House of the Dragon: My Theory on How Hugh Hammer Becomes a Traitor in Season 4

Hugh Hammer's season finale moment came when he held his dead wife's body and finally broke down in tears. That is not the scene we expected. We were all looking for the moment where he joins Ulf White to burn Tumbleton, exactly as it happens in the books. But I could not see the show going that way, because how do you expect this man to burn a town where his own wife is living? That was never going to happen. Now that she is gone, the question becomes whether he finally does the one thing we all expected of him this season.

As for Ulf the White, he wanted a castle and a lordship, but after Rhaenyra and Ormund Hightower humiliated him in public, he decided he did not need either of them because he is a dragon rider and no one messes with him. That is Ulf's story, though. My attention today is on Hugh.

My theory: the show moved Hugh's betrayal forward with a different motivation

We all want to know whether Hugh turns out to be a traitor. The book changed things, which means we have to work out the answers ourselves. I think the show did not cut his betrayal away entirely. Everything in his future hinges on it. He cannot suddenly be made to look purely loyal, because that would ruin his arc and mean a huge deviation from the source material.

What I think the show did instead is move the betrayal ahead in time and give it a different motivation. In the books it is a man who planned this. On the show I think it becomes a man acting out of madness because his wife's death broke him.

Why was Vermithor even in Tumbleton, and did Rhaenyra know about Hugh's wife?

Nobody seems to be asking why a dragon meant to guard King's Landing ended up in Tumbleton. When Rhaenyra hears that Aegon and Sunfyre are alive, she panics, and her panic response is to order Hugh, Addam and Baela to sit on the Dragonpit and guard King's Landing in case the Greens come knocking. Hugh's wife is in Tumbleton while the town is burning, and Rhaenyra should know this.

I do not want to argue that Rhaenyra has no idea Hugh has a wife in that town, because that would make her a complete failure who hands out orders without a second thought. Before she chose the dragonseeds she did background checks on them, and finding out every secret about the people defending the kingdom is exactly the job of the mistress of whispers. This is wartime, and a war strategist needs background information on the people closest to the throne.

Hugh abandons Vermithor to search for his wife on foot

Hugh disobeys the order and flies to Tumbleton anyway. Then, and this is the detail people keep flying past, he gets off the dragon. He leaves the second largest living dragon in the world parked in the middle of a battle and goes into the streets on foot with a hammer, looking for his wife. That leaves Vermithor with nobody on his back in the middle of a dragon fight.

Vermithor and Silverwing prove a dragon is not a horse

With Hugh gone, Vermithor ignores Caraxes and heads for Silverwing instead. Vermithor and Silverwing have been a bonded pair since the days of Jaehaerys and Alysanne, nesting together for decades in the Dragonmont, and the show has been quietly consistent about that fact the whole time. So the biggest weapon Rhaenyra owns spent the most important battle of the war doing exactly what it wanted, for reasons that had nothing to do with the war, with Rhaenyra, or with Hugh.

We keep asking whether Hugh will point Vermithor at the blacks, when this season has been telling us over and over that a dragon is not a horse. Vermithor accepted Hugh and burned everyone else who tried. Seasmoke picked Adam. Sheepstealer let Rhaena claim him after refusing everyone else who came close. Caraxes hijacked Daemon's flight because Caraxes felt like it. The writers have hammered this point so hard my ears are still ringing.

Hugh fought loyally, but the record will call him a traitor anyway

Hugh did not burn Tumbleton, at least not by season's end. That was Ulf's doing, burning blacks, greens and townsfolk alike out of pure spite. Hugh fought on foot for his allies with his own hands, even while trying to find his wife. Judged on what is actually in the man, Hugh is the most loyal person on Rhaenyra's side in that entire episode. He is not a traitor, not yet, even though he disobeyed the queen's orders.

