i really don't get those of you that seem to understand alicent was shaped by the misogynistic system she was born into and yet can't seem to grasp the same about rhaenyra

I can’t believe there’s excuses for what Rhaenyra says about Nettles, the only Black character in the Dance (“a common thing”, “low creature” and “you need only to look at her to know she has no drop of dragon’s blood in her”). Trying to pass it as her paranoia due to Mysaria and cheating doesn’t work. If you call a POC a racial slur, that’s racist regardless of whether that person did something to you. Rhaenyra isn’t Daenerys or Arya, she tried to murder a teenage Black girl. I am not here for any Rhaenyra’s stan trying to excuse or downplay a white woman’s misogynoir and classism because her sons died. Grief doesn’t make you suddenly racist, or compel you to say racist things. You were always that way. The grief just brought out the racism and supremacism that was always simmering beneath the surface.

Actually, Rhaenyra reminds me of the racist Southern plantation owner Mary Epps in the film 12 Years a Slave, who feels jealous and threatened by Patsey (played by Lupita Nyong’o) when her husband Ed constantly rapes Patsey and other female slaves. Mary hates and blames her and the other Black slaves for “seducing” her husband, while making excuses for his outbursts of rage, violence and lust.

And the fact that some of these people say that they like Nettles is what makes it worse.

(This also goes out to some of Team Green who any other time are capable of admitting that Miss Maegor is in the wrong, but suddenly when it’s a Black girl it’s all Missy Anne is a victim too).

If you actually liked Netty you wouldn’t downplay her hurt. You wouldn’t downplay how she was almost killed in her sleep by Missy Anne. You wouldn’t forget that she’s vulnerable. You wouldn’t forget that she is a too woman.

Any way you slice it, she being Black, homeless, a bastard, and the daughter of a whore, is the lowest person in the racial/social/class strata. You don’t like someone and ignore their identity and the role that plays in their treatment(both inside and outside the story).

Septon Eustace(the one who reported on what happened during the council meeting where Nettles death was given a death sentence) may be biased against Missy Anne, but remember who Nettles is.

Remember that even when he was defending her Corlys of all people still called her dirty and ill-favored.

Is it really so hard to believe that Missy Anne would call her a low creature without a drop of dragon’s blood?

Is the woman who ordered her head truly supposed to suddenly be a beacon of morality?

Murder is fine, but she wouldn’t stoop to racism. Eustace totally just threw in those lines for shits and giggles.

As if he needed to do such a thing when she was fine with breaking guests rights and murdering her in her sleep.

Missy Anne is in the wrong here. Not Daemon who was the one person(baring Maester Norren, shout-out to him, he seems nice) who didn’t have a thing to say against her and protected her with his life. Or Mysaria, who while is a conniving snake, she’s not the one who signed that letter.

Like it or not the moment Missy Anne ordered Nettles to be murdered she became the big bad wolf in her story.

The “mental breakdown” excuse is old. She was perfectly fine with Mysaria sleeping with her husband, but only flips out when a Black girl does it.

To not acknowledge that shows me that you value her feelings, personhood, and “suffering” over Nettles(and there are broader implications with that).

Rhaenyra is just like the women from old yonder. The only difference between she and a woman like Mrs. Epps is that she has more power yet she still chooses to punish Nettles rather than her husband. Point blank period she’s a racist.

Then again it’s not hard to see why these people don’t think Missy Anne is racist given how quick they are to say Nettles should be cut because she is Black, are comfortable with calling characters the N-word or comparing Black characters to monkeys, don’t see the problem with calling Dettles disgusting even though they ship an abusive incestuous relationship, yet somehow they aren’t racist a**holes.

Anyone taking these people remotely seriously, let alone viewing them as an authority on racial issues is out of their mind.

For all of rhaenyra's love for helaena she was fine with daemon ordering her first son's murder (she keeps damon and mysaria in her employ and favor) and personally puts a bounty on baby maelor. This when she must know helaena would have never done so. And if she actually thought of aegon as her brother would have realized neither would he. This is whom team black says loved helaena.

And with how she and alicent is being portrayed they are going to allow her to be whitewashed yet again. I have come to realize that's ok (I've accepted they don't want her to be a villain, eventhough she like everyone except rhaena, helaena, and the kids are absolutely villains) but if alicent accepts even a bit of her apology she will be the worst mother and grandmother ever. She knows what is happening to helaena after her children's loss. She will not even recover.

Infact both women should have no love for the other after their kids are lost.

I have come to the point where i think the show runners trying to make rhaenicent canon is the worst decision they have ever made. I hate the show portrayal of alicent as a weak and unsure teenager, when book alicent (while also a teenager) knew her worth and knew politics. I am not a fan of any of the casts interpretation on the characters. The only person i absolutely thought was spot on was tgc but the showrunners ignored everything.

I had thought condal was such a book fanboy but it seems obvious to me with his thoughts on viserys that he doesn't know the themes of the book at all.

Sorry for ranting in your asks but the show is just terrible and I'm annoyed with all the writers and general public praising it as if it is say as good as succession.

I totally agree with you, Nonnie.

People take the “sweet sister” comment way too literally, she was just saying that because Helaena wasn’t a threat to her claim, see the things she said about her brothers.

