#all of this is a long way of saying: 'not an alicent or rh/aenyra stan but a secret third thing (rhaenicent shipper)" lol

[mswyrr]

thoughts on the R vs A stan debates

I see Rhae/nyra and Alicent as equals in their sins ultimately - not the specifics, but the capacity for doing wrong (and for wanting to do good) and that they both keep sinning against each other and then trying to make it right at just the wrong moment, when the other one is most angry and nursing her wounds.

People are valid to have a preference for one over the other or dislike one or the other, but there’s this “Cinderella and her wicked stepmother” headcanon some stans of the book seem attached to that the R focused parts of the fandom keep trying to push that doesn’t work for the tv canon. It flattens and erases the complexity of both characters IMO. Because then A stans try to similarly flatten her and it gets very intense back and forth. The book has no interiority, is a faux history told entirely from a pov centuries removed from events, of course their tv inner lives are and should be more complicated than that?

The way Twitter fandom does it, there’s this endless argument over who is the Madonna and who is the Villain and it’s flattening both women: “Madonna” is not actually a compliment and it requires doing a lot of twisting of their characters for people to shove their “fave” into the role of perfect mother goddess.

Neither of them are, that’s what makes them good lead characters?

For one example: Emma has outright said they played the lead up to the knife scene as R directing aggression and a real desire to do real harm at A and R’s half-siblings.

So, in that pivotal scene, we have BOTH R using her status as heir and favoritism from her father to demand her little brother be tortured AND Alicent demanding her step-grandson's eye be taken.

I love them BOTH. That is messy af. And fantastic? Let women be MESS. And people of their culture and time period, where those are things you can actually demand if you have their respective forms of status.

That moment sticks with me because, as I see it, that was the final moment where they put the wounds in their own kids/half-siblings that led to the war.

At a certain point one stops being solely an abused child and has the choice whether to become an adult who abuses kids in their family or not .

*Both of them made the wrong choice* and wrote the future in blood IMO.

Am I saying the equation of wrongs done perfectly balance on both sides? No. I think that's a useless discussion people have been having for months now. There’s no end to it. It cannot be finally resolved.

I've seen people screaming back-and-forth for months and what I came to is this idea of them as equals, narratively speaking. Because they are narrative creatures, not real people, and it doesn't matter. Nothing will be gained by one side “winning.” Even if they were real and went to family therapy (...or couples therapy) the focus wouldn't be on tallying up.

I see it as this story of 3 generations where each one wrongs the next and then becomes adults who do their own wrongs in turn. With the time between "fuck around" & "find out" getting shorter each time until the 4th Gen who mostly don't even get to live to adulthood & make their own mistakes.

Otto and Viserys 100% started it. But along the way, carrying those soul wounds, R & A become adults who continued it, writing soul wounds into the next generation of kids, and did their part writing the bloody future Viserys and Otto got started. And some of their kids are just old enough to make some awful adult decisions to bring it all home so the 4th generation doesn't even get to have a peaceful childhood.

The only 100% innocent victims are the 4th Gen kids (all the ones who were under 10 when the war started including R's youngest kids and I would say I include Lu/cerys as well since he hadn’t fully become an adult when Aemond killed him). Everybody else is varying levels of involved in the shitshow IMO.

Anyway, all of that is why I find the entire debate irrelevant to me at best and, at worst, a source of a lot of hot takes that seem to want to vilify or Madonna-ify one or the other and I don’t agree with vilification or Madonna-ification of either.