theres something so atrocious about ryan condal also making rhaenyra mean to her black stepdaughters, when they have had a solid relationship in the books and she trusted them too much. she even kept baela close. so to see the teaser where rhaenyra is being the stepmother she never was, book alicent's role being given to rhaenyra, rather than book rhaenyra in this part of the story, where rhaenyra was paranoid and isolationist and kept to herself,,,,,yeah, they should stop giving ryan condal jobs. this man has never done anything right to my favorite book series.
@mononijikayu His mistreatment of Black characters needs to be studied. He needs to take notes from shows like Bridgerton in terms of how to handle Black characters, despite what happened with Marina Thompson. He didn't even bother giving us "Laenyra" when Rhaenyra and Alicent fell out in Season 1, Episode 2.
Rhaenyra loved Laena and mourned her alongside Daemon, yet the showrunner had Daemon mistreat Laena and Baela, even though they are his family and he was even shown hugging his daughters in a deleted scene. I can't wait for my spring interdisciplinary art classes because I want to give Black characters the spotlight they deserve. Characters of color are constantly done dirty, and it isn't fair in terms of representation.
Now that it's Pride Month, Laenyra appreciation should be at an all-time high because LGBTQIA+ relationships need to be portrayed properly instead of giving us half-assed tropes.
Also, if heterosexual relationships can be portrayed as hot, steamy, toxic, sexual, and overly passionate, so should all LGBTQIA+ relationships. The mistreatment of LGBTQIA+ characters gives homophobic propaganda in media more leverage.
100 percent. it's why it has always bothered me. i have been reading these books for nearly half of my life, so the issue to me has and always been the fact that we cannot even call out these things. i mean for example, that creator jj is going on a tirade on twitter about people horrified that rhaenyra is being portrayed to be in an argument with baela and pulling at her chin, when that shouldn't have been happening. people are kissing ass about how this is not only happening to lgbtqia+ characters from the books but also to the poc and black characters in the show. it genuinely frustrates me because, the book in itself was already filled with lgbtqia+ characters, it was already so full of diverse peoples. and yet, it has to be changed to be "inclusive" when it was only being harmful. i do not understand why people are eager to defend this show when the LITERAL AUTHOR OF SAID BOOKS backed away from the project because the showrunner he hired went rogue and changed the entire story and made it horrible.
@mononijikayu Exactly. You’ve hit on the exact core of why this adaptation feels like a slap in the face. For those of us who have spent half our lives reading these books, watching creators like JJ go on tirades to defend Rhaenyra physically pulling at Baela’s chin is just exhausting. The text already gave them a rich, beautifully diverse foundation, but they chose to repackage harmful rewriting as "inclusivity." It is absolutely infuriating to watch people blindly defend a showrunner who went so entirely rogue that George R.R. Martin publicly distanced himself from the project. They are using corporate armor to mask lazy writing and shield themselves from legitimate critique.
What breaks my heart the most is that the framework for something truly profound was already right there in the pages, but the showrunners lacked the depth to understand it. For me, both Rhaenicent and Laenyra aren’t just casual ships: they structurally mirror the Achilles and Patroclus trope. It’s that devastating, mythic archetype where two souls are so utterly intertwined that their bond shifts the entire trajectory of a war where love, grief, and absolute devastation cannot be separated. In the text, Rhaenyra’s profound bond with Laena, and her complex history with Alicent, carry that exact heavy, tragic weight. Yet the show stripped away that mythic passion, trading a timeless, high-stakes epic archetype for sanitized, hollow tropes, while actively introducing those toxic, aggressive dynamics with characters of color. It is a systemic erasure of Black and queer depth. Your anger is entirely valid, and you shouldn’t have to compromise on the soul of a world you’ve protected for half your life.
