Let’s not forget there is a massive double standard in Westeros. Men can openly sire as many bastards as they like and can even legitimate them with royal permission; nobody cares. Women must be virgins until marriage and faithful to their husbands afterwards, otherwise she’s a godsless whore. Alicent isn’t wrong when she says how bad this all looks.
A lot of storylines aren’t terribly relevant to the plot. You could have fleshed out more Laena or Harwin Strong, but in the end they both die before the main conflict, and their main purpose is the effect their death has on others and the moving of pieces.
I read somewhere that the original pilot was supposed to start from here with these actresses, but GRRM insisted that they do the build up with the younger actresses to fill in some of the backstory.
This double standard is not restricted to Westeros. It’s based on our real world patriarchy. A large part of it is that if inheritance is based on paternity, then you have a problem: you always know who your mother is, because, well, you physically emerged from her body. But until modern genetic science, there’s no definitive way of determining who your genetic father is. So society builds strict restrictions on not only the sexual freedoms of women—raising them to the most important levels of societal morality and family honor—but on all women’s’ activities, lest any of them offer opportunities for illicit behavior or even the suggestion of such.
Harwin may be dead but he has obviously had a huge and permanent impact on the story so I think he deserved a bigger backstory. I would have liked to see more of Criston and Larys too. And for that matter Laena and her marriage to Daemon. I actually disagree that characters who end up being killed don’t deserve screen time. You need to care about the characters otherwise their deaths don’t mean much. The various Stark deaths in the early seasons of GOT being a good example of characters with a lot of screen time getting offed.
I don’t disagree with you but I don’t think its so much a matter of forgetting but more their hands being tied with regards to the story. Look at what the Rings of Power is going through for trying to wing it.
The Stark deaths that people cared about in early GOT were main characters. I see Laena (and maybe even Harwin) as more of a Jory Cassel or Syrio Forel sort of character.
The writers kind of have to balance the folks who are saying they want more backstory with those who are saying this is all boring (of which there are many) and I think they’ve done a good job.
Oh, and you still have plenty of time with Criston and Larys.
The production values are amazing - it looks like GoT with every costume and shot.
The acting is pretty decent. I think the script lacks humour, deep interplay between characters and levity, but people are doing what they can with it. When characters die, it is tragic but does not feel as shocking or meaningful as in GoT. Which characters do you care deeply about? Many seem one dimensional.
True, this is mainly in comparison to GoT which had four or five big things going on with every episode, and succeeded by not taking its audience for simpletons and letting them make a thousand speculations each episode. Here: no exceptional characters, one plot, two speculations. I’m not saying I don’t enjoy it. I am saying it lacks the spark of genius despite its good looks.
It is simplistic to reduce GoT to broadswords and buttocks. Gender politics are well and good, and strong female parts worth emphasizing, but GoT did this more ably - how many more succession pregnancies will we endure where difficult choices will be made? The reason the “dragon riders death” was surreal is it was usually about saving the baby, an idea which seems to have been abandoned. In real life, failure to progress is followed by patience and mothers don’t always succumb if baby does.
This series served to show it will be a long time before such a good show is made again regardless of the quibbles for a fan base impossible to fully satisfy.
Sure, but as it is it just makes her look weak. She had ONE JOB, which was to have passionless sex with her gay husband for long enough to produce an heir or two, after which she could follow her heart. Sure, it’s unfair that she was stuck in that position and her husband wasn’t. But it was clearly to everyone what the deal was, and back before the time jump she seemed committed to it. And if she had in fact had two blond kids and then one brown, and then sworn up and down that all three were trueborn, well… that’s a plausible story that it would be very easy for poeple to buy into, far more than “two fullblooded blondies have THREE straight brown-haired children”, which clearly only her father believes.
And, again, it leaves us wanting some crucial gaps filled in. Why didn’t they do that? Were they both just too repulsed by the idea? Did they try a lot and nothing happened? Or were they trying but at the same time she was already hooking up with Harwin?