But he abandoned the Dragonpit while Aegon and Sunfyre were confirmed alive and Aemond was unaccounted for, in the same battle where his fellow dragonseed committed the greatest treason of the war. On the queen's desk, in the queen's handwriting, Hugh deserted his post during the exact window when King's Landing was most exposed, in the company of the man who torched two armies. Nobody writes down that he was looking for his wife. He gets branded a traitor for a thing he did not do, by a queen whose own carelessness put his wife in that town in the first place.

Everything Hugh Hammer has lost heading into season 4

His daughter died in season 2. His family suffered intense starvation. When he reaches his wife in season 3 episode 6, the woman he wants to give everything to pushes him away because he left her to go chase a dragon. He takes her by force and she still will not go with him. Now that woman is dead. Going into season 4, Hugh Hammer has no daughter, no wife, no house, no lands worth the name, no lord who will speak for him, no queen who will speak for him, and the second biggest dragon in the world.

Was Hugh right to betray Rhaenyra? The books' prophecy versus a grief driven path

Whether Hugh was right to betray Rhaenyra is something I am thinking of making a separate video about. The way the show is building him up, it wants to justify the betrayal. Rhaenyra used him, promised him things and did not deliver, handed him only a scrap of Driftmark, and sent him to the wrong place on the wrong night. Whatever complaint Hugh has is justifiable, and now he is a man with a valid grievance and the means to pay the queen back, in the shape of Vermithor.

In the books, Hugh does not just defect. He settles in at Tumbleton with Ulf and starts thinking bigger, because a prophecy was circulating about a hammer falling on a dragon and a new king rising from it, and Hugh decides that is about him. He has the advantage over every other claimant: the second largest living dragon alive, plus a prophecy he has claimed for himself. The show cannot take that route because it has spent two and a half seasons making him a human being with a wife and a dead child, so I think it reaches the same destination by a different road. It will not be ambition, it will be grief curdling into entitlement. Not "I want to be king," but the feeling that none of the claimants are fit to rule while he has the biggest dragon and has buried everyone he had for this war.

Rhaenyra's most disastrous decision, and the loop that creates a traitor

In the books, once word of the Tumbleton treason reaches Rhaenyra, she does not just condemn Ulf and Hugh. She turns on the dragonseeds who stayed loyal. Even Addam, who did nothing wrong, gets branded a traitor simply for being a dragonseed, and Corlys gets caught in the crossfire too. Nettles is no exception. George R. R. Martin himself calls that the most disastrous decision Rhaenyra made in her reign, and I think the show will eventually get there. Right now it is already laying the groundwork, since Rhaenyra is not on good terms with Corlys after knighting Addam of Hull instead of Addam Velaryon, elevating a lowborn man just enough to insult him.

Season 4 gives us the loop: Rhaenyra's carelessness puts Kat in Tumbleton, her panic sends Hugh to the wrong post, he disobeys and loses everything anyway, and when Rhaenyra learns of it she labels him a traitor. Hugh, who was not one, becomes one, and the queen herself creates the monster. That is my theory, and it is the same move the show has already pulled with blood and cheese, with Luke and Aemond, and with Rhaena and the Gullet. Nobody in this war chooses the catastrophe. They stumble into it and then get remembered for it.

Where Hugh goes next, and how the books end it at Tumbleton

Because Ulf has already taken this path, I do not think Hugh defects to the greens. There is no green left to defect to, since Ormund is dead and Daeron's fate is unknown, and even if Daeron is alive he is just a boy with a small dragon that Hugh has no reason to trust. Having defied a direct order, Hugh probably does not go back to King's Landing either. My guess is he stays in the ruins of Tumbleton with Ulf, the two of them living as they see fit with nobody left to tell them what to do, becoming a third faction the queen has to worry about. The traitor label will stick regardless, but what does a man with a dragon care about being called a traitor.

In the books, riders known as the Caltrops eventually kill Hugh in the middle of the second battle with a Valyrian steel sword. Vermithor then goes up with nobody on his back and takes Seasmoke and Tessarion down with him, and that is Tumbleton, the one place the books say the dragons ever truly danced.