#then there’s whatever tf qyburn was doing

[qyburn-in-the-black-cells]

rhaenyra doing the same thing to jace her father did to her is chefs kiss. viserys prioritized his personal happiness by marrying alicent and having sons. rhaenyra prioritized her personal happiness by marrying daemon and having visibly valyrian sons. rhaenyra not being able to recognize that her father’s selfishness is the pebble that started the avalanche of this civil war means jacaerys could be set up for another one. neither of them are the son they feel their living parent needs because that parent fails to make any personal sacrifice to support them politically.

[qyburn-in-the-black-cells]

Criston Cole is the embodiment of everything wrong with courtly love. Knights gained social access to women of equal or higher rank by swearing obedience, to protect them and their (chaste) love and desire for them. Knights and ladies could play at flirting and mime adoration while not threatening the feudal exchange of political access, alliances and wealth transfer in arranged marriages. Criston operates in this social structure to justify locking Alicent out of real political power but is also extremely vulnerable, especially romantically or sexually to her and Rhaenyra. That’s not to say he would consider any of his sex scenes to be assault but his can’t really initiate or ask for emotional intimacy or anything resembling a partnership. Criston is in a distinctly masculine role but his agency is limited - somewhat like wives’ agency is in ASOIAF.

[qyburn-in-the-black-cells]

the entire riverlands are haunted. not Harrenhal haunted but a hundred violent generations of petty Mudd, Teague, Vance, Hook, Charlton, Bracken and Blackwood kings haunted. four hundred of occupation and rebellion haunted. each generation a new king rose against the durrandons and each generation they were slaughtered. they’re the initial choke point of Westeros before the Neck. it’s a carved up land, rivers cutting rivermen apart until the histories can’t remember a time when they weren’t enemies. and the rivers? their rivers and marshes are the boundaries humans and faeries; the living and the dead; keplies that drag men to drown and the bean nighe, washing dead mens’ bloody clothes but never getting them clean. they’re natural borders before the storm kings came, then was a roadmap for guerrilla fighters, then the iron born, who funneled stone, wood, slaves, serfs, salt-wives towards the God’s Eye. they have to immolate their dead on the rivers else they’d be dammed by bones and farmers would till broken teeth every time they sowed.

“We choose fire.” that’s a short agony before death. the rivers have given them ten thousand long years of it.

[qyburn-in-the-black-cells]

The Alys’ weirwood paste induced sex nightmare™ scene wasn’t about Daemon wanting the fuck the mother he barely remembers - it’s about how the lack of romantic and sexual boundaries between sibling, nibling, cousins etc means the one Targ family relationship that is taboo is (grand) parent and child. Sleeping with his mother/father or his children is the only way incest can actually disturb Daemon and truly horrify an audience who’ve become desensitised to how disturbing Targaryen customs are.

[qyburn-in-the-black-cells]

its so telling Oscar Tully calls daemon prince during the execution scene. in harrenhal with a dragon right outside and a notoriously unpredictable kinslayer asking you to murder your dying grandfather he defers to daemon’s ego. surrounded by his men with leverage over daemon and a legitimate reason to check his power and ego it’s prince. someone raised this kid right.

[qyburn-in-the-black-cells]

I haven’t gone here in years but -

When Arthur says “Morgana was always so kind. What happened to make her so twisted? I could have saved her” he doesn’t realise that her kindness was what made her so twisted. It meant she empathised with her abuser Uther’s victims. Then she got angrier and angrier where Arthur pretty much disassociated. She wanted justice, then she wanted revenge for the Purge - and she wanted to get and hold onto the power she needed to have both.

Morgana turned on Arthur because that was more important than their relationship where Merlin was the opposite. His relationship with Arthur was more important than having any sort of justice in Camelot or even returning magic to Camelot.

[qyburn-in-the-black-cells]

Ok hear me out - Aemond is a villain with a cluster b disorder, a childhood inferiority complex, AND is a disabled man in an extremely ableist society. The way Aemond compensates is by performing masculinity and kingship in the most misogynistic, violent and domineering way he can. People cannot be bigoted to him if they’re afraid of him or if he perfectly embodies the least merciful aspects of knighthood and kingship. Of course that’s not true but who’s going to tell him that?

[qyburn-in-the-black-cells]

“A dragon would only accept a dragonlord to ride it. Or so say the histories.

Valyrian histories. Written to guild us in glory.” HOTD S2E5

Rhaenyra genuinely believed this but you can’t sell the Targ myth of true-born dragon incest supremacy to someone who only has a dragon because of a lie about his identity.

[qyburn-in-the-black-cells]

Aemond torturing Aegon and throwing Alicent off the council is just 🤌 abused sociopath gets to heap abuse back on the brother who harmed him and the mother who didn’t stop it. “Do you remember?”

[qyburn-in-the-black-cells]

the Targaryens aren’t rotting in house of the dragon they’re acutely septic - they're not feeding nutrients back into the ecosystem, they're an infected body with crashing blood pressure, failing organs, mental confusion and a lit blowtorch.

[qyburn-in-the-black-cells]

Can we talk about Aemond in S2E2 for a second?

Instead of his dysfunction, trauma and sexual desires resulting in dominance or sadism or the need for overt control that people’ve expected (and enjoyed) - you get someone discussing a traumatic event while replaying a traumatic comforting one in order to regain the feeling of control. He cannot redo the fight on Driftmark where he lost his eye, he can’t get “justice” because when he tried he killed Lucerys and started a war so he goes back to the next major traumatic event in his development.

