Is It Fair to Call Alicent Hightower a Wicked Stepmother to Rhaenyra Targaryen?
This is a super long blog post I worked on bc I wanted to make things clearer.
Pre-Point: Fire & Blood is written like a biased history book with multiple conflicting accounts. We don’t have POV chapters or direct access to the characters’ inner thoughts, so naturally, readers will interpret things differently that’s the whole point. If anything is based on misogynistic logic, then your interpretations may reflect a lack of nuance and a tendency to echo the misogyny embedded in the text, rather than challenge it. Martin deliberately made the story unreliable to encourage readers to think critically. “Unreliable” doesn’t mean everything written is a lie It means we’re supposed to question the different versions of events and read between the lines.
I talked a LOT about the wicked stepmother 1/HERE, 2/HERE, 3/HERE and 4/HERE
Thoughts and Criticisms of F&B. This is a pseudo-history book:
Many readers misunderstand how Mushroom should be read. His accounts are not meant to be taken at face value; they require scrutiny. Mushroom’s aim is consistently to inflate his own importance in the Dance and in the private lives of powerful women, presenting himself as a far bigger participant and witness than he likely ever was. This is why he claims Alicent seduced the king or called Rhaenyra a whore not because these things are reliable truth, but because sexual scandal is the currency through which he inserts himself into history.
There is also a failure from the show to recognize that a woman whose children are being sidelined, and who is demanding her own rights through the rights of her children, is still at the center of an important and meaningful political story.
GRRM isn’t using the wicked stepmother trope because he believes it. He’s using it to show how history turns powerful women into villains. Gyldayn is the point. Fire & Blood is not a neutral chronicle; it’s a court history written by an old, misogynist, elite, male maester whose worldview is rigidly hierarchical. He believes in bloodlines, male primogeniture, and the moral authority of kings. Women enter his story either as vessels for heirs or as disruptions to the system.
When a woman starts exercising power, he reaches instinctively for the oldest story he has: the wicked stepmother. Alicent is not written as a political actor making rational decisions in a succession crisis. She is written as the woman who wanted too much. Once she has sons, once her interests diverge from Rhaenyra’s, her motives are no longer allowed to be structural or systemic. They must be personal. Emotional. Spiteful. Sexualized. She becomes jealous, grasping, manipulative not because the book proves it, but because that is the only framework Gyldayn has for a woman who defends her children against another woman’s claim.
By making Alicent as jealous, manipulative, and cruel, the historian avoids harder questions. Viserys doesn’t have to be blamed for creating an unstable succession. The lords don’t have to be blamed for enforcing misogynistic rules only when it benefits them. The system itself doesn’t have to be questioned. Everything can be pinned on one woman. Alicent becomes the “wicked stepmother” bc once Alicent has sons, she is no longer just the king’s wife she is a political actor protecting her children in a succession system where losing usually means death. Men do this constantly in Westeros. When men do it, it’s called duty. When Alicent does it, Gyldayn turns it into spite.
Alicent threatens a comforting myth: that women in power are either passive or unnatural. She proves that women must play the same brutal political game as men if they want their children to survive. That makes her dangerous to history, not because she’s cruel, but because she’s rational. So history strips her down. Her fear becomes hysteria. Her strategy becomes scheming. Her grief becomes malice.
Gyldayn uses Alicent, Rhaenyra and other women in his account not simply as historical actors, but as tools for the project of writing history itself. He is writing decades after the war, with access to legend, rumor, and moral tradition far more than hard, verifiable facts. As a result, these women are shaped into moral examples warnings about what should not be allowed or tolerated in society.
Alicent receives subtler, but no less pointed, criticism from Gyldayn and from broader Westerosi culture because her power does not come through a passive transfer. She does not simply wait to become Queen Mother after her son’s accession. Instead, she actively works to shape the succession and the court around her children’s interests. Importantly, Alicent was never officially regent. Aemond held the title of Prince Regent, and Alicent exercised authority in practice while he was absent. She is condemned not for breaking the LAW, but for operating too visibly within it. Her fault, in Gyldayn’s telling, is not illegality but impropriety wanting power, acting on it, and refusing to be small.
Gyldayn, Septon Eustace, Mushroom, Orwyle, and all the other unnamed secondary narrators may have intentionally or not twisted real behaviors or events making some women seem more wicked, evil, or irresponsible, or shifting the burden of responsibility onto them instead of Viserys.
Anyway…
If you read the book straight, Alicent looks like an evil stepmother or a villain. If you read it critically, she looks like a woman fighting inside a system designed to endanger her children.
And anyone calling her an “evil” or “wicked” stepmother is repeating a misogynistic trope whether they realize it or not. That stereotype comes straight out of medieval inheritance culture, not from any real “moral” failing in the women themselves. For centuries, stories painted stepmothers as villains bc remarriage created built-in conflict: a second wife had no legal authority, no property of her own, and no guarantee that her children would inherit anything. She was automatically treated as a threat to the older children’s claims. Fairy tales didn’t invent the Wicked Stepmother patriarchy did. And the trope stuck bc it makes ambitious, older women as unnatural, scheming, or dangerous whenever they acted to protect their offspring or secure their position. Alicent fits that mold perfectly, not because she’s “evil,” but because she’s living inside the exact same political structure that produced this stereotype in the first place.
We see writers like Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and Daphne du Maurier lived in times when patriarchy was just how the world worked. Still, even though they were surrounded by sexist ideas, they challenged those ideas in their stories. They took old, sexist tropes about women and turned them upside down instead of repeating them. The “evil stepmother,” the “hysterical widow,” the “jealous second wife” those tropes came straight out of the world they lived in. Martin, though? He’s writing in a totally different era. He has access to feminist theory, gender studies, and centuries of criticism that already called out how misogynistic these tropes are. So if he were genuinely reproducing the same old “evil stepmother” stereotype with Alicent, that would be a huge step backward not just bad writing, but lazy writing. And honestly, he’s not doing that.
In Alicent’s case, we don’t have her POV. So we don’t get her real thoughts, fears, or reasons just how other people described her. That’s why calling her “evil” or a “wicked stepmother” doesn’t really work. The stepmother trope makes it seem like any woman who protects her kids or gets involved in politics must be acting out of jealousy or spite, which is unfair. And because Fire & Blood is written like a history book, not a story with POVs, the maesters leave out her personal side completely. So judging her only by what biased historians say especially when they already saw ambitious stepmothers as suspicious ends up repeating the same old misogyny all over again.
Alicent Hightower is just like Catelyn Stark both are hated by a lot of peoples, but this hate is rooted in misogyny. They’re blamed the most and reduced to the stereotype of “evil stepmothers fighting with their stepchildren,” Neither Alicent nor Catelyn acted out of petty jealousy or cruelty. There’s a strong fan belief that Catelyn Stark and Alicent Hightower are cruel, abusive “evil stepmothers” to Jon Snow and Rhaenyra Targaryen, but this simply isn’t Martin’s style. People ignore the heavy historical & social pressures these women faced and hold them to unfair standards, standards that aren’t applied to the men who actually held power, like Ned Stark or Viserys I.
It makes total sense for women like Catelyn or Alicent to feel tense or anxious about other kids in their husband’s house bc there are actual political and material stakes at play. Alicent didn’t try to take Rhaenyra’s inheritance out of greed or malice; she truly thought her son’s rights were at risk. Aegon was the only firstborn being passed over for a daughter, which was unheard of. And Viserys was still around protecting Rhaenyra most of the time just like Ned stark was around Jon snow and he will NEVER let Catelyn abuse him. No one ever punished Rhaenyra for her behavior, not even Alicent.
How medieval households worked?
Alicent was busy doing her own thing, because people forget that being a queen even a queen consort meant she had duties to be tending to and her own kids to look after. she didn’t have time to be the so-called cruel evil stepmother that many tb fans seem obsessed with making her into, bc god forbid they actually know how medieval households worked. They forget that in medieval courts, women were expected to handle domestic governance, which wasn’t some soft side gig it was crucial to keeping the kingdom from falling apart. Alicent was managing her role while also dealing with her husband, her kids’ futures, and a ton of court gossip. So no, she didn’t have endless free time to bully Rhaenyra every waking moment. If someone thinks a queen had nothing better to do than be petty 24/7, that shows a lack of historical literacy meaning they don’t really know how societies back then actually functioned. It’s basically projecting modern drama stereotypes onto a world where people had way more serious stuff to handle.
That idea doesn’t even make sense if you think about it for two seconds. The castle was huge. The Red Keep alone was basically a massive castle with tons of separate wings, towers, and chambers. They weren’t all living in one little house where Alicent could constantly be hovering over Rhaenyra’s shoulder. Even inside the castle, they had separate apartments, private rooms, and their own staff. Queens had their own quarters, their children’s nurseries, and their own schedules. Rhaenyra also had her own attendants.
A) Alicent and Rhaenyra knew each other long before Viserys married Alicent.
The book explicitly says that
“Rhaenyra, secure in her place as heir, welcomed her father’s new bride, for they had long known one another at court.” -TWOIAF
Alicent had spent like years in KL, attending to King Jaehaerys as his companion and later serving in the royal household, where she and young Rhaenyra interacted regularly. They weren’t strangers at all. Their relationship originally started on friendly terms, almost like an older-sister/mentor dynamic before Viserys’s marriage. This is different from the “wicked stepmother” trope. In classic fairy tales, the stepmother is usually a stranger who enters the household and immediately becomes hostile. In the case of Alicent and Rhaenyra, they knew each other long before the marriage, interacting regularly at court. Had an established, friendly relationship, almost like sisters or mentor/mentee. Only became rivals because of politics and the ambitions of the court, not simply personal hatred.
Alicent is actually described in a way that makes her come off as warm and caring. She genuinely cares for Rhaenyra too; there’s that scene where she calls her “daughter” at the feast, which isn’t just polite it’s affectionate.
“Princess Rhaenyra poured for her stepmother at the feast, and Queen Alicent kissed her and named her ‘daughter.’
Though this is only one interaction, it tells us a lot. Alicent wasn’t a bore, and there’s no mention of her being unnecessarily cruel so assuming otherwise would be unfair. She made an effort to understand her new stepdaughter and showed her affection. Calling Rhaenyra her “daughter” wasn’t trivial it was a deliberate act of care, declaring a loving, maternal role in line with her character.
At just nine years old, Rhaenyra likely didn’t fully understand the implications of her father marrying Alicent. Alicent, at 18, was closer in age to Rhaenyra than to Viserys, (she’s 11 years younger than viserys) making it easier for them to relate as peers rather than stepmother and stepdaughter. Because Rhaenyra had known Alicent for years at court. Rhaenyra may not have initially seen her as a replacement for her mother, but rather as a peer which could explain why they appeared genuinely happy together at first.
“Ser Criston protects the princess from her enemies… but who protects the princess from Ser Criston?”
