Though I Will Say - Tumblr Posts

The Sun shines the brightest. Moon knows this with an unwavering conviction, even if no one knows he does.

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Alicent realizes the weight of what she has done for the first time ever, she even says ‘It was an ugly thing, I regret it.’

She sees what has become of her from the years of resentment, scheming, tension, expectations and yes, the weight of righteousness she has been carrying. 

And what does her father, her family, her blood, the person with the most influence over her, the man responsible for all her perils do?

He says ‘Yes. Good. We can use your anger.’

This bloodshed could’ve been all there is. Alicent could’ve let it go. They could’ve moved past this. But Otto Hightower was exactly what Daemon read him to be all the years back. A power-hungry leach, who is never sated, he always wants more. 

He wd his teenage daughter to a man twice her age when that man was mourning the loss of his wife, he kept trying to undermine Rhaenyra’s position when she herself was only a teenager, he poured poison in Alicent’s ears, convincing her that Rhaenyra was a monster who would kill her children to get what she wants. He came back as a hand, and he will not rest until he sees his children win, whatever means necessary. 

He’s about to do everything he’s accused the other side of doing, and in all of this Alicent is but a pawn who’s desperately trying to regain her agency without much luck, so what does she do? Abuse her children. A cycle of violence and patriarchy that will go on and on and not break. 

Juxtapose that with Velaryons. Juxtapose that with Rhaenyra and her children. Juxtapose that to the way Viserys is fiercely devoted to his first-born child. How he has always taken her side. The way all those powerful people battling for a throne treat their children is a very good mirror of what they can do, what they are prepared to do. 

SPOILERS FOR HOUSE OF DRAGONS

Before everyone jumps on the “wow Alicent Hightower is a huge bitch” train, let’s get some critical analysis in here.

Alicent isn’t mad that Rhaenyra lost her virtue, and in a sense, she’s not even just mad that Rhaenyra lied about this one thing. That’s what she’ll spend the rest of her life trying to convince herself, but it’s not the real truth.

Here is Alicent’s story: she has a good family (in terms of Westeros) and is a noble, but she also has no say in her own life and is basically the social lesser of everyone around her. The best thing in her life, without a doubt, is her friendship with Rhaenyra, and I think she never imagined they would lose that bond because of something the men around them did, especially when it seemed that she and Rhaenyra were both so cognizant of the machinations taking place around them. (Classic, kids knowing more than the adults think but still underestimating the power of those things)

Note: you could potentially make the case that Alicent feels romantic love toward Rhaenyra, but there’s no clear evidence to confirm or refute it, so for the purposes of the post I’ll be referring to it as a friendship. I personally hope it’s not romantic love, because I think there’s something uniquely heartbreaking about losing your childhood best friend.

Cut to: Tragedy befalls the world, and Otto Hightower decides to take advantage of a vacuum by angling his daughter in front of the king. Alicent knows what he’s doing, immediately, and it seems pretty clear that she’s not a big fan of the idea, but she does it because she has never lived in a world where it’s possible for her to disobey her father.

Here is the only real mistake Alicent makes: she doesn’t tell Rhaenyra that her father is sending her to the king’s chambers. Alicent is the only person in whom Rhaenyra can safely confide- she trusts her with her feelings about her father and the succession and the death of her mother. Alicent is her safe place. Alicent probably knows how upset Rhaenyra will be and doesn’t want to deal with that pain and conflict in a situation where she doesn’t really have a choice anyway. It’s not the smartest move but she’s like sixteen and I think she is holding out hope that their friendship will ultimately survive any obstacle.

Unfortunately for Alicent, she doesn’t tell Rhaenyra what her father is making her do, and Rhaenyra finds out what is basically the worst emotional betrayal she could imagine at the worst possible time. In that moment, that friendship was dead to Rhaenyra. She is absolutely a “one strike you’re out” person. I think Alicent knows this in her heart of hearts, but she also believes that she could be an exception because she herself loves Rhaenyra basically unconditionally.

