i think alicents reaction to rhaenys disrupting the coronation is soooooo indicative of her relationships with each of her kids bc like. she tells criston to defend helaena, who she thinks of as the most fragile and in need of protection (ahem she sees her younger self in helaena ahem), but doesn’t do it herself, bc i think there is a fundamental distance between them, since alicent loves her daughter but doesn’t understand her. aemond doesn’t get a mention, because he has always been the child she sees the most as an adult, her equal she believes on some level can take care of himself. and aegon. she stands in front of aegon. which is suchhhhh a significant thing because. it will not do anything. alicents body won’t protect aegon if meleys decides to burn them, it will just kill them both. alicents life is aegons life, she was married to viserys for him, she became queen for him, everything she did from when she was a teenager was for him. and how beautiful and tragic and horrible that she just decides in this moment that if aegon dies she will die too.
i loveeee the asoiaf blood magic theorising sooo much i think its so delicious and disturbing but i am particularly obsessed with how it works with the targaryens. because the valyrians did awful blood magic, and the doom of valyria was almost definitely some kind of magical event that killed them all to punish them for it. but the targaryens escaped. and then they spent the next 400ish years becoming more and more convinced of their own exceptionalism and going madder and madder and then one tragedy after another happens to them. the dance of dragons, blackfyre rebellions, summerhall, eventually robert's rebellion wiping them out almost entirely. like they escaped punishment when they left valyria but asoiaf's equivalent of karma has just been slowly creeping up on them for centuries. they get weaker and lose their dragons and so many targs have crazy and tragic deaths until literally all that’s left of their house is a little girl entirely alone on the other side of the world.