The TV shows based on George R. R. Martin’s works are two for two when it comes the Targaryen family stealing the show. On “Game of Thrones,” Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) becomes far and away the single most powerful player on the table, only failing in her quest to take the Iron Throne because Aegon “Jon Snow” Targaryen (Kit Harington) steps in. Meanwhile, the prequel show “House of the Dragon” features several Targaryens, but the arguably biggest focus is on Rhaenyra (Milly Alcock, Emma D’Arcy). Apart from the family’s deceptively angelic looks, the two women share a similarly steely mindset and vast inner strength. This can make the viewer suspect that they might be closely related even by Targaryen standards — even though “House of the Dragon” takes place some 200 years before “Game of Thrones.” So, are they?

Fortunately, the familial relationship between Rhaenyra and Daenerys is fairly easy to track, and the former is the latter’s great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother. Granted, there are a fair few generations between the two women, but the similarity between the them is easily explained by the fact that they’re just about as directly related as two Targaryens who live two centuries apart can be. 

As both Daenerys and Rhaenyra prove on their respective shows, nephews and uncles aren’t necessarily disqualified from a Targaryen’s dating pool. As a result, the Targaryen family tree can get a bit strange thanks to their tendency to marry within the family, but the ancestral relationship between these two women is nevertheless quite straightforward. 

If Daenerys was just some distant cousin of the main family line, it might be prohibitively challenging for the show and its viewers to believably depict the “Game of Thrones”-era Targaryens as part of the long line of ruling dragon-rider elite “House of the Dragon” is all about. This would be doubly more challenging because the shows are hardly consistent with their lore. “House of the Dragon” has mistakes that are hard to ignore, and both “Game of Thrones” and “House of the Dragon” have a big Targaryen mistake thanks to the inconsistent representation of the family’s dragon sigil. Against this background, simply making sure that Daenerys is a direct descendant of Rhaenyra is a good way to keep things simple.