divorce enthusiast

her circumstances hold a mirror up to alicent's struggles in a way aegon's patheticness and aemond's off-the-rails terminator downward spiral never really can. yeah, alicent's sons suffer and sour and become wretched echoes of the long history of various intergenerational traumas that alicent herself has endured, but only helaena has been subjected to the same kind of violence that shaped alicent's life, and helaena had arguably even less room to try to dredge up some form of self-determination than alicent herself – which is really saying something given how fettered alicent is throughout the story.

the more interesting reading of helaena, rather than simply highlighting her lack of agency, would be to yes-and that absence of agency. she's the only dragon dreamer that we've seen in any of the adaptations whose visions come to her whether she's awake or asleep and without the aid of any kind of mind-altering pseudo-psychedelic substance. what is it then, for her, to have her agency stripped away in regular life and to also be condemned to a lifetime of prophetic visions that she also can't change or affect? what is it for someone in her position, who seems to experience the world in a way completely unlike anyone else's, to be subjugated to things like sex and pregnancy and childbirth because that's Just How Things Go for targaryen queens? what is all that to her? we get a few answers from helaena herself, and none of them are good, but mostly her character invites questions about desire, love (platonic and romantic), sex, objecthood vs personhood, and consent in an extreme degree. she's like the furthest logical extension of what happens to rhaenyra and alicent. it seems silly to dismiss all that just because she does less to command her own life than alicent and rhaenyra.

it seems especially silly among the people who laud the show for its focus on the disempowered smallfolk to dismiss helaena on the grounds that she "isn't doing anything". most of the smallfolk don't do much either, it's just that their reasons are different. they're too far from any locus of power to affect how their lives are ruled. helaena is a princess, and eventual queen, but no one in her life treats her like a complete person. to aegon, she's a burden. to aemond, she's a prize and a tool by turns. and to alicent, who truly does love her but who also can't understand her, she's less a person than she is a kind of vessel for alicent's guilt, or an opportunity for alicent to try to "fix" what can't be fixed. i don't mean that as a rebuke of alicent, and i don't think it makes her a bad person or a bad mother or a bitch. but i do think it's narratively relevant, and deliberately really heartbreaking, that no one including the other women who are treated in the same ways to various degrees, is fully capable of seeing helaena as something other than a means to their own political or emotional ends. i think alicent's inability to connect with her daughter, despite how much she clearly loves her, is a crucial and important part of her and helaena's stories.

i mean. would you be able to look your daughter in the eye when you know she deserves better than anything within your power to offer her? what is it to be a mother who has to reckon with the knowledge that you can't grasp the way your child moves through the world while you're forced to sit back and watch your own husband (who didn't understand you! because you were a child when he married you to meet his own emotional needs!) marry her to her own brother who not only dislikes her but regularly disrespects her personhood? and what is it to be the daughter in that scenario? how do you fully love or trust the mother you could never quite reach or speak to, who always seemed out of phase with you? how do you love her when your literal waking moments circumscribed by prophetic visions of your whole family's ruin?

idk! this is so long and unfocused but i guess it strikes me that helaena is the most gothic-horror of the characters in a story that's Extremely about the gothic horror of the targaryen dynasty driving itself to ruin, but people think she's just a footnote to everyone else's everything. again! i confess that i'm biased, and i don't even disagree with the critique that the writing around her is clumsy and sometimes very messy and unfocused.....