rip jacela

i agree that what they've decided to do with rhaena and daemon i.e., potentially setting up a conflict between rhaenyra and daemon because sheepsteeler is now daemon's daughter's dragon is interesting and compelling

HOWEVER i do mourn what it does for rhaena's storyline.

hotd (and got, particularly as it drifted further from the source material), likes to do this thing where it's like 'girl power is when women are also militant !! or experience the horrors and yet prevail,' which i don't love, especially i do really enjoy that book!rhaena is so influential on the dance, not just despite her lack of dragon but in some ways because of it.

she adapts, she copes, she learns, and, in the end, she survives, even thrives, because of it, while so many of her peers don't. and yeah, that does have some really interesting connections to nettles' storyline, but i think hotd is going about it in a really weird way. and in doing this, then you lose a lot -- book!rhaena is strategic and savvy and bold and brash in her own ways -- hell, she marries a hightower lmao, and now you've taken one of your two Black female characters and decided she should be shunned from society, despite being a princess, which ???

i think it might also be because got recieved such negative reactions towards political negotiation scenes in the end (because they were bad) that the hotd writers might be avoiding some of the political stuff that happened in the reach aka literally all of rhaena's storyline. However, they're also doing a bunch of extra sitting around and talking in harrenhal with every male character in the show, it seems so, idk about that.

basically it feels like yet another case of 'interesting cool storyline of female character erased to prop up a man' or, in this case, 'both an interesting and cool storyline of a female character and literally an entire woman are both being erased,' which i hate. it also rings true to the continued pattern in fandom/media where this kind of behavior is excused: 'the storylines of women of color -- particularly Black women -- are interchangeable and thus nettles can be rhaena who is Black now' which ... YIKES

also it feels like a lot of this is being done to resurrect daemon; to make him both more important and more empathetic, which isn't great. like i keep seeing 'omg girl dad daemon' posts on here, and it's like .... bitch WHERE. not in the books, nor in the show, is there any material evidence of him being a particularly good father figure, much less a 'girl dad' (except that one leaked picture of matt smith literally ad-libbing that was cut, so i really don't understand why people are holding on so tight to it). and then the optics are: Black woman erased from the narrative to humanize a weird white man.