Parallels between Gwayne’s conversations with Criston in Harrenhal and Ormund in Tumbleton .
“Feather bed” is deliberate
Here are some similarities that i’ve noticed between these two scenes:
1) Both these conversations involve a table. Gwayne is tapping on its surface trying to convince Ormund and Criston. Both times he is standing, while Ormund and Criston sit, which symbolises that Gwayne’s talking with someone, who’s above his rank.
2) Both times Gwayne finds the strategic situation hopeless:
3) Ormund himself draws a parallel between him and Criston. Gwayne believes that continuing the battle is madness. In reply Ormund asks Daeron if he thinks of him as a madman for doing so.
4) Both Ormund and Criston are dismissive of Gwayne’s worries. Criston comes up with a guerrilla war tactic and Ormund refers to Rhaenyra’s “squeamishness”. However, Criston manages to convince Gwayne, while Ormund (as it seems so far) doesn’t.
5) Also, “guerrila war tactic” can be considered a creative decision (from some point of view) in the situation that desperate. Ormund accuses that creativity is exactly what Gwayne lacks. As if he says “you are not intelligent enough to understand me or ser Criston”. He insists that Criston was right to fight till his death (Ormund ofc doesn’t know that his goal was to kill himself, and not to achieve a greater good). Needs to be said that both Ormund and Criston are delusional, but for different reasons. They share similarities, but are actually compete opposites.
Now to the usage of the “feather bed”.
Feather bed, at least how i interpret it, is a symbol of wealth and privilege. Criston uses it to emphasise the difference between Gwayne and him.
In the scene with Ormund Gwayne concludes the conversation with “I’m fatigued. It’s been weeks since i’ve seen a feather bed”. He deliberately ridicules himself in front of Ormund, which could mean that Gwayne no longer cares if he considers him weak. As if he’s saying: «Yes, i’m a fragile coward, and I need my feather bed and a tower of mattresses and blah blah blah, I don’t care”.
In the same time, by saying this, Gwayne reflects on his conversation with Criston. In that case his phrase can be interpreted as an expression of guilt. He is probably ashamed of using this privilege again, after all he had been accused of by Cole. Or probably this is what Gwayne would have said to Criston, if he had turned back time to Harrenhal.
That’s not the only time Gwayne is somehow reminded of Cole in ep6. I’ve wrote about this here.
So in conclusion what I’m trying to say is that…
Crispin Cole starts to slowly haunt Gwayne’s narrative…
ngl it’s kinda scary how similarly criston and ormund are portrayed… almost every gwayne’s interaction with criston has a paralleling interaction with ormund. the only difference is that gwane will beg on his KNEES to convince criston to live and choke ormund with his bare hands at any given moment
i don’t condone incest, but pls make daeron marry rhaena at this point by pretending to be ormund’s son. you’ve already changed much. don’t let it be gwayne, it’s to cruel for both of them :(
or let rhaena escape with sheepstealer, she is nettles after all, she can have her ending… idk know how to make it better…
Aemond Targaryen and the Show's Pop Psychology Problem
I need to get this off my chest because the problem with Aemond's writing is no longer simply that his storyline feels rushed, underdeveloped, or insufficiently explained.
The problem is that the show keeps replacing his established psychology with a collection of pop-psychology clichés ("mommy issues", trauma, parentification, an alleged Oedipus complex) and then treats those labels as magical explanations for whatever shocking scene the writers want to produce.
They are not using Aemond's trauma to deepen him. They are changing both the trauma and its consequences from episode to episode, depending on what they need him to do.
At this point, he is often written less like a person with a coherent inner life and more like a trained dog expected to react on command whenever someone says the correct activation word.
And no, "he has mommy issues" is not a serious psychological justification for the kiss in 3x01, nor for turning every emotional need he has into sexual desire.
First of all, being able to invent a psychological explanation for something does not automatically make it good or coherent writing.
With enough effort, you can rationalize almost anything. You can write three seasons and a spin-off explaining that Ulf was secretly a My Little Pony all along. That does not make it a good idea. It does not make it an organic continuation of the character we were previously shown. It merely means that writers are capable of constructing an explanation after deciding what they want to happen.
The real question is not "Can I attach some psychological terminology to this scene?"
It is "Does this choice emerge naturally from the character's established personality, history, relationships, and internal conflicts?"
With Aemond, the answer increasingly feels like no.
The writers seem to decide upon the provocative image first (Aemond kissing Alicent, Aemond responding sexually to maternal imagery, Aemond becoming immediately susceptible to a woman who recognizes his loneliness) and then work backwards, grabbing whatever psychological buzzword can make it sound profound.
