#Tom Harvey | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

nogoodsheepstealing-greatgrandma · 4 months ago

Text

HOTD with book ages vs show casting

It's interesting to think about how fans perceptions of characters would be radically different if we had book accurate casting.

Emily Carey (aged 18-19 here) is perfectly age-accurate to play an 18-year-old Alicent.

Meanwhile Paddy Considine, at 48, was pushing it a fair bit to play a 29-year-old Viserys.

For reference, Tom Glynn-Carney was 28 while filming Season 2.

So not that he's my fancast for young Paddy or anything, but let's be real. You would all be writing self-insertxVizzy fics. Alicent would have no more agency in the marriage if Viserys was his book age than his show age, but fan perceptions of Viserys would definitely be different if he was played by a young and attractive actor (no offense of course to Paddy, he is serving Targaryen realness etc.)

Or look at Fabian Frankel. He would have been around 27/28 while filming season 1. You were shipping Alicole back when Emily Carey was still in the role, after all.

And then there's Rhaenyra, who was 8 during the events of the first episode, and 9 when Viserys married Alicent.

Milly Alcock, roughly 21 here, is just a tad older than 8-year-old Rhaenyra.

Amelie Child-Villiers would have been 12-13 while filming Rings of Power, so older than Rhaenyra at the very beginning but can pass for younger.

To anyone who thinks a child Rhaenyra wouldn't have been interesting to follow, er... have you read ASOIAF? There are quite a few prominent child POV characters, you may have noticed. And Alicent doesn't automatically become uninteresting if she's 18 rather than 15... or 40.

I mean I get it, Rhaenycent shippers, you prefer the sapphic dynamic in HOTD... and it is absolutely fine to prefer something! But it isn't inherently deeper or more interesting. It isn't objectively better. BFFesbians can be just as one-note as you claim step-mother/daughter relationships are with the wrong writing, and step-mother/daughter relationships can be richly complicated.

Now, I've already gone through the absolute horror that is book Rhaenyra and book Criston

Criston Cole was 22 when he met a 7-year-old Rhaenyra, 23 during the events of the first episode. So Fabian at 27 (pictured here) is a a few years older, but his age gap with Amelie is the same as Criston and Rhaenyra. And yikes. This is why 'Criston the Dad who Stepped Up' posts make me throw up in my mouth. (Also it is so weird that Criston is never recast after the time jump even though the actor is younger than Emma D'Arcy - Criston is 47 during the Dance).

And yes, Daemon has a similar age gap with Rhaenyra

Daemon was 24 during the events of the first episode. Though I would add that Daemon wasn't, contrary to popular opinion by greens, grooming Rhaenyra when she was a young child. There isn't really any indication that he paid particular attention to his 8-year-old niece - he was mostly sulking on Dragonstone in a relationship with an adult Mysaria for starters, and then he was off in the Stepstones till Viserys and Alicent's 5th wedding anniversary tourney.

From then, no I'm not in favour of a 30-year-old Daemon and a 15-year-old Rhaenyra... I am not in favour of childbrideros. But considering he'd been absent from her life between the ages of 8-15, and there is no indication he ever paid any attention to her before then... it is less creepy than Criston Cole being Rhaenyra's shadow from the age of 7, with rumours of a sexual relationship beginning at a point when she would have been 12-14.

By Westeros standards Daemon unfortunately falls into the 'culturally normalised and could have a whole lot worse' category (and tbf, considering the popularity of ships like SanSan...). This isn't a pro-daemyra or anti-daemyra post, I'm not really going to go into their relationship or whether or not it's healthy here, just clarifying that Daemon isn't the Humbert Humbert of this story - that would be Criston (not being Humbert Humbert of course is a very low bar).

And when it comes to the casting and how that impacts audience perceptions... Matt Smith at 39 was too old for both 24 and 30 year-old Daemon (though exquisite in the role of course).

Considering how his haters condemn Daemon for his actions in episode 1 while excusing Aegon for rape and Aemond for murdering Luke (and burning alive many many other children)... Let's have a look at an age-appropriate actor for 24-year-old Daemon and see if that changes anything.

Ooh would you look at that, Ewan Mitchell at 24 while filming S1.

Or Tom at 28 during S2, just two years younger than 30-year-old Daemon. With a face that wins hearts over rape. You telling me if Daemon was his book age you wouldn't be excusing his actions? You wouldn't be taking all the rape apology arguments Aegon stans use and applying them to Daemon's seduction of a 15-year-old Rhaenyra?

