This article contains light spoilers for Fire & Blood.
A lot can change between the pilot episode of a TV show and the rest of its season. No franchise knows that better than Game of Thrones. The original pilot for the HBO fantasy drama was famously scrapped and reshot with a major casting change. Then the franchise’s first attempt at a prequel spinoff, Bloodmoon, was axed entirely after filming a pilot.
House of the Dragon, the first Thrones spinoff to make it to air, didn’t have many of the pilot woes as its predecessors. This series about the Dance of the Dragons made it from episode 1 to episode 2 largely unscathed. There is, however, one notable difference between the two. In episode 2, Daemon Tagaryen’s (Matt Smith) paramour Lady Mysaria of Lys (Sonoya Mizuno) appears to have gained an unfamiliar accent.
While Mysaria didn’t have too many lines in episode 1, by episode 2 she is quite verbose and her inflections sound markedly different from her first appearance. House of the Dragon appears to be (belatedly) trying to establish Daemon’s mystery woman as an enigmatic figure from the east. But who, exactly, is Lady Mysaria and what do we know about her home city of Lys?
The answer lies, as it often does, in George R.R. Martin’s books. The history of the nine city-states of Essos known as the “Free Cities” are fleshed out in Martin’s main A Song of Ice and Fire saga and a handful of other texts. The encyclopedic The World of Ice and Fire and the alternate history book Fire & Blood (upon which most of House of the Dragon is based) contain the most useful information regarding Lys’s culture, geography, and politics.
Eight of the nine Free Cities (with Braavos as the exception) were once western outposts of the House Targaryen’s ancestral home, the Valyrian Freehold. After a cataclysm known as the Doom of Valyria all but wiped that empire off the map, nine of the Freehold’s cities continued on in western Essos like business as usual.
As King Viserys’s Small Council notes in House of the Dragon’s first episode, the Free Cities rarely, if ever, pose a military threat to the Seven Kingdoms in Westeros. Occasionally, a handful of cities will rally around a charismatic leader or cause. We are seeing this happen currently in House of the Dragon as The Triarchy, an alliance of Lys, Myr, and Tyrosh, gathers under the leadership of Craghas “Crabfeeder” Drahar. For the most part, however, all nine Free Cities are happy to operate as independent entities and frequent trading partners of Westeros.
Of the nine Free Cities, Lys is perhaps the most beautiful and populous (though its precise population is not known). The city resides upon several rocky islands off the western coast of Essos. Its people are known as the Lyseni. Like many of the other Free Cities, Lys is primarily concerned with trade and its natural splendor and relative safety make for excellent capitalistic conditions. Along with the ample trading that goes on in Lys, the city is particularly hospitable to its male guests thanks to the many “pillow houses” and “pleasure gardens” that dot the island.
What’s interestings about Lys from the books, and House of the Dragon’s subsequent deviation from it, is that the city is said to be the most “Valyrian” of all the Free Cities. The Lyseni people are said to resemble Valyrians, having the same blond hair and lilac eyes that House Targaryen is known for. Of course, in House of the Dragon, Mysaria has dark hair and does not have a similar appearance to any Targaryen we know.
It’s possible that House of the Dragon’s Mysaria is not “ethnically” Lyseni but rather Lyseni in the sense that she was a resident of a pillow house in Lys. It’s also possible that House of the Dragon has just decided to not worry about the appearance of Free City residents so long as they appear sufficiently different from the main characters.
And that brings us to Lady Mysaria herself. Who is this white-robe clad woman? And why does Daemon find her so appealing? Well, as has been made apparent over House of the Dragon’s first two episodes, she is both beautiful and, uh…sexually gifted. Ever the libertine, Daemon is naturally attracted to beautiful things. He’s also attracted to getting to make his own decisions, as evidenced by his disdain for his assigned wife from the Vale. As Fire & Blood eventually reveals, however, Mysaria is much more than a pretty face. She is immensely talented in the realm of espionage and sabotage. Both skills should prove useful in the wars to come.
Think of her like the Daemon’s own personal Varys, the Spider. With Daemon’s ingenuity and interest in cruelty and Lady Mysaria’s unique talents, the duo should prove to be quite formidable going forward.
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