But "mommy issues", "trauma", "parentification", and "Oedipus complex" are not spells you can cast over a scene to make it psychologically coherent.
Wanting maternal protection is not the same thing as sexually desiring one's mother.
Being deprived of emotional safety is not the same thing as being incapable of distinguishing care from erotic attraction.
Being parentified does not mean wanting to replace one's father in one's mother's bed.
And a traumatized man is not automatically so psychologically infantile that any woman who offers him comfort can turn his need for affection into sexual submission.
Aemond can have attachment wounds, he can crave approval,he can be terrified of abandonment. He can resent Alicent for failing to protect him, he can long for the unconditional care he never received, he can be ashamed of needing comfort at all.
None of that logically leads to "therefore he wants to fuck his mother".
That is not depth, it is the cheapest and most sensational possible interpretation of a complex emotional wound.
And the most frustrating thing is that the show already had a far more coherent and interesting foundation for Aemond's psychology.
In season one, Aemond was not presented as the child Alicent completely neglected while openly preferring Aegon. If anything, Aemond often appeared to be the son most aligned with her: disciplined, dutiful, observant, serious, protective of the family, and responsive to the fears she had instilled in her children.
Aegon was the child Alicent chased, scolded, slapped, pleaded with, and desperately attempted to force into his role as heir. Aemond was the child who actually tried to become what the family needed.
That does not mean his relationship with Alicent was healthy. It means his wound was more complicated than "Mother loved Aegon more".
The more coherent wound is this:
I do everything correctly. I study. I train. I obey. I remain vigilant. I become stronger, more capable, and more responsible than my older brother. I compensate for everything he refuses to be. And none of it is enough, because he was born first.
Aegon does not have to earn his position. Aemond can spend his entire life attempting to deserve it and still remain second. That is where the competition with Aegon should come from.
Not merely "Mother preferred him", but the unbearable realization that competence cannot overcome hierarchy. Aegon possesses by birth what Aemond tries to earn through suffering, discipline, and self-denial. That creates a real and compelling contradiction.
Aemond can despise Aegon because Aegon wastes everything he has been given. He can envy him because Aegon has never needed to prove himself. He can crave his approval because Aegon is still his older brother. He can resent being forced to compensate for Aegon's failures, he can feel guilty because part of him wants to replace him. He can love him, hate him, protect him, and want what belongs to him at the same time.
That is psychological complexity.
It is also why Aemond's remorse over what he did to Aegon should matter far more than a fleeting expression or a three-second nightmare.
If harming Aegon represents a genuine fracture in Aemond's identity, then it should affect everything that follows. It should change how he understands his ambition, his loyalty, his role within the family, and the line between wanting Aegon's place and actually destroying him to obtain it. He should be forced to confront the possibility that he has become the very threat he once believed he was protecting his family against.
Instead, the remorse appears for a moment, signals to the audience that he supposedly feels something, and then vanishes when the scene no longer requires it.
That is not an arc, it is emotional set dressing and this happens repeatedly because Aemond's trauma itself keeps changing according to the requirements of each episode.
When the show wants him to be frightening, his trauma produces cruelty and indiscriminate violence, when it wants him to be pathetic, it turns him into an abandoned child. When it wants sexual shock value, his trauma becomes an Oedipal fantasy, when it needs him to be manipulated, his trauma becomes loneliness. When it briefly wants to humanize him, his guilt over Aegon appears.
Then each wound disappears until the writers need it again.
This is not one complex person displaying different aspects of the same psychology. There is no stable emotional throughline connecting these behaviors, it feels like the writers are pulling different "trauma cards" from a deck and using whichever one produces the desired scene.
Parentification could have provided that throughline, but the show appears more interested in sexualizing it than exploring what it actually does to a person.
Viserys was emotionally and politically absent from Aemond's life, Alicent lived in a permanent state of fear, Aegon was unreliable, Helaena was vulnerable, Daeron was away. The entire family believed itself to be under threat.
Aemond could therefore have built his identity around a belief like:
If I am not strong, disciplined, watchful, and useful, no one will protect us.
That would explain his obsession with control and his contempt for weakness.
It would explain why he cannot ask for help and why he treats vulnerability as humiliation. It would explain why he needs to be indispensable.
It would explain why Vhagar becomes more than a dragon or a weapon: she is proof that he has transformed himself from the overlooked, dragonless child into the person no one can ignore.
It would also make losing Vhagar psychologically devastating in a way that has nothing to do with reducing him to "a sad boy who needs to be cuddled".
Without Vhagar, Aemond would be forced to confront the question he has avoided his entire life:
If I am no longer the strongest person in the room, am I still worth anything?
That is an extraordinary character question. The show could explore how someone who has built his entire value around usefulness, power, and protection behaves when those things are taken away from him.
