Watch The Throne
On chairs, ideology, and power
Author’s Note: This essay contains spoilers for Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon, both the books and the TV adaptation.
Architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe once remarked that "a chair is a very difficult object. A skyscraper is almost easier.” It’s a surprising, provocative consideration: that chairs, for all of their small-scale simplicity, still find ways to challenge us through their demands as both a decorative and functional object, embodying ideas and perspectives within the material manifestation of their fabricated forms.
Chairs are almost always an accessory, parts of an ensemble of furnishings. They’re hardly ever the center of attention in interior decor, unless it’s for a coffee table book that features hundreds of them or for an exhibition of design history like The Schaudepot at the Vitra Design Museum. Designers rarely (if ever) create only chairs, incorporating this kind of object into a whole portfolio of furniture that embodies their aesthetic values and craftsmanship. As Jesús Llinares of Andreu World points out, “Often we do not notice chairs, [but] they are nevertheless a real luxury, and a tremendously valuable object not for their price or exclusivity, but for being part of our life more than we are able to see.”
The subject of chairs—and what they represent socially, culturally, and politically—has been on my mind since I started watching HBO’s House of the Dragon. Like the rest of the Game of Thrones series, the main conflict of the show boils down to who has rightful claim over the Iron Throne and who does not. As questions of inheritance and legitimacy arise, this power struggle explodes into a brutal civil war that ultimately leaves Westeros’s ruling family, the Targaryens, irreversibly scarred.
Unlike the original show where the Iron Throne becomes largely symbolic and most of the story unfolds across Westeros’s seven kingdoms and beyond, almost all of the important political events in House of the Dragon happen within the Red Keep’s throne room. It’s the place where the results of King Jaehaerys’s Great Council would place Viserys in the line of succession over Rhaenys Targaryen, the Queen Who Never Was. It’s where King Viserys would later clash with his brother Daemon. It’s where Viserys would later name his daughter Rhaenyra as his successor, and it’s the place where he defended her claim and those of her sons shortly before his death. The Iron Throne is, afterall, the physical manifestation of the Targaryens' dynastic power, having been created by swords seized by Aegon the Conqueror. The legend goes that Aegon’s dragon, Balerion, forged the monstrosity of blades with his dragonfire.
The Iron Throne we see in House of the Dragon, which is set 200 years before the events of A Song of Ice and Fire, is significantly larger than the one we see in Game of Thrones. This one seeps out onto the Great Hall like a pool of spilled blood, much more jagged than its more modern counterpart. Its redesign for the screen is more in line with what author George R. R. Martin envisioned: “a hunched beast looming over the throne room, ugly and asymmetric,” deliberately uncomfortable. Obviously this upgrade can be attributed to House of the Dragon’s larger production budget, but I do love how fans have since decided that the more minimal throne was the result of Robert Baratheon’s “cleaning up” of the Red Keep and its Targaryen symbolism.
A piece of lore that’s stuck with me since I first read the books is that the Iron Throne has a nasty habit of cutting whoever it deems unworthy or too weak to rule. The list of those who sustained injuries from it is not long, but it is significant. The Mad King (Aerys II) was nicknamed “King Scab” for the amount of cuts he had, unsurprising since he’d be the last Targaryen to sit on the Iron Throne. There’s Maegor the Cruel who was found dead on the throne, slashed and speared through by its blades. While some speculate it was foul play, others believe it was the throne itself who did it. Aegon the II, thanks to injuries he sustained in battle, would not even be able to ascend the Iron Throne anymore, having to sit instead on a wooden chair at its base. After the Dance of the Dragons, it’s said that Queen Rhaenyra sustained several injuries after she reclaimed her title, prophetic of her short-lived rule—how that will play out on-screen in House of Dragon is still unknown.
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