This trend of making female characters "likeable" by stripping them of their flaws, as evidenced by HOTD, is so insincere and tasteless when you consider the quality and quantity of women who've existed in fiction who are just allowed to be multifaceted regardless of whatever their moral alignment is and whether the audience personally likes them. Compare show!rhaenyra and show!alicent to the likes of...
Jennifer Check (Jennifer's Body), Nancy Downs (The Craft), Gale Weathers (Scream), Lady Jessica (Dune), Princess Azula (ATLA), Callista (Xena: Warrior Princess), Darla (BTVS), Faith Lehane (BTVS), Lilah Morgan (Angel the Series), Meg (Supernatural), Bela Talbot (Supernatural), Abaddon (Supernatural), Livia Soprano (The Sopranos), Bedelia Du Maurier (Hannibal), Rachel (Orphan Black), Eleanor Shellstrop (The Good Place), Beverly Keane (Midnight Mass), Dolores Abernathy (Westworld), Maeve Millay (Westworld), Harmony Cobel (Severance), Claudia (IWTV), all of the women in Kill Bill, etc.
...it is just embarrassing when you compare those women to what HOTD is giving us.
I fucking hate this trend, anon. 🙃
I’ve said repeatedly that HOTD destroyed Rhaenyra and Alicent by turning them into permanently victimized mouthpieces for C&H’s painfully shallow commentary about patriarchy.
Removing women’s ambition, cruelty, selfishness, hypocrisy, and capacity for terrible choices does not make them progressive or sympathetic. It makes them hollow. Female characters are allowed to be difficult, morally compromised, power-hungry, vindictive, and still fascinating. They do not need to be scrubbed clean until every decision can be blamed on some man standing nearby.
Had the adaptation preserved the characters from the book, both the women and the men would have been far richer. Instead, C&H flattened nearly everyone into ideological props and then congratulated themselves for writing complexity.