If Alicent is anything but scorched earth on Rhaenyra, and vice versa, they don’t understand these fucking characters and they will be a fucking joke to everyone.

The reason why Alicent was vengeful was because she saw her grandson being beheaded, people tend to forget that Alicent was there, she saw everything, and her only daughter driven to suicide. It’s a fucking miracle that Alicent didn’t kill Rhaenyra with her bare hands.

I hope they’ll listen to TGC in this season, but i don’t have much hope.

I am finding this fandom’s fanfic collection to be pretty disappointing but I’m not surprised.

The amount of misogyny directed towards Alicent speaks volumes on how fake Team Black are about their so called “equality for all” rhetoric. Which is not surprising since Rhaenyra is the embodiment of white woman feminism but it’s still disappointing to see.

I also find it hilarious how these fic writers make characters like Aegon, Aemond or Helena switch sides towards Team Black to spread this “Rhaenyra good sister” trope or whatever. It’s worsened when either character blames Alicent, and Alicent alone, for their shitty upbringings. Somehow the martial rape victim who was a teenager when she had these children is the real villain here.

It’s an interesting observation, I’ll admit that much. I just wonder how their minds work to end up thinking like this. So very strange.

this also angers me 

it’s always “alicent never allowed rhaenyra to be a sister to her siblings”... uhmmm point me where that happens in the show where she speaks ZERO words to her siblings outside of antagonizing her 10 year old brother and trying to get him interrogated as he sits there severly wounded? 

and aemond and helaena switching sides.... look, i think you can write whatever you want in your fic as long as you’re not gonna be a misgonyst just for the sake of it with no literary purpose, because people should write fics about whatever they want, but i do have to say that i hate the idea that they call helaena a “prisoner” of the greens or that she would turn her back on her family and leave them to suffer and die? i mean even if you look beyond the show, helaena in the books is described as a happy girl before team black do what they do to her and her children. 

in fact it is the show that made her seem often upset and that’s because she’s a dreamer that no one seems to understand that she is one, including the targaryens in her family and including her father who supposedly held dreamer in higher regard than dragonriders (and helaena is both), and she probably foresees terrible things. and it’s also because they’ve given her character so little and basically made her a plot device despite her being the queen and playing a pretty important part in the dance. 

and aemond.... alicent is the only person who stood up for him. it was her and her children cornered in a room. rhaenyra wanted him interrogated as he stood there, already badly wounded by her sons. she wanted his mother implicated in high treason and it was all so bad that it made aegon be the one to stand up and take all the fire. 

i admit, in retrospect, when i forget a little about what rhaenyra has done in that scene in particular, i too would like to see what it would be like if things had been different and they had gotten along, but i will never push alicent out of the picture for it. 

but again: i do think people should write (mostly) whatever they want and obviously no one can stop them, but i do think this theme can be awful when it is written with so much hate for alicent.

I tried to casually comment on got back when it was airing but it seemed useless without reading the books first and i wanted to wait until grrm was done (I'm a dreamer i dream a lot i know) but what finally broke me was this one video on YouTube about how the show completely dismissed the political conflict between Sansa and Daenerys (Dany trying to use an existential threat to the North and her dragon power for her own political gain, making her a conqueror essentially) I'm just starting agot so i don't know how these characters will evolve and how they will clash who knows if grrm knows atp i just realize now that for Dany aging her up (as good as Emilia's portrayal could be) erases part of the context of Dany's choices like in the book is said over and over again that the one in this situation with all this power is a literal child like u are nor supposed to forget that... I know Robb and Jon are aged up too so it's probably similar... iwonder what you think about this. Anyway good hotd day and let's hope they learned something and we get complex Alicent/Rhaenyra

Oh yes, Game of Thrones definitely removed so much of the complexity we see in the asoiaf characters to make them more "palatable" to mainstream audiences! I basically started reading reading the books halfway through the show (around season 4 I think?) and I was already a diehard Daenerys fan (literally from the first episode lmao) but I was taken aback by how much of the nuance we see in book!Dany didn't make it to GoT... I basically fell in love with Daenerys all over again! Same with Arya, I didn't truly appreciate her character until I read the books.

In aging up Dany they removed much of the context that shapes her character. Book!Dany is essentially a childbride who in using her dragons to dismantle slavery finds herself in the midst of a turbulent political situation (dealing with the aftermath of the collapse of a slavery-based economy) while barely a teenager. And it's not just the age thing either cause the show went out of its way to dial down much of the softness Dany exhibits in the books in favour of more "badass" moments. It's a real pity imo cause you can see from the way Emilia talks about Daenerys how much she adores her character (and she has also studied the source material too) so she would have delivered a more soft Dany beautifully.

What they did with the asoiaf books is essentially the reverse of what they're doing with Fire and Blood. In Game of Thrones they had some very rich source material in their hands and well developed characters, leading in much of it getting lost in translation; with Fire and Blood while the "historical" events are there, it lacks the three-dimensional characters of asoiaf due to its format (fake history written by a biased third party years later as opposed to thousands of pages of pov character narration) so the show has had to step up and be creative.

I definitely agree about Rhaenyra and Alicent! I think exploring their younger versions and letting the audience see how their experiences as teenagers shaped them into the women they'll be during the Dance was a smart move.