This isn’t beefing or spreading rumors Alicent is pointing out that 13yo Rhaenyra is in a vulnerable position as an unmarried girl surrounded by ambitious men. Notice how the word “protects” is repeated twice. Alicent is emphasizing protection she’s insisting on it. she’s desperately trying to defend Rhaenyra. By putting Criston in both roles, the line subtly says it out loud he is the danger. In the book, Criston is way older than rhaenyra, so any romantic/sexual involvement w// a teen princess isn’t just inappropriate, it’s disturbing. He’s a sworn Kingsguard, bound by oath. No matter how u slice it, Rhaenyra is surrounded by men w// agendas, and for a brief moment, Alicent is the only one seeing the danger which is interesting considering he later joins her side.
“many lords and knights sought her favor,”
And Alicent was clearly aware of the dangers that posed. If Alicent had wanted to discredit Rhaenyra’s virtue, she would’ve encouraged Criston’s actions. But she was genuinely looking out for Rhaenyra’s well-being, which is honestly rare in a world like ASOIAF. Like, not many people especially in Westeros would actually speak up about something like that. But Alicent did? She noticed the dynamic between Rhaenyra and Criston Cole and literally called it out, asking, “who protects the princess from Ser Criston?” bc w/ most people in that world wouldn’t even think to protect a young girl from potential harm especially if that girl wasn’t their own daughter. Alicent didn’t have to say anything, she could’ve just let Rhaenyra make her own mistakes, but she didn’t. She saw something that didn’t feel right and said it out loud. That’s empathy. That’s maternal instinct. This is what spreading rumours is:
“Even so, there were those who murmured that the Hand had risen above himself, that he had brought his daughter to court with this in mind. A few even cast doubt on Lady Alicent's virtue, suggesting she had welcomed King Viserys into her bed even before Queen Aemma's death. (These calumnies were never proved, though Mushroom repeats them in his Testimony and goes so far as to claim that reading was not the only service Lady Alicent performed for the Old King in his bedchamber.)”
Did we forget that Alicent herself was a victim of rumors too? Before Alicent even becomes queen, she is already the subject of gossip. People whisper that King Viserys was lusting after her even before his first wife, Aemma, died. Saying that Alicent was Viserys’s mistress while the queen was still alive, that she did “more than read” to the dying King Jaehaerys, and that her rise to queenhood wasn’t a matter of political marriage, but seduction and schemin (the fact that she was only 15yo)
Even if you argue that why didn’t Alicent do something if she thought Rhaenyra was in danger? That question comes from applying modern expectations to a patriarchal society / medieval world. She raised the issue of Rhaenyra’s safety and how dangerous it was for a young, unmarried girl to be surrounded by ambitious men. That’s already a huge risk in that world. She did act, in the only way she safely could. And if you expect more from her, you’re ignoring how women’s voices were limited in that world.
B) Now, the relationship between Alicent and Rhaenyra evidently deteriorates
However, based on what we do know, it’s likely that the change began once Rhaenyra truly understood what Alicent becoming queen/stepmother actually meant.
“But when Alicent gave birth to a son, Prince Aegon, a daughter, Princess Helaena, and another son, Prince Aemond, in rapid succession, and Rhaenyra remained Viserys’ heir, those feelings started to change.
“The amity between Her Grace and her stepdaughter had proved short-lived, for both Rhaenyra and Alicent aspired to be the first lady of the realm…”
As a spoiled only child who was used to being the center of attention especially during Aemma’s life Rhaenyra may have felt displaced by Alicent and her children. When Aemma lived, Rhaenyra had been;
“At the center of the merriment, cherished and adored by all, was their only surviving child, Princess Rhaenyra, the little girl the court singers dubbed “the Realm’s Delight.” […] the princess was placed into service as a cupbearer...but for her own father, the king. At table, at tourney, and at court, King Viserys thereafter was seldom seen without his daughter by his side.”
And GRRM said:
“RHAENYRA TARGARYEN: The first-born child of King Viserys I, Rhaenyra Targaryen was almost ten years older than her half-brother Aegon. She was the king's only living child (two siblings having died in infancy) by his first wife, an Arryn of the Vale, and grew up expecting to become the first ruling queen of Westeros. When the second of her brothers died soon after being born, Viserys himself began to treat Rhaenyra as his heir, keeping her by his side in court and at council meetings. Many of the nobles of the realm took nte, so the young princess was surrounded by flatterers and favor-seekers all through her childhood…Pampered from an early age.”
She was a pampered only child raised to believe the world revolved around her. She was “the king’s only living child by his first wife”. Her father spoiled her, surrounded her with flatterers, and made her believe she could do no wrong and Aemma may have been content to let her beloved daughter shine as the “first lady of the realm”/“the realms delight” especially since she had no sons and Rhaenyra was her only child. But Queen Alicent had no reason or desire to do the same for her new stepdaughter. she herself is now the queen with her own new children. Rhaenyra was used to being the center of attention. She got all her father’s love and the court’s praise as a kid, so when Alicent and her children arrived and shared that attention, it’s easy to see why Rhaenyra might have blamed Alicent. She was still young and didn’t know how to handle not being the only one important. That jealousy and feeling replaced helped start the long feud between them.
And since Alicent had no desire to let Rhaenyra be the First Lady of the Realm, people act like she’s an Evil Stepmother for not being endlessly nurturing to everyone’s Child and refusing to nurture someone else’s Child. Just like Catelyn refuses to treat Jon like one of her own. She doesn’t have any “Motherly Instincts” towards Theon. Even with Brienne, she connects with her on more of a Woman-to-Woman level than through some Mother-Daughter dynamic. She never feels obligated to play the angelic Mother to every child, and the fact that people hate to see Women refuse to be endlessly a Mother to every Child is, again, Misogyny.
Also the book does not say they were fighting to be First Lady it says they both aspired to that role. Aspiring means they both desired or were positioned to hold that status, and you can aspire to something without scheming or fighting for it. If Alicent decided to step back when she was queen and let her stepdaughter have all the Attention it would’ve been a political disaster. It would’ve made her look like a secondary figure in her own marriage, basically sending the message: “she’s just here to give the king heirs, not to wield influence.” That’s what ppl mean by a “glorified mistress.” Someone who bears children but holds no real power or respect at court. And honestly, that’s not fair. Queenship isn’t just about producing heirs it’s about holding authority. If Alicent had allowed herself to be sidelined, it would’ve weakened her and her children’s standing permanently.
Aemma could be considered “good” because she was compliant, never ambitious, and didn’t disrupt anyone’s expectations. She fits neatly into the chroniclers’ idea of the ideal queen: vassal of heirs, compliant, invisible, and unambitious. Alicent, by contrast, is ambitious, politically savvy, and unapologetic about securing her family’s position so she’s “wicked” in the eyes of chroniclers and fandom who unconsciously equate female ambition with “immorality.”
There are many **real medieval examples where queens did step into political power after having sons and refused to be sidelined, because stepping back would have meant losing authority, and security for their children and faction. When the queen wasn’t satisfied with being a wife and child‑bearer only… they will use their proximity to the throne and their sons’ future legitimacy to secure power for themselves and their children.
Bc a queen isn’t just a wife she is the most politically and socially visible woman in the realm. Being the “First Lady” of the court isn’t about jealousy it’s about visibility. Alicent’s choice to be the first Lady wasn’t selfish it was self-preservation, and it was her RIGHT. This is the only reason anyone would marry the king. she wanted to assert her own authority, not be treated like a ghost in her husband’s reign. After all, her marriage to the king wasn’t born of love it was a political move. She provided male heirs, and in return, she secured power, as was expected of her.
C) Later, we have the problem of succession
Rhaenyra is a teenager, atp there’s no point in portraying Alicent as “beefing” with a child.
A lot of people blame Alicent for creating the succession crisis, when in fact it was Viserys’s fault.
Viserys had done nothing to change the order of succession. The Princess of Dragonstone remained his acknowledged heir, with half the lords of Westeros sworn to defend her rights. Those who asked, “What of the ruling of the Great Council of 101?” found their words falling on deaf ears. The matter had been decided, so far as King Viserys was concerned; it was not an issue His Grace cared to revisit. Still, questions persisted, not the least from Queen Alicent herself. Loudest amongst her supporters was her father, Ser Otto Hightower, Hand of the King. Pushed too far on the matter, in 109 AC Viserys stripped Ser Otto of his chain of office and named in his place the taciturn Lord of Harrenhal, Lyonel Strong.
They accuse her of trying to replace Rhaenyra with her own sons and she was beefing with her but Alicent and Otto brought their concerns to Viserys, not to Rhaenyra. That alone undermines the claim that she was “bullying” a child and It’s not “creating problems” for Alicent to raise valid political concerns especially considering Westeros’ gendered succession norms and the precedent of the Great Council. Her sons were always going to be seen as potential heirs, not because of her, but because of the system. Raising those concerns with Viserys is not the same as attacking or bullying Rhaenyra. In fact, there’s no evidence that Alicent ever voiced these concerns to Rhaenyra directly.
You can argue Alicent had political motivations (just like most people at court), but that doesn’t equate to personal cruelty or abuse. It is EXPECTED and NORMAL for noblewomen to want their children to inherit as I explained HERE. Yet Viserys only firmly reaffirmed Rhaenyra’s status as the SOLE heir Only after marrying Alicent and fathering three sons. So who’s really at fault? Viserys. If anyone failed Rhaenyra, it was him. It was viserys who refused to clarify what Rhaenyra’s status meant only after he had sons. Alicent didn’t create that ambiguity. She was reacting to it, like anyone in her position would, especially in a world where sons always inherit before daughters. And we know that if Aemma had given him a son, Viserys 100% would have named that son his heir. And it wasn’t just Alicent and Otto who raised the issue what about the people at court who asked, “What of the ruling of the Great Council of 101?” Were they also beefing with a child just because they questioned the succession? Viserys spat on the Great Council’s ruling by naming Rhaenyra his heir without ever summoning a new council to confirm it. He left the realm divided and confused that’s where the real fault lies.
We know that King Viserys I was inspired by Henry I of England, the father of Empress Matilda, who in turn inspired Rhaenyra. Henry did the exact opposite of what Viserys did: when his child died, he remarried to have another heir. When his second wife failed to produce children, he named his only surviving child, Matilda, as his heir and never remarried again. Viserys, however, acted VERY differently. After the death of his child, he named Rhaenyra his heir, then remarried and had three sons.
This doesn't make any sense in any reality… In the first place, did we ever have a king in medieval Europe or in Targaryen history who named his daughter heir to replace his brother bc of the insult thing, then remarried, then had three sons, then kept her as heir, then spat on the Great Council of 101 and never summoned a new one to back his daughter w// fresh legitimacy after having three sons? Not to mention Viserys never required ALL the lords to swear oaths of loyalty to Rhaenyra, he made only HALF the lords swear oaths 24 years ago when Rhaenyra was just a child and named it a day, then he never renewed or reinforced those oaths again. If you compare it to the real-life historical basis, the succession crisis between Empress Matilda and Stephen falls apart. I also explained HERE that in Henry I’s case, naming his daughter the sole heir meant facing one battle: convincing the realm that a woman could inherit. In Viserys’ case, however, he faced two battles: persuading the lords that a woman could rule and convincing them that his new sons and wife didn’t matter.
So why ALL the blame on Alicent ? And not on viserys? because Alicent is a woman. The men, like Viserys, who caused or helped the problems, are forgiven or not blamed as much. Alicent had sons and wanted to protect. The reason Alicent gets blamed more is because of sexism. People judge her harder just because she’s a woman.
