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horizon-verizon · 7 months ago

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F&B's Writing & Gyldayn's Intent (Watsonian/In-World)

Gyldayn uses Rhaenyra, Alicent, & other women in the original document (that he's writing in years after the actual war, with the eye of a person who has learned more of the legend than hard boiled facts) to write propaganda-istly w/in the project of writing historically. They are mean tto be "moral" examples of what not to be and what not to allow in society, again, female rulers and woman who--baseline--tried to assert the same or similar tights to me. Or in Alicent's case, tried to use her connection to a male to attain more power to her that would be traditionally given if her son had been heir & become king. Even Alicent receives subtler criticism from Gyldayn/larger Westerosi culture for her trying to gain power or doing acts out of her role because it was not power that came through a passive (not peaceful) transfer of power. I mean that she actively worked to become the next Queen "Mother" (Not regent, she was never officially that. Aemond was Prince regent and she acted as regent while he was gone) instead of passively receiving that rank as her son ascend.

While I recognize & believe that Rhaenyra should have been the ruler just for the precedent if for nothing else, the then-value of her ruling to the cultural setting was that she was chosen by the past ruler, not hat she herself was a good leader. This is the quality that ennobled her cause for others to support her. The lords who followed her wanted to because they wanted to make sure their own heirs would have stronger bases to become the next ruler/leader of their house and thus they wanted to make sure that their own authority & decisions would be stabler. Alicent troubled this element of feudal power transfer by disobeying Viserys' wishes, thus her punishment of losing all her kids is also her punishment for daring to try for power. To in-world many readers.

Many events he describes or uses others to describe is uncredible & throws doubt as to what actually might have happened as well as who these women are & how much agency they could have actually had. After all, Alicent was a royal Consort, not a Queen Regnant. She, like other lady or Queen consorts, will never have the same authority or agency that her husband & male children have (the latter in some ways). The heft of her power is relegated to the court through more subtler, "soft-power" avenues & making marriage alliances only thru her husband's permission, rather than drafting & enforcing policies, going to war, etc. Everything is done under his permission or ignorance.

And even w/Rhaenyra to become a Queen Regnant, as the heir she still has to marry & become stuck in a situation her father poorly planned & arranged for her despite her likely being clear on who she wanted to marry where she faces arguably higher chances of people coming for her position by smearing her reputation. She loses her kids bc other people wanted to take advantage of her gender & were convinced Aegon deserved the throne more than her or were just trying to get power for themselves. She gets usurped for the same. Her mother dies from Viserys/the patriarchy's pursuit of a male heir. And yet, there is proof of her having more than just the one positive female connections AND court esteem than what HotD portrays BEFORE the war.

What about the Descriptions of their Personalities OUTSIDE of F&B?

My thing is that...even with Gyldayn *maybe* trying to make or imply Rhaenyra was this terrible person bc she only wanted to avoid war to protect her kids & not--as show!Rhaenyra does--to not make victims of those most vulnerable suffer the consequences of war and war crimes:

1) [pic below] GRRM described her to Amok as the sort of person who was exactly that, so I don't think it's likely that Rhaenyra was as reserved as adult!show!Rhaenyra was, nor that she cared abt "protecting the realm" anymore than bk!Viserys or either!Otto did. This is not an F&B source. This was recorded back in *2006*.

Amok was the artist who drew the official-official art of various characters, who GRRM gave very specific instructions & descriptions to help him realize these characters, btw. The description for Rhaenyra above yielded the blow pic.

🎨: Amok

2) "The Princess & the Queen" was part of an anthology called "Dangerous Women", & the introduction [pic below] explicitly lends more credence to the concept of both Rhaenyra & Alicent having *enough* agency to want a war & assert what they thought were their dues

As much as blurbs usually give us a quick and cursory idea of what the text actually gives and how Alicent & Rhaenyra could have been labeled as "dangerous" simply for being women with considerable power relative to other women around them and most noblewomen in Westerosi history, there's also just been textual hints (AND the GRRM instructions to Amok above) of Rhaenyra not being as compliant or reserved as most of show!Rhaenys. Asking for Lucerys to be named heir of Driftmark at all while Corlys is sick in bed (in the bk, Viserys didn't arrange for this at all before she married Laenor), for example. She went out to get this for her kids (and before people try to say this is her attempting to steal Driftmark from Baela and Rhaena, once again, CORLYS--the head of that house and the only determinant of who gets to inherit it, thus Rhaenyra's supplication, never wanted a girl to inherit said house. Plus even if he did, he'd have to make the deal with Daemon, the girls' father before he could name them....bc he's not their dad nor are they a part of his "house"!). She was not summoned nor was this a thing someone else did for her.

