ASHLEY JOHNSON & BELLA RAMSEY as ANNA & ELLIE WILLIAMS THE LAST OF US | Season One
#locklyle LOCKWOOD & CO. | 1.05
aegon: i don't think we can mansplain, manipulate, or manwhore ourselves out of this
aemond, cracking his knuckles: manslaughter it is
they spun her around on the damp old stones, spun away all her sorrow and pain. ( insp. )
one death may have been a mercy. the dowager queen alicent of house hightower, second wife of king viserys i and mother to his sons, aegon, aemond, and daeron, and his daughter helaena, died on the same night as lord westerling, after confessing her sins to her septa. she had outlived all of her children and spent the last year of her life confined to her apartments, with no company but her septa, the serving girls who brought her food, and the guards outside her door. books were given her, and needles and thread, but her guards said alicent spent more time weeping than reading or sewing. one day she ripped all her clothing into pieces. by the end of the year she had taken to talking to herself, and had come to have a deep aversion to the color green.
in her last days the queen dowager seemed to become more lucid. “i want to see my sons again,” she told her septa, “and helaena, my sweet girl, oh…and [rhaenyra]. i will read to [her], as i did when i was little. [s]he used to say i had a lovely voice.” ( strangely, in her final hours queen alicent spoke often of [rhaenyra], but never of her husband, king viserys. ) the stranger came for her on a rainy night, at the hour of the wolf.
I’ve seen a lot of people talking about how the half of Viserys’s face that’s rotting facing the greens and the half that’s fine facing the blacks is symbolizing their badness and goodness but I’d argue differently. The rotting side faces the greens because they are the ones that deal with Viserys at his worst. Alicent is raped by him. Aemond is mutilated and denied justices. They are the ones caring for him as he rots away and they see the worst of him. The blacks get his best side. Rhaenyra gets a loving permissive father. Luceros and Jacaerys don’t get punished for what they do. He protects them against rumors of bastardry. They visit him when they want his help but have not been there for his sickness.
The two sides of Viserys’s face are about the two sides of himself and which each cohort sees.
A man will tell you poison is dishonorable, but a woman’s honor is different. the mother shaped us to protect our children, and our only dishonor is in failure.
Lysa Arryn asos-sansa vi
«How Targaryens Learned to Hate Stories»
The Greens
This fucking family, I can’t
I hate you, don’t leave me
Alicent follows her father through the keep after Viserys dies, she knows what has to be done. But then she meets Rhaenyra.
1200 words of Alicent’s internal turmoil and a little wishful thinking from a local lesbian. Rhaenicent has me in a chokehold rn
When his grief had passed, King Aegon II summoned his loyalists and made plans for his return to King’s Landing, to reclaim the Iron Throne and be reunited once again with his lady mother, the Queen Dowager, who had at last emerged triumphant over her great rival, if only by outliving her. “Rhaenyra was never a queen,” the king declared, insisting that henceforth, in all chronicles and court records, his half sister be referred to only as “princess,” the title of queen being reserved only for his mother Alicent and his late wife and sister Helaena, the true queens. And so it was decreed.
–The Princess and the Queen
remember when daemon targaryen mocks viserys for believing in prophecies? remember when viserys says “many in my family have been dragonriders, very few have been dreamers”? remember when for the death of lucerys, instead of going after aemond, daemon will send assassins to murder helaena’s firstborn son and traumatize her? remember on the bridge when he says to otto “i would rather feed my sons to the dragons”? maybe grrm, if he wasn’t daemon’s no1. fanboy, should have given daemon a death to measure his words and his deeds against helaena, the dreamer and dragonrider of the family whose child he kinslayed.
Bowing her head in defeat, Queen Alicent surrendered the keys to the castle, and ordered her knights and men-at-arms to lay down their swords. “The city is yours, princess,” she is reported to have said, “but you will not hold it long. The rats play when the cat is gone, but my son Aemond will return with fire and blood.”
FIRE AND BLOOD by George R.R. Martin
That is insufficient. Aemond has been damaged, permanently, My King. “Good will” cannot make him whole. There is a debt to be paid. I shall have one of her son’s eyes in return. He can choose which eye to keep, a privilege he did not grant my son.
— Queen Alicent Hightower HOUSE OF THE DRAGON «Driftmark»
My skin has turned to porcelain, to ivory, to steel.
Daemon (internet's feminist, female gaze, malewife boyfriend) really called Alicent, who spent her life getting raped in her marital bed by his rotting brother Viserys, a whore, and accused her of murdering him, when she cared for his decaying corpse for a decade while Daemon did not so much as lift a finger.
Queen Alicent has not forgotten the love you once had for each other.
Aemond said “retreat!” but Vhagar heard “let’s eat!” and ran with it
"Over the centuries, House Targaryen has produced both great men and monsters. Prince Daemon was both. In his day there was not a man so admired, so beloved, and so reviled in all Westeros. He was made of light and darkness in equal parts. To some he was a hero, to others the blackest of villains."
So much is wrong with this passage.
The absolute moral relativism.
Conflating basic human nature (the struggle between good and evil inside every human being) with grey morality.
Implying that someone who ordered the slaughter of a baby and threatened another baby with rape can do anything good to balance his morality scale and be called "equal light and darkness" and not outright evil (and Daemon didn't even fucking do anything good to tip his morality scale after the "Blood and Cheese" shit).
Implying that we can't call Daemon and people like him "evil" because evil people are exclusively bad and can't have any good sides to them (as opposed to evil people just being those whose bad side overwhelmingly eclipses their good side).
GRRM does not fucking understand what grey morality is and it shows, especially here.
For Daemon to be morally grey, his motives and actions need to be SO ethically and philosophically complex and context-dependent that we can't pin them as good or bad. Or his good deeds should be as equally great as his evil deeds.
Daemon has none of that.
His motives and actions are overwhelmingly horrible and almost entirely motivated by self-interest.