Both traumas are an end result of cycles of abuse - the lost eye the first end result of Viserys’ succession crisis and his rape the end result of the systemic societal expectation that boys and girls (when married) become sexually active in their teens or pre-teens. Often with adult partners. Aemond wouldn’t consider losing his virginity to Sylvi rape like his mother wouldn’t consider what Viserys did to her to be marital rape. Which is so jarring for the viewer because both Alicent and Aemond were so unquestionably raped yet they both maintained some kind of bond with their rapist.

[qyburn-in-the-black-cells]

Alysanne and Viserra’s relationship and her engagement to the elderly Theodore Manderly is weird because it can probably be read two ways -

1 - She’s projected so much of herself and Jaehaerys relationship onto Baelon and Alyssa that it makes her worry about a younger, prettier woman trying to seduce Jaehaerys if she died. And she knows he, the man who might’ve involved threesomes in her early sexual development (Corysnne Wilde), wouldn’t say no.

or

2 - If you buy into the theory Saera was sexually abused: Viserra exhibited the same signs as Saera but Alysanne wasn’t able or willing to identify before. So she makes the hastiest marriage possible to get Viserra out of court (away from Jaehaerys). And, look at that, it’s to an elderly Theodore Manderely who’ll probably die before she’s twenty, leaving her an immensely rich (childless) widow able to choose her next husband or live independently for the rest of her life.

Or both. Honestly it could be both. It’s probably both.

[qyburn-in-the-black-cells]

Alys is a warg, a skin-changer and a greenseer. Maybe something else but that could be enough to draw her life out to two hundred, four hundred years. Bloodraven’s a hundred and forty-four trapped in a tree with a branch growing through his eye out the back of his skull. He’s a skeleton sustained by the Weirwood. So how can Alys walk and laugh and live in a seemingly normal body? A glamour? Perhaps. But for Wildings have three taboos for skin-changers - do not consume human flesh, do not mate with an animal, do not warg another human.

[qyburn-in-the-black-cells]

no wait. all the dragons have reigns anchored into their necks. vhagar has a corset piercing cut into hers. targayens have to mutilate the symbol of their house and the source of their power in order to control them. like…..it’s so on the nose I can’t believe I didn’t notice it. like I’m like do “you have eyes.” also something about large predators with large territories being a pain in the ass to keep in captivity irl and dragons being stuffed in a literal pit…none of this is original. its just an added layer of horror to dragons going extinct. bc they have to feel like seaworld orcas in those caves

[qyburn-in-the-black-cells]

Have you ever heard of Blodeuwedd? A not-woman from the High Medieval Welsh stories, The Four Branches of the Mabinogi or The Mabinogion. Blodeuwedd (Rhaenyra or Alys) was made from oak, broom and meadowsweet for Lleu Llaw (Daemon) warrior, magician and future king who’s tynged - fate, destiny - cursed on him by his mother was to never take a human wife (Targaryen incest). Foreseeably Blodeuwedd took a lover (Aemond or Myseria). To kill her husband they needed a net (Harrenhal itself), a black goat, a cauldron (Alys’ weirwood paste), a spear forged during Mass for one whole year (Valyrian steel) and he needed to be by a river (the God’s Eye). Lleu Llaw survived the attempt and killed Blodeuwedd’s lover. Blodeuwedd was turned into an owl, forced to be nocturnal “for it shall be [all other bird's] nature to attack thee, and to chase thee from wheresoever they may find thee (79).”

Alys and Rhaenyra exist outside of normal humanity and therefore human womanhood. Rhaenyra is a dragon rider and a Targaryen, closer to a god than a man, the mother of a draconic stillborn and if you believe the theory Targaryens mated with dragons, then closer to an animal as well (non-derogatory). Alys is a witch, a warg and a greenseer, both closer to a god, by way of the weirwoods, and an animal by way of her owl and especially because of the owl "Birds were the worst, to hear [Haggon] tell it….’Spend too much time in the clouds and you never want to come back down again. I know skinchangers who've tried hawks, owls, ravens. Even in their own skins, they sit moony, staring up at the bloody blue.’ (Dance of the Dragons).”

Daemon’s entire Harrenhal plot line is about dissecting his psyche and nightmares seeping into the day to hamper his attempt to make himself king. He’s forced to confront the “tynged” of victimisation by and perpetuation of the Targaryen cycle of incest - he currently cannot love or wed a human woman. In F&B his named partners when he takes Harrenhal are all visibly Valyrian and two are close relatives. After purging it in Harrenhal he takes the possibly (probably) non-Valyrian Nettles as a lover, presuming she shows up in the show and/or book Daemon had a similar experience to show Daemon. His closest shown non-familial or romantic relationship in HOTD is with Alys. Daemon struggles to see Rhaenyra and Alys for who they are even when they and Harrenhal tells him directly. He is no longer Rhaenyra’s god and she is not his priestess; she is no longer made for him. Alys’ first line is the harbinger of his death yet he treats her as a confidant and a subordinate; she is closer to a malevolent god, ready to turn on him with her lover when the time comes.

[qyburn-in-the-black-cells]

Thinking about Rhaenyra and motherhood -

She did her best to break the cycle of emotional neglect for her sons even when she’s being abused herself.

She did not have a daughter to pass the women’s cycle of incest-grooming onto.

Until Baela and Rhaena -

Both who she’s arranged incest marriages for.

One who she’s shoehorned into a maternal role. And the other who probably share(s) the blood of the dragon with Daemon (and Rhaenyra). They are restless and chaotic.