Just two episodes after Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D’Arcy) threw a nauseating rat banquet, House of the Dragon upped its gross food game with another disgusting feast.
The feast shows up in Season 3, episode 5, which reveals that Ormund Hightower (James Norton) has been bankrolling the murders of Gold Cloaks across King’s Landing. By the episode’s end, Daemon Targaryen (Matt Smith) and Ser Luthor Largent (Tom Cullen) have killed one man who was involved in the killings, and who claims he was acting alone. However, that turns out not to the case, because by the episode’s end, nine other Gold Cloaks are dead, including Luthor.
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Daemon discovers these corpses posed in a horrifying tableau. The deceased Gold Cloaks sit around a long table, their innards splayed out among tankards and candles. Above them, someone has painted the words “a feast for traitors” in blood.
It’s a disgusting sequence, a cross between “The Last Supper” and body horror. It’s also not in House of the Dragon‘s source material, George R.R. Martin’s Fire and Blood — at least, not in this exact way.
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For starters, the Gold Cloak killing spree is a show-only addition, as are all of Ormund’s plans to crown Daeron Targaryen (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth). However, the corpse feast does take place, just in a very different setting.
In Fire and Blood, as Ser Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel) and his men march south through the riverlands, his scouts come across a similar corpse feast. Pro-Rhaenyra forces staged a “grotesque mockery of a feast,” using the rotting bodies of fallen soldiers to strike fear into the hearts of their opponents. Later on the march, Criston’s men find another corpse banquet, but this one is a trick: The corpses are actually living soldiers in disguise, and they manage to kill a dozen of the scouts.
Based on the fact that their insides have now become their outsides, it’s clear that the dead Gold Cloaks in House of the Dragon are not pulling a similar trick. However, that feast, like the book’s, is waging some serious psychological warfare. Notably, though, House of the Dragon switched which side of the war is creating this nasty corpse art, shifting it from Team Black to Team Green. The change means that Criston’s biggest opponents in the show, Roddy the Ruin (Tommy Flanagan) and Ser Oscar Tully (Archie Barnes), aren’t painted as total monsters. It’s also in keeping with Ormund’s more sadistic side in the show, although there’s no way he would ever disembowel a man himself. Think of the smells!
