Alicent Hightower pushing for her sons isn’t selfish.
Alicent pushing for her sons isn’t selfish act it’s pretty consistent with how inheritance works. Most mothers “widows” in that world would absolutely prioritize their children’s claims, especially in a system where a rival claimant is also a potential threat to your kids’ lives. Disinheriting a son in a male-preference system isn’t a small thing, it’s a massive slight with real consequences for status and safety. People downplay that way too much.
A) It’s not unusual for women in history to go against their husbands wishes for their sons.
What even counts as “selfish” in a world where survival and family protection are all entangled with political violence and succession crisis?
William the conqueror publicly mocked his eldest son Robert by calling him “Curthose” (“short-stockings”) He favored his younger children. William didn’t trust him, didn’t respect him, and never gave him real authority. And his mother Matilda secretly funded her son’s rebellion against her husband William, risking her marriage, status, and safety. By defying the most powerful man in Western Europe to protect her child, William publicly accused her of using his money to “arm and succour and strengthen [the rebels] to my grave peril.”
Isabella of France fled to France. she returned with an army and an alliance with her lover, Roger Mortimer. She successfully deposed her husband king Edward II and had him imprisoned (and likely murdered) and helped place her son, Edward III, on the throne.
Eleanor of Aquitaine went against her husband, Henry II, and backed her sons' revolt against him. The rebellion failed, and Henry imprisoned Eleanor for 15 years. However, upon Henry II's death, her son Richard I took the crown, freed her, and she wielded power acting as regent during his crusades. When Richard died, she successfully campaigned for her younger son, John, to succeed him as King.
Margaret Beaufort spent years maneuvering politically to secure her son’s claim. was deeply threatened by the Yorkist kings. She went against them, turning to political intrigue and plotting rebellions against Richard III. She successfully united support for her son, Henry Tudor.
God forbid GRRM writes a historically accurate woman who fights for her son’s position instead of quietly obeying and dying tragically after fulfilling her reproductive function. Queens, queen mothers, regents, noblewomen defending their children’s inheritance is not impossible feminist anomaly invented for fantasy drama. history is FULL of women scheming, ruling, rebelling, or outright going against husbands, councils, and political expectations for their children’s survival or claims but somehow a woman acting politically for her son in a succession crisis becomes “evil ambition” while passive suffering gets instantly romanticized as the more acceptable form of femininity.
If every major house do the same thing advancing their own bloodline and protecting heirs then calling one woman “selfish” for doing it is less about ethics and more about selectively feminism by punishing a female ambition inside a system everyone else is already playing.
The point of the story: This tale isn’t about “one woman the main character being denied power.” No it’s the tale of the princess (rhaenyra) and the queen (Alicent), the Blacks and the Greens. You can see from the title of the story. I can also flip the argument and reduce the whole tale to a second wife who risked her life in childbirth and was denied power through her children, simply bc she was treated as an exception. But It isn’t just a ONE woman denied. It’s TWO women the princess and the queen. It’s not simply “ambitious greedy entitled woman vs. wronged woman.”One woman is treated as an exception to male preference, the other is treated as an exception to the usual power afforded a queen mother. Exceptions are unstable. That’s why the story isn’t just about personal bitterness. It’s about a political order that tried to hold two contradictory ideas at once: A daughter can inherit like a son. A queen consort has no independent claim through her children if it contradicts the king’s will.
B) Competition for power happens with other women too.
We will see Stark widows women push for their sons’ inheritance. Widows and noble mothers act as political protectors for their children, bc their own status is tied directly to whether their sons inherit. If the line of succession is unclear or threatened, it makes sense that different Stark women would try to secure advantages for their own children behind the scenes.
“The She-Wolves” story and “The Princess & the Queen” being included in an anthology called Dangerous Women already frames them in a specific way.
The anthology introduction emphasizes women with actual political influence and disruptive power inside their societies. Not passive little NPC wives standing prettily in the background. These women matter bc they can alter succession and redirect history itself.
And notice how women become “dangerous” the second they wield power in ways that aren’t purely decorative. Men scheming, conquering, manipulating succession and starting wars, is treated as standard political behavior. But women doing the exact same thing become threatening, manipulative, hysterical, evil, etc. The double standard is baked right into the language.
when Stark widows or Alicent are described as “dangerous,” it’s more about women acting as players in succession struggles and women using limited tools available to them to protect their children’s claims.
They’re not “dangerous” bc they’re uniquely power-hungry. They’re “dangerous” bc they work in spaces usually dominated by MEN, they assert claims (their sons’ & their own position) and they refuse to stay passive when inheritance is at stake. The Stark widows fighting behind the scenes or Alicent another widow pushing for her sons isn’t unusual it’s what happens when women in a restrictive system finally have leverage.
These women aren’t just reacting emotionally they’re engaging in the same logic as everyone else. The only difference is that when women do it, it gets written as something more threatening or “dangerous”, bc it disrupts expectations of what they’re “supposed” to be. There’s a gendered double standard in how agency is interpreted.