Especially if you still had him acting alongside 21-year-old Milly, who was supposed to pass for a 14 to 18-year-old Rhaenyra.

Hopefully though no one would be excusing a younger Daemon played by Tom Glynn-Carney if he had been put against an actual 14/15 year-old like Evie Allen. Who would have been a more age-accurate (and disturbing) casting for Rhaenyra...

Oh wait, how old was Maddie Evans (Dyana) while filming S1 again? 15? Never mind.

Casting teenagers in such scenarios is of course a difficult business - above all the first priority is to protect underage actors. Milly was well-suited to convincingly play Rhaenyra from early teens to late teens, and it's impossible to constantly re-cast for absolute age-accuracy across the time jumps. But it does impact perception - while the first priority is to protect underage actors, the casting of older actors to play teenagers does contribute to society's perceptions of teenage girls in particular as mature adults, rather than children.

Meanwhile the attractiveness of adult male actors - and the younger they are - does indeed shape what some audiences are willing to forgive or excuse. Reactions to Daemon and Viserys by fans (especially green fans) would be radically different if they were cast with their book ages - sorry to say it greens, but your objections to their characters is in large part due to the fact that you are not attracted to DILFS (or leprosy!). And even if we still aged up Rhaenyra like the show does when she first met Criston Cole, reactions to him during the Dance would be vastly different if he was played by a book-accurate 47-year-old. Again, Fabian Frankel is younger than Emma D'arcy.

Of course, the bar for age accurate casting is clear in the way we were supposed to accept Olivia Cooke playing Tom Glynn Carney's mother (they are two years apart).

Because again if Alicent had been 18 at the start of the show and 41 at the start of the dance she would have ceased to be an interesting character or something I guess. Because no one wants an older woman (ew gross!) as the series co-lead alongside a non-binary lead. And because mother/stepdaughter relationships are inherently one-note while BFFesbians are inherently rich, deep and complex... apparently. It has nothing to do with, you know, the writing quality.

Final Round!!! Aegon and Aemond picking fights with kids

Harvey Sadler here is 8/9 years old when he played young Lucerys. Which makes this baby face 2-3 years older than... a six-year-old Book Jacaerys when 10-year-old Aemond was 'pummelling him savagely'.

So yeah, "3 against 1" - the oldest of those 3 being younger than Harvey Sadler. And honestly, 6-year-old Jace has my undying respect for the sheer balls on him to go up against a bigger kid twice his age and size. Does he care that Aemond has just claimed the largest dragon in the world? No, he pushed over his baby brother!

"But it's more interesting if Aemond and Jace are peers" Maybe. If HOTD gave Jace equal screentime and character development perhaps. But they didn't. Any value added by making the antagonist interesting and sympathetic is cancelled out if the cost is ignoring the protagonist or making the protagonist boring (especially in a family civil war drama!).

"But sympathetic Aemond is much more interesting" I am not arguing against making him sympathetic. He is still a kid here, and he still has Aegon to bully him and earn him pity points and trigger a cycle of bullying as he takes out his grievances on others who don't deserve it etc. You don't need to age up his victims or remove sympathy or screentime from them. Sympathy doesn't have to be zero-sum.

Leo Hart was 13 at the time of filming, so the perfect age to play a 12-year-old Jace during the dinner scene where a grown-ass Aegon picks a fight with him over asking Helaena for a dance. Also an accurate age to play a 13-year-old Luke when Aemond murders him.

Elliot Grihault who played teenaged Luke was meanwhile actually closer in age to Book Jace during the dance than Harry Collett (no offence Harry, you still made a more believable teenager than 24-year-old Jon Snow did).

And lest we forget Aegon's true nemesis... 13 year old girls on tiny dragons 'no bigger than a horse'. No offence to a 24-year-old Bethany Antonia, but Shani Smethurst at 12 was perfectly cast to play Baela during the Dance and absolutely would have been the next Arya if this show didn't hate black girls.

But hey, at least we got adult Baela saying "I am blood and fire" while the script struggles (*cough doesn't bother) to find her anything to really do. That sure is an improvement over book Baela acting out, causing chaos, kissing kitchen boys and crying to save them from punishment, grieving alone on dragonstone after the gullet, trying desperately to get the adults around her to believe her suspicions about Grey Ghost, wrecking Aegon on her tiny dragon, being forced to grow up quickly under captivity and fiercely defending her rescuers from execution.