Alicent cannot have Rhaenyra and that is the great tragedy around which her entire life revolves. I’m genuinely convinced that this is what has always driven her at the deepest level. Not a desire for power, certainly not a belief in her sons as rulers, nor even an unconditional love for her children. Not even the longing for freedom she discovered in Season 2 truly motivates her at her core. Those are all just layers covering what lies beneath: Rhaenyra.
By now, Alicent has fully internalized this painful resignation. And it is precisely this realization she tries to pass on to Mysaria when Mysaria stops her escape. She has to improvise - and instinctively reaches for the only thing she truly has to offer: her own story.
“There is only one who could walk that path with her—and she chose him long ago.”
There is so much bitterness in that line.
For Alicent, one of the defining moments of Season 1 was when Rhaenyra lied to her about her night with Daemon. Something broke inside her that day - something she has clearly never fully recovered from.
A wound that kept reopening: Rhaenyra married Daemon. Rhaenyra rejected Alicent’s “Come with me.” None of it truly surprised Alicent, but it hurt every single time.
Daemon represents something much larger: the Targaryen way itself. Something inherent to dragonriders that Rhaenyra and Daemon share and that Alicent has never believed she could compete with. Even as a young girl, in her very first appearance in Episode 1, she refuses to fly with Rhaenyra on Syrax. She could never follow her down that path. It’s easy for Alicent to turn Daemon into a symbol of everything she believes she has lost between herself and Rhaenyra.
“Her attentions may be on you now that you bathe in the warm light of her gaze…”
That line alone is remarkable. Alicent describes Rhaenyra’s gaze something almost sacred. It is strikingly romantic language. She connects with Mysaria by invoking a feeling they supposedly share: the experience of standing in the favor of the woman they love.
“But will you stake so high a wager on the whims of a dragonrider?”
Alicent has been burned by that unpredictability more than once. Most recently when she believed Rhaenyra would let her leave after Alicent opened the gates of King’s Landing. Whatever political reasons Rhaenyra may have, Alicent is left with the feeling of, once again, not having been chosen. Once again, she has been run over by the unstoppable force of the Targaryen path.
So Alicent turns her attention to the only thing she still believes she can both save and keep: Helaena.
Her renewed attempts to flee, prompted by Helaena’s pregnancy, are undoubtedly an expression of genuine concern for her daughter. And yet another question inevitably arises. Given the doubts Helaena repeatedly expresses, whether about leaving Jaehaera behind or her refusal to terminate the pregnancy: who is this escape really for?
Is Alicent fulfilling Helaena’s wishes - or her own?
Her actions seem to be an inseparable mixture of love, projection and selfishness.
Helaena is the only one of Alicent’s children she still wants to save at all. Aegon, Aemond, and even Daeron seem lost to her. Helaena, by contrast, embodies something Alicent still longs to preserve. Not power, not dynasty… It’s innocence. With her neurodivergent nature, Helaena exists outside the court’s endless games of ambition and manipulation. She is as innocent as Alicent once was - and as Rhaenyra once was - before everything fell apart.
Perhaps Alicent is clinging to the last chance to preserve a fragment of that innocence she herself lost long ago… and that, in her mind, remains inseparable from her relationship with Rhaenyra.
Her fixation on Helaena is not a new motivation. It is the inevitable consequence of her old one.
She knows she can never win Rhaenyra for herself. Nothing she has ever done has freed her from that pain. She wants, at last, to leave everything behind - and save the one part of herself that has not yet been completely destroyed: Helaena.
Whether that will be possible remains to be seen. The Season 3 poster feels almost revealing. Alicent is moving away from the Iron Throne alongside Helaena - but her gaze turns back, lingering, as always, on Rhaenyra. A visual representation of the greatest tragedy of her life.
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