#this fandom continues to kinda suck at tagging non-romantic/sexual ships and stuff

[mneiai]

I've been reading some House of the Dragon fics, because while I outright hate some of the things that show has done with the plots/characterizations/etc there are also some interesting moments to be exploited (much like with GOT), and if you're looking for some interesting AUs, I'm enjoying these ones:

The Sons of the Dragon is an Aemond/Jace series with some great relationships between Jace and Rhaenys, Jace and Alicent, and Jace and Cole (who is his father, something I always enjoy lol). It starts out with a change to the infamous Driftmark episode and leads to the two boys fostering together, and from there the interesting changes keep happening. There's a lot of Rhaenyra and Daemon bashing, but the fic is HotD based, not just F&B based, and it works well in the verse.

The Fate of the Dowager Queen has Alicent time travel just far enough back to maybe avoid the worst of everything. It has a lot of her having to come to terms with what she did and didn't do in the life before and some very amusing parts where she realizes how much she didn't know or had made the wrong assumptions about things. It's got sweet Alicent & Rhaenyra and some well thought out changes that Alicent could do.

The Bitter Spring is another time travel AU, with Rhaenyra going back in time to just before her mother dies. It warns in the tags that it won't go the way readers are expecting and it really, really doesn't, but it's a fun divergence from the norm and the writer puts in lots of amusing nods to later history. It has a strong thread of past Daemon/Rhaenyra from the timeline before and that is also the endgame ship.