Annara Snow

How is she worse than Aegon IV?

1. Not a character 2. Not a place

Which is what I thought was always obvious, that no one won and it was a destructive pointless war But it's not obvious, it seems, to a big contingent of hardcore Team Blsck fans who argue, on social media and on this forum too, that the Blacks won, their crucial argument being that "Rhaenyra's line" lived and ended up on the throne (as if she wasn't fighting for her own rule), and that "Alicent's line died out", as evidence that Alicent is evil and a loser and that "GRRM hates Greens". Cue tweets rejoicing over Jaehaera's death and arguing that GRRM killed her to punish the Greens, and constructing forced arguments that Aemond's son doesn’t exist, isn't his son, or, my favorite, "Alys sacrificed him/will sacrifice" (?) because...reasons (she's evil because they say she's a witchand that's all you need) or if he exists, he is a bastard, and bastards don't matter. (Same for any bastards Aegon may have had) Like I said, HotD fandom is quite something.

Fans who are upset at Jaehaera's fate think it was completely unnecessary and only undermines the ending of the Dance. Since people who talk about HotD are focused on the Dance, why would they focus on "is there enough drama during the Regency?" rather than "How does her death work thematically in the context of the Dance"? A comparison to Catelyn is odd, since her death was from her POV and very much about her and her arc. Jaehaera's death is mot about her - Ran just confirmed it's all about Unwin Peake.

Henry VII was married to Elizabeth of York and had children with her, heirs to the throne, but that didn't prevent a pretender from claiming to be her brother Richard, and from gaining support of foreign rulers such as his alleged aunt Margaret of Burgundy or the king of Scotland.

It is me who interprets those paragraphs as him agreeing? LMAO Oh, so when he says the Targaryens were "rightfully" considered closer to gods than men, that's up for interpretation? Wasn't Gyldayn initially not even supposed to live into Robert's reign? Aside from that one line inserted there, the text is 100% written as something one would write during the Targaryen rule, so I'm pretty sure the bulk of it was meant during Aerys. Or am I to believe this guy started writing during Robert and didn't get info on how Robert felt about Targaryens (in spite pf being descended from them), so he goes "...the Targaryens were rightfully considered closer to gods..." The overall support of the Targaryen history makes sense in terms of continuity of the Iron Throne (and the pro Conquest thing certainly does, due to Orys Baratheon), but direct statements about Targaryen superiority make no sense if the text started to be written during Robert's reign. Unless that's another error, because Gyldayn wasn't initially meant to live to Robert's reign. Either way, mind boggles at the idea that someone writing that a royal family was rightfully considered gods was being objective. ETA: what break with tradition?! Henry Tudor, unlike Robert, married the daughter of a York king to justify his own claim, and evsn before that the main reason he had any support was because he managed to get support from the Lancastrians as a Beaufort descendant who was also Henry Vi's nephew. He didn't break with anything. He just had to portray Richard III as an evil usurper, and himself as a savior who ended decades of wars, and he otherwise upheld the tradition of earlier kings.

@Lord Varys Gyldayn was writing DURING Aerys' reign, not about it. Therefore the propaganda (and the fact his sources were full of it too). LOL at "no Targaryen propaganda". There's a whole long paragraph or two where he goes at length about what an honor it was for people on Dragonstone for some Targaryen or other to decide to "honor" a bride and her husband and father by taking the Lord's Right and getting her with a child, and how everyone was happy about it because Targaryens were "rightfully" seen as more gods than men. (Rightfully!) Countless times he says no one can ever be as beautiful as Valyrians with their silver hair and purple eyes. Not to mention all the idealization of Aegon the Conqueror (when Aegon does threatening, mass killing and burning, he's awesome; and Orys Baratheon was so nice when he married the daughter of the king he killed, who was delivered to him as a prisoner) and Jaehaerys I. At one point in the Sons of the Dragon chapter he says Jaehaerys was undoubtedly the rightful heir to the throne "by all laws of the Seven Kingdoms", which is not true - and the very next chapter acknowledges that there was actually disagreement if he was, or it was Aerea. That's just some of it.