She would probably forgive Rhaenyra were their positions reversed, but that’s also partially because she doesn’t have the same kind of relationship with her own father, and because she has never really entertained the idea that she can have the life she wants, unlike Rhaenyra, for whom freedom (everything she’s ever wanted) appears to be dangling right overhead. Rhaenyra could basically never represent a real threat to Alicent’s life trajectory, whereas Alicent has now, in a sense, become what Rhaenyra believes is her biggest obstacle to the throne. She had started to make peace with (or at least resigned herself to) the fact that her father had to marry, but she was NOT prepared for Alicent to be the woman he chose.

Rhaenyra is of course apoplectic and ices Alicent out, but I think Alicent, through all of that, has constant hope that they’ll be able to repair their friendship AND that she’ll even get to have more freedom then she ever thought possible as queen. They’ll be best friends and as close to equals as they can get.

A while later, Alicent’s lived a few years as queen and she knows that it basically sucks. She has no friends and she has to keep having sex with a scabby, grumpy, dying old man. Rhaenyra, for her part, isn’t angry anymore, but she also now only views Alicent the way she views everyone else at court- as someone she needs to maneuver, a potential tool at best. So obviously she accepts Alicent’s offer of friendship, but she doesn’t mean it the way Alicent means it.

So Alicent still has to be mostly very lonely and a mother to three (she loves her kids but she basically never got to enjoy being a young woman) and have terrible sex with a scabby, dying old man, but her father is still the Hand and she finally has her best friend back, and that makes it all bearable.

Then she finds out about this whole Rhaenyra/Daemon thing and is like, oh fuck, this ruins literally everything. She knew her father wanted to supplant Rhaenyra but she still felt she was being successful in straddling the line between the two succession stances. She goes to Rhaenyra and is like, okay cool, this is really bad but I can solve this as long as we talk one-on-one and figure it out.

I’m not certain that Alicent would have kept Rhaenyra’s secret if Rhaenyra had told her the truth, but I think it’s really possible. She went to Rhaenyra mostly because she wanted to resolve the situation as best she could, and Rhaenyra being happy is in Alicent’s best interest. She thought their friendship was restored and so she thought she could trust Rhaenyra to tell her the truth. Plus, Rhaenyra did swear on her dead mother 😅

Alicent definitely didn’t know that her father would be dismissed, so of course she feels terrible about that, and then she discovers that Rhaenyra lied point blank to her face (Rhaenyra was telling the truth when she said Daemon didn’t have sex with her but she lied outright when she also said “I swear to you my virtue is intact” or whatever the exact wording was), which means that their friendship is very much not intact, which means that Alicent facilitated the ruin of her father’s life for basically nothing.

Alicent’s anger isn’t about Rhaenyra’s virtue or being lied to, it’s about what the lie indicates about her relationship with Rhaenyra, something for which she has made legitimate sacrifices.

Alicent isn’t innocent - she should have known better that marrying Rhaenyra’s father would be a permanent end to their friendship as they knew it (especially in a case where she didn’t explain it to Rhaenyra herself) but she didn’t want to deal with the conflict, or being torn between her father and her best friend, so she told herself what she had to in order to get out of bed every morning.

Theirs is a friendship break-up like many others but the stakes are a thousand times higher when you’re talking about the fate of an entire kingdom and a world in which you either play the game or you die. The moral of their story is that power (and specifically, the patriarchy) is likely to corrupt even the most good, pure, and tender love.

And fuck the patriarchy. After all if women were treated like people in this kingdom Aemma would still be alive, either because they’d be perfectly happy to have Rhaenyra as heir to the throne after Aemma underwent so many dangerous pregnancies (and hopefully she would have gone through only one of them before they realized it was too risky to keep trying to have kids). OR, at the literal least, she would have been allowed to decide not to have her body sacrificed in a not-guaranteed-to-work attempt to recover her child.

So as the show continues on and Alicent makes cruel decisions and everyone watching comes to hate her, because we are, of course, being set up to root most for Rhaenyra in this story, just try to remember that she held onto hope that things would be okay for basically as long as she could, and that most of the things that led her to that point were not her fault or even in her control. I’d probably get pretty bitter too.