#alicent also demonstrates this *to an extent* with being treated like Otto’s wife despite being his daughter

[banefort]

How is Rhaenyra part of the "my father is the worst person alive and I'm his favourite daughter"

?

All three of the women are united by being (in one way or another) selected by their fathers to continue and lead the family enterprise (the iron throne, waystar, the falcone gang). But, through a combination of their father’s inability to see his daughter as anything else other than a princess to be doted upon, and inability to reconcile his own misogyny, he ends up condemning them to a life of extreme suffering and extraordinary gendered violence.

All three of their fathers experience a level of cognitive dissonance whereby they want to gift their daughters the world, but simply do not care or do not notice that the male-shaped role they’re pushing them into will crush them, and they also don’t see patriarchy as enough of an issue to them to warrant making any changes to the system they preside over. If my brave strong daughter can thrive under the effects of ‘misogyny’ (thrive being me half heartedly asking patriarchy corp to make an exception for her) then surely it isn’t even an issue!

And there’s also another level to it whereby all three fathers enact some level of femicide on the mother of their daughters (Viserys and Carmine literally and deliberately killing their wives, + Logan alienating Shiv from Caroline by turning them against each other), then not quite realizing that by doing so their girls are being ‘groomed’ to later in life be similarly shunned and tossed aside (think of that one poem about girls turning on their mothers thinking it’ll save them from the same fate). Also, all of the fathers lash out and punish their daughters for questioning their role in systemic violence against women, and relegate them to the same fate as their mother once confronted by their gender through them expressing empathy towards women (Rhaenyra doesn’t explicitly question Viserys’ role in her mother’s death, but it’s still a relevant point imo).

And all of that^^^ just kind of coalesces into this awful paradoxical state which these 3 women have to occupy - simultaneously playing their father’s daughter, son, and wife