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mirrorwitches) wrote2024-11-07 03:34 pm
mirrorwitches) wrote2024-11-07 03:34 pm
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"a daughter is a daughter all her life" dvd commentary
in response to a tumblr ask. fic is here.
“Helaena,” Alicent whispers, smoothing her hand down her sleeping daughter’s back, over her nightgown and beneath her starspun hair. “Wake up, sweet girl.”
Her girl jerks awake, flying upward. Alicent puts one hand over Helaena’s heart and feels its frantic beat. With the other she pushes back the curls escaping from the braid she’d plaited before putting her to bed. Dull with sleep, she doesn’t flinch back from the touch. How could she slumber so deeply, this night of all nights?
Alicent could not sleep. Earlier that evening she’d come to Helaena’s chamber and discharged her long dreaded maternal duty: to inform a maiden daughter on the cusp of her wedding of the facts of life. Alicent had not been able to prevent herself from crying, a little, looking at Helaena’s lovely face, her delicate skin with its fine dusting of freckles. She had never been able to understand how she and Viserys, some unworthy night, made something this beautiful, a Targaryen girl with silver hair that curls like Alicent’s own. Every time she was pregnant, all Alicent could think of was it being over, of getting the babe out, but the second they’d put Helaena in her arms for the first time, delirious with pain, she’d slurred politely to the midwife, “Put her back, please.”
the “put her back” line is definitely the one from this fic that got the most attention from commenters. and maybe the crux of the fic that answers your question. what is interesting about alicent and helaena is that she dooms her daughter to her own sad fate, because her own sad fate is literally the conditions of her daughter’s existence i.e. a life sacrificed to dynastic reproductive mandate. she was born to have a daughter like helaena, and helaena was born to continue that chain. and here is the hinge of the moment of helaena’s birth, where alicent expresses this desire to undo it, and all the rest. which as imagined would condemn helaena not to non-existence which is sort of unfathomable, but to never separating their flesh, as a gesture of love and grief and protection. and all that is present with the rest of the fic, where she, you know, has sex with her daughter. whose body she will be inside. there’s probably something there with that.
Helaena had cried as a babe, constantly, as if she too protested her subjection to the world’s brightness, its vastness. She was clumsy: her milky skin spoiled with sickly green bruises. She clasped her hands over her ears at any sudden noise. “It hurts, mama.” The world hurt her.
the suggestions of helaena’s (prophetic power-induced) neurodivergence - sensory overload, aversion to touch - are really interesting. this comes entirely out of a moment in show itself. she flinches and claps her hands over her ears when vaemond is killed in 1.08, even though its not accompanied by any loud noise, and alicent instantly puts her hands on her in an attempt to comfort. this was written pre-season 2 and what i allude to here, that alicent’s clinging over-protectiveness comes out of a sense of helaena’s special fragility (on top of the fact that she’s alicent’s only daughter, which she does state in season 1), is confirmed in season 2 in her conflict with aemond over helaena doing dragon battle: that she’s the “gentlest” of them, the “most worthy of protection” and that it might “destroy her mind.” to your question about not knowing where to start, this is where everything starts for me. identifying things in the text itself and then asking “how can i explore that through porn?”
Mama had explained that earlier, back across the bleak hours she’d spent tossing and turning in her bed, unable to think of anything else, images of Aegon forcing his way into her girl playing across her closed kids. It would hurt. Her brother would hurt her, Alicent said, even if he didn’t mean to.
another engine of writing for me in this fandom specifically is asking what specific really odd experiences might feel like to live. so in this case, being a mother whose children get incest married.
Her daughter cocked her head to the side and said with an actual laugh, sounding fond, “What experience of Aegon makes you think he ever doesn’t mean to hurt?”
helaena was a real challenge here, but a delightful one. she especially was after season 1, where she got so little screentime. she still is after season 2, where she also got very little screentime. but also i was pleased in the ways i think season 2 bore out my characterization of her. she seems to not quite exist in time with everyone else, so people are surprised by how sharply perceptive she can be, because it is exactly her position of being out of joint that allows her a clearness of vision. helaena and aegon’s relationship also presents a challenge, because again it’s basically totally non-existent, and the tack i took in this was that it’s interesting because they are like, normal siblings, not targaryen siblings, and yet are, you know, married.
helaena has experienced aegon as her big brother bully, but there is a fondness that comes from being inmates in the same shared prison of your family and childhood. helaena is fond because aegon is so perfectly known, even if what she knows is that aegon delights in causing pain to those weaker than him. but also she’s oddly zen about this, because of sheer familiarity that makes that cruelty taking sexual forms not daunting. it’s playing out the implications of the incest marriage structure. this is not saying this would be everyone’s reaction to marrying their mean older brother, but it could be one response, and from very little material, it seemed the one that read as most accurate to the helaena we got, the one who is so tragically unruffled giving a toast that references her marital rape in 1.08.
