Hello everyone! İ hope you will enjoy this video. Sorry if the audio is a little messy. İ rly need to get myself a good microphone and i probbably will very soon. İ will make one more video after this one and then ill probbably take a break from all of this as i will need to focus on my final year of University. İn this video i explain why Aemond’s character pacification works and compare it to my earlier video about why Alicent’s did not. Yes i am still mad about how the writers decided to take agency and responsibilty from her in episode 9. İ still hate that episode. İ will defend this opinion until the day i die. My video about Alicent Hightower: www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEn8x... Thank you so much for watching! Cheers...

I really am fascinated by the Aemond adaptation in the show. I am worried because his character in the future could be presented in a cartoonist way in order to hype up house black. The nuance of his character right now is quite intriguing.

I wonder how season 2 will handle Aemond. After coming back to KL the public will surely brand him as a kinslayer, but I am curious to see if he tries to deny it or if he accepts his new role, on the surface at least. Will he even confide with his family? Maybe Aegon will believe he didn't mean to kill Luke and so they grow closer? Idk, there are definitely a couple of ways it could go. Also, we still don't know his relationship with Daeron. And how will he react after Blood and Cheese happens?

Targ Cult's opinions about Helaena's dreams, Jace, Laena, etc. shows that 99% of their criticism of HOTD is pure bad-faith spite of not getting their preferred version of the Silver Kween vs Evil Stepmom disney movie. Their third grader emotional intelligence is best shown by the childish petulance towards Helaena. "What is the point of her dreaming if she can't predict!!"....No, it’s true! the only reason why prophetic visions should ever be included in fiction is so that the a Silver Kween Girlboss Warlord can interpret it with 100% accuracy & clarity, allowing steps to be taken to successfully prevent it & saving the world! This is 10/10 MCU storytelling btw! Surely there is no reason why the character who meets a tragic, unjustifiable fate might be given the power of prophecy with no way to communicate it?! *Like show a single ASOIAF character who is a prophet or dreamer who accurately interpreted their prophecies. The prophecies are exercise in human folly & futility. The beauty IS in Helaena knowing everything but not being able to prevent.* If one can't understand this simple thematic choice they should go watch Beauty & the Beast or something. Targ fandom embarassing themselves every day trying to wrap their heads around thematic choices that don’t directly propel the plot forward in a linear line to the next event, screaming & howling about fictional characters’ “agency”. Then you have their straight up fanfic about Jace. You know this show is doomed when Targ Cultists, who've hijacked the ASOIAF fandom, can say that F&B Jace is a brilliant military commander & his traits were stolen by THE Aemond Targaryen & get hundreds of likes. Traits that F&B explicitly assigns to Aemond & Daeron : good fighter, clever, military asset, bravery. Meanwhile Jace, who's F&B characterization begins and ends with "umm he was a good kid". Almost a deranged level of detachment from reality. Lastly, Targ Cult invented an entire Laena-Rhaenyra headcanon ship from 3 literal lines in F&B (where nothing romantic is explicitly stated & Laena is Rhaenyra & Daemon's passive doormat as Targoids would want every non-Targ woman to be). That's all their criticisms come down to. Jealously that the Hightowers are given the importance they deserve and the general public isn't infatuated with the Lizard cousins the way they were with Dany. All you have to do is see the deranged amount of hate they showed to the 3 year old actress playing Jaehaera for being called "The Little Queen", accusing it of being stolen from Daenera...when Jaehaera in F&B is called, ding ding ding, the little queen! Canon to Targ Stans is whatever fits their fake outrage. Team Black delusionally convincing themselves that Baela Rhaena & Laena are more important than Alicent, Helaena & the Greens shows that they don't actually care about canon, they're sabotaging the show out of spite for not getting Girlboss Silver Kween Warlord vs 65 yr Old Evil Stepmom Disney Villain Caricature.

