#gayle rankin avatars

[behindfairytales]

Gayle Rankin in House of the Dragon (s2) as Alys Rivers

[tearsofbriseis]

GAYLE RANKIN as ALYS RIVERS

[thephantomcasebook]

How much do you wanna bet Alys is gonna be girlboss #2 of the show behind Rhaenyra lord help us all I have zero faith in the writers of the show anymore.

I mean, I don't know ...

I heard that the first drafts of Season 2 were really terrible and ultimately rejected by the Studio because it was clear that Condal and the writers were injecting themselves into the narrative by writing characters as their avatars.

Alys was basically a vessel for Condal's frustration at Team Black fans for woobifying Daemon. Also both Blood and Cheese were written very meta and almost fourth wall breaking as the writers room commentary. And at one point, in several drafts, Blood supposedly rapes and sodomizes Alicent, while basically gloating about how Alicent could never act "Righteous" again, and the person that peeped it, said it read a lot like the writer was self-inserting to revenge rape Alicent and basically all Conservative women. Apparently this is the rumored scene that Olivia Cooke reportedly threatened to walk off the project if they didn't change.

The real issue is that the writers, apparently, did such a shitty job, that Warner Brothers went out of pocket to hire the head writer for "The Crown" to come in third party as a ringer and fix the scripts and stay on as a script editor on-set during shooting.

So, the advantage is that they have an award winning drama writer who is an expert in portraying historical royal intrigue and personal politics in a place of power. However, the problem is that he is not familiar with the source material and he only has the show bible to go off of for characterization - which means that Aegon of Season 1 will probably stay Aegon of Season 1.

Also, with Gayle Rankin being so last minute a replacement - literally - I'm not sure what will be done with Alys character or characterization. The early drafts reportedly weren't very good. But from what I understand she wasn't written as a girl-boss for political or social reasons, but as a mouth piece for Condal to humiliate Daemon to take out his frustrations on his fans.

My hope is that as someone who isn't a fan of "The Crown" but have seen a good chunk of it, the writer is superb at really good and relatable female characters that are flawed and vulnerable despite their high station and political power. I think that he could do very well with Alys if given the chance. But how faithful would she be to Book!Alys, I couldn't say.

There is a lot of parallels between "The Crown's" portrayal of Princess Diana and "House of the Dragon's" portrayal of Alicent and even Helaena. So, even though I couldn't speak to Alys. I think that we might get some good content with Alicent and Helaena from the guy.