It's been really frustrating to see how stupidly Aemond has been written this season. First off, the fact that they made him take Harrenhal all by himself never made sense to me. Obviously Alicent urged him to go, but he could have joined Criston on the road and gone together. Even though Harrenhal was poorly defended, it's still a large and dangerous castle, which book Aemond seemed to understand. In Fire & Blood, Criston actually reached Harrenhal a day before Aemond did, and it was clear they planned it all together (like season two suggested). They celebrated their victory, and only after learning of the Fall of King's Landing did Aemond become enraged and execute the Strongs (excluding Alys).
At some point while book Aemond was at Harrenhal, I believe Alys's spells and/or manipulations started working, which is why he became irrational and refused to leave with Criston. This is what I would have wanted to see on screen, and it would have suited what was established in the earlier seasons much better.
Instead, after he meets Alys in the show, he becomes even dumber and completely forgets what’s going on in the realm. Both he and Alys seem very detached from reality, as if they can just ignore the war and the war will magically go away. I understand he’s being manipulated, but again, we don’t see much of that because their dynamic develops so quickly.
In season three, Aemond is stabbed by one of the Strongs, then his dragon leaves. He seems sane at parts, for example, when he’s cutting wood and immediately clocks that Alys wants him all to herself and might be manipulating him… but then he’s dreaming about establishing his own legacy at Harrenhal without a dragon or anyone to support him? He's also conveniently forgotten about Criston, who I always thought he had a very close, almost father-son like relationship with. He’s also forgotten about Helaena, Jaehaera, and Daeron, too. He has pretty much no concrete plans or motivations. Is he feeling suicidal because of what Helaena told him at the end of season two? Is he so done with his family that he doesn’t care? I don't know.
Aemond always had his stupid moments, for sure. Chasing and killing Lucerys was irrational, and burning Sharp Point was both awful and stupid. But having him chase Luke at Storm's End made sense to me because the boy literally took his eye and got away with it. But this season, his actions don't feel grounded in any plausible emotion or logic anymore. He, like Alicent, is being written as plain foolish for the sake of the plot.
Precisely. At this point, Aemond no longer feels like a character making decisions, however irrational or self-destructive. He feels like a character being mechanically adjusted to fit whichever scene the writers want to include next.
The problem is not simply that Aemond is behaving irrationally. Irrationality can still be psychologically coherent!
The problem is that his irrationality changes shape from scene to scene depending on what the plot requires.
They have stripped him of agency, coherent motivations, and much of the personality they established in the previous seasons. It genuinely feels as though he has 20 different personalities fighting for dominance with a switch happening every few minutes and no valid psychological reason for it.
One moment he immediately recognizes that Alys wants to isolate him and might be manipulating him, the next he is apparently dreaming of building a legacy at Harrenhal while completely forgetting the war, his dragon, his army, and everyone he left behind.
I also wondered whether we were supposed to assume that he is drugged or under Alys's influence almost constantly, but even that does not fully explain it, because the manipulation itself has been written so vaguely and developed so quickly. "He feels abandoned by everyone" is not enough either.
Criston's absence is especially glaring because Aemond does not even need to miss him emotionally for it to matter. Criston was his Hand, his commander, his closest military ally, and arguably the nearest thing he had to a father figure. Those were Aemond's men and that was his entire military campaign. Does he not wonder where the hell they are, what happened to them, or why Criston has not reached him?
I understand the intended ideas: isolation, abandonment, injury, manipulation, perhaps even suicidal resignation. The problem is that none of them have been developed clearly enough to account for his behaviour. His reactions do not seem to arise naturally from what came before, they simply switch on whenever the plot requires a particular version of him.
He is not driving the story anymore. The story is bending him into whatever shape it needs from scene to scene.