The top comment is the guy who goes in every video to say "Alicent loathes his son, she abuses him, she's screaming/insulting/hitting him all the time"...basically sums up the media literacy (and deliberate bad-faith in some cases) of the average Freefolk brain when faced with an iota of ambiguity or subtext. I think Aegon and Alicent's relationship can be summed up by what Rhys Ifans said in the BTS of episode 5 about the farewell scene between Alicent and Otto. That it almost felt like he wants to tell her "I love you", but that vocabulary does not exist in his world. We see a parallel of that in the carriage scene in episode 9 (misunderstood by not a few people) when Aegon poignantly asks "do you love me" and Alicent answers "you imbecile"....which basically translates to "everything that I've suffered and sacrificed, it is to give you this day." If you look at the amount of hurt and pained expression in Alicent's eyes when she is berating Aegon over Dyana, I think it comes off less as an abusive and tyrannical parent and more as a mother who is at her wits end with a wayward son on who's basket she has put all her eggs in. Alicent's attitude towards Aegon is probably reflective of the fact that she had bet all her hopes, dreams, aspirations and sacrifices on his future. Her neverending disappointment with him is a byproduct of that lofty expectation. The fear and paranoia she shows is a warped sense of love that can only exist in this Tudor-like world where you're convinced your son is a marked man because of his station. That comes with a lot of presusre. I know that Aemond is considered the favorite son, but I think who Alicent really loves the most is seen in who she jumps in front of when Meleys comes in. It's the type of person who takes "you'll be a fine queen" as an iron-clad diktat from Moses (a song of ice and fire, where people are famously not known for speaking ambigiously), and not two drowning people making a last feeble and futile attempt to get out of the precipice, against the cicrumatance that has already predisposed them to ruin. WHY NO FEMALE VERSION OF THE EDGELORD GIRLSBOSS SLAYAGE LIKE CERSEI!!! EASIER FOR MY FREEFOLK BRAIN TO UNDERSTAND!!

A famous actress said if you're a female character you can only be a victim or a villain. And you're a victim only because you're not trying too hard to be a villain. That sums up every vulgar critique of Alicent that comes from one group of Targ Stans who deliberately misinterpret every subtext out of spite cause they didn't get their 65 year old evil stepmom disney villain caricature; and another group of fans who are allergic to any emotional complexity, getting frustrated cause every woman isn't portrayed as Maergery girlbossing her way into Tommen's bed and working her Slay Kween magic on a child. If Alicent was really portrayed as the Mushroom version of the 1930s Vamp Seductress stereotype, unscrupulously jumping on 70 year old Jaehaerys' bed, it would've been more digestable for their emotional intelligence. Things like her repressed sexuality being manifested in her son is way too much for an audience who's media literacy can't go further than "lol nyra good mom. teach son valyrian!! alicent bad mom. hit son!!" For Targ Nation, their concern about Alicent's agency is purely out of bad-faith. What they're really hurt about is Rhaenyra not getting the same sycophancy as Dany. It's frustrating for a Targ Cultist to not be able to make a Sophie Turner out of Olivia Cooke. How a Targ stan's spiteful mind works can be easily seen by the amount of deranged hate they've piled on everyone from Helaena to the little actress of Jaehaera on twitter. But going back to the narrative, they incessantly complain about the Rhaenyra Alicent friendship, but it's this "lost friendship" that provides the show with the kernel of its tragedy. When Martin wrote the supplement to the Dance, he titled it "The Princes and the Queen", not the princess and the king. Alicent and Rhaenyra were always gonna be the heart of the show, the driving force, its nexus. If you don’t see just how central their bond is to the story, the narrative choices are not gonna make sense to you. This friendship allows the "inevitability of fate" narrative device used in the first season, which is reminicient of greek tragedies like Oedipus Rex, who in his desperation to avoid fulfilling a prophecy ends up doing exactly that. Early on the show establishes strong interpersonal relationship b/w the protagonists, the bond breaking of which is the raison d'etre of the tragedy. The other sticking point is the propehcy miscommunication. But they made it abundantly clear the coup was already prepared. The prophecy was wisely used by Otto simply as a propaganda pretext & by Alicent as a self-deluding tool of moral justification. It was her trying to convince herself (not others), what she was doing was moral & right. Alicent wasn't obtuse, it was her defense mechanism under extreme pressure. She was trying to absolve her conscience from the blame of civil war. Ambiguity and moral dilemma does not automatically make a character bad. "Having a clear goal" does not automatically make ancharacter good (like Alicent learning nothing in the end and telling Jaehaera to cut aegon III's throat in his sleep as if Jaehaera's gonna get a Tom and Jerry do-over). Everyone doesn't have to walk around with the self assured voice of Joe Goldberg in their heads. The 8d chess hyper-rationalists forget that most real humans are indecisive, impulsive, irrational, their actions often self-contradictory. Rarely do people act with the cold, calculated ruthless efficiency of a Waffen SS general from WW2 B movies. F&B is a hazy, bare bones narration of a whirlwind of events (GRRM called it "only a book of outlines") with very little emotional attachment being formed with the characters, who have no growth from these events, fight a buncha battles, and die. The show pulled off the impossible feat of making the casual audience invested in a buncha hurriedly written, barely fleshed out, no character arc having, hyperbolic & one dimensional terrible people doing comically exaggerated terrible things from a glorified mediocre cash grab history book.

