#she is the eldritch snatching aemond from his own story

[lemonhemlock]

Alys being a terrifying witch comes from the sexist sources in f&b. If she was so powerful, why would she have been a servant to house Strong? Aemond would hardly be the first prince to have a mistress. Everyone in this story is a hypocrite, Aemond's no exception. The man who killed a Strong bastard, falls for a Strong bastard and fathers a son on her. There's beautiful irony in that. It's him throwing the rulebook aside. They're fighting a war, there's no place for rationality.

If she was so powerful, why would she have been a servant to house Strong?

Great question. We don't know most likely because we're not meant to know. Alys' story doesn't make sense because the supernatural doesn't make sense.

In my copy of Rise of the Dragon, Alys becomes "the witch queen of Harrenhal" and installs what seems like another transgressive regime of "broken men, robber knights, outlaws and their followers". There is artwork with her presiding over a burning Harrenhal. Tyland Lannister becomes very preoccupied by this, but dies of Westerosi COVID before he can do anything about it. Alys promptly disappears from the story again.

The maesters may not believe in magic and may use it to discredit women, but we, as readers, know that it exists in the ASOIAF universe, and GRRM very much codes Alys as a sorceress every time he gets the chance. This is not the kind of character that can live out her life submissively in the king's court as a mistress. Alys is not so much a woman as a force of nature. She is transcendent. She doesn't belong.

From a writing perspective, Alys literally changes the genre of Aemond's story. He was in a war story, now he's in a gothic fantasy. It's a sure fire way to signal to the reader that this character is doomed. There is no "normal" for Aemond after Alys, since a fundamental breach has been performed on his previous plane of existence. He is Caesar crossing the Rubicon. Aemond has passed the threshold: he left Alicent and Aegon on the other side and now he cannot go back to them, since they're playing out a totally different genre. The only escape is death, since these two spheres are irreconcilable.