Instead, it repeatedly takes the language of care (mother, comfort, being held, being seen in weakness) and sexualizes it, as though sexualizing trauma automatically makes a storyline darker, more mature, or psychologically daring.
It does not.
It makes it more simplistic.
The relationship between Alicent and Aemond was already tragic enough without incest. Aemond could love Alicent while resenting her for teaching him to live in fear and he could hate that she relied upon his strength and then recoiled when that strength became violent and uncontrollable. He could feel that she made him responsible for protecting the family but never truly recognized what that responsibility cost him.
Alicent could see him as her most dependable child, the protector she needed, the consequence of her own fear, and the man she helped create but can no longer control.
There is dependency there. Resentment. Emotional enmeshment. Role reversal. Disappointment. Fear. Love distorted by responsibility.
That is already dark.
A kiss does not deepen those dynamics. It crushes them under a shocking image and encourages the audience to interpret all of that emotional complexity in the most superficial possible way:
He wants his mother!
No. He may want the mother he should have had. He may want safety, approval, recognition, and permission to stop carrying responsibilities that were never supposed to be his.
That is not the same desire.
The same problem now affects Alys.
My objection is not simply that Alys can manipulate Aemond. A character like Aemond can absolutely be manipulated. Intelligence, paranoia, and strength do not make someone immune to manipulation.
But manipulation has to work through the specific person being manipulated. It should involve observation, resistance, testing boundaries, gradual trust, and the exploitation of contradictions that already exist.
Alys often does not feel as though she has learned Aemond. She feels as though she has read the script.
She knows which wounds to mention, which images to show him, when to comfort him, when to provoke him, when to sexualize his vulnerability, and which words will apparently neutralize his suspicion.
Meanwhile, Aemond (a character who distrusts people he has known for years) is expected to become emotionally pliable because a stranger has correctly identified that he is lonely.
Yes, he is lonely, that does not mean he would instantly believe or submit to the first person who names his loneliness.
Recognizing someone's wound is not the same thing as earning access to it.
At times, the show does not write Aemond like a psychologically complex person being gradually manipulated, it writes him like a trained dog conditioned to respond to a handful of cue words. Say "mother", "lonely", "unloved", or "dragonlord", and the script expects him to produce the required emotional response on command.
Press the correct button and Aemond becomes vulnerable, press another and he becomes violent. Mention his mother and his emotional need is suddenly sexualized. Mention his loneliness and his suspicion conveniently weakens. Mention Vhagar and he collapses into worthlessness.
That is not someone carefully learning how to manipulate him, it is the writers reducing him to a collection of pre-programmed reactions.
The insult is not that Aemond has emotional triggers. Everyone does! The insult is that the show treats those triggers as shortcuts that bypass the rest of his personality. His intelligence, pride, paranoia, discipline, and ability to recognize an obvious attempt at influence all disappear as soon as another character says the designated activation word. He does not feel understood, he feels trained.
And "she touched his deepest trauma" is not enough of an explanation when the show has not even maintained a consistent idea of what that deepest trauma is.
The result is that Harrenhal does not feel like a genuine psychological deconstruction of Aemond, it feels like the systematic removal of his agency.
He is injured. He bleeds. He hallucinates. He loses control. He is comforted. He is provoked. He is manipulated. He is kissed. He reacts to what other characters do to him.
He increasingly becomes the object of the storyline rather than its subject.
There is a difference between allowing a powerful character to become vulnerable and turning him into a passive container for whatever symbolism the writers want to impose upon him.
Pain is not automatically depth. Humiliation is not automatically deconstruction. Passivity is not automatically vulnerability. Contradictory behavior is not automatically complexity.
A character is complex when apparently conflicting behaviors emerge from a recognizable internal structure. Aemond can be cruel and frightened, arrogant and insecure, ambitious and ashamed, resentful of Aegon and still emotionally attached to him. But the writing has to show how those contradictions coexist.
You cannot simply make him a calculating strategist in one scene, an indiscriminate psychopath in another, a helpless child in the next, and a sexually confused victim of "mommy issues" after that, then call the inconsistency psychological realism.
At some point, he stops feeling multifaceted and starts feeling like a different character every time the plot requires a new reaction.
And this damages more than Aemond himself.
It weakens his relationships with Alicent and Aegon by replacing their specific history with generic psychological shorthand. It makes Vhagar into another button the writers can press whenever they want him to feel powerless. It gives Alys immediate emotional importance without doing the work necessary to build that importance.
It even risks weakening the eventual confrontation with Daemon.
If Aemond reaches that point after spending an entire season being diminished, ridiculed, psychologically remote-controlled, and stripped of agency, then Daemon is no longer facing a formidable and tragic opponent. He is facing the remains of a character the show has already dismantled.
