A)
"Promiscuous" implied consent between all parties. These passages beg you to reread them:
Following the ancient tradition of House Targaryen, King Viserys wed his son Aegon the Elder to his daughter Helaena. The groom was fifteen years of age; a lazy and somewhat sulky boy, Septon Eustace tells us, but possessed of more than healthy appetites, a glutton at table, given to swilling ale and strongwine and pinching and fondling any serving girl who strayed within his reach.
(A Question of Succession)
Then add this coming quote, how Septon Eustace (who doesn’t like Rhaenyra and favored the green [you know this by watching how he uses language when talking against Rhaenyra’s weight and for...well you shall see....]) defends Aegon, just as you do:
Prince Aegon was “at his revels,” Munkun says in his True Telling, vaguely. The Testimony of Mushroom claims Ser Criston found the young king-to-be drunk and naked in a Flea Bottom rat pit, where two guttersnipes with filed teeth were biting and tearing at each other for his amusement whilst a girl who could not have been more than twelve pleasured his member with her mouth. Let us put that ugly picture down to Mushroom being Mushroom, however, and consider instead the words of Septon Eustace.
Though the good septon admits Prince Aegon was with a paramour when he was found, he insists the girl was the daughter of a wealthy trader, and well cared for besides. Moreover, the prince at first refused to be a part of his mother’s plans. “My sister is the heir, not me,” he says in Eustace’s account. “What sort of brother steals his sister’s birthright?” Only when Ser Criston convinced him that the princess must surely execute him and his brothers should she don the crown did Aegon waver. “Whilst any trueborn Targaryen yet lives, no Strong can ever hope to sit the Iron Throne,” Cole said. “Rhaenyra has no choice but to take your heads if she wishes her bastards to rule after her.” It was this, and only this, that persuaded Aegon to accept the crown that the small council was offering him, insists our gentle septon.
(The Blacks and the Greens)
Septon Eustace -- a green supporter/whitewasher -- doesn’t even negate the fact that the girl who he’d been caught with was at most 12 year old, btw. He specifically negates that she was too low born.
That 12-year-old can't give consent, anon. "Even" in this medieval setting (real medieval/early mod period nobles still preferred to have people marry at least 15-16, they preferred/often had the couple have matching ages or were a couple years apart AND Westerosi nobles consider a girl marriageable once she has her period, but safer to have sex with/consummate the marriage later).
And yet, later we hear this:
Word of Rhaenyra’s coronation reached the Red Keep the next day, to the great displeasure of Aegon II. “My half-sister and my uncle are guilty of high treason,” the young king declared. “I want them attainted, I want them arrested, and I want them dead.” Cooler heads on the green council wished to parley. “The princess must be made to see that her cause is hopeless,” Grand Maester Orwyle said. “Brother should not war against sister. Send me to her, that we may talk and reach an amicable accord.”
Aegon would not hear of it. Septon Eustace tells us that His Grace accused the Grand Maester of disloyalty and spoke of having him thrown into a black cell “with your black friends.” But when the two queens—his mother, Queen Alicent, and his wife, Queen Helaena spoke in favor of Orwyle’s proposal, the truculent king gave way reluctantly.
(The Blacks and the Greens)
Aegon II was two-and-twenty, quick to anger and slow to forgive. Rhaenyra’s refusal to accept his rule enraged him. “I offered her an honorable peace, and the whore spat in my face,” he declared. “What happens next is on her own head.”
(The Blacks and the Greens)
The event with Aegon supposedly sincerely saying “What sort of brother steals his sister’s birthright?” (as Eustace says) CONTRADICTS Aegon’s later words, tone, and actions regarding Rhaenyra are completely in tone.
And his entitlement and misogyny were set in the story long before he was ever pushed or guided onto the throne. In the first quote above, we learn of Aegon’s personality: hedonistic and lazy. Both traits when combined you do not want in someone who could gain absolute power and authority. Why? Well, we saw immediately when the book lets us know he “fondled” and “pinching” serving girls. No respect for the boundaries of those subordinate (or perceived as such) to him and the entitlement driving him to act maliciously to the underserving for his own selfish pleasures.
Anon, do you actually think those girls could and would say no to a prince, or outwardly show and say no in the fear of his position and and insistence?
Do you actually think they wanted to be fondled?
Do you actually think that someone that entitled and with all that power and privilege and willingness/desire to fondle and ignore boundaries, wouldn't push an errant, unfortunate serving girl, push her against a wall, order her into a room, and then force himself on her?! This is a rapist’s MO, anon. Do your research, or just think.
Do you actually believe, that someone who has been told their entire life that they deserve the throne because they had a penis and later says several times that he would kill Rhaenyra to keep his throne, doesn’t want the throne for himself even just a little (esp after being convinced she'd kill him otherwise...which if you spent your entire life seeing your sister be heir and actually accept it, why does it take one guy to tell you--and only now--that she is definitely going to kill you? He had his whole life to feel she'd actually kill him, why now?)?! Or doesn't thrust himself on girls he feels he has entitled, free access to because his position as a male royal already (to him) grants him that ability?
How does Eustace’s words about Aegon’s compassionate/brotherly affections not come across as a lie (less likely, admittedly) or at least something that exposes Aegon as untrustworthy and selfishly power-hungry in light of the very possessive tone he takes whenever he talks about him and others going against Rhaenyra?! He never cared or respected Rhaenyra, not really!
Aegon praises Aemond for killing Lucerys, and we are meant to see him as wanting to be brotherly to Rhaenyra?!