The only way I can justify that scene is to assume that it never happened, and it's another instance of Gyldayn writing propaganda during the reign of Aerys II. However, there's a ton of people in the fandom who take everything the narrator says im Fire & Blood as gospel truth, even wheh it's obviously not written to be taken that way (e.g. Gyldayn calling a Northern bastard girl he never met and claims might not have existed as "half-wild and unwashed", which some seriously quote on Twitter), and who are really invested in the idea of Valyrian blood supremacy, I see them on Twitter all the time getting hundreds of likes...so it probably doesn't help when the book is not obviously challenging those ideas. At least to me, reading about how everyone was supposedly stunned by the beauty of a 6 year old just because she was Valyrian with silver hair and purple eyes is obviously absurd and my reaction is "lol sure, that happened", but I don't know how many had the same reaction.

1) It was normal to start having kids before the age of 24 in real world too. This is an example that exceptions happen. 2) So he created the fictional world like that for no reason whatsoever, just because it's fun like that? Not to say anything at all? All those descriptions of war crimes and war devastation in ASOIAF had nothing to do with anti-war stance? If all the extremely young mothers (and sometimes fathers) are meant as a criticism of such practices, that gets lost if you exaggerate it so everyone does it and portray it as something with no bad consequences. (ETA: and motherhood at young age still portrayed as bad in F&B in some cases like Daella Targaryen, but with Daenaera, not really and I don't see why Aegon III's wife had to be that young, there's no point to it)

1) Aegon and Jaehaera were nowhere near adulthood when they married, so that phrasing is odd. But anyway: Cecily Neville was married to Richard Duke of York when she was 14, and had her first child at the age of 24. She went on to give birth to 12 children in total, 7 of whom survived infancy. 2) No, that's definitely a GRRM problem, and a you problem. Trust me, the "brain rot" of disliking the normalisation of pedophilia and hebephilia is, fortunately, not confined to Tumblr.

Thank you. Now my opinion of GRRM is much worse. Because apparently it's perfectly fine to have 13 year old mothers (or fathers), but completely out of question to have royals start having children in their 20s. There was no reason why this is how his Westeros had to be like that. "Historical accuracy" it's not. In real life European Middle Ages, 13 year old mothers were very rare (Margaret Beaufort was a very specific and unusual case; there was a rumor that king John - someone with a very bad reputation, especially regarding his sexual behavior- consummated his marriage with his second wife when she was 13, but she only became a mother at 19), and it was normal to wait till the bride is older for consummation, even if the church allowed it after first period. And there were also nobles who only started having children in their 20s, even if they married younger (Richard Duke of York and Cecily Neville, who went on to have 12). It's also no excuse as he could have easily said they had older children who died in infancy. Nothing was forcing him to include so much normalised pedophilia and hebephilia in F&B and the resr of pseudo-histories, and this is a writing choice that's hard to defend. At some point depiction does start looking like endorsement.

They gave Dany CERSEI's ending. Rhaenyra's ending is not GoT Dany's ending. Nor is Rhaenyra's arc at any point Dany's arc. Dany is a self-made liberator of slaves, girl who grew up in exile, poverty and helplessness, was abused by her brother, sold and raped, before managing to attain power by herself, hatching dragons in a miracle magic ritual she risked her life for, and then going on to use that power to topple slavery and free slaves, gaining undying loyalty of thousands, who called her "Mother", and emnity of the slaving nobility and others whose profit depended on that system. And then the show had her go suddenly crazy, obliterate an entire city for no reason, become uber-evil, and then had her put down by her lover, the heroic protagonist. Rhaenyra is a princess who grew up in privilege and was given everything on a silver platter by her father, including to be his heir (not because he believed women should rule in general, but because he wanted her to rule specifically, as an exception) before he died and her rivals usurped her throne. She's not fighting for anyone other than herself and her immediate family. And there's nothing wrong with a royal fighting for their throne. But the only thing she has in common with Dany is that they're both silver haired Targaryen princesses with dragons who are trying to become ruling queens. Rhaenyra is more like a mix of Stannis and Arianne than she's Dany. And Rhaenyra doesn't actually go mad, nor does she start killing and burning masses of people - if anything, she's too passive as a dragonrider, compared to many other dragonriding Targs. She encounters big obstacles, makes mistakes and acts short-sighted. She overtaxes the smallfolk to make up for the lack of treasury and doesn't think about how they will feel about her lavish feast in honor of her son. She gets bad reputation as a cruel woman partially because of what happens to Helaena's children - Blood & Cheese, which was mostly likely her husband's doing she might not have known nothing beforehand, and what happens to Maelor, which is partially her fault because she put a bounty on a toddler, but she probably never expected the outcome. She makes mistakes, shows that she doesn't particularly care for smallfolk (duh!) or the rights of other women (duh!), shows that she's a hypocrite when it comes to bastards, orders torture and executions (which is tyrannical but just as much as monarchs tend to be while fighting a civil war), and gets increasingly paranoid so she starts alienating her allies; she turns against Nettles and says some very racist and sexist things against her, then also against Addam, at which point she really alienates her main allies and shoots herself in the foot. Basically, she shows herself to be an incompetent ruler under pressure*, and her flaws that were there all along grow to stare you in the face, and she becomes increasingly unlikable to both the people in-universe (with Helaena's death as an inciting incident that will probably get compared by the media to Princess Diana's death) and to the audience, and, in modern parlance, problematic (#RhaenyraCancelled, #NettlesDeservedBetter, #AddamDeservedBetter). She doesn't go from heroic revolutionary beloved by the people (which she never was) to a raving madwoman cackling evilly while she burns cities (which she never becomes). And she's not put down by a hero protagonist, she's captured and cruelly killed by her rival for the throne, who's very far from being heroic or noble, and who then goes on to be murdered himself later. *Could Rhaenyra have been a good ruler under different circumstances? I expect the show to play with that question. Would things have been completely different if Rhaenyra and Alicent were able to remain friends and support each other? I think we'll see the show asking that question. The story is a tragedy, so it works best when the protagonists have their fatal flaws, but you also have a sense that things might have turned out better if only...

