moe

Viserys II with chunky Baelor

Do you think baelor brings up vague memories of viserys II's older brothers?

With his dark hair and cheerful laughter?

In rare official occasions

If you believe Alicent is a bad mum, they'd say you hate an innocent child bride who was pimped to a living corspse instead of criticising Otto who "sold his teenage daughter to Viserys". And surely add you defend Otto's shitty parenting because he's a man. Yes, arranged marriages sick. But idk why apply modern standards to Westeros? By Westerosi standards, a 15 yo is an adult. Hess said Alicent married Viserys at the age of 16. Alicent had 2 options - becoming a septa or getting married. Hadn't she married Viserys, she would have been married off to someone else. It would have been a minor lord because she's not lord Hightower's daughter, but second son's. She had no suitors flocking around her and even if she had, she would have ended up marrying the most worthy candidate. Likely the wealthiest one or the one with best connections. Otto was ambitious, that's right, but he simply secured her daughter's future the way any other Westerosi patent would. He found the most beneficial match for his daughter. In the eyes of the society he did the right thing.

Alicent, in turn, sold her sons to Rhaenyra and tried to force Helaena to terminate high pregnancy, which could have resulted in her premature death.

I think a lot of HOTD glazers either do not understand the society this story is set in, or they understand it perfectly well and deliberately ignore it whenever modern framing is more useful to their argument.

They then repeat whatever interpretation the showrunners or actors provide as though it overrides the internal rules of Westeros. It doesn’t. You can criticize Alicent as a mother without “hating women,” just as you can discuss Otto’s decisions within the political and social norms of his world without personally endorsing those norms.

Yeah. Condal and Hess have basically erased the cultural weight of kinslaying from the story.

Aemond kills Luke and the consequences are barely explored. Daemon unleashes Blood and Cheese and everyone moves on. Alicent can poison her own son and the show treats it like just another plot beat.

#🌻anon

Sadly, people are doing this to more and more fiction now, and it usually produces terrible analysis because the setting gets stripped of its own internal logic.

HOTD makes the problem worse because Condal and Hess actively encourage that reading and then build their fanfiction around it. Instead of engaging with Westeros as a feudal society with its own laws, customs, religion, inheritance rules, and political realities, they keep importing twenty-first-century social arguments that simply do not function the same way in the source material.

Dragons. Anton Seder. Das Thier in der decorativen Kunst. The animal in decorative art. 1896.

They apparently abandoned the idea of Dyanna being involved in the plot. She randomly pops out of nowhere when the smallfolks prepare food riot. But now that Aegon is supposed to have his redemption arc, Dyanna is forgetten, alongside Helaena's vision of the Battle above the God's Eye, Luke's death, Aemond becoming a kinslayer and children fighting pits. Speaking on which- no matter how hard they try to "redeem" Aegon on Tom's request, it's really hard for me to forget the rapes and the pits. I'm quite shocked these two things were so easy for the audience to forget.

Season 1 was indeed clearly setting up a different story from the one Seasons 2 and 3 decided to tell.

Every new season retcons whatever came before so the writers can chase a new idea without dealing with the consequences of the old one. Characters, motivations, foreshadowing, even major crimes just vanish when they become inconvenient.

But we did start seeing the cracks at the end in my opinion. Like the timeskip were too fast. I'm ok with being fast getting the black and green kids, but then why immediately cut to them being older then? What was the point in showing off different scenes with those kids, and then immediately being older??

Also, as far as I know, the show started in the middle of the book??? There was more stuff to know with the previous king and his VERY interesting kids and they did do that????????? I'm still very confused over why there was a succession crisis!!! But I understand why now!

This show could have been done well. Even with season 1, maybe with some changes (like cole killing in daylight basically) but it could have been done. Maybe we could have smth with Jaehaerys I kids in some dialogue or hell, even a flashback. Honestly I'm so tired of this bs now

Personally, I think Season 1 started going to shit within the first five minutes of the pilot, when teenage Alicent stepped out of that carriage and teenage Rhaenyra immediately started flirting with her. 🤣

There is a difference between changing smaller details because television is a different medium and fundamentally rewriting characters to accommodate self-insert fanon.

And the marketing already told me exactly what kind of adaptation we were getting. Season 1 was promoted around Alicent and Rhaenyra standing side by side, not Rhaenyra and Aegon, the actual rival claimants whose conflict drives the Dance.

We had a handful of sex workers on screen, and we did not see one get assaulted on screen. One sex worker pretended to be a corpse, and that is enough for you to realise these clients don't have normal tastes.

We see waitresses carrying around trays surrounded by drunk and rowdy men; not once did I see one of them being touched without their consent.

Compared to HOTD and GOT, the violence in AKOST is freaking mild.

If Hess & Condal had their hands on this show, we would have seen Aerion do horrible things to Tanselle or the sex workers on the camp. Even to Aegon, between him revealing his identity and before the trial. Just so that they can spread the message, 'Hey! This horrendous world has so much violence in it! Let me show it to you!'

AKOTSK may not have a lot of female characters, but they have a lot more respect for them than the previous shows.

I agree with you on all of this. 🙂