Disaster

I really love the symbolic journey rhaenyra goes through in the kingswoods during the hunt in episode 3. she kills a wild boar to save her life, in stark contrast with her crowned father who cannot finish off a bound stag. the hunt is an unnecessary exercice in state regalia but rhaenyra goes out to face real wilderness; and that contrast is shown through the animals killed. in medieval times, the stag represented royalty and noble strength - but for the romans, a boar was a superior kill and represented the coming of age of a warrior. as such, rhaenyra’s path is laid out for her. she will not be a weak king, acting out medieval nobility in meaningless games. her fate is visceral war. and when she comes back to the camp, the blood on her face spells it out for all to see. as such, the symbolic discrepancy between the stag and the boar is yet another occurrence of the mingling of historical inspirations to create tensions in asoiaf worldbuilding. the targaryens have more in common with the emperors and kings of antiquity but the world they rule over is staunchly medieval - and that’s one of the reasons why they feel so alien in westeros. rhaenyra walked out of those woods with the alien swagger of diana while all the onlookers stood in the middle of their tents and peacocks. it’s gorgeous symbolic storytelling!

 Winter Love — H.D

insp (x)

It remembers names.

house of the dragon (2022–) | succession (2018–2023)

Rhaena and Baela Targaryen

Patreon | commissions | print store ✩

ALICENT HIGHTOWER + art

ALICENT and AEGON + safe place

house of the dragon (2022–) / my dark vanessa, kate elizabeth russell

viserys is daemon’s dad-brother REAL

what people on the “daemon wishes he was a girl so he could be his brother’s wife” train fails to realize is that viserys is also his dad. hotd has a lot of dad-husbands. alicent, the most persecuted woman on the planet, hast two (her dad who is her husband and her husband who is her dad). so it doesn’t contradict that. (what does for me, or makes it more complicated, is that as miserable as daemon is as a second son, and as a man - as rhaenyra is as daughter and woman - he would not be happier as his brother’s wife, any more than rhaenyra would be happier as her brother aegon. daemon maybe wants to be a wife to his brother as visenya was to her aegon - but since viserys would never allow that kind of wife, can he be said to want to be viserys’ wife? rhaenyra becomes her own aegon, and allows daemon to be her visenya. the way things can happen only in relation matters). but it does mean it is much weirder! thinking about how daemon internally agrees with and relates to rhaenyra’s miserable “i will never be a son” in the pilot script. he wants to be viserys’ son, and like rhaenyra is miserable to be viserys’ child who is not and can never be acknowledged as son. but viserys brought him up.

a really sexy variety of ship is “we love each other but are fundamentally opposed politically” and rhaenicent is a good example of this that both haters and appreciators try to sand down. in a big way the political stakes are not really equivalent to any modern categories and are also about feudal successive n politics with ideology dressing up dynastic concerns but rhaenyra and alicent actually do have deep disagreements about where power derives from and what you owe to it. alicent really cares about LAWS and rhaenyra is like laws don't matter if i personally think they are stupid. and that's actually a meaningful ideological disagreement! i do have a lot more sympathy toward the latter because i think trying to pass off bastard children as your husband and murdering people who try to start shit rules and i supported it when cersei did it and i support it now. oh my god. rhaenicent IS kind of ned/cersei with it...

alicent DOES pull the ned move of mercy toward his enemy that dooms him...sparing rhaenyra directly leads to the death of all her kids. that's so hot