D) Next we have the tourney.
Alicent did NOT Declare war by wearing Green on Rhaenyra simply by wearing a green gown at the anniversary tourney in 111 AC. The book says:
“In 111 AC, a great tourney was held at King’s Landing on the fifth anniversary of the king’s marriage to Queen Alicent. At the opening feast, the queen wore a green gown, whilst the princess dressed dramatically in Targaryen red and black. Note was taken, and thereafter it became the custom to refer to ‘greens’ and ‘blacks’ when talking of the queen’s party and the party of the princess, respectively.”-F&B
And in RoTD:
“The queen still had supporters who adhered to her view that Aegon, not Rhaenyra, should be Viserys’s heir. But Princess Rhaenyra, now in her teens, had her own supporters. The tensions between Rhaenyra and her stepmother played out at feasts and tourneys…and any other noble gathering. At a great tourney in 111 AC, celebrating the fifth anniversary of the king’s marriage, Queen Alicent appeared dressed all in green while fourteen-year-old Rhaenyra was clad in the red and black of House Targaryen. Ser Criston Cole, wearing the princess’s favor, defeated all the knights of the queen’s faction that he faced. After this, their factions received formal names: the greens and the blacks.”
All I see in this passage is Alicent making a perfectly normal political and ceremonial choice for the fifth anniversary of her own marriage to the king. She appears dressed in green. Nowhere does Gyldayn claim that Alicent’s gown was a formal declaration of war or an open challenge to Rhaenyra’s rights. He doesn’t even imply it. Nothing in the book says Alicent insulted Rhaenyra, challenged her claim directly, or “started” anything. What the passage actually tells us is that Alicent still had supporters who believed Aegon should be heir, and Rhaenyra had her own faction as well. That situation is completely normal in a medieval monarchy. When succession is controversial, factions form. They always do.
At the time of the green dress incident, Rhaenyra is not a little girl. She is a teenager, old enough to be politically aware, old enough to have supporters, old enough to understand succession, and old enough to feel threatened by another claimant. Rhaenyra takes Alicent’s actions as an insult because, in her view, Alicent is daring to compete. Not abusing her. Not mistreating her. Competing. Alicent is advocating for her own children which is exactly what Rhaenyra herself expects loyalty for when it comes to her future sons. The “wicked stepmother” trope gets slapped onto Alicent because it’s culturally familiar and morally easy. It lets the narrative say: this woman is bad for wanting power through her children, while ignoring that this is the only socially acceptable way women are allowed to wield power in Westeros.
THE FACTION
The existence of an Alicent/Green faction ≠ an active rebellion. In a medieval court, factions are normal, constant, and mostly performative. Lords talk. They posture. They signal loyalty. They wear colors. They gossip at feasts and tourneys. That is politics, not war. these people weren’t doing anything. They weren’t raising armies. They weren’t refusing oaths. They weren’t attacking Rhaenyra. They weren’t crowning Aegon. They were expressing preference in a system where succession was unresolved and legally messy.
That’s why calling it “beef” or “wicked stepmother plotting” is ahistorical. This is not Alicent “picking a fight.” This is a court doing what courts always do when: a king names an unconventional heir, a male heir exists and precedent and proclamation clash. And crucially: as long as Viserys is alive, these factions are inert. If you actually believe: “talk = threat” then every court conversation is treason. That’s not how power works. Threats only become real when: someone is given legitimacy, someone is given space or someone is allowed to mobilize.
Borros Baratheon is the perfect example. He doesn’t “rebel” because he talked. He becomes dangerous because he is allowed to choose, armed with leverage, and rewarded for it. That’s when performance turns into action. Until then, these lords are doing what they always do: hedging, signaling, and waiting. Alicent having supporters is not her “starting a war,” and it’s not her “beefing” with Rhaenyra. It’s the political environment Viserys created by refusing to resolve succession cleanly and refusing to secure anyone’s future properly.
The Hightower sigil is a white tower crowned by a flame on a gray field. Their famous beacon is consistently described in A Feast for Crows and elsewhere as reddish orange, never green
He drained the dregs of his tankard. The torchlit terrace of the Quill and Tankard was an island of light in a sea of mist this morning. Downriver, the distant beacon of the Hightower floated in the damp of night like a hazy orange moon, but the light did little to lift his spirits.
So this idea that green was a recognized martial banner for House Hightower is simply made up. The green gown was her own choice, not some pre-arranged family war signal. Green was HER color. The Hightower sigil: No green flame anywhere. Literally none. the Hightowers’ official colors are silver or gray. The famous beacon is described as reddish orange, not green. That means all these claims that green was some ancient “war color” of House Hightower are completely invented by the show. Here is exactly what TWOIF says about their history.
The Hightower flame is not green. Their tower is not green. Their stones are described as gray. Their beacon shows up as reddish orange in the night. Rhaenyra deliberately showed up wearing black and red, the colors of House Targaryen itself. Was that a declaration of what? If you’re going to claim Alicent was “declaring war” by wearing a green dress that wasn’t even the color of her house’s flame or field, you have to explain why Rhaenyra coming dressed “dramatically” in Targaryen colors isn’t equally provocative or more so.
[HOTD]: It wasn’t like in the show, where Alicent came late to Rhaenyra’s wedding wearing green while Rhaenyra was in a white wedding dress at this point the show is trying to victimize rhaenyra and people mix the show with the books. That whole scene was created for the show. The show totally dramatized that moment just to push the “Greens vs. Blacks” divide but it doesn’t even make sense, because Rhaenyra was wearing a white wedding dress while Alicent showed up in green and in the book the Blacks were called the Blacks because it was Rhaenyra who went to Alicent's wedding anniversary party wearing her house colours when she always favoured purples and maroons.
Anyway, it’s clear that Alicent and Rhaenyra aren’t getting along by this point. But there’s NO mention in the book of Alicent actually doing anything to harm or bully Rhaenyra. By this point, rhaenyra IS spoiled. She had grown used to having her father’s undivided attention, and suddenly, he remarried and had three new children with his new wife… It’s entirely possible and actually quite normal that Rhaenyra felt displaced and reacted emotionally to this dramatic shift in her family life. This doesn’t mean Alicent was cruel. It means that Rhaenyra, like many children/ teenagers in blended families, may have struggled with jealousy or resentment which is a common, human reaction. Even today, we see many children get jealous when a new baby or sibling is born and that’s with parents trying their best to handle the situation. Sometimes, no matter how much the adults try to help, the jealousy still happens. That’s just how children are. It’s a normal emotional reaction.
E) This is where things really start to fall apart, because Daemon begins to cause trouble.
When Daemon came back we see he was especially cold to Alicent kids, Aegon and Aemond his nephews since their birth pushed him further down in the line for the throne. So if anyone is really having beefing with kids, it’s Daemon Targaryen.
“although he treated her with all the courtesy due her station, there was no warmth between them, and men said that the prince was notably cool towards her children, especially his nephews, Aegon and Aemond, whose birth had pushed him still lower in the order of succession.”
Daemon spent six months mocking Alicent and her children. He was the cool, rebellious uncle who gave Rhaenyra gifts, paid her attention, and took her on dragon rides, making her feel more special than the queen. At the same time, he openly making fun of Aegon and Aemond who were just babies. A teenage Rhaenyra, who liked him, followed what he did.
“making mock of the Greens at court and the ‘lickspittles’ fawning over Queen Alicent and her children.”
Daemon zeroed in on Rhaenyra’s issues with Alicent, and together they openly mocked Alicent, her children, and their supporters. It wasn’t subtle it was public, deliberate, and part of the growing hostility at court. They raced dragons together, and Daemon told her she was way prettier than Alicent, which boosted her teenage ego.
Princess Rhaenyra was a different matter. Daemon spent long hours in her company, enthralling her with tales of his journeys and battles. He gave her pearls and silks and books and a jade tiara said once to have belonged to the Empress of Leng, read poems to her, dined with her, hawked with her, sailed with her, entertained her by making mock of the greens at court
Rhaenyra was only fourteen. Whether the rumors were true or not, Viserys kicked Daemon out again. Daemon returned to the Stepstones, and things in King’s Landing calmed down. I’ve already explained the grooming part HERE.
“Queen Alicent’s urging that Viserys sent Daemon away. But Septon Eustace and Mushroom tell another tale...or rather, two such tales, each different from the other. Eustace, the less salacious of the two, writes that Prince Daemon seduced his niece the princess and claimed her maidenhood. When the lovers were discovered abed together by Ser Arryk Cargyll of the Kingsguard and brought before the king, Rhaenyra insisted she was in love with her uncle and pleaded with her father for leave to marry him. King Viserys would not hear of it, however, and reminded his daughter that Prince Daemon already had a wife. In his wroth, he confined his daughter to her chambers, told his brother to depart, and commanded both of them never to speak of what had happened.”
DAEMON was her true enemy, not Alicent, not her younger siblings. It was him. He shaped her into hating Alicent and her younger siblings he groomed her. He was exiled twice for good reasons. We know exactly what his relationship with children was like he mocked a dead baby and called him “heir for a day,” he groomed his niece just because she was named heir, he destroyed her relationship with her siblings and he was known for raping the “youngest” and most “innocent” and he’s a child murdrer. People blaming Alicent for everything while giving Daemon a pass is honestly a great example of how misogyny works in fandoms. So why is all the hate going to Alicent instead of Daemon? Because people are more comfortable blaming women especially than blaming men who act violently and break all the rules. That’s misogyny. It holds women to higher standards and excuses bad male behavior as “complex” or “grey,” while any female ambition is called evil.
So who’s exactly was beefing raping, grooming and killing children? Daemon Targaryen. People blame Alicent for turning her kids against Rhaenyra, but in the books, it was daemon who started it. Alicent did what literally any noblewoman in her position would’ve done and still got blamed. Daemon broke every rule and still got defended. At that point of course Rhaenyra and her stepmother, Alicent, don’t get along at this point. Rhaenyra and Daemon had just spent six months making fun of Alicent, her kids, and everyone in her circle. Aegon was only about four or five years old, so any tension was mostly one-sided but even little kids can tell when someone’s ignoring them or making fun of them. Also, Rhaenyra made it CLEAR how she felt by always calling Alicent’s kids her half-brothers, instead of just saying brothers like a normal sibling would. That says a lot.
“My half brothers would be more to his taste,” she told the king (the princess always took care to refer to Queen Alicent’s sons as half brothers, never as brothers).
It’s also interesting that Aegon always called Rhaenyra “sister” and “heir,” which suggests Alicent never poisoned him against her because if she had, he wouldn’t have spoken of her that way just like the way rhaenyra does.
