Disaster

The way both Alicent and Rhaenyra mirror Cersei in a way… Alicent is worse than Cersei that, Rhaenyra is just like Cersei this. Listen, Alicent is encouraged by her father to seduce the king, a man fifty years older, and Cersei is given away by her father to a king who doesn’t love her and abuses her. Rhaenyra believes that her gender in the matter of succession means nothing, she believes that her blood flowing through her sons’ veins makes them as much Targaryens as if she were their father. Cersei says out loud that she’d make a better king than Robert, she knows she’d be a better ruler than her sons. Her sons are Baratheons only by name, in their veins flows Lannister blood, because Jaime is also their father, and yet while Cersei is denying all that, she achieves what Rhaenyra wants to. Alicent goes insane over her children’s safety, attacking Rhaenyra with a knife. Cersei would burn cities down to protect her own, she murders the Sands for Myrcella. Rhaenyra is in love with her queensguard, Cersei is in love (as much as she can be) with her queensguard. Rhaenyra also loves Daemon, and Cersei loves Jaime, both stories are centred around the theme of understanding, being made of one matter, being destined to be together, to burn together. Alicent and Rhaenyra are like two sides of Cersei: Alicent is the side that was “sold”, the side that found her only comfort in her children, the side that played the game of thrones because she was brought up that way. Rhaenyra is the side that eats the heirs, the side that’s the king, the side that’s in love with her twin brother, the side that plays the game of thrones because it’s in her blood. They are both Cersei.

The Starks have had terrible things happen to their family but all of that happened for some explainable reasons. It was coherent. Ned stark endangered cersei, bran saw cersei and Jaime together, Robb and Catelyn were betrayed for money. Rickon was killed because Ramsay was a little sadistic bitch. But the Lannisters?? Their mother died giving birth to Tyrion only for Tyrion to kill their father. Joffrey was poisoned at his own wedding, and we see the parallels between the red wedding of course, but the fucked up thing is that his death had nothing to do with the Starks. Myrcella was poisoned (like Jon Arryn was poisoned), and also Oberyn’s weapon was poisoned, and she died in her father’s arms, for the first time giving Jaime acceptance, despite it being acceptance of incest. Tommen threw himself out of the window for the organisation that kept his mother captive. Tywin, the proud man and the richest man, is killed on the toilet. Jaime loses his hand to the Boltons, kinda reminiscent of the way Theon is tortured by the Boltons, but then the particular hand situation also has nothing to do with the Starks, it was because he was behaving like a Lannister in hopes of saving Brienne. It’s like they are cursed, just like Cersei says in season two “maybe this is the price we pay for what we’ve done, for our sins”. For all the killings, but also Jaime pushed a kid out of a tower. Jaime fucked Cersei literally on the body of their own dead son. Everything that happens to the Starks is tragic, but whatever happens to the Lannisters is deeply disturbing.