of the Free Cities that we already met in Game of Thrones, like Braavos, Volantis or Pentos. A salty prince who has installed his army of pirates in the Stone Steps, a very important trade route for the fleet of Lord Corlys himself, king of Driftmark, from which blood flows in the new header. He steals the goods and martyrs his victims by ‘crucifying’ them on the beach for the crabs to devour, bite by bite. They are the most impressive images of everything we have seen so far of The House of the Dragon.
Are they giving us to understand that the Benefactor of the Crabs is, in some way, a monstrous threat in the style of what the Night King was in Game of Thrones? Can it be that the crabs take the place of the White Walkers and their zombie army in the imagination of the spectators? To answer, we return to the heart of the comparison between The House of the Dragon y Game of Thrones. In the original series, the supernatural conflict was much more present from the first chapter, where the arrival of a winter that might end humanity was already announced; in the spin-off, that ghostly threat is spoken of as being from the distant future, and the plot focuses much more on the fratricidal struggle within the Targaryens for power.
I mean, the answer is no. The Benefactor of the Crabs is not a being with great supernatural powers. He is a pirate-prince that we will see how he performs in combat. And crabs are… crabs.
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Actually, at the end of the second chapter we are already moving towards where this conflict is headed. The Benefactor of the Crabs is supported by more Free Cities than Myr. Specifically, the one known as the Triarchy, which is an alliance between Myr, Lys and Tyrosh, all on the coast of Essos. His objective is to create conflict in Los Stepdaños de Piedra to weaken the already rotten reign of Viserys Targaryen. Lord Corlys wanted to go to war with them directly, but the court is much wiser (or cowardly) than he is. Added to the rudeness over Viserys’s decision to reject his daughter Laena and marry Alicent, Corlys seeks an unexpected ally in Daemon Targaryen: he proposes that he confront the Benefactor of the Crabs so that he can win points in his race to the Throne of Targaryen. Hierro: “The ‘second-born’, if they don’t value us, we assert ourselves.”
So what lies ahead is a showdown between a character as ambitious, unbalanced (but with a certain heart) as Daemon Targaryen once morest the very strange Benefactor of the Crabs. Will it be the first great war scene of The House of the Dragon? You just have to watch the preview of chapter 3 to check it out.
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