3) Even in F&B, Rhaenyra *does* try to avoid a war (even if nothing else to protect her kids) AND warns the greens that if they backed out of their claims...that if Aegon were to give up the crown, she wouldn't come for them. Aegon angrily refused her counter terms. Independently. And there is a whole exchange abt it that spans most of the "The Blacks and the Greens" chapter. It's unlikely that this portion was heavily twisted into making Rhaneyra look bad when Aegon is the one who looks out of control AND the maesters are funded by the Hightowers, especially for HotD to completely remove Rhaenyra's famous speech to Orwyle and those prior terms.

Instead, we got Rhaenys:

insist that she is not a part of a war she really is, has always been a part of, and always will be a part of through Daemon's daughters being her granddaughters

only support Rhaenyra once Rhaenyra shows hesitance that I'd argue is unnecessary bc the two camps, like in the bk, were actually waiting on how the lords reacted to their sent ravens and were preparing for a war JIC...so really Rhaenys acts more like the reverse of the evil-bitchy woman trope stereotype that plagued GoT [post by @rhaenyragendereuphoria], further evidenced by her otherwise staying silent like a wooden post

So...

The fact that these women tried to use their wits/courage or just immediately assert themselves gain more power and lift some restrictions on their agency is itself expressed through their more "fiery" personalities and thus I believe this is necessary to show in any adaptation. I mainly speak about Rhaenyra & Rhaenys, because if they hadn't made Alicent a SA victim at 15, I'd be fine with what we got.

And...

there doesn't have to be not a 0 or negative value of power one can wield or agency one could have even as a person with a marginalized identity. HotD hasn't really shown us what exactly Alicent has & hasn't tried to do aside from constantly trying to speak directly to Viserys or how she convinced him to allow her to sit at council. Where's the journey of her accruing that power & influence?

HotD has taken some quotes from Rhaenyra especially that we can't say are examples of her being this harridan of violence and sufferign Gyldayn tries to paint her as

Basically there is a level of credit HotD doesn't really give the original characters because they misinterpreted how & why the maesters wrote F&B, obviously being "team green", but also including accounts that disparage the greens. [this post by ozymalek vs this post by poorshadowspaintedqueens]

Excerpts from ozymalek:

The Dance era in "Fire and Blood" is something that will fundamentally cause the feelings of cognitive dissonance... ......................... It did not provide easy answers, it was written as a historical account, the in-universe historians were clearly biased. People, however, had trouble realizing who the historians are biased for and against. Team Green would have you think that "F&B" is biased against the Greens, because their allegiance as maesters clearly being to Hightowers notwithstanding, they could not evade simple historical facts: that most of the kingdom supported Rhaenyra, that Greens were horrendously misogynistic and that her usurpation was clearly wrong. That's why, approaching it from the "choose your favorite war criminal" point of view, it was difficult for Greens to accept that their preferred side is so cartoonishly evil... ......................... The maester's anti-Targaryen bias, however, manages to sneak in and mess with the reader's balance, causing said cognitive dissonance. ......................... It's hard to deal with it as a reader, let alone as a showrunner who's trying to adapt a story in which not everything is set in stone. They incorrectly assumed that, because they are constantly forced to question what is happening in the story, the bias is with the underlying idea that there was a correct side. As such, they assumed that all the inconsistencies result from maesters not choosing to view it that way.

Excerpt from poorshadowspaintedqueens:

There are hints throughout Fire & Blood that women were doing more behind the scenes and that the narrator (Gyldayn) just doesn’t care, unless they were also having scandalous sex. I, for one, think there was a lot more to Rhaenyra Targaryen, for instance, than those creepy, gross “lessons” Mushroom claimed she took from Daemon when she was 13, or having illegitimate kids with Harwin Strong and being “punished” by gaining weight (which is fatphobic as well as creepy). But a lot of that requires reading into the text and between the lines, rather than taking it at face value.