Someone may say: But Alicent is the one who need to fix the relationship between rhaenyra and her siblings! Again you can’t apply twenty-first-century standards of blended family harmony to medieval societies especially royal courts. Alicent could not take Rhaenyra to a therapist or send her to a progressive boarding school to process her feelings. I know many ppl today judge Alicent through a modern lens, as if she could have solved everything by encouraging some warm, close relationship between Rhaenyra and her younger half-siblings. But this is an unrealistic expectation and shows a lack of historical understanding. In medieval-style societies it wasn’t possible for Rhaenyra to build bonds with her half siblings like today by taking care of the babies herself, teaching them to read, or taking them to school. Royal children were raised by wet nurses, maesters, and septas. The family dynamic was formal and often distant. So when you today insist that Alicent “failed” Rhaenyra emotionally, or was automatically cruel because Rhaenyra felt jealous , you’re ignoring basic feudal realities: Royal marriages were about alliances and heirs, not feelings. Queens were not expected to “blend” families in modern terms.
F) The entire emotional labor of the family cannot fall on Alicent’s shoulders
People love to dump all responsibility onto Alicent as if she alone should mend the family, make peace, make Rhaenyra happy, make her children adore their half-sister, and magically smooth over structural conflicts created by Viserys and the entire feudal system. Alicent cannot “make her children love Rhaenyra” when Rhaenyra never tried to know them. People speak as if Rhaenyra was some warm, loving big sister who was denied the chance to bond with the younger kids. But in canon, she barely interacted with Aegon, Helaena, Aemond, or Daeron. She did not spend time with them, didn’t build any trust, didn’t treat them like siblings, never refers to them as “my brothers” always “my half-brothers” The only time she pushed to “interact” with Aegon or Aemond was to demand punishment for the “bastard” insult And that’s it. That’s the relationship. You cannot demand that Alicent “make her children love Rhaenyra” when Rhaenyra showed no interest in them and no desire for familial closeness. Even in feudal terms, Rhaenyra didn’t act like siblings in royal families who were politically raised together to avoid conflict. She simply didn’t engage. Viserys creates the conflict ? Alicent is supposed to fix it. Rhaenyra refuses to bond ? Alicent is supposed to fix it. The children dislike each other ? Alicent is supposed to fix it. Tension rises ? Alicent is supposed to fix it. Violence erupts ? Alicent is supposed to fix it.
But Alicent did actually try to fix the relationship and she told viserys:
Queen Alicent had her own candidate: her eldest son, Prince Aegon, Rhaenyra’s half-brother. But Aegon was a boy, the princess ten years his elder. Moreover, the two half-siblings had never gotten on well. “All the more reason to bind them together in marriage,” the queen argued. Viserys did not agree. “The boy is Alicent’s own blood,” he told Lord Strong. “She wants him on the throne.”
Rhaenyra is now sixteen. She’s no longer a teenager she’s an adult. Alicent actually proposes she marry Aegon, and one of the reasons she gives is that they don’t get along. “All the more reason to bind them together in marriage,” she OPENLY acknowledging that Rhaenyra IS hating her now six-year-old younger brother. If Alicent hoped for Rhaenyra and Aegon to marry, why would she be poisoning her children against Rhaenyra?… But Viserys shoots the idea down, saying, “the boy is Alicent’s own blood she wants him on the throne.” I mean…? yes, of course she does, it’s her RIGHT! AND SHE WANTS HER SON TO STAY ALIVE. Viserys treat Alicent like a glorified mistress he uses her for heirs but won’t fully back her politically, won’t protect her sons in the succession, and refuses to make clear choices. Alicent end up being stuck between the role she should rightfully hold and the way her husband diminishes her. Why is that Book Alicent’s “worst crime” is wanting her husband to do what virtually every lord and king in the Seven Kingdoms does: name his firstborn son as heir or having her blood on the throne.
Even under the stupid argument that the proposal was an attempt to undermine rhaenyra’s authority as Queen. this is still complete fan-fiction and not supported by the book. Why wouldn’t Daemon undermine her authority, considering he was explicitly meant to be kept away from Rhaenyra and the throne? Her entire claim was, in part, justified on the basis that Daemon had to be disinherited and excluded from power. Where does it say Otto, Alicent, or Aegon II would’ve usurper / undermine Rhaenyra if she married Aegon? Viserys being annoyed at Alicent wanting her “blood” on the throne doesn’t mean he thought they’d undermine Rhaenyra. since any children Rhaenyra and Aegon had would also be of their 'blood', so they would get what they wanted “their blood” on the iron throne. And Aegon wouldn’t have usurped Rhaenyra if she’d been his wife from the start he even called her sister and heir and the main argument used to convince him was that she’d kill his family but if they’d had children together, that threat/argument wouldn’t even exist.
END…
Adult Rhaenyra
Once Rhaenyra marries Laenor, the situation fundamentally changes. She is no longer a child navigating a blended family. She is a married adult woman, publicly confirmed as heir, forming her own political household. At that point, the idea that Alicent should still prioritize a warm, maternal relationship with her stepdaughter over the security of her own children stops being realistic. By then, Rhaenyra has already made her hostility clear. She openly resents Alicent and her children, she spent 6 months mocking them, and treat their very existence as an insult/threat. That matters. In a feudal system, feelings become policy. If the heir despises you, you cannot assume mercy later. Alicent would have been irresponsible not to read the writing on the wall.
And yes, the half-siblings’ dislike of Rhaenyra is completely understandable. From their perspective, she is: An older sister who resents their birth. Someone who mocked them publicly. Someone who calls them half brothers instead of just brothers. They didn’t create that rivalry. The system did and Rhaenyra never tried to soften it. Rhaenyra didn’t have to love Alicent or dote on much younger siblings. No one expects that. But as heir, she did have a responsibility to manage relationships that directly affected succession stability. Cultivating even a cold, formal bond something like “we disagree, but we coexist” would have gone a long way. She never even attempted that. Instead, Rhaenyra consistently chooses the worst option: She’s reactive rather than strategic. She takes things personally instead of politically. She lashes out, then doubles down. She never adjusts after mistakes.
A smarter heir would have understood that Alicent’s children were not just “annoying reminders” of her father’s remarriage they were permanent political facts. You don’t neutralize rival claimants by ignoring them or humiliating them. You neutralize them by binding them to you with roles, incentives, and mutual interest. Rhaenyra does none of that. So by the time Alicent stops trying to play stepmother and starts acting purely as a political mother, it’s not cruelty or jealousy it’s triage. Rhaenyra is grown, married, entrenched, and openly hostile. Alicent’s remaining duty is to the survival of her own children.
And honestly? If Rhaenyra had been even moderately patient, cautious, or self-aware, the Dance might never have happened. But she isn’t written as smart. She’s written as impulsive, proud, quick to anger and convinced that being named heir means she no longer has to earn loyalty. That flaw doesn’t make her evil but it does make her a disaster waiting to happen.
Aenys did coexist with Maegor, even though Maegor was violent, volatile, and terrifying. And the reason that coexistence worked, for as long as it did, wasn’t law or precedent it was personal politics. Aenys genuinely loved his brother, trusted him, and kept him close. He gave Maegor status, command, and honor. He didn’t try to sideline him, call him half brother, humiliate him, or pretend he didn’t exist. That emotional bond mattered more than any legal theory. The war only becomes inevitable after Aenys dies, when the throne passes to Aegon the Uncrowned. Aegon and Maegor had no such bond, no shared trust, no emotional investment. Maegor was cruel and had no reason to accept Aegon’s rule, and Aegon had no power to contain Maegor. At that point, law collapses and force takes over and Maegor wins.
That’s exactly the lesson Rhaenyra fails to learn. Violent or rival claimants can sometimes be managed if there is: genuine affection or respect, inclusion rather than exclusion, a sense that their survival and status are tied to the ruler’s success. Aenys understood this instinctively. He ruled softly, but he ruled relationally. Rhaenyra does the opposite. She treats Alicent’s children as insults, not as political realities. She never builds affection, never offers security, never creates mutual dependence. She assumes her claim is self-enforcing.
Viserys openly favors Rhaenyra over all his other children, to the point where his children with Alicent (Aegon, Helaena, Aemond, and Daeron) are treated almost like political afterthoughts unless they’re directly useful to maintaining Rhaenyra’s claim. He doesn’t cultivate their public image, he doesn’t ensure they hold central positions at court, and he shows no visible desire to integrate them into the same intimate, doting relationship he has with Rhaenyra. So alicent decided to take care of her own children instead of his own child.
Viserys didn’t even try to secure anything for his kids with Alicent. Like, compare that to Henry I Empress Matilda’s father and Viserys’ real-life parallel who made sure his illegitimate sons were well provided for. Henry I gave his bastards lands, titles, and marriages to secure their futures. Why? Because Henry knew that men with nothing to lose are dangerous. If his bastards were landless, powerless, and dependent on royal favor, they could become focal points for rebellion. By giving them security, he reduced the incentive to challenge Matilda. But Viserys? Viserys does the exact opposite. He has three trueborn sons which is already a political earthquake in a male-preference monarchy and yet: He does not grant them independent lordships. He does not give them meaningful political roles. He does not arrange marriages early to bind them to loyal factions. He does not carve out futures that exist outside Rhaenyra’s inheritance.
And this is the truly baffling part: Viserys intends to pass over his sons, yet does nothing to protect them from the consequences of that decision.
If Rhaenyra inherits, her brothers are: Obvious rival claimants. Living symbols of an alternative succession. Permanent threats to her legitimacy, whether she wants that or not. Any competent king would understand that this puts those boys in danger. Either you: Integrate them safely into the political order with lands and power, or Accept that they will become flashpoints for conflict. Viserys does neither. He just… ignores the problem and hopes love and oaths will fix it.
Under Viserys’s plan, Aegon, Helaena, and their children are not being integrated into the future regime at all. They’re being asked to exist at the mercy of Rhaenyra’s goodwill, with no independent base of power, no legal insulation, and no guaranteed safety. Which means their safety depends entirely on one thing: Rhaenyra choosing not to see them as threats. And that’s an absurd gamble to ask a mother to take especially in a system where rival heirs don’t have to act to be dangerous; they just have to exist.
That’s why Alicent’s fear isn’t paranoia it’s rational. Viserys is asking her to trust that: Her sons will be safe without power. Rhaenyra’s reign will be uncontested. Daemon will magically stop being Daemon. Centuries of succession custom will simply not matter. That’s not governance. That’s denial. Henry I prepared for conflict even while trying to prevent it. Viserys refuses to prepare at all and leaves his wife and children to pay the price for his wishful thinking.
From Aegon’s perspective, the logic is brutal but simple: If he does nothing, he remains a living rival forever. If Rhaenyra feels insecure, he and his children are liabilities. f anything goes wrong in her reign, he becomes the obvious scapegoat. So what does he actually have to lose by pushing back early? The status quo already puts him on a slow path to erasure.
That’s why Alicent’s resistance isn’t some personal vendetta against Rhaenyra. It’s a response to a system that has already decided her children are expendable. Any mother in a dynastic society would read the situation the same way: if your sons are denied power, land, and futures, then they are being denied safety. And this is where Viserys truly fails them all. He wants a clean, painless succession without doing the work that would make that possible. He refuses to choose between his daughter and his sons, so he chooses nothing and “nothing” in feudal politics is a decision with consequences. Alicent pushes back because she has to. The structure gives her no other option. In a world where power equals survival, asking her children to “freeload” under their sister’s rule isn’t peace it’s a countdown.
Let’s not forget that Court gossip always exaggerates tensions especially between women.
