#stay off of asoiaf tiktok it's bad for your health

[gwenllian-in-the-abbey]

what do you think of this tik tok post about Team green being jealous of team black?.

https://vt.tiktok.com/ZSFt7fLYu/

So this TikToker's thesis is basically that the characters on team green is angry at the characters on team black when they should be angry at "the system that upholds the status quo," and thus their rage is misplaced. Why isn't Alicent angry at the patriarchy rather than being mad at Rhaenyra for not toeing the "conservative" line?

It's actually a bit crazy making, as someone with more than a passing knowledge of history, to see takes like this make the rounds and get traction. There are multiple layers of silliness but I'm going to focus on the assertion that their rage is misplaced, that they should be raging against "the system" instead.

First, let's get one thing out of the way. Of course the system is the issue. If you put Rhaenyra and Alicent in the modern world, half of their problems would disappear. Inheritance, bastardy, fuck, in most modern countries the monarchy wouldn't exist at all. Of course we have systemic issues in our world too, and so they'd have a whole slew of other problems.

The problem with applying a systemic critique to the actions of characters in Westeros is that you have to be aware that the system exists before you can rail against it. We, the audience, can understand that the problem is a systemic one, but we can't expect Alicent or Rhaenyra to understand that much less to act upon a systemic understanding of their issues. We're talking about a psuedo-historical period in which people still believed in the divine right of kings. Alicent and Rhaenyra are BOTH conservative by any meaningful metric. There was no such thing as liberalism in Westeros, no progressive movement. Smashing the patriarchy is about 4-5 social movements down the line for a people who haven't even had a schism in their church yet much less a protestant reformation, a scientific revolution, or an enlightenment, all of which were important stepping stones to the development of the idea that governments are systems that are controlled and determined by human beings, rather than a set of privileges granted to an elite class by god/the gods. You can't be angry at a system when you're not even aware there is a system. So from the start this argument is based on a false premise and while I could go into the specifics of how Rhaenyra's actions shouldn't be celebrated as liberated or progressive because even SHE doesn't see them that way, the so-called "game of thrones historian" needs to pick up an actual history book first before we can have that conversation.