Alicent Hightower (HotD) and the Question of Character Consistency
First, sorry for replying to a short comment with what has somehow turned into an essay. I realise you may not want to read all of this, and I do not expect you to agree with me or answer every point. I do respect your interpretation, though, so I wanted to explain mine properly in case you are interested in understanding where I am coming from rather than just continuing a back-and-forth.
I think we are discussing two different things. You are explaining why Alicent may feel regret or make certain choices in individual scenes; I was saying that the show has not convincingly developed her from the protective mother of Season 1 into the person making those choices in Seasons 2 and 3.
I understand that you see Alicent’s immediate regret after the dagger incident as part of a consistent trajectory, but I do not think that moment is enough to establish that her characterisation has remained consistent across all three seasons.
Season 1, Alicent regretted losing control and nearly harming another child. She did not regret defending Aemond. That distinction matters. The scene never suggests that she came to believe Aemond was undeserving of protection; her anger came from the fact that her son had lost an eye while almost everyone in the room appeared more concerned with the political implications for Rhaenyra’s family.
Throughout Season 1, Alicent’s instinct when her children faced immediate danger was generally to move towards them. She struggled to understand Helaena, but still tried to reach her and showed genuine tenderness towards her. She was deeply disappointed in Aegon, yet placed herself between him and Meleys. At Driftmark, she stood against the entire room for Aemond. None of this makes her a perfect mother, nor does it justify demanding Lucerys’s eye, but it establishes a recognisable emotional core: however damaged their relationships were, she still regarded her children as hers to protect.
That is why I find parts of her writing in Seasons 2 and 3 difficult to reconcile with Season 1.
I can understand many of her later decisions within their immediate context. By the Season 2 finale, she is frightened, exhausted, politically powerless, and desperately trying to save Helaena with very few cards left to play. Helaena is also plainly the most vulnerable of her children, so it makes sense that Alicent would prioritise her. I sympathise with Alicent, agree with some of her choices, and strongly disagree with others.
But an action being understandable on the micro level does not automatically make the overall character arc coherent on the macro level.
Aegon is a terrible person, but he did not originally want the crown. He fled and resisted before Alicent and the other adults around him forced him onto the throne. He remains responsible for everything he later chooses to do, but Alicent cannot use him as the sole scapegoat without the story seriously confronting her own role in placing him there.
Likewise, Alicent has every reason to fear and condemn what Aemond has become. But moving from fiercely defending him at Driftmark to revealing his location and becoming involved in a bargain concerning his death is an enormous transformation. Such a reversal could form a compelling, tragic arc, but it requires more development than simply showing that the decision causes her pain. Her tears demonstrate that she is not indifferent; they do not, by themselves, bridge the gap in her characterisation.
The situation involving Daeron and Ormund makes this problem even harder for me to ignore. I can understand, and even agree with, Alicent’s decision not to maintain the deception surrounding the boy presented as Daeron. On the most humane reading, she refuses to let an innocent child be sent to the Wall in her son’s place. It is also the more strategically defensible choice: the lie would become almost impossible to sustain once the war escalated and the real Daeron appeared publicly on Tessarion. If Rhaenyra later discovered that Alicent had knowingly deceived her, whatever trust or protection Alicent had managed to secure for herself and Helaena would likely disappear. Telling the truth about the decoy, therefore, makes sense both morally and pragmatically.