Misogyny fuels the dramatization of female relationships. In Westerosi court culture, which is like real-world history, women’s interactions are often reduced to catfights or rivalries, regardless of reality. Two powerful women in proximity are expected to hate each other, and even minor disagreements are exaggerated into deep animosity. Court gossip is both performative and strategic: nobles benefit from portraying houses or key figures as unstable or divided. Rumors of enmity between a queen and her heir, for example, could serve multiple political agendas.
If Alicent truly had open and obvious enmity toward Rhaenyra as early as 10, she would have been politically punished for it. Viserys loved Rhaenyra and continued to support her claim even after Alicent bore him sons. If Alicent were openly antagonizing Rhaenyra in court, she would be undermining her own position as queen. There is little concrete textual evidence of her doing that until the war nears. We don’t have a neutral narrator this is filtered through male and biased chroniclers. Much of our perception of Alicent “antagonizing” Rhaenyra comes from sources like Septon Eustace and Mushroom, whose accounts are biased, contradictory, and colored by misogyny.
The idea that Alicent made her hatred “obvious” or “antagonized” Rhaenyra from childhood is likely a distortion rooted in court gossip and misogynistic assumptions. The reality was probably a tense, complicated, and mutual discomfort amplified by sexist tropes and chronicler bias rather than direct personal hostility on Alicent’s part. There’s basically no solid evidence in the books that she’s some Machiavellian villain. Most of it comes from Mushroom or other interpretations that exaggerate her ambition or make her as a foil to Rhaenyra.
THIS IS a very GOOD post about the evil stepmother Alicent by @gwenllian-in-the-abbey here:
💬 2 🔁 75 ❤️ 153 · Do you think that book!Alicent was a one dimensional evil stepmother and the show has fixed her by making her a sad vict
when the show claimed they're gonna do the "real events" (before we all learned what a pile of shit we'd be presented, starting with the age fuckery), I sincerely hoped we'd finally get to see what a pile of stinking shit Viserys really was. Because either he was the two generations of brother-sister incest got his IQ into single digits, or he deliberately constructed the shitshow as some sort of humiliation power play (my personal theory). No one can convince me he was a pure cinnamon bun who couldn't have predicted a war happening, because even a pack of expired frozen veggies could see the conflict brewing from miles away.
The idea that Viserys was some helpless, soft-hearted cinnamon roll who just oopsie-daisied his way into the Dance is one of the most dishonest reframings the show pulled. You’re right: either Viserys was catastrophically incompetent, or he was actively exercising power in the most irresponsible way possible. There is no third option. Because the conflict was not subtle. It was not unforeseeable. It was not some tragic misunderstanding that spiraled out of control. It was visible years decades in advance. As you put it, an expired bag of frozen peas could see it coming.
He named Rhaenyra heir once, under highly specific political circumstances, and then refused to ever adapt that decision to new realities. He remarried and produced multiple legitimate sons, then did absolutely nothing to reconcile that fact with his earlier proclamation. He refused to codify succession law, refused to call a Great Council, refused to extract binding oaths again, refused to clearly define the status and future of his sons. He allowed factions to form openly at court, watched them harden, and then pretended they weren’t there. He failed to secure marriages, lands, offices, or long-term safety for any of his children beyond Rhaenyra.
And the show’s insistence on portraying him as a tragic, gentle man who “just wanted everyone to get along” is frankly insulting to the book and to basic political literacy. Medieval kings didn’t get to opt out of succession planning because it made them sad. Your humiliation-power-play theory honestly makes more sense than the canon framing, because at least it treats Viserys as someone who understood that: Everyone was trapped by his decisions. Everyone had to orbit Rhaenyra because he said so. Alicent and her children were permanently insecure by design. Any resistance could be framed as cruelty or ambition rather than self-preservation.
How Gyldayn “cleans” Viserys
What really grates is that the Gyldayn makes Viserys’s failures onto the women: Alicent is written as aggressive for reacting to an unstable system. Rhaenyra is written as tragic for fighting for a claim that was never structurally secured. Viserys gets to die surrounded by evil people and his “evil wife.” Gyldayn does not deny that bad things happened under Viserys. Instead, he: writes Viserys as emotionally good (“loved his daughter,” “loved his wife”) Treats his failures as personal weaknesses (indecision, illness, grief) Separates intention from consequence so completely that responsibility evaporates. This is classic elite historiography. If a king felt affection, he must not be culpable. Governance failures become vibes problems.
That’s why Viserys is never seriously analyzed as: A king who failed to uphold customary law. A father who destabilized all his children’s futures. A husband who weaponized succession threats inside his marriage. And Viserys' horrible treatment of Alicent aside from his horrific treatment of Aemma Arryn, referring to Alicent’s children as “her blood” is not neutral. It’s distancing language. It frames: Rhaenyra as his child, the extension of his will and Alicent’s children as external, political, almost intrusive. That alone exposes the lie of the “loving father.” and the “loving husband” A man who truly sees all his children as his own does not linguistically other half of them. Gyldayn never questioned this because doing so would require admitting Viserys created the very factionalism he pretends to lament. The threat to name Aegon heir to coerce Rhaenyra into marrying Laenor is even worse. Using one child as leverage against another. Turning succession into a disciplinary tool. Making the throne a threat hanging over his family. Instead, Gyldayn gives us the soft-focus portrait of a man who “meant well” and therefore cannot be blamed.
Once you try to read between the lines and stop taking Gyldayn at face value, a different Viserys emerges: A king who refused to legislate because legislation would limit him. A husband who erased one wife’s children to preserve the fantasy of another. A father who confused affection with responsibility. A ruler who let women absorb the blame for the instability he engineered. Gyldayn doesn’t fail to see this. He chooses not to say it. And that choice — that silence — is itself the most damning indictment of Viserys in the entire book.
Hi! I agree with pretty much all of this, I'm just a little confused. What legislation was Viserys avoiding that would have limited him? The succession comes to mind, and maaaaybe the Stepstones conflict? But I don't understand how naming his surviving son would have been a limitation. Otto was already Hand. Otto was already doing most of the day-to-day ruling, and once Viserys got badly sick it was Otto and Alicent, wasn't it? So its not like it would've given them that much more power in practice? Like, some yes. Some more respect, for the mother of the next king, yes. But how much really?
The Stepstones I can kinda see because it would in a way limit Viserys to having to deal with war which I don't think he was trained for, and diversion of resources to a war effort instead of like. Tourneys?
Would the succession thing have been limiting him to... ?? Having to see to it that Aegon was educated properly? (I got vibes that Aegon didn't have much of a motivation or direction and didn't know much about ruling.)
Honestly it may just be the author choice, assuming its only to try to callback to the Anarchy between Stephen and Matilda of England, that is causing the confusion of Viserys acting like...this. Because it could've been easy to put the debate between Daemon's son (if he's written to have a son) vs Rhaenyra (or her sons). Especially with the question from Jaehaerys back in the Great Council days being "which of my *grandchildren* should inherit" vs "my child or my nephew". You get the Laenor politics, if Daemon had kids with someone other than Laena (let her be a maiden fair, riding off across the sunset, etc, #SingleGirlLife, #JustAGirlAndHerDragon), then Corlys and Rhaenys wouldn't be torn between their kids (or you do have him married to Laena, and you do have Rhaenys and Corlys torn between their kids'/grandkids' claims).
Especially if Rhaenyra is pushing *her* claim, not her sons', the decision for Rhaenys and Corlys, with the decision of 101 looming behind them.... it would be interesting to see how it was handled.
Hi @storm-pirate the issue isn’t about naming an heir. Viserys naming anyone heir is not a limitation. Kings do that all the time. What would limit him is accepting that succession is governed by something other than his personal will. In-world, Viserys wasn’t avoiding one specific written “law” so much as avoiding formalizing limits on royal discretion that already existed by custom. That’s actually the point: Westeros runs on precedent + consent, not codified absolutism. What he avoided (or refused to clarify) can be grouped into three things:
A Great Council (the big one). A Great Council is the closest thing Westeros has to constitutional legislation. It sets binding precedent on succession (like the Great Council of 101). Once called, the king is implicitly accepting that the lords have a say. Viserys never calls another one after naming Rhaenyra, even when the situation radically changes (male heirs, rival claims, obvious factionalism). Calling a Great Council would have: Limited his personal authority. Forced a realm-wide decision. Likely reaffirmed male-preference succession. So he avoids it.
Codifying succession law. Westeros has customary law, not statute law. Viserys never: rewrites inheritance rules, abolishes male-preference primogeniture, creates a clear legal framework for female succession and resolves the bastardy issue of Rhaenyra’s sons in law. Because once succession is codified, it applies beyond him to other houses, future kings, and future disputes. He prefers: “The king has decided” over “The realm has agreed”
Limits on royal power over inheritance. If Viserys formally established that: a king can override succession customs at will then every lord in Westeros would immediately ask: Can my liege do that to me? Can the crown disinherit my sons? Can daughters suddenly unseat brothers? That would provoke pushback from the entire nobility. So Viserys keeps things intentionally vague, ruling by personal authority instead of law which works only while he’s alive.
By avoiding anything that would “limit” him: councils, laws, binding precedents. Viserys actually ensures chaos. Because the moment he dies: there is no shared legal framework only competing interpretations of cus. Viserys avoided the very mechanisms that could have stabilized the realm, because they would have required him to stop acting like an absolute monarch in a system that never truly allowed absolutism.
You’re absolutely right: Daemon’s hypothetical son would have fixed everything. If GRRM had: given Daemon a legitimate son early or even just kept the possibility alive longer. You’d get a much cleaner crisis: Rhaenyra vs Daemon’s son. The dance makes no sense.
People saw Visenya and maegor fight against the faith of the seven and assumed that the faith doesn’t exists within house Targaryen and that alicent having the faith as her religion is fucking horrible.
Alysanne literally sent her daughter Maegelle to become a septa as a thanks to the mother for giving her many children. her son Vaegon became an archmaester and studied at old town.
Aegon the conqueror was literally crowned by the high septon and so was Jahaerys I. Princess Daella didn’t marry Royce blackwood because he believed in the old gods instead of the faith of the seven.
So the faith of the seven isn’t just something alicent brought into the house Targaryen to go against them. By her time, most of them were already part of the faith and believed in it.
Also having her faith is not a bad thing! Just because she decorated the castle with the faith symbols doesn’t mean she was changing everything! The Targaryens symbols were still everywhere, which are dragons.
The dragons are the symbol of house Targaryen and the faith of the seven is everything to house Hightower. And Alicent is the current queen and a Hightower who has Targaryen children. So it’s not wrong to combine both symbols of the families.
Also, I wanna say, the Seat of House Targaryen is Dragonstone, the Red Keep, and the Holdfast are home to the Rulers of Westeros and as such, symbols of Westeros itself. How the fuck are you gonna call yourself King of the Andals, the Rhoynar and the First Men and have none of those symbols under your roof?
Literally! If you want to be King of the Andals, the Rhoynar, and the First Men, you better damn well live like it and your castles better reflect that claim.
Jaehaerys I explicitly binds the crown to the Faith, promising protection of the Faithful as part of his kingship. The Conciliator doesn’t just end the war he rewrites the social contract.
