Fragile Attraction

They're a power man should never have trifled with.

BLACK & RED

With the war upon us, black and dark red take over the Targaryen gowns, Queen Rhaenyra enlarges her presence with broad shoulders and crossed collars. While lady Baela and Rhaena follow the style of the young ladies with V-shaped details.

Necklaces

Earrings

Rings

I mean, that's the fear, that's the texture, that's the damage. He harms minors. It's the harming minors villain.

Every time Alicent has been used or trapped by the men around her, the show has made it about her. As a teen bride, the sex scenes focused on HER FACE, we watch her flit in and out of dissociation and the required role of loving wife and vessel. With Larys, we learn that even her ideas about roles and power related to class and service crack and fade. She only knows how to have power through submission and humiliation and we know its her father who taught her this. Sex with Criston is not even about his worship of her, but about her sort of... passive acceptance that this is what he needs from her and that this is the only pleasure she can have. Aemond escalating and taking up the mantle of King by violating her and consuming his psychosexual confusion around his mother is shot facing Alicent, we watch her process this nightmare in a new way. It isn't shot to titilate and it doesn't matter what it means to Aemond. It matters that Alicent learns that there is no place where it ends. Alicent is only a vessel. No amount of harming or hurting Rhaenyra has ever stopped that from happening. And now, the risk and tbh thrill of helping Rhaenyra can't save her either. If there was a time when it would've, we understand that that time is long past.

And the way Alicent processes this matters. It's unavoidable. It's duty. She was free to leave the castle, to go pretend she was a person in the woods, in a lake, to Rhaenyra, but Alicent's cage isn't a keep or a castle. It's her gender. It's her gender as MEN explained it and assigned it to her. Otto Hightower lives in her. It contrasts this episode with Rhaenyra having to be physically locked in a room with other women as a reminder of her gender. Like Alicent, Rhaneyra has her gender forcefully shoved down her throat, here metaphorically, but still at the hands of her own son. To have sons is to entrap yourself, to continue the cycle. In fact, Jace can only see Baela as an equal because she hasn't been marked by motherhood. Everyone understands that the "come with me" is a parallel to Rhaenyra and Alicent, but I think it's interesting too that Rhaenyra's talk of riding away on dragonback together stops when Alicent has motherhood thrust onto her, we see her be rude to Alicent a little when she's pregnant. And when it's Alicent saying it, it's because now they've both been anointed Mother. The show opens with violent labor in pursuit of a son. In a way, that's all the show is.

Compare both of these scenes to Weiss & Benioff's garbage choice to move Sansa from an A plot to a D plot to have her raped and brutalized by Ramsay Bolton. Most of that scene, which IS gratuitous, and actually does go against theme for Sansa, focuses on THEON. They did that to a POV character for the sake of Theon having more manpain, which Weiss & Benioff confuse for chivalry (ironic considering how important chivalry is to Sansa, a character they didn't bother to truly explore, to the point of inventing a sex worker to torture for the sake of showing someone from the North going to the South and finding it isn't actually romantic - this is a real justification they gave in interviews btw). And they did after never really grappling with Theon's feelings about Ned, but particularly never grappling with his feelings about Robb.

What I think makes this adaptation so successful is that it's telling a more nuanced story. It uses Fire and Blood as just a blueprint of the major events but the characters living through those events are much more human. And almost every major tragedy in the show is not the consequence of an evil person making an evil choice but of characters trying to control forces much larger than them. It's about hubris and the illusion that you can control the world around you. The dragons are the perfect example of this. The Targaryens don't actually have complete control over their dragons. By attempting to use the dragons to influence events around them they end up causing much of the suffering in the show. Aemond didn't want to kill Lucerys but he couldn't stop Vaghar. Rhaena wanted to help in the battle of the gullet but couldn't control Sheepstealer and ended up causing Jace's death.

But even characters who don't ride dragons end up causing suffering by trying to control those around them. Otto expected a pliable puppet king he could rule through but he couldn't control Aemon. The greens thinking they can control the Triarchy and use them as a weapon against their enemies only for them to go rogue in the battle.

HBO's House of the Dragon (United States, 2022) Season Three, Episode One

Emma D'Arcy as Rhaenyra Targaryen.