(This is a case where having started with the “flashback” to young Rhyneara hurts us. If we just started with her this age, we would think “eh, loveless arranged marriage to gay dude, obviously nature took its course”. But we did see how determined, open-eyed and strong-willed young Rhyneara was, which makes it more frustrating and puzzling that things didn’t work out the way she intended.)
My view is that it’s pretty obvious. Rhaenyra, like Cersei, decided she wasn’t going to let society or anyone else tell her whose sperm to fertilize her ova, damn society. I’m not surprised at all that this is what she ended up doing. She’s a dragon rider and she will live her life like one, to the extent she can, ruling and not being ruled. If it means plunging the land into civil war, she comes to the table to seek compromise only when she senses her hand has become weak.
Or maybe they tried and Laenor just couldn’t manage it, for one reason or another.
The fact that there are very few actual rational actors makes complete sense to me. I mean, look at our history.
Though it would be nice if the show explored or explained why all of Rhaenyra’s children were fathered by someone other than her husband.
But those are two very different things, with different implications for her character.
I mean, maybe it doesn’t matter at all going forward. But it just seems a weird omission/discontinuity, particularly given what we saw of young Rhyneara. Odd that they didn’t even throw a 30 second snippet of dialog between her and her gay husband to help clarify things one way or the other.
I’m not sure I agree. I’m often just satisfied with having to analyze for myself an fill in the gaps.
(The biggest example of this is the back story of Darth Vader. The five-minute scene in which Kenobi told Luke that Vader was once his pupil and turned bad and killed Luke’s father was exactly enough to tell the story. Actually telling the backstory instead of leaving it up to our imaginations ruined it.)
I haven’t read the source material but from what I understand, it is written as an in-world history by an unreliable narrator. The TV series so far as I understand it has often directly contradicted it (especially at the detailed, personal level). So the TV show is free to tell a version of the story and let us imagine that the “real truth” might lie somewhere in between or somewhere else entirely.
I’m not sure I need an explicit depictionnofnThaenura’s series of decisions and motives. I’m happy to take it as written and let the story move forward, only filling us in where it lands a dramatic point.
I don’t understand how this would be in any way in question. The first five episodes did a wonderful job of explaining why this would be the case, what more could anyone possibly need?
Yep. I’m happy to hold them both in my mind until the story, if it does, decides that I really need to know for sure. After all, that’s what it’s like being an observer, isn’t it? We don’t always know for sure what’s going on in someone’s mind or what happened behind closed doors. Sometimes we must make room for conflicting possibilities and live with that uncertainty.
That absence of certainty is not making me enjoy what I’m seeing any less and maybe it might even enhance my enjoyment somewhat.
Yeah I agree and this should have been explored in a full season which could have dealt with her first birth. Rhaenyra and her succession are pretty much the heart of the entire story. She has taken huge risks to both herself and her children and it’s really not clear why.
The difference between her and Cersei lies with their relative importance in the show and the time we are introduced to them. Cersei was just one of maybe a dozen significant characters and had already given birth to her illegitimate children at the start of the story. Rhaenyra is one of the 2-3 central characters and was introduced well before her marriage.
And also Cersei and her actual husband didn’t share an incredibly iconic physical trait whose lack in illegitimate children would clue everyone in to her infidelity. (Granted, it was her children’s hair color that was eventually noticed, but only by John Arryn and later Ned Stark after a TON of digging.)
All set up by Littlefinger, of course. He was the puppet master for just about everything that happened in GOT. I guess the weird guy is attempting to play that role in HOTD, but does he have the creativity of Littlefinger?
This analysis of Larys’s scenes bring up something that had not occurred to me.
My impression from earlier episodes was Rhaenyra (and even Husband) was very clear on doing their royal duty when they would be married - they seemed to accept it and fine with it. A part from doing those duties, they agreed they could play/do what they wanted - again, both accepted and fine with it.
Then flash forward, and the main thing they were expected to do (have kids) was not done in the slightest, and I’m not clear why not since it’s a pretty big deal to only have bastard kids.
And then her lover beat his to a pulp.