My problem begins with what Alicent volunteers afterwards. In the Godswood, she has already explained that she barely knows Ormund because she has spent the past twenty years in King’s Landing and communicated with Daeron and Gwayne only through letters. Rhaenyra then leaves, apparently abandoning that line of questioning for the moment. Alicent nevertheless calls her back and reveals that Ormund is unusually sensitive to odours. At that point, Alicent is no longer merely answering an immediate demand under threat. She is providing potentially actionable information about the Green commander with whose army the real Daeron is currently embedded. Once the decoy has been exposed, Alicent must know that her youngest son is not tucked away safely in Oldtown; he is in Ormund’s keeping and directly dependent upon the survival of Ormund’s host. Rhaenyra may have said that she would spare Daeron personally, but sparing a boy means very little if the army surrounding him is broken. Alicent has lived at court since childhood. She knows what happens to a young prince inside a defeated force. Alicent is not generally written as politically naïve or incapable of anticipating how information may be used. She reads Cole, understands Aemond, and knows Rhaenyra well enough to recognise exactly which remaining softness she is appealing to in order to keep herself and Helaena alive. More importantly, she successfully negotiates with Mysaria by identifying what Mysaria wants, which pressure points to use, and what she must offer in return. This is a woman capable of reading competing interests and constructing a bargain under extreme pressure. Whatever else Alicent may be, she is not generally portrayed as someone who simply fails to think two moves ahead. That leaves two possibilities: either she does not follow the implications of revealing Ormund’s weakness through to Daeron, or she does follow them and accepts the risk. The show meaningfully dramatises neither. It simply needs the information to pass from Alicent to Rhaenyra.
And the danger is not hypothetical. Soon afterwards, Rhaenyra sends men to kill Daeron, and the attempt fails only because Gwayne reacts quickly enough. Yet we never see Alicent learn what her disclosure helped make possible, reckon with the danger to her son, or even confront the contradiction between exposing the decoy to protect one innocent child and then volunteering information that endangers her own. That is my broader complaint in miniature: Alicent is given the relevant knowledge, the story collects the consequence, and the part where she has to hold both at once is skipped.
Another point is that “she could not save everyone” does not fully resolve the issue for me. I want to be fair about how little room Alicent has. She is overwhelmed. She has no army, no council, and no leverage except what she can talk someone into. Helaena is genuinely the most breakable person in that castle — after Jaehaerys, after the confinement, she is barely eating. Alicent is not choosing between good options, and I don't think she is choosing in bad faith. But look at what the writing has her spend, in order. Aegon's life, offered at Dragonstone. Ormund's one weakness, handed over while her youngest son is inside Ormund's host. Aemond's location, and then her own hands as the lure. Jaehaera, quietly cut from an escape she let Helaena believe the child was part of. And Helaena's unborn child — Alicent presses the moon tea, and we admit she has a reason to consider it as "an option may be cruel in the short term, but it is humane in the long run". So in total, there are five lives, and every one of them is Helaena's blood as much as hers: three brothers, a daughter, and an unborn child.
That is the domino the show sets running, and it never stops to look at where it lands. Because the thing it says to Helaena — the one person all of it is for — is: your mother will keep you breathing at any price, including two of your children and three of your brothers. Alicent means it as love. I believe she means it as love. But the show hands her a daughter it has spent three seasons establishing as fragile, has her strip that daughter's world down to a pulse, and frames the result as rescue. That is why "she couldn't save everyone" doesn't settle it for me. Saving is not the same as subtracting until only a body is left.
I also think some fairness is owed to Rhaenyra in the Season 2 sept scene. Rhaenyra took a serious risk to offer Alicent a possible way back. Alicent realised that she had misunderstood Viserys’s final words, yet still said, “There has been no mistake.” Her reasons were understandable—grief from Jaehaerys's death, fear, pride, political reality, and the danger retreat posed to her family—but it was still a choice made after she learned the truth. The show wrote her as an agent in that scene. Then, Season 3 keeps positioning her as someone who is cornered, stripped of power, and asked whether she'll be blamed only for what men have done. Either framing works on its own. What I can't follow is a show that builds the first and then narrates from the second without ever reconciling them.
Characters are allowed to change, collapse, contradict themselves, and make terrible choices. My criticism is not that Alicent should have remained exactly as she was in Season 1. My criticism is that the show has not convincingly developed the transition from the fiercely protective mother of Season 1 to a woman bargaining with the lives of several of her children.
I still love Alicent. I still sympathise with her in Seasons 2 and 3. But loving a character does not require me to call her writing consistent. For me, the later seasons contain individually understandable moments (and sometimes unacceptable ones) without forming a convincing overall trajectory.
Photo captured by Melinda Jeanne Pehanick @ Pinterest (https://www.pinterest.com/pin/11822017768461037/)
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