#hotd speculation

I love the idea of Alys Rivers being the ghost in Harrenhal /or some sort of personification of Harrenhal or of the Riverlands/ or a personification of the old gods tied to the weirwood trees. She’s a spiritual entity and not truly corporeal, so your mind decides how you want to see her. Harrenhal haunts you so Alys knows all your deepest, darkest thoughts, desires, sins and insecurities. And the gods would be able to see your heart, wouldn’t they?

With this in mind, here’s my analysis of some of Daemon’s interactions with Alys and some thoughts on what it might suggest for Aemond’s future encounters with Alys. (This includes some Season 3 spoilers and leaks.)

Daemon sees Alys as a servant because he’s a Targaryen/Valyrian supremacist (he’s a Daemon supremacist, lbr) who thinks everyone who’s not Targaryen/Valyrian is beneath him. (It’s also pretty interesting how in the scene where Daemon sees Alys for the first time, she walks in as Ser Simon is making an oath and swearing by the gods....) The new Alys still suggests Aemond will view her as a noble bastard like the ‘Strong boys’ and as the Jocasta to his Oedipus because he’s ruled by the injustices of his childhood (meaning him being bullied by Aegon and Rhaenyra’s sons before he got a dragon) and by his Mommy issues with Alicent.

(Also, going with the Oedipal theme, there’s a leak that says Aemond will have a dream of himself beheading Otto Hightower in front of the iron throne. Otto was more of a father figure to Aegon and Aemond than Viserys was and Oedipus did kill his own father, so there's that.)

Is Aemond going to have that dream and then go and behead Ser Simon, similar to how Daemon sometimes saw Ser Simon after he'd had a dream about Viserys and took his frustrations with the dream out on Ser Simon? Daemon accused Ser Simon of plotting against him and threatened him with a knife right after he'd had a dream of himself being confronted by Viserys in the throne room. Ultimately Daemon didn't do harm to Ser Simon, but Aemond might not be so merciful, especially if he's just heard about Rhaenyra taking King's Landing.

^This scene. It’s the first time Daemon hears Alys’s voice. Was Alys actually standing behind him telling him, ‘You’ll die in this place.’ Or did he just hear a whisper on the breeze the same way Alfred Broome does when he’s standing near the weirwood tree and hears a whisper of, ‘Traitor.’ Is Aemond going to have some sort of experience near the tree before he starts having conversations with Alys?

Many (all?) of the conversations Daemon has with Alys could just as well be his internal monologues. E.g. ^This scene where Daemon talks with Alys about Rhaenyra and tells her he’s more suited to rule than Rhaenyra is. Maybe he was just brooding and thinking all that to himself. Does Ser Simon keep coming across Daemon muttering alarmingly treasonous things to himself and thinks, ‘Good gods, this man needs an intervention.’ (And how does Ser Simon see Alys, I wonder?)

Alys knows Daemon desperately wants old Lord Grover Tully dead because that would finally enable him to get the Riverlands on his side. And what do you know, when Daemon is at his lowest and ready to give up and leave Harrenhal, Alys gives him hope by telling him the wind will change in three days, i.e. Lord Tully will be dead in three days. You could also interpret this as her offering to kill Lord Tully for him, an idea Daemon himself came up with first when he suggested Oscar Tully ‘mercy kill’ his grandfather. Aemond knows his entire family is against him, he wants to be king, and he likely wants to start his own line - both so that he can finally have the family that’s loyal to him and because a king needs an heir to secure his rule. (In the first Season 3 teaser Aemond says, ‘A new dawn is coming, a new line of unsullied kings.’) So will there be a similar 'wish fulfillment' scene where Alys suggests Aemond’s desire to have a wife and son will come true, possibly because she herself will make it come true??

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.

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