The writers and directors have said as much in interviews, this was a deliberate choice designed to highlight the nobility's general callousness towards everyday people.
The only thing we got was Hess' sarcastic comment "
civilians don't count". What else we actually got from the writers were along the lines of
this:
Hess said:
I just remember we were in the writer's room one day and I was like: It would be awesome if Rhaenys just came through the floor on a dragon.
And
this:
Sapochnik said:
We needed a penultimate scene, so we tried to come up with, 'What's the worst thing that could possibly happen at a coronation'?
And I understand the impulse to come up with explanations for things a show you like do as well as extending them the benefit of the doubt that they know what they are doing. And I am well aware I am doubly negatively biased against the show for dislike of the source material and lack of trust in HBO after
Game of Thrones, so it's not like I'm objective or anything.
But sometimes the show just makes a lot of really dubious or plain stupid decisions. It's not a clever subtle messaging about anything.
I see a lot of people trying to explain away some stuff that are just illogical or inconsistent writing on its face, and that just reminds me of similar behavior back when GoT was airing. No, the change from Jeyne Westerling from Talisa Maegyr wasn't
an honeypot plot by the Lannisters to make the Red Wedding even more tragic, she was just an anachronistic world war nurse who just happens to have the family name of one of Volantis' powerful families, and Robb's mistake was made into a more simplistic love story. No, D&D did not "foreshadow" Arya killing the Night King due to Melisandre's
words to her back in season 3, they just thought it would
subvert expectations avoid the expected. And let's not even talk about people trying to retroactively make Mad Dany make sense.
Now, the showrunners of
House of the Dragon aren't the same as GoT (except Miguel Sapochnik, who gave us the Battle of the Bastards, the Long Night, and The Bells
), but I feel they share some of the same habits and audiences are falling into the same patterns of thinking far more about a scene than they appear to have. Like, Aemond this episode:
maybe this is about how Targaryens don't really control dragons, and using animals and forces of natures for your petty conflicts is dumb! But maybe this is also part of the pattern of how, since post-timeskip, the show seems unclear on what the motivations of the cast should be and how it leads to the conflict, and unwilling to have them act in at least morally dubious ways to get there, so Aemond oopsie-daisy accidentally kill his nephew. Or how Rhaenys sure didn't want to kill the Greens as it "wasn't her war", but quickly changes her tune and convinces Corlys to get involved in the conflict the next episode. If the show is about nobles jockeying for power and making people suffer, both sides sure seem more like mostly decent people who just clumsily stumble into war.
Maybe they are making a theme about how the common people will suffer, but usually, the show isn't subtle when it wants to message something. "Childbirth is women's battlefields" has been hammered a lot of times throughout the episodes, complete with symbolic parallels with wars. By contrast, the killing of smallfolk seems more like an afterthought to Cool Spectacle to me, and people wanting to read more into it, especially those who want it to presage
the boiling over and violent involvement of the populace in the conflict in the form of the Storming of the Dragonpit and Gaemon Palehair's reign. For example, Laenor faked his death, and the focus of the narrative and the camera is on the gay character fleeing the politics to live in happiness with his lover...
not on the random (likely common) man who got killed in his place.
I dunno, I feel like if this were truly about the smallfolk, the narrative would make it clearer and more obvious across numerous instances rather than just having random incidents and people only really focusing on last episode's callousness.
EDIT: I don't want to appear to just bash the show, it is
miles better than
Fire & Blood, especially in the characterization of the Greens, who were either forgettable footnotes or comically evil. But I feel like the show was really at its best pre-timeskip.
