a war will have you 65 years old reporting to a 16 year old like damn i hope oscar tully looses me on the hunt today

key to daemon and rhaenyra for me is this fantasy of forced equalization. daemon has this immense power over rhaenyra by virtue of his gender, age, family relation, and various actions he takes from this position of power, but she becomes heir to the throne and his future monarch when she is a teenager, in a move that displaces him as such and takes his own independent social existence from him; in very real ways she has greater political power than him from that point on. and this matters for who they are within their context: daemon from then on owes her loyalty and subservience by the guiding ideologies that rule their lives. it forces an uneasy balance, rather than simply an outrageous imbalance, without negating or effacing the previous imbalance of power which the show never forgets. so it replays over and over daemon kneeling to her and swearing his service and proving his loyalty as that tension is continually being worked out as the through-line of his plot: he tragically “created” her (as a vision from his own brain accuses him with) - can he now bear the price of surrendering his own sovereignty to her as his monarch in turn? does he actually maybe long for that? are there countering rewards, joys, to this excruciating giving over of the self, this recognition that one’s acts of power come with corresponding obligations? it arrives at a strange vision of warped mutuality that is powerful precisely because instead of ignoring them it is so intensely bound to all the constituent hierarchies of a political system dependent on highly formalized sets of obligations. daemon is both bound to recognize an obligation by rhaenyra via an external structure, and also comes to accept this in a profounder emotional way, after having spent a life trying to escape his own subordination as unbearable (because, with viserys, the process of mutuality did not succeed for a variety of reasons, the exact equation of sovereignty-to-subjection could never be solved). which, yes, is such an appealing fantasy to me, of being able to bind one’s creator to oneself and have as equally created him in one’s own turn.

one week later and he does in fact canonically fuck with the dornish what the hell