Either way Team Green bro😂💚

We have to remember tha tthe "Book" is actually an in-universe book. AS in, it is propaganda written by highly mysoginistic and "anti-Targaryen" people. So everything said in that book must be taken with a grain of salt.

I forget the actors name but he always on form. One to watch

You're so good. How do you almost have no subs?

Team Green, while not spitefully delusional like the Targ Cult, have their faults mainly about neutrality and Aegon. Green fans take the team sport neutrality thing to an extreme. It's almost like they want a chyron constantly reminding the audience with bullet points why each side is justified, for the sake of strict neutrality. *The point isn't neutrality, it is to set Rhaenyra up as the protagonist who betrays the audience's trust & disillusions them.* It's the , but done better. No protagonist who is gonna end the show as a lilly white heroine will blatantly lie on the memory of their dead mothers or say "their wants are of no consequence" about the peasantry. The show actually did a great job of putting various subtle red flags about Rhaenyra (like her total ignorance about spending money in ep4 & 6 is big foreshadow) without ever making her flaws too prominent or too obvious. Because then it would've defeated the whole purpose of her arc. Finally Team Green's irrational fear about Aegon. I think it's a good thing that Aegon did not wake out of his crib as the illustration in "The Shepherd Burns" and we'll actually get to see his experiences during Dance slowly shaping his personality, as the two are inseparable, and by the time we get to Dragonstone, he'll be unrecognizable from the window jerker. A character arc?! Something that is totally non-existent in F&B. It's equivalent to complaining "they ruined Theon!!! He's more important than Robb!!" at the end of s1. Green fans get hung up on the deviancy, but don't realize the show already did one better on F&B by giving Aegon the backstory of lonliness & parental neglect that explains the personality F&B Aegon actually goes on to have as king. Them showing the vacuum of his childhood, the pressure he feels as the firstborn son & the validation he seeks from his uncaring father was perfect. It's the three defining traits he goes on to have as King : depression ("let me sail away"), resentment ("do you love me") & resilience ("we know father"). Show Aegon is actually brilliant once you engage with the character a little deeper.

Otto and Aegon are just as evil as they are in the source material.

Uh what?! Aemond iddn't betray anyone and he certainly never "ran away north". What are you on about? Aemond wanted to attack King's Landing and fight all of the Blacks' dragons to win it back and free his mother and sister, but he and Criston disagreed about the tactics and parted ways. Aemond went on his campaign s to burn their potential armies that could help the Blacks, and provoke Rhaenyra to send some of the dragonriders after him so he could fight and kill them, Alys was taken prisoner by Sabitha Frey in Harrenhal and Aemond returned to save her and then she ran away with him and was with him during his campaign in the Riverlands. Where did you get your version of the story? It sounds like it was through a Game of Telephone.

You think book alicent the one dimensional evil queen a bootleg cersei was better than show alicent?