Quite a few people in the fandom think Jaehaera's death and Aegon marrying Daenaera (especially the way it's described*) is the worst thing GRRM wrote re: the Dance and should be changed. (I think he only wrote it because he realized he had written himself into a corner with Daena naming her son Daemon, which makes no sense if she's Jaehaera's daughter, but didn't want to change the Blackfyre backstory) I think they could just skip that, show the immediate aftermath the couple of years after the Dance, minus that, cut Unwin Peake altogether, and do a flashforward to Aegon and Viserys reuniting. *13 year old Aegon being smitten by the "beauty" of a 6 year old is something that only makes sense in F&B if it's a romanticized legend of what was really Aegon agreeing to what his cousins were arguing for, because they're his cousins and because he doesn't really care anyway. The F&B narrators sound like pedophiles at least half of time, but that doesn't mean otherwise sympathetic Aegon III should be made one.

It's the same because it's about absolute primogeniture and older sisters inheriting over their younger brothers. They hoped Rhaenyra would support them, but, advised by Corlys, who said the lords would be against it, she ruled in the favor of the rights of younger brothers over their older sisters, comfirming that she considers herself an exception (because her father, the king, said so). Which should dispell the silly notion - promoted by a huge part of Team Black fans - that Rhaenyra is some kind of feminist or that her being the ruling queen would help other women. It was just about her, of course. Not that this is wrong, in itself, but people should stop making Rhaenyra into something she is not. (She's already made that clear when she said "Baela's sons" would inherit the throne.) And one of the women she ruled against certainly didn't take it well since she refused to give her shelter later when she fled KL.

I don't think that they’ve included Mysaria's line that the royals and nobles only have power because people allow them to, for no reason. The fandom was too busy ranting that Mysaria is being portrayed too nicely, to note that this was assering one of the pverarching themes of the show. Or that scene at the start of 1x03 when an unnamed soldier getting tortured by the Crabfeeder happily greets "my Prince" Daemon as savior, only for Caraxes to stomp on him and kill him, because obviously neither the Prince nor the dragon noticed or cares about him. The show really wasn't subtle with that scene. And of course Viserys wondering whether anyone was meant to have the power of dragons, and Rhaenyra's line "They say Targaryens are closer to gods than to men...but without dragons, we are just like anyone else."

It was serious. The Twitter HotD fandom is...quite something.

I can't wait for the "unwashed" Kingslanders to show how much say they don't have when they end up killing the dragons, causing the death of Rhaenyra's son and driving Rhaenyra out of the city. Poor Targ stans. You are blissfully unaware that Ryan Condal's favorite book is A Feast for Crows, the one you probably never read or skimmed over because it was "boring" with the Brienne chapters, just like all the Arya chapters in ACOK and ASOS most likely, all that stuff and "unwashed peasants" and the consequences of war. Who cares about that when it should be all about royals lording their absolute power and doing incest for blood purity all over the place, which you all think GRRM wrote the series to celebrate. Absolutely hilarious.

