You want to tell me that Daemon - fucking Daemon - left Tessarion with the Hightowers? The Dreams-Didn't-Make-Us-Kings-Dragons-Did Daemon?! He left Tessarion with Ormund Hightower and the Hightower army... Why the hell would he do that?
The stupidity of the Fake Daeron plot rivals even the trip beyond the wall to capture a white walker from GOT S7. We reached the level of writing of one of the worst seasons of Game of Thrones...
The biggest problem with HotD is the lack of consistency. I have no idea who the characters are because the writers change their entire personalities from episode to episode, season to season. The actors are amazing, and they do what they can, but they cannot fix bad, inconsistent writing.
Many people say that Fire & Blood is badly written. Well, it's definitely not ASOIAF, but even in Fire & Blood, the book written by an unreliable narrator, there's a certain level of consistency that makes us feel like we know the characters we read about.
Rhaenyra is proud from the very start to the moment of her death.
Alicent is devoted to her children. Even after they die.
Daemon is daring, dashing and dangerous. To the very end, when he decides to kill his nephew in some crazy feat that no one else would dare to even think about.
Aemond is a boy pretending to be a man. He keeps up the facade right to the moment of his death.
Even though GRRM did not have full creative freedom while writing Fire & Blood (some events of the Dance were mentioned in asoiaf and he needed to stay consistent), we can still find something familiar in the characters we read about.
In HotD, the characters change their personalities depending on the plot. They also do not remember what happened in previous seasons. Daemon leaves the symbol of House Targaryen and their greatest power with Ormund Hightower. Alicent kind of forgot that, while her father was gone from King's Landing for ten years, she had been scheming and plotting to usurp the Iron Throne. Now, she talks about the plots of men.
And last, the Rhaenicent of it all. I wasn't always critical of this change. In fact, in the begining, I was very open to it. I thought it made the story more interesting and added another layer of tragedy. Two friends turned enemies because of the Iron Throne. The problem is that the writers can't let go of that friendship, and in their desire to keep the show anchored to Rhaenyra and Alicent and their "friendship", they are destroying Rhaenyra and Alicent as characters.
The greatest achievement of HotD is that, somehow, they managed to turn me, a staunch supporter of Rhaenyra and the Blacks, against Rhaenyra. Not because I suddenly started to believe that Aegon should be the heir, but because Rhaenyra is the most boring, bland character in the show. Even Baela, whose main role in the show is to play a therapist to her love interests, is better. At least I'm not cringing whenever she shows up on my TV screen.
And they can have Emma D'arcy cry and hit Jace's dead body in despair, but none of it matters if that death doesn't affect Rhaenyra in some way. Visenya, Luke, and Jace's deaths cannot have any impact on Rhaenyra because that would turn Rhaenyra against Alicent, and the showrunners cannot have that. So we have Rhaenyra, a bland, passive character, who goes through the events of the dance as if it was a shopping list. Things happen to her, but she's not allowed to react or respond, to let those events change her, to be angry with people who orchestrated all of it, to hate. She's just there... weeping because of Otto's death, cosying up to Alicent and asking her for advice, even though she knows Otto and Alicent started this war. Every tragedy that happened to Rhaenyra can be traced to Otto and Alicent. But, well, we can't let that get between Alicent and Rhaenyra. After all, what is the death of Rhaenyra's children compared to the few years she and Alicent spent as friends... let's instead be angry at Baela and other people who stood with Rhaenyra all this time. Let's get into a fight with Corlys over the legitimisation of Addam and Alyn, even though Joffrey is the heir to the Iron Throne, so Driftmark succession is no longer important to Rhaenyra. But at least Joffrey was mentioned in this episode. Twice! Maybe the audience will remember him when the time comes for him to die...
If anything, HotD taught me how to not write the characters. So thanks for that, I guess.
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