rewatching episode 1 and what's tragic is i don't think alicent's internalized and externalized misogny is a fundamental attribute of her character. she gossips cutely with rhaenyra about a noblewoman pregnant with a child out of wedlock with no real sense of censure or condemnation but only a teenager's titilated delight in the presence of sex; she recognizes rhaenyra feels fear about being supplanted by a brother even if she won't speak it and diagnoses a desire for power in rhaenyra that she can't quite articulate and that rhaenyra can't either. she dresses rhaenyra for her investiture as heir with tenderness and looks on with real pride. even through episode 3, she says rhaenyra was chosen as heir because she was the better choice and seems to have no unshakeable beliefs about women's inability to hold political power. a tainted life shapes her into the figure of the queen and mother that lashes out at rhaenyra's sexual transgression in episode 4 from a complicated mix of motives: bitterness at rhaenyra's temporary flight to freedom (the fact that rhaenyra's revelatory sexual encounter with daemon is intercut with alicent's own marital rape really makes clear the irrational, childish - she's 19 here! - bitter outburst at someone who got out of the cage even for a moment, rather than anyone responsible), this idea that she is protecting rhaenyra by making sure she doesn't throw away barbed patriarchal protection or approval by sexual misconduct, simple jelaousy because rhaenyra had sex with someone else that wasn't her. her venom toward rhaenyra in episode 6 also seems to me to have a lot behind it: the false perception rhaenyra is "freer", hooking her sense of betrayal at the events of episodes 4 and 5 to rhaenyra's perceived sexual incontinence in a misogynistic way, and making strategic use of that misogyny for her own political ends to achieve the safety of her children.
obviously people who hate her like to imagine her as simply like, a modern conservative, which is not true, but more unsettling to me is her fans who almost fetishize her misery and the ugly forms it takes as she thrashes around as something innate to her and inescapable rather than a complex reaction to circumstances that is far from inevitable to me. an obvious counterpoint might be that alicent chooses how she reacts to those circumstances, and is responsible for them, and i agree, but i do think there is a something unique to how fundamentally her burgeoning sense of adult self was totally destroyed by the fact that she was a child bride and mother at 15. what is alicent's self? there is a degree to which she never gets a chance to even develop it but there is something in the girl that shares an illigitimate pregnancy as nothing more than an entertaining bit of gossip to amuse her best friend, that is flattered by daemon's asking for her favor, that tugs rhaenyra forward by the hand to joint flirt with another handsome knight, that suggests it could have gone differently. she could, indeed, have become someone else, if she'd been left alone to continue becoming someone at all.