1x04 "king of the narrow sea" / 1x09 "the green council / a clash of kings

As well as everything else Viserys is Old Woman Izergil no I won’t elaborate

two tweets annoyed me yesterday in related ways:

this is nonsensical because dany is the source of all targaryen traits. she is THEE targaryen and the distillation of her line in its greatness and horror and glory and violence. of course other targaryens have pieces of her! grrm created dany, the greatest fantasy protagonist of all time, TO ME, and then everything flows from her. in her dreams she runs through halls lined by the statues of the kings of her line urging her to wake the dragons, and these are those ghosts in life. rhaenyra is a vastly different character in personality, but it’s fitting there are echoes here too. rhaenyra embodies a certain targaryen restless striving for change, a resistance to what exists, a yearning for something else. it’s not nearly as well-developed or as morally keen as dany’s but it’s something many targaryen women have. it’s very fitting for the one female ancestor of dany’s who tried to wield ultimate power in the way dany is grappling with! it’s just a key part of martin’s work of houses having key traits and members echoing and reworking each other. no one is some complete individual in asoiaf. everyone is haunted by those who come before and will come after

speaking of no one being a complete self…

i cannot think of a fictional character who has less desire to “exist in his own right” than daemon targaryen. daemon’s keenest wish, and the pain of his life that comes from it’s denial, is his desire to wed the violence he was raised to to the will of a monarch worthy of it. viserys will not let him, not that he ever stops trying: he achieves immortality as a warrior by conquering the stepstones and immediately gives his crown to his brother. all his acts are for his family. when he tries to get viserys to let him marry rhaenyra, it’s not even an individual marriage; “let us return the house of the dragon to its former glory.” in the ruin of his life, where rhaenyra has finally, in her distrust of him, thrown away what he has to give, he spends those 13 lonely days alone before he meets his destiny haunting the halls of asoiaf’s most haunted location with no companion but his dragon, becoming one of its untold ghosts prior to death, it is horribly tragic because he is alone, the loneliness of the absence of others. the dream of some ecstatic targaryen melding that always failed with viserys and briefly seemed to achieve with rhaenyra (this is part of his mania in episode 10: her will is different from his, the violence that is his purpose in the westerosi gender prison has no outlet) has just crumbled. and he wants to die. if this leak is correct and rhaenyra joins him at harrenhal like in the book, possibly united again as they prepare to take king’s landing, it will simply heighten that devastation. daemon’s tragedy is in his epitaph, where he is not known by his deeds but by his brother, his wife, his progeny.

even when every targaryen but she is dead, daenerys is not alone, or only herself. she is the dragon, and that’s what the ghosts are for.

A little obsessed with themes of haunting and ghosts in asoiaf. Characters are surrounded by ghosts, they are ghosts, they love ghosts, they are part of ghosts, they live in places that are ghosts, they unleash ghosts and they bargain with ghosts, most importantly they are haunted by ghosts. Ghosts and curses and prophecies are all very closely tied together in the narrative. Arya who is a ghost in Harrenhal, already a place full of them, Harren and his sons, countless lords and servants, burnt by wildfire, burnt again and again, because the place is said to be cursed. The Red Keep with bodies of its builders buried somewhere within, the Red Keep full of black cells with some half-men, half-ghosts still waiting for justice and sunlight. With skulls of dragons beneath its floors, a defeated legacy. Winterfell with its crypts, full of dead starks, and they are more than just crypts: they are a shelter, a haunted house, a sept in a way. The whole of the riverlands one single haunted space, as if executed with one giant hand of Tywin Lannister. He unleashes a curse with deeds so vile they start haunting lands and fates and houses, Westeros itself. That story Bran tells, about the rat cook who killed guests in his own house, and was cursed to devour his own sons; Walder Frey murdering his guests at the Red Wedding. Drogo is taken from Dany through a bargain with the dead. The dead haunt her: Rhaegar on the Trident, dragons and hundreds of her Targaryen ancestors. House Targaryen is a ghost. Westeros itself is haunting Dany, something she cannot remember. The entire white walkers story is literally the dead getting up from the graves, from the ground and walking, killing. Not alive, not dead, not exactly ghosts. What harm can Lyanna Stark’s ghost do us? Catelyn Stark back from the dead, mute. “She don’t talk but she remembers”. Idk it all seems very consecutive, as if the ghosts are active parts of the story, even from the grave navigating the characters, affecting reality. “It all goes back and back to our fathers and mothers and theirs before them”. Jenny dancing with her ghosts.

