sorry for the inactivity lately, i’ve been busy obsessing over asoiaf (again) and just finished dealing with a crisis after realizing that i do, in fact, like aegon. no, not the conqueror. yes, the musty one.

Something I've noticed is that when people say "this character I hate has wasted potential" or "we were robbed", it generally means "Man, I wish this character had been written to be as nasty as I wanted them to be so I could hate on them more without being told I was wrong."

Take Hawks from My Hero. Most of the time when I see people lamenting his potential or saying he used to be so deep but now he's boring, they generally wanted one of two things. Either they felt he should have become disillusioned with Heroes and joined the LoV or be harshly punished by the narrative for killing Twice and had a huge break down that made him decide the villains were just poor misunderstood souls who needed hugs.

I've noticed the same thing with Alicent from HoTD. People who already hate her say that the writers could have given her more agency and depth if they'd just made her Cersei 2.0. She should have been a cunning villain that hated Rhaenyra from her introduction and spent the entire season finding ways to try and abuse her.

But generally, despite admitting that the characters don't live up to these expectations, they still criticize them for these flaws they think the authors should have given them. Alicent is still a horrible misogynist that spent years abusing Rhaenyra, who only wants her son on the throne because he has a dick. Hawks is still a cold blooded killer who is being punished by the narrative by some new thing every few chapters (loosing his wings, the first raid failing, Twice being cloned by Toga).

It really can't be both. It can't be that the authors failed to, or didn't portray these characters these ways, but also criticizing the characters for being these exact things. They either are or aren't. Or in the very least the author had to be trying to portray them that way and failed.

I understand being frustrated because a character didn't get written well. I certainly have issues with how Hori has written the LoV, but I don't say "Hori should have had them do X" but also "God it was awful when they did X". In fact most of my critisuims of the LoV is that they don't live up to how their fans view them. Dabi should have had more scenes where he cared about his family, Toga should have gotten a more in depth backstory where it showed just how awful people treated her due to her Quirk, Shigaraki should have a better goal then 'destroy everything I don't like'. I've never once said Hori made the LoV to sympathetic. The only thing I've criticized was his writing depending on sad backstories to much to make the audience feel bad for the LoV.

Are there missed opportunities with these characters? Sure.

It's clear that both Alicent and Hawks suffer from wishy-washy writing. Hori clearly wanted Hawks to be a more grey character but doesn't have a very good grasp on how to pull it off, so instead Hawks flip flops from heavily negative framing to highly positive. The HoTD writers wanted Alicent to be more sympathetic and have more than greed and misogyny driving her actions, but at the same time needed her to still be unlikable enough that neither side would look like the clear good guy/victim of the other. So, one episode she's being terrible to Rhaenyra and telling Aegon he'll be the next King, while the next she's shocked her father is planing to put Aegon on the throne.

Making Alicent a pure evil character whose only out for herself and power for her family or Hawks into a cold assassin who learns how evil the system is from the villains wouldn't necessarily make than better characters or the story better over all. It just would have made them more consistent. But so would having Alicent be entirely driven to put her son on the throne because she was sure her children would be killed otherwise or having conflicted feelings for Rhaenyra and Hawks sticking with the Heroes because despite how bad the HPSC was to him he still wants to save people as a Hero.