Alicent My Beloved

Emma D'Arcy as Rhaenyra Targaryen HOUSE OF THE DRAGON Season 3 | Official Teaser

OLIVIA COOKE attending the "House Of The Dragon" Series 3 World Premiere (June 08, 2026)

oh!

“I have a hunch that Rhaenyra still perceives Alicent as her sort of judge and jury, regardless of how polarized their relationship becomes. And I think that dynamic plays out in a way that’s sort of really interesting and acute this season.”

#it always comes back to rhaenicent

Baela and Rhaena have lost the same people throughout their lives: their mother, their grandmother, Lucerys, and now Jacaerys. Who else will they lose? Or is it that love isn’t meant for them—only grief?

liv at the s3 premiere!

We have literally never been more back<3

A HOTD + The Onion/Reductress Headlines gifset a day until S3 (Day 6 of 18) 1.06 - 'The Princess and the Queen'

Olivia is in white because Rhaenicent will elope in season 3 finale 🙂‍↕️

like…

HOUSE OF THE DRAGON — 1.02: The Rogue Prince — 1.10: The Black Queen

she is a power player in a very violent political system that she has survived for a long time in, and regardless of her ambivalence, i just do not see the figure criston’s partial and sexist view conjures - a woman too tender and good to confront violence as a reality, and therefore unfitting to head a government prosecuting a war. it’s equally telling her moments of resistance, of using power for herself rather than others, are centered around the love of women, and work against the goals of the men who try to control her. but it can’t really undo the patriarchal power structure, as it is often posited to do via a richean lesbian continuum kind of framework - she has to work within it, always. none of alicent’s relationships with women can ever be extricated from hierarchies of power or said to be working against it in any neat way, at least so far. alicent saves rhaenyra’s life, but the only way she can do that is by seeking and affirming power for aegon. it doesn’t disrupt monarchal power, it actually affirms it, while working to strip rhaenyra of power. she later capitulates to rhaenyra for helaena, but it entails affirming rhaenyra’s pursuit of power, because safety for helaena is dependent on rhaenyra gaining power. these female bonds do not have any straightforward, inherent political purpose or function. they always affirm power as much as they disturb it, they might redistribute it or fight specific unacceptable ends, but they are too tied up in this system for it to ever fundamentally disrupt it. but that has great meaning to me! life is often not made up of radical acts or breaks, which most of us have few real opportunities for, but a more complex negotiation of accommodations and resistances that can still profoundly shape lives.

House of the Dragon, (Condal 2022-) / "[...] the cry of a woman keening. It came from the bog': (Re)presentations of the Bog in Nineteenth-Century Irish Gothic Fiction", (Galiné, 2018) / A Storm of Swords, Bran II, (Martin 2000) / A Feast for Crows, Brienne IV, (Martin 2005) / "Rural Ghost Walks", (Bevan 2023) / Fire and Blood, "The Dying of the Dragons", (Martin 2018)