That does not elevate Daemon, it makes the entire climax smaller.
And to be clear, I do not need Aemond to be invincible, I do not need him to be morally justified, I do not need him to outsmart everyone, resist every manipulation, or remain emotionally untouched.
He can lose, collapse, be manipulated, want comfort, regret what he has done. He can discover that the identity he built around strength was never sustainable.
But those things have to emerge from a coherent understanding of who he is. They cannot be produced by swapping his psychology out for a different cliché whenever the writers want a shocking moment.
The problem is not that the show has failed to provide enough psychological justification.
The problem is that it has replaced psychology with pseudopsychological buzzwords.
Aemond already had a compelling central wound: being the son who does everything correctly and still discovers that it will never be enough. The child who becomes useful because usefulness feels safer than being loved. The second son who tries to earn what the first son possesses by birth. The boy who loses an eye, gains the largest dragon in the world, and builds his identity around never being powerless again.
Explore that!
Explore the absent father whose role he was implicitly forced to fill!
Explore what happens when his usefulness no longer protects him. Explore what losing Vhagar does to someone who has confused power with identity.
Explore the guilt of wanting to replace Aegon and then realizing he may have actually destroyed him. Explore why he cannot separate being needed from being loved.
But please stop pretending that all roads lead to "mother" plus sexual desire!
That is not the inevitable culmination of his trauma, it is shock value wearing a psychology textbook as a hat.
For all of HOTD's faults, they did capture lightning in a bottle with Gwayne Hightower.
Prissy nobleman comes to King's Landing to join a war. His actual motives were to wave his Hightower dick at the commonborn Dornishman who dared steal his father's position as Hand and seems to think he's worthy enough to get close to his fair and noble sister, the Queen.
Turns out war isn't a dick-measuring contest. It's not a tourney; you can't just stop at an inn whenever you want. Criston shows Gwayne how serious real battle is and saves his ass by doing so. Little by little, he earns Gwayne's respect by being a competent commander and knight.
When Gwayne finds out he's sleeping with his sister, he's floored by how Criston doesn't seem to see it as an achievement, as a prize — Criston doesn't throw it in his face that he has the Queen's favor. He meets Gwayne's overt and violent display of masculine overprotectiveness with docile submission. Dick-measuring contest denied once again, and Gwayne is forced to sit with himself, his feelings, and Criston's feelings.
If Criston isn't a competitor, then he must be a friend, right?
Gwayne starts seeing Criston more and more as an equal and less as someone he has to cow. He began this journey wanting to remind this Dornishman his place, but Gwayne realized that Criston was already hyperaware of his place and he himself, sheltered pampered Reachman that he was, was the one who had to reminded of his.
He starts referring to Criston more by his title of Hand and Lord Commander with less sarcasm and more sincerity.
And for a moment, maybe Criston himself starts to believe Gwayne sees him as an equal. When he talks about wanting to show him Oldtown, it almost sounds like that.
But then the word "service" comes out of Gwayne's mouth.
He meant no harm by it; he probably didn't think much of that word at all. That was simply what came naturally to him. And that's the tragedy of it. Even when he himself respects and sees Criston as an equal and a friend, his mouth has been conditioned to always refer to him as a servant.
Maybe he realizes this when Criston tells him why he had to decline his offer of sanctuary. Maybe that's why he cries, realizing the mistake far too late. Maybe if he had more tact and less pride, less arrogance, he could have saved him.
Gwayne returns to Tumbleton a changed man, no longer the prissy nobleman asking to stop at an inn in the middle of a war. He's filthy when he stands in front of the head of his House.
Perhaps this is the first time he sees Ormund for what he is. He always thought Ormund clever in the ways of war, but he believed that of himself until he was actually on the battlefield. Gwayne bristles when Ormund calls Criston a "dim Dornishman" when before he wouldn't have even registered it.
Worse part is maybe he also sees who he was in Ormund and becomes more ashamed of himself for it. He doesn't even want to stay anymore to help, disillusioned he is by war, and he can't bear to look at his own reflection.
But like Alicent asking him to join Criston's army to watch over him, Daeron does the same. Stay and watch over him. I am afraid what he might become if he's alone.
He thought Alicent meant that Criston would become a monster if left to his own devices. The reality was he wasn't keeping an eye on him to prevent him from hurting others, but from hurting himself.
“our age of bronze is collapsing” is this beautiful random burst of monty python dialogue amidst the drudgery of nolan’s vision and i think it should win the first-ever oscar for best solitary line
[wringing my hands as i look out my window directly overlooking wall street, watching the sun rise on october 29, 1929] aw fuck it’s the great depression