Alysanne wanting her pregnancy blessed at a sacred spring matters bc it shows how deeply normalized this synthesis had become. Even the most powerful dragonriding woman in Westeros still participates in Faith ritual when it comes to birth.
Aegon I dates his reign from his anointing by the High Septon, not from the Field of Fire, not from the submission of Harrenhal, not from Balerion burning castles. Legitimacy is religious before it is military.
After Maegor, the Targaryens understand that dragons alone are not enough. You cannot rule Westeros as a permanent occupying force. So when ppl claims that Rhaenyra, or this generation of Targaryens, are “anti-Faith,” what they’re really doing is projecting modern secular/religious binaries onto a medieval setting where religion functions as infrastructure. No one who intends to rule seriously rejects that infrastructure.
Even Maegor is remembered as a tyrant because he broke that compact. His war with the Faith isn’t written as brave rebellion it’s written as catastrophic overreach that nearly destroys the dynasty. Everything after that is corrective.
The Targaryens are Valyrian dragonlords by blood, but they are Westerosi monarchs by practice. The Faith is part of how their rule is made acceptable.
criston cole and jaime lannister are so fascinating because they both represent the masculine ideal of chivalry and knighthood, but at the same time their stories are “feminine” stories, in which love means everything to them and they prioritize it over anything and they suffer because of it. and i think that’s beautiful.
The letter reads like it was written for a world that does not exist anymore. Rhaenyra writes as if old blood ties still outweigh material incentives and reminding Borros that his father was loyal. But Borros isn’t his father. That’s the whole problem. Now in a feudal system, loyalty is transactional, not hereditary. The Greens understand that immediately and show up with the one thing that actually matters: a royal marriage. That’s land, heirs, prestige, permanence. Rhaenyra shows up with memory, and a promise to “reward” him later.
And the timing makes it worse. She’s already lost King’s Landing, already framed as the destabilizing claimant, already the side that needs him. That puts her in a weak bargaining position, and the letter never acknowledges that reality. What really kills it is that the letter assumes the oath is still active. But: Borros never swore it himself as lord, the oath predates Aegon’s birth and Viserys never reaffirmed it. So from Borros’s POV, she’s asking him to risk his house on an outdated promise with no concrete gain.
Compare that to Matilda: the oaths weren’t a one-off childhood ceremony that people could later hand-wave away. Henry I didn’t just make the barons swear once and move on he forced them to swear repeatedly, across different political moments, as adults, with full awareness of what they were promising. Some swore to her after she was widowed, some after she remarried, some after she had a son.
Viserys didn’t do that. Rhaenyra’s letter feels like she still believes her claim is self-evident when the entire war exists because it isn’t. Viserys never reconvened the realm to re-swear after Aegon was born. So when Borros Baratheon shrugs and says “what’s in it for me?” he’s not being dishonorable he’s behaving exactly like a feudal lord is incentivized to behave. And that’s the difference with Matilda: Matilda’s claim failed despite repeated oaths. Rhaenyra’s claim failed after a single, strategically weak oath-taking that Viserys treated as permanent when it absolutely wasn’t.
Ser Jaime Lannister, KG. Appointed at 15 because a king wanted to spite his dad. Served under: Aerys II (killed him), Robert Baratheon (cucked him), Joffrey Baratheon (fathered him kid died on his watch) Tommen Baratheon (fathered him kid died on his watch) and Cersei Lannister (queen, sister, lover, final employer, also died)
Key accomplishments: Broke every vow except “wear white” Regicide (prevented mass murder, got zero credit). Adultery with the queen (ongoing) Incest (advanced difficulty) Failed to protect every royal child he fathered. Lost a hand, kept the job and became the cautionary tale and the legend.
Sansa Stark gets endlessly hated by this fandom for falling in love with someone handsome, noble-looking, and charming and for not immediately recognizing his cruelty. Meanwhile, the same people openly glazes and defends Aerion, Maegor, Daemon, and Aemond because they’re handsome, silver-haired, and ride dragons. They don’t forgive cruelty. They just forgive it when it comes with silver hair, a dragon, and a cool soundtrack.
See Sansa is an “idiot” for failing to see the cruelty and red flags. That’s too real for a lot of these people. But if you go in knowing they’re all POS’s then it’s “cool and sexy” and they can daydream about being the one to “fix” him, or just revel in the cruelty.
Sansa is the victim and those people don’t want to acknowledge the victims because that ruins the “fun” because acknowledgment of the fallout of the cruelty isn’t fun. So she has to be an idiot so everyone else can go back to liking the “evil” characters without feeling like it says something about them morally.
Never mind that it says more about you that you have to justify liking a character to the point where you degrade a victim (even fictional victims) so you don’t have to engage with the actual actions of said character.
It’s fine to like evil characters just don’t drag their victims or make excuses for them. That says more about you than just liking the character.
Fire & Blood isn’t written to tell us what happened. We already know the endpoints. It’s written to ask why power that looks absolute is actually fragile, and what kind of power accelerates its own collapse. The Targaryens don’t fall because dragons die or because the Starks are “meant” to rule the North again. They fall because the very tools that let them conquer at god-speed corrode the human systems needed to sustain rule.
The Targaryens conquered Westeros without consent, without shared institutions, and without integration. Dragons replaced legitimacy. Fear replaced law. Blood replaced accountability. That works fast. It does not work long. Conquest took three years. Collapse took three centuries. That ratio is the thesis. Every generation inherits power they didn’t earn and weapons they don’t understand. The dynasty becomes obsessed with purity, exceptionalism, and myth instead of governance. They start confusing survival with destiny.
Dragons don’t just destroy enemies. They: Remove the need for compromise. Eliminate feedback loops. Reward impulsive rulers. Turn internal family conflict into mass death. The Dance isn’t an accident. It’s an inevitability once a family holds WMDs with no succession system strong enough to contain them.
And this is where your Stark point matters: The Starks ending where they began is not narrative stagnation it’s contrast. The Starks rule slowly, locally, and without shortcuts. No divine claim. No superweapons. Their power is boring, limited, and renewable. They lose Winterfell, regain it, lose it again, regain it again. That’s what sustainable rule looks like in ASOIAF: not permanence, but recoverability.
The story asks: Why did one house burn across a continent and implode, while another stayed small and endured? Fire & Blood answers that by showing the Targaryens mistaking dominance for stability and myth for legitimacy.
And Daenerys sits at the end of that arc on purpose. She isn’t a random Targaryen. She’s the final stress test of the system: Can a Targaryen rule without dragons being the point? The answer GRRM gives is brutal and consistent: No. Because by then, the dynasty doesn’t know how. So the ending isn’t “back where we started.” It’s proof that the starting point mattered all along.
The Targaryens conquered Westeros without consent, without shared institutions, and without integration. Dragons replaced legitimacy. Fear replaced law. Blood replaced accountability. That works fast. It does not work long. Conquest took three years. Collapse took three centuries. That ratio is the thesis. Every generation inherits power they didn’t earn and weapons they don’t understand. The dynasty becomes obsessed with purity, exceptionalism, and myth instead of governance. They start confusing survival with destiny.
Lmao, what? Everyone conquered Westeros without consent, without shared institutions and without integration. In fact, it was the Targaryens who DID integrate themselves to what was already there (big mistake)
Fear has always been the law of Westeros, since the FM began cutting sacred trees. Legitimacy was never there to begin with, nor was accountability.
Three hundred years is a lot for a dynasty to last, actually, George is simply bad at numbers and how long should anyone reign. That's why we don't see evolution on the science or the society.
Funny enough, some evolution came alone with the Targaryens, who you hate, but did not stay long because the other Westerosi lords did not like it.
Power they didn't earn, so like literally every heir of any other house? Weapons they didn't understand. Weapons, really? Dragons aren't weapons, they're animals necessary for the survival of Planetos.
The dynasty does not become obsessed, some men do and some men don't. Some are good at ruling and care about that, some don't.
But it was destiny, was it not? For it was Daenerys and no other who woke the dragons from the stone, so their survival led to this girl of their blood who is they key to end the Long Night. Isn't that destiny?
And not even going with the Stark, 'cause holy shit, what even.
I love how Targaryen stans can’t defend their fav house without pointing at other terrible people who did similar things. Every time when I criticize Targaryen actions, the response is basically: “Well, others did it too.” It’s like criticizing Nazis and someone replying, “Okay, but other regimes also committed atrocities.” Saying “everyone was horrible” doesn’t absolve the Targaryens of firebombing cities, ruling through fear, or using dragons as weapons of mass destruction. It just confirms that feudal dynasties built on conquest are bad especially the ones with nukes. Pointing out that: other houses committed crimes, other dynasties were violent, other cultures were brutal, does nothing to negate the specific harm the Targaryens caused with dragons, blood purity ideology, incest, and divine exceptionalism. You can like a house and admit it was destructive. You can enjoy the fantasy without turning critique into a competition of “who was worse.”
First: “Everyone conquered Westeros without consent.” This is true in the most meaningless possible way. Yes, feudalism is violent. No one disputes that. But scale and method matter. The Targaryens didn’t just conquer; they introduced an extinction-level asymmetry. Dragons aren’t equivalent to swords, banners, or even normal warfare. They erase cities, bloodlines in minutes. Saying “everyone used violence” is like equating a knife fight to nuclear fire because both involve harm.
Second: “The Targaryens integrated themselves.” My ass. They brought dragons, slaves, and inbreeding. They Kept marrying sisters. They landed on Dragonstone with dragons and slaves, Integration implies cooperation and respect. The Targaryens gave neither. Big mistake? Sure if your idea of “integration” actually means colonial conquest with fire, blood, slavery, and bloodline purity. Omg I’m not even gonna get into this shit.
Third: “Fear has always been the law of Westeros.” Okay…?? So that makes everything the Targaryens did “justified” now? Cool. So tyranny is tradition now. Got it. Fear exists everywhere, but dragons institutionalize terror. They turn fear into a permanent political technology. When legitimacy rests on “we can end you from the sky,” accountability collapses by definition. Aegon melting Harrenhal is not interchangeable acts.
Fourth: “Three hundred years is a long time; GRRM is bad with numbers.” This is cope. Not when half that time is rebellions, civil wars, massacres, dragon-on-dragon genocide, and legitimacy crises. Three hundred years is short for a dynasty that claims divine blood, prophetic destiny, and godlike weapons. Especially when other houses last thousands of years without dragons. The lack of social, scientific, or institutional evolution under Targaryen rule isn’t a math problem it’s a thematic one. Their power stagnates the system because nothing has to change when you rule by fire.
Fifth: “Some evolution came with the Targaryens.” The Targaryens didn’t evolve they went from sheep-fucking in Valyria to sister-fucking on Dragonstone. That’s your so-called progress. The Targaryens brought slaves from Valyria when they landed on Dragonstone to escape the Doom, treated themselves as above everyone else, and ruled through fear and fire. That is not evolution. That is entitlement masquerading as greatness. Meanwhile, the Hightowers were cataloguing all the knowledge and history in the world long before the first inbred Valyrian dragonlords stopped screwing each other. Dorne is the only place in Westeros I’d call “evolving” in some ways everywhere else is just repeating the same brutal cycles of power and privilege. What actually changes under the Targaryens is centralized autocracy, not progress. And when reforms do appear, they vanish the moment a dragonlord dislikes them which tells you everything about how fragile and unserious that “evolution” was.
