✨ ᴀɪ ᴍᴇɢᴜʀɪɴᴇ ✨

– Dracarys!

it is astounding how fans can identify racist and misogynistic tropes or completely crash out over flawed writing in other shows but enter mass delusion when it comes to hotd. the velaryons having interchangeable flat personalities, criston being abused and brutalized for comedic relief, alicent existing to be subject to every possible weird sexual situation and repeatedly blamed for the catastrophic war, carte blanche given to rhaenyra and daemon after slaughtering children.

Okay but, as a professional historian, history is a bunch of competing narratives, sure, but some of those are still vastly more likely than others, and even though pure historical truth is forever out of our reach, your job is still to take a stance and, crucially, defend it. With evidence. And logic. Some sources are more reliable than others. And some events simply cannot be argued with due to their very public nature. So when F&B gives us different versions of a story, it's up to the writers to determine the most likely one based on the reliability of the sources and the inworld logic, not just pick the one they think would look "coolest". And that still leaves the instances where what F&B says is simply what happened, without a shadow of a doubt. Those things should not be changed. And any changes they DO make should make sense within the established rules of the universe.

Examples:

Aemond and Vhagar killing Lucerys by accident? Perfectly acceptable. We only know the outcome, we were not there in the sky with them, so it very well could have happened.

But Daemon being the one to kill Vaemond with no input from Rhaenyra? Simply not canon, because Rhaenyra feeding him to Syrax was a matter of public record at the time that no maester could conceivably later erase without a bunch of people going "wait, my dad was there when the Velaryons came to court to demand justice for it". Therefore, the show should not have changed that simply to make Rhaenyra more palatable.

Criston beating Joffrey to death instead of killing him in a tourney? Defies in universe logic, because a Kingsguard breaking guest right and committing murder during a wedding would have been executed.

Ok I did a thing? This is digital and it's too large of a file to transfer to my phone so this is just a crap photo of it but anyway helaegon and their children in the sept in kinglanding

This is kinda a more book accurate depiction of them but there is alot of Easter eggs to my own ideas of the characters and I mean that in personality and looks, I also realise now that maelor looks younger than 2 years old which does kinda annoy me now but oh well I've drawn it so 😭😭