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Imagine you are Alicent Hightower, living in a brutal medieval world where having royal children does not mean they are safe it means they are always in danger. Your sons are not ordinary boys; they are potential claimants to the Iron Throne. Even if they never try to take power themselves, other people could easily use them as symbols to start a rebellion. Just their existence makes them a threat.

This is not something George invented out of thin air. It happened again and again in real medieval history. One of the most striking examples was Henry VII of England. When he defeated Richard III and became king, he married Elizabeth of York to unite the rival houses of Lancaster and York. But he knew that her relatives the Plantagenets still existed, and that made them dangerous. They were children, but their blood alone was enough to endanger his rule.

Edward Plantagenet, the ten-year-old son of George, Duke of Clarence, had never plotted or fought against Henry. He was only a boy locked away in the Tower of London because of who his father was. Historian Alison Weir, in The Princes in the Tower, writes:

“Edward of Warwick was kept in the Tower all his life because he was the last male Plantagenet of the senior line, and his mere existence posed a threat to Henry VII’s claim.”

In 1499, when Edward was almost thirty, he was accused of conspiring with a pretender and executed almost certainly to remove the threat once and for all.

Medieval rulers believed that a rival claimant was like a weapon lying around waiting for someone to pick it up. You could pretend it wasn’t dangerous, but eventually, someone would use it. If you left that claimant alive, you were leaving the door open to future war. This logic was not personal cruelty; it was how dynastic politics worked. Thomas Penn, in Winter King, described Henry VII’s paranoia this way:

“It was not cruelty but necessity… the safety of his dynasty depended upon the removal of all claimants.”

When you look at Alicent’s actions in Fire & Blood, you can see the same pattern. She knew that if Rhaenyra took the throne, her sons Aegon, Aemond, and Daeron would never be truly safe. Even if Rhaenyra herself promised mercy, her allies like Daemon and Corlys Velaryon would always see the Greens as a danger to be eliminated. The lords of Westeros would never fully trust that the old king’s sons would stay quiet. The truth is that if Rhaenyra had won, it would only have been a matter of time before someone demanded that Alicent’s children be killed or imprisoned, just like Henry VII did to Edward Plantagenet.

This is why the Dance of the Dragons spiraled into violence so quickly. It was not simply about personal pride or ambition. It was about survival. Alicent understood that once Viserys died, the question of succession was not a polite disagreement it was a fight to the death between her family and Rhaenyra’s. People often say, “Alicent started the war,” but in that world, any claim against the chosen heir meant war, no matter what the claimant said they intended.

It is easy to stand outside the story and call her actions monstrous, but if you were in her place if you knew your children were likely to be executed or locked away for life what would you have done? Would you have sat quietly and trusted that your enemies would spare your children forever? Or would you have tried to secure your family’s survival first, even knowing it could mean bloodshed?

When you look closely at the way medieval politics worked, you see Alicent did what almost any ruler or mother in her position would have done. She acted because she understood that in Westeros, like in real history, mercy was a luxury no one could afford when the survival of your house was at stake.