And since house like the Starks that has multiple marriages across generations. If Beron Stark is dying, it makes sense that different Stark women would be active behind the scenes, each trying to protect their own children’s position in the line of succession. Women like Serena & Sansa being left out of clear inheritance paths would logically contribute to those underlying disputes, since their children’s status would depend on how that succession gets decided.
Widows in Asoiaf are politically weaker overall, bc their authority is tied to their husband’s status or their sons’ inheritance. If their sons don’t inherit, that weakness can increase even more:
they lose the main source of their long-term influence (their line continuing power)
their position at court becomes more dependent on others’ favor
rival branches of the family may push them aside
they can be politically sidelined if their faction loses the succession struggle
A widow’s stability is closely connected to whether her children secure inheritance. If they don’t, her influence usually declines, bc she no longer has a direct stake being recognized in the power structure.
I am not talking about widows in the sense of whether they are “deserving” of power in a moral or governmental evaluation of what rulers should do for the public. I am talking specifically about widows as political actors inside succession systems, and what kinds of conditions determine whether a highborn widow can actually secure her position or her children’s inheritance without being challenged.
Check this post about marriage contracts.
If Viserys had made it absolutely clear before marrying Alicent that Rhaenyra would not be replaced as heir, then the political situation around that marriage could have been very different. Otto’s decision to push Alicent forward is tied directly to uncertainty about succession, not just personal ambition. It’s common for men without sons to remarry specifically to produce a male heir, and that expectation shapes how other lords interpret a king’s choices. That’s why Corlys offering Laena to Viserys makes sense politically it’s another attempt to secure influence through a potential male line and strengthen alliances at the same time.
And it wasn’t just Otto and Alicent others in the realm also questioned it, pointing back to the ruling of the Great Council in 101. Viserys’ response, though, is essentially to shut the conversation down instead of clearly reinforcing or revising that precedent in a way everyone can accept. So instead of resolving the uncertainty, he leaves it hanging.
It was EXPECTED and NORMAL for noble women to want their children to inherit.
Catelyn is highly sensitive to anything that threatens her children’s inheritance that’s a big part of why she resented Jon, since she saw him as a potential rival to her children. Within that same framework, it’s very hard to imagine she’d be fine with a stepdaughter inheriting over her own son. Her own blood!
“Precedent,” she said, her voice bitter. “Yes, Aegon the Fourth legitimized all his bastards on his deathbed. And look at all the misery, war, and death that followed. You may trust Jon now. But will you trust his sons? Or their sons after them? The Blackfyre pretenders kept coming back for five generations, until Barristan the Bold finally killed the last of them. If you make Jon legitimate, you can never unmake it. If he marries and has children, any sons you have by Jeyne will never be safe.”
“He is your son, not mine. I will not have him.” — Catelyn Stark, A Game of Thrones.
Daenerys herself was already imagining her son as king while Viserys was still alive. There doesn't seem to be much doubt there, and she sounds pretty certain that her son will sit on the iron throne.
“Yet they were bound to Drogo for life and death, so Daenerys had no choice but to accept them. And sometimes she found herself wishing her father had been protected by such men. In the songs, the white knights of the Kingsguard were ever noble, valiant, and true, and yet King Aerys had been murdered by one of them, the handsome boy they now called the Kingslayer, and a second, Ser Barristan the Bold, had gone over to the Usurper. She wondered if all men were as false in the Seven Kingdoms. When her son sat the Iron Throne, she would see that he had bloodriders of his own to protect him against treachery in his Kingsguard.”
Even GRRM did confirmed that Visenya and Rhaenys competed for Aegon influence, and authority. There was tension and rivalry in how they related to him and to their positions in the new order.
Margaery and Olenna absolutely wouldn’t just accept their line being sidelined. Olenna is ruthless, she’s willing to have Joffrey killed when she sees him as an immediate existential problem. Y’all really think Olenna would just sit there and accept her granddaughter Margaery’s son getting passed over for Rhaenyra, the stepdaughter?
Rhaenyra herself acts violently when her children’s position is threatened, which shows she works under the same logic as Alicent. When her line is at risk, she doesn’t respond with restraint or principle she prioritizes her children’s survival above all else.
This isn’t Alicent being uniquely selfish. It’s a system where almost any mother in her position would push the same way. But I know a lot of team black stans being historically illiterate and it’s not shocking when parts of fandom discourse treat a quasi medieval succession crisis like a modern election cycle with HR policies and peaceful transitions of power. You can absolutely support Rhaenyra’s claim and still recognize that queens, queen mothers, noblewomen, and regents historically fought for their sons, feared rival claimants, and did not just politely sit down waiting to see what happened to their children. That’s not “evil woman behavior,” that’s fucking historically accurate woman, the problem is less “which team” and more when people flatten medieval / early modern succession logic into modern discourse and then act shocked that characters behave according to the brutal rules of their world.
And I blame hotd they made the story about “who is morally right in a modern sense” instead of “how does succession politics actually function in this quasi medieval system”
