#hotd speculation

(There will be spoilers for F&B ahead!!)

Condal and Hess are setting it up so that everything Rhaenyra does (abusing Baela, becoming cruel and paranoid, arresting Corlys, forcing Alicent into servitude etc.) can be blamed on Jace’s death.

It’s not her fault she’s like this!!! How do you expect a grieving mother to behave when her baby boy’s dead???

The problem with this is if Rhaenyra can’t mentally or physically function without Jace then she’s not fit to be Queen.

C&H are once again proving their “feminist take” is 100x more sexist than anything George wrote! 🤣

I have to repeat my take on this: the show has not built any meaningful connection between Rhaenyra and her children. None. What I can see is that Rhaenyra cannot function without Jace because Jace was basically her exposition prop and political assistant. “Baby boy”? What baby boy? 🤣🤣🤣

If they wanted to make Jace’s death the emotional breaking point that explains Rhaenyra becoming cruel, paranoid, abusive, or politically unhinged, they needed to actually write that relationship first. You cannot skip the foundation and then expect me to cry when the roof collapses.

And if they are trying to pull a Daenerys-style downfall with Rhaenyra, then her spiral should have started after Lucerys and worsened after the miscarriage. Those were already huge losses. In the book, her grief over Visenya is ugly, furious, irrational, and political. She directly blames the Greens. That is how you show grief curdling into vengeance. But in the show? Luke dies and she stares into the distance. Visenya dies and it barely feels like the script wants to stay in the room with it. I guess she did not like those two enough. Kids with Daemon? Fuck them too. Are they alive, dead, kidnapped, emotionally relevant? Who cares. Rhaenyra must go loco and kiss Alicent. 😃

This is the conversation that precedes her appearance:

Bland, whitewashed characters with little to no turmoil or agency going on are revered as complex and nuantical on Twitter. And if you even dare to disagree, you're immediately sentenced to the stake. Characters like Alicent and Rhaenyra could literally not even be in the episode and nothing would change. Rhaenyra was in episode 4 for not even 5 minutes and with everything going on in it you wouldn't even have noticed that. She should have been there, leading the council as Cole marched on rook's rest, her only available connection to the mainland in the crownlands, apart from Claw Isle, after duskendale fell to the greens and instead her only scene in such climactic episode is her walk of shame returning home and her, rightfully, getting scolded by her son for thinking that she could still sue for peace with Alicent, the mother of her son's murderer. The show makes the decision to have Rhaenys volunteer instead of having Rhaenyra send her there so that later when Rhaenys dies Rhaenyra cannot be blamed for it. The fundamental changes of characters like Alicent don't work because the writers are not able to sustain such changes from the source material they are deriving the story from. Going from leading the council that would place Aegon on the throne, to never even being in on the plan to usurp Rhaenyra, that her father created, is such a letdown for such a political savy character like book Alicent.

Aging her down, to Rhaenyra's age, and making these two childhood best friends, was a mistake.

What is very evident is that the showrunners have no clue, so far, what to do with a character like show Alicent. If she's not going to lead the council when Aegon is bedridden and Aemond is off to fight in the Riverlands, why doesn't she just leave?

Going from an active participant in a usurpation from somebody who needs to miss-hear or misunderstand her dying husband for her to get in on the plan, only so there is an excuse to get her on the war council is bad writing.

Making people believe that Rhaenyra was usurped because of a misunderstanding, and not only because she was a woman, is bad writing. And going to the extremes, of having these two 'betray' each other in order to have a reason to make Rhaenyra look bad in the eyes of her rivals is bad writing. Rhaenyra could have been the perfect heir, and even only because she was a woman, Otto and Alicent would have usurped her either way.

Going back to the point of this post; Timelines, ages, events, who got married to who, how many kids they had, things that you can quantify are not something that can be made up, used as rumors or form of propaganda in a history book. What you make up as a rumor is sexual escapades and a young girl seducing her sworn shield who has watched over her since she was seven. Things that can make a person look bad to glorify or uphold the good of someone else alongside all the other stuff that happens behind closed doors and makes you question where the information is coming from.

I find it so odd that the aggressive marketing team for the second season was all about choosing your side. Lol, what is there to even choose? Choose between the overly sanctified Rhaenyra, who god forbid is still searching for the peace that has already been thrown over the cliff long ago, and is not allowed yet to make a mistake. Or, Alicent, the pathetic hypocrite who made her bed and is not willing to admit it. Anything interesting about these two women is completely being cut so that Ryan Condall and Co. can continue to spread the "men are bad and violent, women are the gentle peacemakers that don't want war." which is leaning a little too heavy for my taste into gender essentialism which would make every choice they have ever made about these two characters more misogynistic than any of the action of the actual misogynistic characters in this story. Taking away the very little agency these characters had and constantly making them the perpetual victims of the patriarchy and completely sidelining any sort of character traits that they may actually develop through their actions had they actually been taking any, doesn't work for me.

Great way to undermine the character grow of the protagonist of the other, most praised, show from the same universe.

After the leaks for S3E3 dropped, I’m hoping their gonna turn this into a similar plot to the books high sparrow plot where the nobility end up leading to major peasant movements that threaten the nobility’s power. It would make sense to add this to the story to expand on the moon of the three kings plot point from the book, show the evolution of the peasants frustrations and expand on why three separate groups come to power after Rhaenyra leaves. That is to say if Ryan Condal actually follows the book plots but he’s being weird about choosing which points to follow and change and all that.

If they do go further down taking Egg’s peasant reform plot, they should atleast add the nobility pushing back because if the nobles pushed back against Egg during peace time, they should be really pushing back against Rhaenyra during war times.