Sixth: “Weapons they didn't understand. Weapons, really? Dragons aren't weapons, they're animals necessary for the survival of Planetos.”
Also GRRM:
Question: Why do you think the political institutions in the Seven Kingdoms are so weak?
GRRM: The Kingdom was unified with dragons, so the Targaryen’s flaw was to create an absolute monarchy highly dependent on them, with the small council not designed to be a real check and balance. So, without dragons it took a sneeze, a wildly incompetent and megalomaniac king, a love struck prince, a brutal civil war, a dissolute king that didn’t really know what to do with the throne and then chaos.
And:
Vulture: When civilizations clash in your books, instead of Guns, Germs, and Steel, maybe it’s more like Dragons, Magic, and Steel (and also Germs).
GRRM: There is magic in my universe, but it’s pretty low magic compared to other fantasies.
Dragons are the nuclear deterrent, and only Dany has them, which in some ways makes her the most powerful person in the world. But is that sufficient? These are the kind of issues I’m trying to explore. The United States right now has the ability to destroy the world with our nuclear arsenal, but that doesn’t mean we can achieve specific geopolitical goals. Power is more subtle than that. You can have the power to destroy, but it doesn’t give you the power to reform, or improve, or build. —Vulture 2014
And:
Interviewer: Do you think it's possible to have a dragon and live a benevolent life? Or would you inherently get pulled into using that power?
George: That's an interesting question… It's often been said that the dragons are the nuclear weapons of my imaginary world. They are the most devastating weapon and they cause great destruction and massive loss of life… This is part of Dany's storyline in the original novels. Dany has three dragons, but that doesn't mean she can necessarily rule cities like Meereen, where she finds herself Queen, easily, without destroying them… I'm a baby boomer, born in 1948, and, growing up in the 50’s, there was always the spectre of nuclear war. I lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis and Khrushchev and saber-rattling and there were all these books about the nuclear Holocaust or about Armageddon... We were worried about that, but these nuclear weapons have only been used twice in all of history on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Afterwards there was a long period where only America had nuclear weapons, nobody else in the world had them, and there were always these concerns about “well, we can win any of these wars”. MacArthur and some other people wanted to use the atomic bomb in the Korean War. When China invaded, the thought process was “why are we letting them do that? We could win the war!”… Barry Goldwater, in the 1964 election, also thought “Why are we fighting this war in Vietnam? Let's just drop a nuke on Hanoi.”… But we never did it, we always refrained. We were the dragon riders that would only use our dragons to intimidate… but now as more and more countries have that, I think the danger becomes greater and greater and someday someone is going to use them. Right now the danger is very high, if Putin starts losing the war in Ukraine is he going to resort to nukes? And then the question becomes “if Putin does resort to nukes, does America unleash it’s dragons or do we not and let him get away with it?”. These are profound questions, we could debate this for an hour with a panel of political scientists, but there’s not an easy answer.
Martin compares dragons to nuclear weapons in real life. His point is that dragons are incredibly powerful and destructive, capable of wiping out entire cities, just like nukes can.
And:
“I have tried to make it explicit in the novels that the dragons are destructive forces, and Dany (Daenerys Targaryen) has found that out as she tried to rule the city of Meereen and be queen there.
‘THE POWER TO DESTROY’
“She has the power to destroy, she can wipe out entire cities, and we certainly see that in ‘Fire and Blood,’ we see the dragons wiping out entire armies, wiping out towns and cities, destroying them, but that doesn’t necessarily enable you to rule — it just enables you to destroy.” —Fox News Channel - November 2018
And:
Esquire: How will Fire & Blood deepen our understanding of Daenerys and her dragons?
GRRM: This is a book that Daenerys might actually benefit from reading, but she has no access to Archermaester Gyldayn’s crumbling manuscripts. So she’s operating on her own there. Maybe if she understood a few things more about dragons and her own history in Essos, things would have gone a little differently. —Esquire - November 2018
And:
The Guardian: And the dragons? GRRM: “Oh sure, dragons are cool too,” he chuckles. “But maybe not on our doorstep”. —The Guardian - November 2018
And
Interviewer: We now know that Dany is destined to rule Westeros, but it seems that the Lannisters are in disarray, who would be the next major adversary, the Others?
GRRM: Ahhhhhh… Uhmmmmmm… Well, I don’t know that I know that Dany is destined to rule Westeros, I think that’s something very much that’s gonna be explored in the novels to come, certainly Dany would be returning to Westeros, I think most people can agree on that, but she has a lot of adversaries who may take issue with the assumption of a resumed Targaryen rule. – random house interview- 2005
What drives Dany? With Dany I’m particularly looking at the… what effect great power has upon a person. She’s the mother of dragons, and she controls what is in effect the only three nuclear weapons in the entire world that I’ve created. What does it do to you when you control the only three nuclear weapons in the world and you can destroy entire cities or cultures if you choose to? Should you choose to, should you not choose to? — interview
And
The Targaryens are also an ancient house but they're not an ancient Westerosi house. They knew that destruction was coming to Valyria and went far away from the capital city and the settled on the volcanic island of Dragonstone. They were dragon lords in Valyria. Now dragons are really formidable and they can turn the tide of a battle. It flies, it's difficult to hit, it breathes fire, against which most knights and men at arms have little or no protection. So if you have dragons, that's were the nuclear option analogy comes in. You're hard to mess around with. So the dragons and fear of dragons was one of the things that made the Targaryens very secure in their power. - GRRM
And
balinares
I'd agree... except DRACO. Draco Draco Draco. Nicest dragon ever. If the Cocteau ever does a dragon event, I sure hope Dragonheart will be on the list, because intelligent, friendly dragons need more recognition. Doesn't hurt when they're voiced by Sean Connery, either. (...)
volk_nn
Draco is the most friendly and charming dragon of media culture, IMHO =)
grrm
Yes, but dragons are not meant to be friendly or charming. —Coolest Dragons Ever" (Feb. 10th, 2014)
And:
I’ve said many times I don’t like thinly disguised allegory, but certain scenes do resonate over time. Other people have made the argument, which is more more contemporary, that it might have resonances with our current misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. I’m aware of the parallels, but I’m not trying to slap a coat of paint on the Iraq War and call it fantasy.
When civilizations clash in your books, instead of Guns, Germs, and Steel, maybe it’s more like Dragons, Magic, and Steel (and also Germs).
There is magic in my universe, but it’s pretty low magic compared to other fantasies.
Dragons are the nuclear deterrent, and only Dany has them, which in some ways makes her the most powerful person in the world. But is that sufficient? These are the kind of issues I’m trying to explore. The United States right now has the ability to destroy the world with our nuclear arsenal, but that doesn’t mean we can achieve specific geopolitical goals.
Power is more subtle than that. You can have the power to destroy, but it doesn’t give you the power to reform, or improve, or build.—GRRM - Vulture - 2011
And:
It’s what makes Cersei Lannister the way she is, and is she capable of learning and changing? What drives Dany? With Dany I’m particularly looking at the… what effect great power has upon a person. She’s the mother of dragons, and she controls what is in effect the only three nuclear weapons in the entire world that I’ve created. What does it do to you when you control the only three nuclear weapons in the world and you can destroy entire cities or cultures if you choose to? Should you choose to, should you not choose to? —“Interview exclusive de George R R Martin, l'auteur de Game Of Thrones” de -Le Mouv’- 2014
And
- I'm not even going to try to scratch out of you details about the plot of future books! But in your world, dragons are some kind of superweapon. Nuclear bombs of Westeros.
GRRM: It is, yes. Nuclear weapon. This book that you are holding now is this big one, “The World of Ice and Fire” - this is the history of the entire world of Westeros, written by me together with Elio Garcia and Linda Antonsson - legends, and all about the Targaryen kings. There are excellent illustrations. Among other things, it talks about dragons in the days when the Targaryens had dragons. They held them for 150 years, and the great war, A Dance with Dragons, was a civil war where dragons fought against each other. There is a lot about the power of dragons and how hard it is to kill them. But on the other hand, many dragons died then, because they are still not invincible and not immortal. They are difficult to kill, but possible. And, of course, they can kill each other. So it's all there. Does this anticipate major events in the cycle... we'll have to wait and see. —George R.R. Martin in Hamburg: "Dragons are cool!" - 2015
What sort of servile self-denial are you trying to espouse?
It’s like arguing the sword isn’t a weapon because it’s “alive” in a metaphorical sense. And If destiny justifies everything, then nothing can ever be criticized. I never said the Targaryens are uniquely evil. It’s “they are uniquely destructive because of the tools they chose to center their power on.” That distinction matters. They are like other houses in one crucial sense: if any great house had dragons, they would be tempted to do the same thing. But this should NOT be an excuse.
From HERE:
They very much are just like every other house and if the Baratheons or Martells or Lannisters had access to dragons you can bet they’d eventually conquer Westeros too. The trick is not to excuse their actions. Aegon pacified the Seven Kingdoms that were “constantly at war” with each other. As if border squabbles are anywhere near the devastation the Targaryens wrought with their conquest and subsequent civil wars for the throne. As if this isn’t the same excuse used by IRL powers to invade other countries. The same for the “prophecy” excuse. Aegon had lots of options besides burning the seven kingdoms to the ground to “unite” them to prepare Westeros for the eventual Long Night. But in his pride and hubris he set up a system doomed to failure and which his descendants were given the tools to eventually leave Westeros is a far worse position to defend against the apocalypse than if Aegon and his family had just sat tight until the “end times” with their dragons. The Targaryens are cool. The dragons are cool. But too many fans confuse these literal war machines with the dragons from modern media. They’re not like Toothless they’re (in Martin’s own words) a nuclear equivalent and the Targaryens were all too happy to unleash them on each other and their enemies and civilians alike. The Targaryens were set up from the start to fail. Martin did that on purpose and if, after reading everything the Targaryens did to the civilians they were supposed to “rule”, you still think they’re the “good guys” then I don’t know what to tell you. The Targaryens are not the heroes. They’re not the liberators. Their legacy is one of fire and death and the sooner Jon, Dany and Aegon reject that legacy and go on to build new and better, the better off they’ll be. Though I have a feeling one or more of them will instead embrace that legacy and ultimately, just like their ancestors in Valyria and later Westeros, will go out in a blaze of horror and death and take thousands with them.
The starks
Anyway… when I said: “And this is where Stark point matters: The Starks ending where they began is not narrative stagnation it’s contrast. The Starks rule slowly, locally, and without shortcuts. No divine claim. No superweapons. Their power is boring, limited, and renewable. They lose Winterfell, regain it, lose it again, regain it again. That’s what sustainable rule looks like in ASOIAF: not permanence, but recoverability.”