So if those women would have had their reputations or actions reduced to nothing by the author...where exactly do we see HotD!Alicent, Rhaenys, & Rhaenyra do "behind the scenes" AND in public--even in conversations that superficially look amicable--to realize this thing Gyldayn ignores?!!!

[this is before we realize that this didn't work, I'm in general, how situations are arranged not as they happened or the results which belied what Gyldayn himself would not have expected if he had lived at the time]

End...

So again, yes, F&B establishes the importance of Daenerys' rise to power & the importance of why her rise is so important if for nothing else (bc there's more than the political angle) for the politics of a female ruler becoming Queen in a sexist world. Abt to come to Westeros. At the same time, while Rhaenys, Rhaenyra & Alicent's agency was severely limited...it doesn't mean they had none. They had more than what other women had & usually had & supporters or lives that made them express more..."fiery" personalities & theyr were less afriad to really use those resources. So it really seems more like people can't take haughty & proud women as protagonists.

Real women & other marginalized groups in real history had their agency suppressed as well (relatively)...doesn't mean they had a value of 0 agency or tried to gain more. That through political authority & power even behind the scenes.

So, when I see an Alicent w/o at least deciding to tell her father (after she marries) that she will accrue her own power AND for House Hightower through her kids to compete against Rhaenyra

AND

I see show!Rhaenyra's decision to go to war framed as if she is the one making THE decision to plunge them all into war unfair & a clear wrong done by HotD when:

if Aegon were to become the next king, how seriously would he take the prophecy Viserys bestowed the knowledge on to Rhaenyra?

the greens (Otto) are not even thinking in terms of what's good for "the realm", & it's very obvious

when she came up through the floor on Meleys & killed so many KL peasants, Rhaenys herself basically gave the greens more *public* incentive to declare a war on Rhaenyra & make themselves look more like "protectors" against the "evil" blacks; in whatever version any writer makes of this event in Westerosi history, it will always be true that Rhaenys' granddaughters would be perceived as problems for the greens bc they are Daemon's daughters

Just bc Gyldayn, Mushroom, Septon Eustace, Orwyle, & all those other unnamed secondary tellers might have unintentionally or intentionally twisted some real behaviors or events to make some women seem more evil or irresponsible, or tried to heave that burden of responsibility onto the women rather than Viserys, doesn't mean that the women *didn't display* "fierier" behaviors or that we can't witness specific mini-events of them trying to gain more agency & getting it, even when it pans out to them losing so much through the war. It rather highlights, to me, how those assertive qualities were demonized AND the possible agency-grasping acts were ignored. Like how Alicent isn't that culturally credited for the green council.

But why is it bad or inadvisable to allow Rhaenys, Rhaenyra, Laena, etc. to even at least sometimes act away from their "bear with it" social compulsions as aristocratic women once in a while?! Why is it so conceived as either impossible or disliked for a woman like Rhaenyra or Rhaenys like to articulate their emotions at the violent suppressions of their agency or that of the others' through anger, annoyance, "rudeness", or rage, and more comparatively more evenly distributed instead of it just Rhaenys harping on Rhaenyra or Laena on Daemon?! If we assume Gyldayn made up or twisted their worst actions/words--and not that he exaggerated them--to degrade ANY sort of passion from a woman with authority or incumbent authority as "dangerous", then why do we tolerate the extreme dilution of of theior most active actions?!

Why would all this mean we have to mute their personalities, age them down to experience even more abuse, be even more intellectually unhinged, or experience a lack of support that they DEFINITELY had in the original story? Is this not all inherently sexist?!

There is one moment in episode 8 where Rhaenyra turns away from Vaemond when he disrespectfully mocks her during the council, and it infuriates me that Rhaenyra couldn't even face him or either verbally or nonverbally mock him back...this is then type of shit I'm taking about. And this wouldn't have negated the fact that she thought it necessary to move her kids from the Keep to avoid such various degrees of the same from the wider court and for her own kids.

Let me know if this post needs something. Despite its length, I still feel there needs to be something more added or to explain some thoughts.

#hotd critical #hotd writing #book vs tv comparisons #fire and blood characters #hotd characterization #westerosi women #hotd comment #hotd misogyny

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