By The finale for HBO’s hit series House of the Dragon aired not so long ago, and in it was a particularly terrifying sequence with Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen giving birth to her daughter. Alas, the baby did not survive and while it wasn’t shown very well on camera, there were debates among fans whether the baby was normal-looking or deformed. Now we have definite clarity on the subject.
Prosthetic designer confirms: the baby was deformed
Prosthetic designer Barrie Gower took to his Instagram to post the photos of the stillborn child. It has scales, deformed head, non-human nose. All roughly in line with the description in the books. Take a look:
This birth is described in George R.R. Martin’s Fire & Blood, and earlier in The Princess and the Queen
“When the babe at last came forth, she proved indeed a monster: a stillborn girl, twisted and malformed, with a hole in her chest where her heart should have been and a stubby, scaled tail. The dead girl had been named Visenya.“
The baby was clearly among those rare cases in the Targaryen line, where it was described that an unsuccessful birth had produced a stillborn baby with dragon-like features. Most famous of those cases was none other than Daenerys Targaryen, who had a similar case of birth in the first book, when she gave birth to Rhaego.
“He was scaled like a lizard, blind, with the stub of a tail and small leather wings like the wings of a bat. When I touched him, the flesh sloughed off the bone, and inside he was full of graveworms and the stink of corruption.”
In the Game of Thrones adaptation, none of this was showed and all was left to the audience’s imagination.
House of the Dragon Season 2 is currently in development for a potential 2024 release. Stay tuned with Redanian Intelligence for more news!