I was talking specifically about the Starks in the story’s present timeline (AGoT through the end of Asoiaf / [GoT show]) I said things like “ending where they began” and “lose Winterfell, regain it”. That’s about what happens to the Starks in the show GoT, not about the old history of the North. And when I said slowly, locally, without shortcuts, no divine claim, no [superweapons]. This is a critique of the current model of power in the narrative. That’s about how the Starks rule in the show/books, not about what their ancestors did but about losing and getting Winterfell back again is specific to the characters’ journey, not history. History doesn’t repeat that exact same thing.
GRRM: Whenever I propose analogies like that, fans jump in with their own ideas, but it depends on what team you root for. To me, the Starks are heroes, so they would be the Giants.
Btw, GRRM is very obviously not pro blood-purity, colonialism, feudalism or absolutism or racial supremacy if that somehow wasn’t clear to you. So I genuinely don’t know how some people thought this story was going to end. With the restoration of empire? With the narrative validating bloodline superiority and conquest as “necessary”? ASOIAF has spent thousands of pages tearing those ideas apart. The point isn’t that dragons make you a good ruler. The point is that power fantasies built on purity myths and overwhelming violence always collapse and take innocent people with them.
GRRM has repeatedly made ASOIAF not as a Targaryen-centered saga, but as a story about House Stark: their struggles, losses, resilience, and eventual restoration. The “return to glory of a great family” line from an interview naturally made people think Targaryens because of dragons and conquest, but GRRM has clarified multiple times that the emotional and narrative heart of the series is the Starks.
This has also been backed up by Bryan Cogman and even D&D in interviews and panels. The narrative isn’t about restoring an empire or validating dragons it’s about the Starks reclaiming their place in the world.
If you’re genuinely crying under every post that criticizes your inbreeding dragon monarchs, the block button is right there. Free. Accessible. Revolutionary, even.
People really say “I hate the Hightowers because they’re religious fanatics and zealots” with their whole chest, and then turn around and stan a dynasty that openly practices incest and calls it sacred, pushes blood-purity rhetoric about being “closer to gods,” historically practiced polygamy, used dragons as weapons of mass terror to enforce rule, and has lore drenched in blood magic and human-sacrifice-adjacent nonsense. A family whose entire political philosophy boils down to “we’re different, therefore the law bends for us.” But yeah, sure, the real danger to Westeros is… the Seven and the Hightowers.
What makes it even funnier is that the Faith of the Seven, for all its very real flaws, is at least grounded in the social fabric of the realm. It explicitly bans slavery, condemns human sacrifice, places moral limits on rulers (even if unevenly applied), and broadly reflects the values of the majority of Westerosi people. It’s not perfect, but it’s a stabilizing institution in a feudal society that desperately needs checks on raw power.
Meanwhile Targaryen ideology is basically: we’re hot, we ride flying nukes, our family tree is a circle, and therefore we rule. There’s no accountability there, just vibes, terror, and inherited supremacy. Calling that progressive or enlightened is genuinely wild. That’s not liberation politics, that’s a supremacist cult with good aesthetics.
And that’s the real tell, honestly. What people actually mean isn’t “I oppose fanaticism.” It’s “I oppose fanaticism when it inconveniences my faves.” They’re completely fine with extremism, exceptionalism, and authoritarian rule as long as it’s dragon-coded and silver-haired. The issue isn’t zealotry it’s whether the zealotry is hot. If the Hightowers dressed like Valyrians, spoke in prophecy riddles, and rode dragons, ppl would be writing dissertations about how the Faith is “deep,” “morally complex,” and “misunderstood.”
The Dance does not start because the Hightowers randomly woke up evil one morning. It starts because the Targaryens spent generations creating the most unstable ruling system imaginable. refused to codify succession law, relied on vibes and dragons instead of institutions, and treated precedent like a suggestion rather than a rule. Viserys named an heir and then did absolutely nothing to secure that decision politically or legally. He let rival claimants exist at the same time, ignored the implications of having legitimate sons after naming a daughter, and assumed everyone would just behave because he said so. The Hightowers didn’t invent male-preference inheritance. They didn’t invent the Great Council precedent. They didn’t invent the idea that multiple plausible heirs can exist at once in a feudal system. They just acted within a system the Targaryens had already broken and refused to repair. Acting inside an existing political framework isn’t villainy, it’s literally how feudal politics works.
Which is why “the Hightowers started the war” is pure cope. Viserys created a dual-claim crisis. Rhaenyra and Aegon were both legally plausible depending on which precedents you prioritize. The realm was split ideologically long before a crown touched Aegon’s head. A war that inevitable isn’t “started” by one house. Blaming the Hightowers is like blaming a match instead of the oil-soaked room.
The funniest contradiction of all is when Targ stans say “Westeros is an absolute monarchy, Viserys’ word is law” and in the same breath insist the Hightowers are evil for using religion and politics. Pick one. Because if monarchy is absolute, Otto advising policy is normal, Alicent securing her son is rational, and religion and nobility shouldn’t matter. And if monarchy isn’t absolute which is what the book actually supports then the Hightowers are doing standard feudal politics, the Targaryens are the destabilizing force, and dragons are the problem, not the solution. So yeah. The Dance is self-inflicted Targaryen disaster. The Hightowers didn’t invent the conflict. The Seven didn’t cause the war. Dragon incest blood-magic conquerors are not morally superior just because they’re cool and silver-haired. Hate the Hightowers if you want, but at least hate them for real reasons not because they didn’t worship flying nukes.
People need to stop treat Westeros like an absolute monarchy, where the king’s word overrides law, precedent, religion, and noble power. As if Viserys were Louis XIV saying l’état, c’est moi and everyone just had to nod along. That is not the political system of Westeros.
Westeros is a feudal, consensus-based monarchy, not an absolutist one. The king rules with the great lords, precedent and custom, inheritance law, the Faith, and political reality. A king can push against tradition, but he cannot erase it by decree and expect it to hold after his death. That’s the crucial part Team Black ignores: Viserys’s power ended the moment he died. Naming Rhaenyra heir did not rewrite succession law. It created a disputed exception that only functioned while he was alive to enforce it. Once he’s gone, his wishes are just one factor among many not divine law.
If Westeros were truly an absolute monarchy, oaths wouldn’t matter, coronations wouldn’t matter, precedent wouldn’t matter, the Faith wouldn’t matter, the Great Council of 101 wouldn’t matter. But all of those things do matter repeatedly, across the entire history of the setting. Even Aegon the Conqueror ruled by compromise: he preserved Andal law, he negotiated with the Faith, he confirmed lordly rights, he did not rule by pure fiat. And Viserys is nowhere near Aegon’s level of authority, dragons or no dragons.
So when people argue: “Viserys said it, therefore it’s law” what they’re actually saying is: “I’m importing a modern absolutist model into a medieval feudal setting because it makes my fave look more legitimate.” Westeros doesn’t work like France under Louis XIV.
And the Dance exists precisely because Viserys tried to act like an absolute monarch in a system that absolutely was not.
Jon Snow is sixteen and his brain goes “wait… hope? optimism? future-oriented thinking?” and immediately short-circuits like bro why am I acting like a fifteen-year-old rn. Sir. You ARE a child. The system has failed you.
This kid had one calendar year that was just sent to the North, identity crisis speedrun, uncle gone, hazed, found community, dad murdered, life sentence at 14, first field trip = near-death experience, separated from friends, forced to kill his mentor, goes undercover, falls in love, climbs a 700ft wall twice, betrays his girlfriend, loses another dad, saves the world on vibes and PTSD, loses that dad too, girlfriend dies in his arms, brothers “dead,” accidentally wins student council president, immediately enters political hell.
And all of this before his voice even fully drops.
People really expect Jon to be this flawless stoic war general when he’s basically a sophomore who got drafted into the apocalypse. Like yeah, everything goes downhill after the election, that’s what happens when you give a traumatized teen power and zero emotional support.
“Worst year of his life” doesn’t even cover it. It’s more like the worst coming-of-age story ever written. No prom, no guidance counselor, just murder, vows, and existential dread. Honestly, the most unrealistic part of ASOIAF is that Jon hasn’t just laid down in the snow and gone “actually? no.”
You forgot that he successfully negotiated what is essentially a multi million dollar loan to prepare for the apocalypse. And he did all that before he’d be legally allowed to drink by our standards.
it's so fascinating to me how every single youtube video essayist consistently concludes that the reason why house of the dragon season 2 was bad is because it only had 8 episodes and no battle at the end. i hate to be the bearer of bad news, but 2 more hours of incoherent misogyny and extremely fake looking dragon battles was not going to significantly change our lives. game of thrones season 8 also had a battle at the end and was still bad.
call me crazy but maybe if you hire an amateur showrunner solely obsessed with asoiaf deep lore, you're going to end up with a show that largely ignores the original social stakes of the world and uses the characters as vessels to glorify the worldbuilding that he thinks is cool. maybe you're going to end up with a show completely devoid of any satisfying relationships, arcs, or touching emotional core
i agree theoretically that to adapt a story at the scale of asoiaf, more episodes is better than less. but episode quantity doesn't affect quality of the story if the showrunners aren't actually talented, experienced, or knowledgeable about the book and themes they're adapting. the fundamental issues with hotd can't be fixed with more episodes because it's not just that the story was rushed. it's that the show presents completely opposite philosophies, characters, and motivations from what existed in the books (and sometimes from what existed last season or mere episodes ago), while still expecting the story to cohere in an emotional, thrilling, and logical way.
A lot of video essayists fall into this trap too. Waaaaaay to many get caught up in the “world building” which is admittedly incredible but never bother to engage with what the world of Ice and Fire is trying to tell them.
Which leads to incoherent messes like HotD. An inconsistent world but with no story to tell. And if the story is nonsensical and inconsistent then all the best world building you could cram in doesn’t matter. Because if the story is boring then the world it takes place in is boring too.
That’s the problem. Too many people want a sand box they can play in or a wiki page to fill out and don’t actually care about the world being adapted and what message the author is trying to convey through the world and characters inside of it.
Martin’s world isn’t some place you can just slap your own half assed message about “misogyny and patriarchy bad” (which like yeah we know guys do something more interesting) and expect it to be received well. The world building works because it seamlessly meshes with the characters inside-they make choices based on the world and system around them and the system is a product of their choices.
Shoving modern day morals into a medieval world doesn’t work. Why would these characters have progressive ideals when they are the ones who built and benefit from the system in place??? Why are you creating a “chosen savior” narrative from a book series that repeatedly rips that idea to shreds??? Why are you using “prophecy” to justify your heroine when we already know the prophecy isn’t true from GoT???
The story doesn’t fit the world anymore. And when that happens the world stops being interesting. All the “deep lore” and “more episodes” in the world can’t fix that.
fic rec for people who somehow still follow this blog!!
like a banner into battle by branwyn
Doran, ruling prince of Dorne, arrives in King's Landing to discuss the proposed betrothal of his son Prince Trystane to the King's sister, Princess Myrcella.
His entourage arrives at the doors of the throne room JUST in time to see Meryn Trant tear Sansa Stark's gown open and beat her with his sword.
it's simply SO good and unfortunately unfinished, but like, worth it, def. fair warning -- it's nothing explicit, but you have clear pairings of sansa/oberyn & sansa/doran
gamechangershow
kianamaiart
amandla
prguitarman
tangentwithtanner
pixelskylines
snowghoul
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
