The Blue Butterfly
The blue butterfly is a symbol of transformation, good fortune, and hope. Helaena becomes a blue butterfly upon her death, joining the others, and finds her way back to Alicent. And the fact that it's specifically blue makes Alicent notice it. It's the blue they've both been wearing since the end of last season. The color that has increasingly connected mother and daughter visually. The blue associated with House Florent—Alicent's mother's house—and therefore with Alicent's own lost maternal lineage. Has Alicent ever told Helaena that, ever since she was a little girl, she found comfort in imagining that her mother was near whenever a swarm of blue butterflies appeared? Does Helaena remember? Is this her final act as Alicent's daughter?
Alicent loses her mother as a child and spends the rest of her life searching for traces of her in Helaena. Helaena loses her life and chooses to leave behind exactly the kind of trace she knows her mother will understand. She becomes the sign, the comfort, the thing Alicent once looked toward when she needed to believe that someone she loved wasn't truly gone.
There's something so beautiful about Helaena's transformation being framed not simply as death, but as release. She wanted freedom, and now she finally has it. The girl who spent her entire life trapped by the Red Keep, by marriage, by motherhood, by prophecy, by other people's wars, is suddenly something weightless, something that can fly, and instead of flying away from everything that hurt her, she finds her way back to her mother.
The butterfly is Helaena saying goodbye, and Helaena trying to make her death survivable for Alicent. Helaena is saying, "Mummy, I might be gone, but you need to continue living, you need to go on, please find the hope and the comfort you need to move on. I'll always be with you, I'll always love you." Helaena's final gift to Alicent is hope. For once, Helaena isn't telling her mother what is going to happen. She's telling her that whatever happens next, she has to live through it.
As a blue butterfly, her daughter has returned to her and finally found the freedom she always wanted. As a blue butterfly, Helaena offers Alicent comfort, assuring her that she chose this for herself and that she is finally free. As a blue butterfly, Helaena tells Alicent that she is not to blame. As a blue butterfly, Helaena informs her mother of her own passing, reaching out to her one last time to lighten the burden of her grief so that Alicent won't spend the rest of her life blaming herself.
That is Helaena's final act as a daughter, trying to comfort her mother even in death. And Alicent sees the blue butterfly as a symbol and seems to understand.