Aemond Targaryen…who would henceforth be known as Aemond the Kinslayer to his foes…returned to King’s Landing, having won the support of Storm’s End for his brother Aegon, and the undying enmity of Queen Rhaenyra. If he thought to receive a hero’s welcome, he was disappointed. Queen Alicent went pale when she heard what he had done, crying, “Mother have mercy on us all.” Nor was Ser Otto pleased. “You only lost one eye,” he is reported to have said. “How could you be so blind?” The king himself did not share their concerns, however. Aegon II welcomed Prince Aemond home with a great feast, hailed him as “the true blood of the dragon,” and announced that he had made “a good beginning.”
(A Son for a Son)
I don’t know about you, anon, but I say that a true brother would not want to kill their sibling’s child or want to have them dead so much.
B)
Rhaenyra calls him “half brother” because he literally and eagerly stole her throne AND before that, for years he and his other brothers have been in a "rivalry" with her sons. Because of Alicent telling them that Rhaenyra's sons were bastards and, as a woman, she didn't actually, deserve the throne anyway--
plus any/all the probable throwaway remarks Alicent makes on Rhaenyra's supposed amoral character ("disrespectful", "disobedient", "whorish") that show how Alicent feels about her without her necessarily instructing them since they have been old enough to use basic cognitive functions and reasoning--
Honestly, if she called him worse or an actual pejorative, it'd match the depth of how Aegon wronged her and her own kids.
Aegon and his brothers likely would have willfully antagonized them, initiated much of their fights (verbal or else), & went out of their way to make them feel very unwelcome in the Red Keep. The greens' and the blacks' children have been hating each other. It's not hard, if you know what prejudice looks like and accept its existence, to use the brain and imagine scenes like I've described.
They may as well not be actual family, because the greens have already treated her and hers as not family, even as enemies. Do you think she should lie more than she already has/hasn't? During a time that they have, again, denied her something that her own father allowed her?
Aegon doesn’t treat her with respect, Alicent doesn’t, Aemond doesn’t, didn’t, and never will? Aemond, who fought with her sons and threatened their very lives after openly calling them bastards before one took out his eye? Aegon, who also has no reason to respect Rhaenyra after Alicent has been telling him to not do so for years?! Alicent, who turned on her when Rhaenyra was 10 the moment she birthed this same man, Aegon the Elder, after hearing Viserys refuse to change his mind and replace Rhaenyra with her son?
Rhaenyra should feel close to these people? Should regard the boys as her "brothers"? Why should Rhaenyra feel and speak anymore graciously than she already does?:
“As for my half-brothers and my sweet sister, Helaena,” she announced, “they have been led astray by the counsel of evil men. Let them come to Dragonstone, bend the knee, and ask my forgiveness, and I shall gladly spare their lives and take them back into my heart, for they are of my own blood, and no man or woman is as accursed as the kinslayer.”
(The Blacks and the Greens)
There is a reason why she doesn't say "half-sister" regarding Helaena, whose role in all of this seemed always nil, and is thus the most "innocent". Plus her personality is itself more happy-go-lucky than ambitious.
If Rhaenyra were a male heir, no one would say she shouldn’t call her brother her/his “half-brother” as if that were the worst thing she/he could have done to the green boys. They would call her/him gracious or patient. Or, if they were inclined to, even “weak” like people (including those who supported him before) did with Aegon the Uncrowned.
Because by all means, if someone is stealing your designated seat of power that you were assigned and entrusted with with since you were 7 years old (and you are now a grown person with kids of your own, in your early 30s) and you don’t do try to force them back, you would thought of as not worthy of that throne. This is how a medieval mind works. and even modernly, if someone intentionally takes what you’ve prepared for for years or destroys it....am I then expected to repress or ignore this and act as if the person is my friend? As if they are worthy of my respect or grace?
Anon, what sort of servile self-denial are you trying to espouse?
C)
There are truly way too many ways that I and others have already argued how this show removes or reduces the greens' canonical evil, misogynist, and selfish ambition into "accidents" or makes it non-existent, unimportant, or subsidiary. The entire premise of the Dance is that the patriarchal system and a few of its agents choose to usurp her for their own want for power, and thinking that they are entitled to do so because she had a vagina and not a penis. And the results are:
- their (the greens’) entire line was wiped from the map
- Rhaenyra’s line survives but she dies horribly and the Targs lose the very dragons that are part of not just their own selves but is also the magical balance of this universe/weapon against the Others in the coming Long Night
- and her sons live out the rest of their childhoods politically vulnerable -- one the rest of his life psychologically in despair and unworthy (after seeing the same person you defend feed his mother to a dragon)
If you were keeping track of the story GRRM writes, you should know this and make these connections.
How Ryan and his team write is to remove all means of agency and accountability from his characters so that we only have victims to feel sorry for, and it's even a knock against the villains of the story. Seth Abramson talks about Ryan’s “theory of accidents”. How Ryan believes he is adding complexity by making characters reactive instead of proactive and asking unnecessary and motive-dismissing “what ifs”.
But all Ryan is doing is showing:
- how he wants this series to revitalize public interest in ASoIaF TV after GoT’s horror show of an ending
- how he seems to either misunderstand or believe the conservative, misogynist, classist greens were in the moral right and political defense when actually it's the other way around (thus you see misogynist, tradcath and tradfems, racist, classists feeling validated and popping out the woodwork in the fandom, vocally expressing their thoughts unmatched in the previous years of asoiaf fandom)
- how superficial his motives towards this franchise is
If you really want to know how this show does this, you should look at my blog under the tags “history is a series of accidents”, “Rhaenicent,” “hotd characterization”, “aemond’s characterization”, “aemond and alys”, and “Aegon ii’s characterization”.
But if you don’t I suggest you do not bring up arguments that are dead wrong.
