Eylih

The pretension of Alicent and Ser Criston Cole's relationship is frequently labeled as "sexual liberation," yet the screenwriters carefully frame it through the lens of young Alicent's naive perception. She views Criston as a humble, righteous savior, ignoring that he was the adult who failed to say no to a young Rhaenyra's advances. Instead of taking accountability, he exploits Alicent’s innocence, allowing her to idolize him as a morally noble man. As Alicent grows older, this warped perception forces her to tolerate his escalating corruption, even staying silent when he murders Lord Beesbury in council.

Her understanding of intimacy finally catches up to her with a maturity she lacked in Season 1: she realizes that she and Criston are bound not by love, but by their unrequited feelings for Rhaenyra. However, while Criston’s bitterness is petty and vindictive, Alicent’s grief stems from a profound loss Rhaenyra was the only person who ever made her feel safe, kind, and human. Tragically, this longing traps Alicent in her own arrested development, preserving a childlike vulnerability that Criston continuously exploits.

The legal mechanics differ, this emotional exploitation is just as soul-crushing as her forced marriage to King Viserys. With Viserys, Alicent’s body and youth were overtly sacrificed to the altar of statecraft: she was a child bride explicitly used by her father to service an aging, decaying king for political leverage. Conversely, her relationship with Criston is framed under the tragic illusion of personal choice, making its toxicity far more insidious. Viserys took her physical innocence by patriarchal decree, but Criston actively hijacks her conscience. By positioning himself as the tragic victim of Rhaenyra's "sin," he transforms Alicent's protective instincts into a parasitic bond, weaponizing her perpetual guilt. Viserys trapped Alicent in an external cage of duty, but Criston forces her to build her own psychological prison, ensuring she can never heal from her stolen childhood because she is too busy protecting the man exploiting her brokenness.

While the show removes the legal definition of childhood grooming by aging the characters up, Ser Criston operates entirely within the tactical mechanics of an emotional predator. Grooming is defined by the deliberate cultivation of a vulnerable asset over time, and Criston systematically targets Alicent at her loneliest, most isolated point to install himself as her sole source of validation. Rather than a standard romance, this is a calculated erosion of personal boundaries: he engineered a decades-long psychological dependency, gradually blurring the lines between her religious devotion and his survival.

By forcing a traumatized girl to become the lifelong custodian of his secrets, he ensures her emotional growth remains permanently stunted. Ultimately, Criston’s behavior is the textbook definition of grooming: he did not just stumble into an adult relationship with a vulnerable queen, he structured an environment where his power relies entirely on keeping her broken, guaranteeing she will always choose his protection over her own sanity.

This lifelong conditioning ultimately culminates in Alicent becoming a profound false martyr. The tragedy of her character is not that she genuinely had zero autonomy, but that she willingly chose submission, mistook her compliance for moral superiority, and then blamed everyone else for her resulting misery. While she was a victim when Otto first pushed her into Viserys’s chambers, adulthood stripped away that excuse; as the Queen of the Seven Kingdoms, she possessed immense soft power that she chose to channel into upholding the patriarchy rather than resisting it. She willfully locked herself in a cage of duty and religion, and instead of taking accountability for that choice, she weaponized her own lack of freedom out of pure envy toward Rhaenyra’s autonomy. Her mindset became a self-righteous delusion: "I am suffering, therefore I am holy: you are free, therefore you are a sinner." She demanded that Rhaenyra suffer just as much as she did, simply to validate her own self-inflicted imprisonment.

The hypocritical martyrdom exposes the staggering contradiction behind her line to Rhaenyra, "the arrogance of blaming me." From an objective standpoint, Alicent is entirely at fault for the impending war, having spent twenty years building the political network that usurped the throne and ultimately crowning Aegon. Yet, because her agency was systematically hollowed out by her father and hijacked by Criston, she genuinely cannot conceive of herself as an active perpetrator of history. She confuses a difficult choice with a lack of choice, using her perceived victimhood as a shield against a truth that would otherwise cause total psychic death: admitting that her lifelong misery was pointless, and that she helped destroy the only person who ever truly loved her. To Alicent, it is the height of arrogance for a woman who lived with freedom to blame a woman who lived in a cage for the cage's structural collapse blind to the fact that she was a primary architect of its construction.

This is not to absolve Alicent of blame, but to recognize a deeper, more devastating reality. As Rhaenyra poignantly asks, "Did your hand not bring it forth like a midwife?" a line that underscores how completely both women are driven by generational trauma and systemic grooming. Just like their mothers before them, they are trapped in a machine that ensures they will never find peace.

This is the true tragedy of the story. Despite their mutual blame, their self-inflicted evils, and the predators exploiting them, the apple is rotten to the core. No matter how much George R.R. Martin publicly distances himself from the adaptation, and no matter how much fans critique Ryan Condal and Sara Hess's writing, the narrative still perfectly aligns with the core thesis of Fire & Blood: the absolute death of innocence.

Even the real-world tribalism of the fandom the toxic infighting, the harassment of the actors, and the defensive outcries of their loved onesunwittingly mirrors the text itself. Both on-screen and off, the bitter factional warfare springs from the exact same tragic, fractured root. It is in this dark symmetry that I am able to find beauty: all of it matters. The flaws in the adaptation, the toxicity of the environment, and the devastation of the characters all compound into a singular, undeniable monument to how systemic trauma destroys a legacy from the inside out, making the tragedy as hauntingly real today as it is on the page.

Adding the lens of modern purity culture exposes a wild irony: the fans who ruthlessly harass others over character morals are performing the exact same self-righteous mental gymnastics as Alicent and Criston themselves. By reducing complex psychological decay into a simple black and white binary, this toxic moral policing proves that the fandom is just as trapped by the illusion of righteousness as the tragic hypocrites on screen.

"The idea that we control the dragons is an illusion. They’re a power man should never have trifled with."