The King is dead. Long live the Q… uh, King? In “The Green Council,” the Greens conspire and successfully steal Rhaenyra’s throne (for now) and will likely face significant backlash from the Blacks as we head into the finale on Sunday.
On this week’s episode of the Night’s Cast, Vanessa and Petra discuss character motivations (or lack thereof), choices and their consequences, and who really cares about the smallfolk anyway?
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I’ll say this in defense of parents. Some of the best parents have crappy kids. Unfortunately, Alicent was left to basically be a single parent as a person who hadn’t developed her own self-actualization. She’d always done as bidden and as expected, and when she realized the gilding was still a cage, she couldn’t compartmentalize her disappointment from how she interacted with her children. She acted more like an older sibling forced to raise the younger ones.
But the kids’ also suffer from the middling relationship between their parents and, once again, Viserys’ short-sightedness. Whoever the intended heir is, a smart ruler prepares all the kids to some extent to step in. Medieval mortality rates anyone? Especially in childbirth? Nevermind how often wives were in power in their husband’s absence. But there goes Viserys shirking any duty he finds unpleasant. Which, as we saw early on, bothered Alicent as well when she shamed him into helping in the Stepstones.
I do agree there’s a lot of underdeveloped connective tissue to character motivations and reactions that a bit more time with them in certain age periods could have helped.