Old Valyria is also a ghost. It’s kind of a ghost town and it’s own separate ghost that haunts Targaryens for centuries. They are so obsessed with their blood, with their connection to their roots that do not exist anymore, even after the Dance and the death of the dragons. Old Valyria is a home and it keeps them from building a new one in Westeros.

Visenya is a particulate favourite of mine, she is The Ghost of House Targaryen. First of all, she was a witch (who raised her son from the dead no less). But more importantly, her legacy haunts House Targaryen. Vhagar devouring new dragons, baby Visenya dying in the womb; the memory of Visenya as of the golden age of conquest walks hand in hand with doom for everyone and that’s sooo Targaryen. Overall that scene with the Black Dread’s scull looming over Rhaenyra and the chase between Aemond and Luke are like. House Targaryen ghosts and doom envisioned.

- Parallels between Alicent and Rhaenyra.

I like both Alicent and Rhaenyra but, some of these 'parallels' really bother me.

Rhaenyra was justified in her feelings of anger and ignorance toward Alicent. Rhaenyra's mother died and Alicent was her best friend who she had been confiding in about her grief, her father remarrying and being replaced as heir, only to find out that Alicent (under the instruction of Otto) and Viserys had been secretly courting and were to be wed. Of course, Alicent was going to be the one attempting to salvage their friendship because she was the cause of its ruin to begin with. Rhaenyra had every right to brush off her attempts to reconnect if she wanted to.

That comment about being imprisoned in a castle and made to squeeze out heirs was before Alicent opened up about feeling lonely. Rhaenyra also immediately apologised when she realised the implications of her words. Actually, what Rhaenyra does do when Alicent confides in Rhaenyra about her loneliness, is tell Alicent 'I missed you too'.

Rhaenyra was also justified in wanting Otto removed as Hand of the King. Rhaenyra saw through Otto and his intentions/actions to have her removed as heir and have Aegon named instead despite Alicent's upholding of Rhaenyra as heir at the time. It's unfortunate that his removal came at a cost to Alicent but, it wasn't as if Rhaenyra did it to spite Alicent.

I never said that Rhaenyra wasn't justified in her feelings, Alicent was the one forced to marry the King and Rhaenyra doesn't say anything to her father? Instead, she lashes out at the girl who had no choice.

She wasn't the cause of the ruin of the friendship because she didn't choose to marry Viserys. If she had every right to brush off Alicent's attempts to reconnect, I have every right to point it out and think it was a shitty thing to do.

She did apologise but it doesn't take the fact that Alicent's feelings were hurt.

She might see it as justified, but it doesn't change the fact that Alicent was all alone in court after that. Most people see Otto's "spying" on Rhaenyra as a backstabbing attempt, but he did the same to Daemon, the heir at the time.

Not trying to be rude, but Rhaenyra's virginity is a matter of "state", she says so herself. So the Hand being aware of her whereabouts and the "bad" things that she does is justified, it just comes across as self-serving because it was Otto...Lyonel would report to the King as well, any Hand would...the realm is at stake if Rhaenyra can't get married.

Most people don't go out of their way to hurt others, but they do it anyway and that was the main point of my post.

Alicent showed to be a better friend than Rhaenyra.

Yeah, see, this is the main annoyance to me when talking about hotd to people. It’s a show about the patriarchal society and the plots of the higher standing destroying love and friendship between two young women, amongst other things. Neither one of them had the chance to 1) evade what happened or 2) behave gracefully because they are both around 15-17. 15-17! In a situation in which one of them is practically sold into marriage to an old man (her best friend’s father) and the other has just lost her mother only to see her best friend marry her father. It’s very fucked up. Neither of them are good/bad friends, they are two girls stuck in a situation in which they are both powerless. Until Rhaenyra starts looking for ways towards freedom and power, while Alicent (who in her mind is trapped even more than irl) forces herself to play a good daughter/bride/mother, and then that destroys their relationship completely. It’s about two girls’ love being ripped and thrown away by powerful men and the system that supports them. It’s pointless to prove that either of them was worse/better, because that’s not the point of the story itself.