LMAO Did I expect the "it's silly to think not caring about the lives of smallfolk or lives of people not close to you in general is a character flaw, or matters in a show about the royal family tearing the realm apart in their fight for the throne" argument to actually be put forward? Not exactly, but I'm not the least bit surprised it's there, or who it's by. Nothing new, of course, just a slightly more eloquent rephrasing of the legendary Targ stan tweet from a few months ago that said it's silly to think GRRM wants us to care about the "unwashed peasants".

The books made me hate both the Blacks and the Greens. In the end I just felt sorry for the snallfolk and the dragons who died/went extinct because of those idiots. The show has managed to make me care about many of the characters on both sides - quite an accomplishment. Not by making them act more nicely - they are still as bad in their actions - but by putting them into context and developing them into fleshed out characters with complexity that you can relate to, rather than the bare sketches or almost caricatures they are in the books.

What makes you think making their relationship central means downplaying the drama between them, rather than ratcheting it up as much as possible? There’s no indication what, if anything, Rhaenyra knew about B&C in advance, or how she felt about it afterwards. We just know Daemon arranged it with Mysaria's help. Daemon writes "A son for a son" and Blood confesses under torture he was to bring the head to Daemon in Harrenhal.

Really? They have been saying her downfall is entirely the fault of patriarchy and not her own at all? Do you have a source for that and the exact quotes? That sure isn't supported by season 1 where, just in scenes that don't exist in the book: - young and bratty Rhaenyra says it doesn't matter how the snallfolk feel - she also sees herself as an exception and tells Rhaenys "they rejected YOU" - acts arroogant and dismissive of other noblewonen (who aren't heirs or drsgonriders) instead of trying to make friends and allies; - acts dismissive, bored and mocking to her sutors, instead of trying to make allies, - doesn't at all care that one of her suitors (a child) killed another; - adult, more mature Rhaenyra still doesn't care about the lives of people who are not close to her, especially if they are smallfolk - conspiring in the murder of an innocent servant so she could send her husband away and marry her uncle: - older, mature Rhaenyra definitely thinks she's am exception and has no intention of chamging succession rules or helping other women inherit (when she makes a deal to make Baela Jace's cknsort, she says Baela's SONS will be heirs to the throne) - she is so invested in lying anout her sons' parentage that she even lies to her orn son in private. The seeds are all there for her later mistakes and for her fkaws to become more glaring. But Rhaenyra's problems are in large part due to patriarchy. Everyone's are, but hers are front and center since she's trying to become the first ruling queen of the Seven Kingdoms. There's no getting around that. Were people against her because they didn't want a wiman on the throne? Some certainly were. Others thought that it was against tradition and rules of succession..but why are the rules male preference primogeniture? Alicent was scared her sons would be killed as a threat to her rule, but would a man be threatened by the existence of younger siblings? Very unlikely. Some may have had a problem with the fact her heirs were illegitimate and she was commiting treason by passing them as legitimate. But would a man be doing that? Would Aegon or Robert ask their wives to lie and pretend they gave birth to their bastards? No. Not judt because it would be more difficult to pull it off, but because they don't have to. Men can have bastards and openly acknowledge them without runing ther reputation ruined alongside any support for ascending the throne. Some might also have feared Daemon would rule instead of her, but if a prince and heir was married to a controversial aunt, would people be worried about the consort ruling? Probably not. Men are assuned to have power over their wives, and we see Daemon trying to overrule Rhaenyra in the finale. And the reason she's depicted as the worst person ever by historians is also largely due toi patriarchy. She turned out to be a bad ruler, but so did Aegon II, so was the incompetent Viserys, weak Aenys and of course the brutal tyrant Maegor, but are their examples used to argue mem should l not rule? No, but hers is used in Westeros to argue women shouldn't. The fallacy i of treating Rhaenyra, one woman, as a representative of all women. And also not recognising that being a woman did wotk against her. But Rhaenyra also upholds the patriarchy herself. We'll definitely see her overtaxing smallfolk and underestimating their power (it's character for show Rhaenyra). We'll see her ruling against the Rosby snd Stockworth women (though she may be sad about it), and this backfiring later. We'll see her turn against Nettles and be hypocritical about bastards, including passing the tax on people having bastards (she may think it would help uphold the lie about her sons and opposing the proposal may look suspicious). Instead of "Rhaenyra was always bad", which would be a borimh tske, it will be about the corrupting influence of fighting for power, which means upholding a hierarchical system ÷and hopefilly they will make a point that one woman on the top doesn't necessarily mean things are better for women in general.

Not a character.

@Lord Varys re: the Strong boys - LMAO have read the source material with something called reading comprehension. You might try it sometime instead of insisting every single obvious thing is spelled out. You interpreting the text to mean that people thought Harwin was their father because they had brown hair, brown eyes and pug nose while Harwin didn't look like that, is hilariously absurd. Although, while here you want even the obvious spelled out, on the other hand you seem to have no problem with coming up with elaborate headcanons. Re: Regency, Alyn has to marry Baela and to become Lord of the Tides after Corlys's death, otherwise why is he even on the show? Alys is important during the Dance, but her story is extremely incomplete if she just disappears from the show after Aemond's death, or if we see her giving birth, that's a nice payoff but not as good as her becoming the Witch Queen of Harrenhal and defying the crow with a bunch of Broken Men loyal to her They have to film the scene where Ser Regis dies (however they portray his death) after saying that "baseborn whelp of a kinslayer and a milk cow" line. And those things happen in the early years of the Regency, together with Alicent's deat, which has to be in the finale. Olivia is going to kill that. They could even bring back Emma to have Alicent have an imaginary conversation with Rhaenyra. I don't think they need to go deep into the Regency, but I strongly disagree with people who think the show should finish withAegon III's ascension and Aegon and Jaehaera's wedding. It would be very incomplete. We need to see all these things, and the other widows ruling, and Nettles as the Fire Witch in the Vale, and the Widow Fairs, etc. The survibors' fattes and people recovering after the war. From the later years I think we just need to see Aegon and Vuserys reuniting, and at least a hint of dragons dying out, even if they need to do a couple of flashforwards But if they were to tell the rest of Alys' story and how it ends, I'm all for getting it first in the show rather than Wikipedia-style in 2 of F&B. Although at least theoretically it cyn be out in 3-4 yeads when season 4 is remeased

The importance placed on both Alys and Alyn suggests they will adapt some of the Regency at least, which I always thought they would and should. The question is just how much. I was thinking at least a long or double episode finale. The paternity of Rhaenyra's sons was equally obvious in the book and in the show. Rhaenys's black hair was a poor attempt to explain their looks, since they not only had brown hair but also brown eyes and features such as pug nose. Rhaenys has none of that. In the show, the Targaryens have blue eyes rather than purple, and Harwin also had grey blue eyes, so that's a moot point. They also don't really have features that particularly look like Harwin - in fact, Jace has Valyrian facial features and looks a lot like Rhaenyra (Instagram edits that give him silver hair make that really obvious). Some argue that Luke looks like Aemma. So it's all about the hair color, and the fact the actors are fully white. But the latter probably doesn't mean as much to people in universe as to the viewers - since they're at least 3/4 white and Laenor is pretty light skinned. Lots of biracial people who are 1/4 black look likd Wentworth Miller rather than Bethany Antonia and Phoebe Campbell. And since people in-universe have no concept of "white" and "black" as races (to them, Corlys and Rhaenys are the same, Valyrian race), they would see it as metely a difference in skin tone but not a crucial racial attribute (unlike silver hair and, iin the books, purple eyes) - similarly as people in our world have no trouble seeing some people with dark curly hair and brown eyes and possibly olive skin as the same race as strawberry blonde people with blue eyes and extremely light skin, due to certain cultural and historical factors, but will consider other dark haired, brown eyed people a different race due to (sometimes only slightly) darker skin tone (or not even that), certain facial features (or not even that) and cultural, historical and religious factors. So for the viewers, the fact that the actors are white seals the deal (because it would be unacceptable today to cast white actors as biracial characters who are part black). In-universe, however, it's equally obvious in books and show - in both cases, they have a strong resemblance to Harwin, no resemblance to Laenor, and features that are nothing like those of their mother, official father, maternal grandparents or official paternal grandparents. Personally I was never in any doubt that Harwin was their father when reading the source material (But they messed up by not letting Jace retain the actor's natural curly hair, which would make him look more like Harwin. That straight hair wig and the messy timeline is why the stupid "Criston is Jace's father" theory came to be.).

@Lord Varys ROTFLMAO yes.