On the whole Helaena took it calmly. She had not cried. She said she had watched her little beasts mate and she could tell Alicent all about it, and she started to, awful things, creatures that laid eggs inside corpses so the offspring had to eat their way out—
“It will not be like that,” Alicent snapped. “You aren’t a bug. You’re a girl. Bugs don’t feel—”
“Oh, they do,” Helaena said, letting one of the worst ones, the kind with many many legs, scuttle up her arm—Alicent had permitted her to take one from its cage, thinking it might grant her daughter comfort. “When Aegon came and tore off their wings, my dragonflies felt it. I felt it. All the way in the Dragonpit, I felt it. I knew it wasn’t in my head, because Dreamfyre cried out and I ran all the way back, but alas it was too late. They feel, feel, feel,” she sang softly under her breath. “I wept, that they hurt, but not that they died, because I knew the ones that remained would breed, breed, breed.”
making helaena a bug girl is so fun and there’s a lot you can do with it. here i’m using it as a metaphor to evoke the sense of targaryen dynastic reproduction, as experienced by those within it, as an unalterable natural law, a compulsion to mate and breed that is as unconscious and instinctive as the reproduction of bugs. i remember thinking it was too on the nose, but whatever.
Alicent had shuddered, but here was something Helaena understood, that she could use. “Yes. I suppose in that way—you are a Targaryen, a princess, and you will bear your brother many fine, strong children, and among them a future king.”
experienced as the above, despite whatever rationale is given for it as a distinctive human act that builds human culture, as alicent hastens to provide. like i said, too on the nose, but i think it works on the level of alicent trying to find a shared language, that makes it much less so than it first appears. it calls forth this horror of senseless animality for her - but that is not stated, except implicitly, with her trying to assert her own worldview through appropriating imagery she imagines helaena understands. but it’s actually perhaps a misunderstanding - helaena may well just mean “yay, more bugs.” or not! we’re locked very firmly in alicent’s POV, which is one thing i hoped to achieve here. the above litany by helaena is thematically suggestive to both alicent and reader, but what it means to its speaker itself must remain hers and our projection, in a way that i wanted to bring home by the anthropomorphic symbolic use of animals (i.e. human projection of meaning on other forms of life that we only use as mirrors which obscure the independent irreducible reality). the sense of helaena’s unknowability, which alicent is frustrated by but also is able to convince herself she can overcome, that she can know what is best for her daughter - important to what happens below.
Now Helaena stares at her unblinkingly. Alicent sniffs back the tears that have started to flow freely. “You are right, my darling. Aegon—he is not a gentle boy. He will hurt you. But I am here. I know, marrying your bro—marrying Aegon is not what you might have chosen, but at least this way I am here. This is a world for men. Mother is here.” She is rambling. Hadn’t her entire body reacted with revulsion to the idea of giving away her daughter to the eldest of Rhaenyra’s bastards? Viserys had treated her as if she was hysterical. Weren’t they all one family? But she had known, somehow, that it would mean losing her daughter, Helaena beyond reach of her help or comfort. Alicent can do Rhaenyra’s whelps enough justice to recognize they were of sweeter natures than Aegon’s, their base servility outing. Still, Viserys was of a gentle nature. It did not matter. Alicent would not be able to be there for Helaena. That was vital. Thank gods, she regretted what Larys had done, but thank gods, her father, her guide, her defender, was back. And look, Rhaenyra had taken the whole lot off to Dragonstone and her uncle had taken up residence shortly thereafter and they were surely now well underway in turning it into a whorehouse and Helaena would be alone in the midst of all that.
what’s endlessly fascinating about alicent and helaena is that alicent dooms helaena to reproduce her fate in both unagential and agential ways. obviously, alicent had no agency in helaena’s birth. but she does, as her mother and a queen, have agency over the course that life takes. a line of alicent defense is to insist this is not the case, and there’s a degree of truth there insofar alicent also doesn’t have much choice in whether her princess daugher marries or not. but she does choose who her daughter marries and thus really directly shape the direction helaena’s life takes. she intervenes, entering into conflict with her husband (which she ultimately wins) in rhaenyra’s proposal to betrothe jace and helaena, and from aemond’s statement (“if only mother had betrothed us”) it appears she is the one responsible for her subsequent engagement to aegon.
it’s really complicated! i’ve talked about this all before - she’s between a rock and a hard place. if helaena married jace, we the viewer know she would marry a nice boy who treats women well (alicent knows this less well, as jace is 10 at the time, and his ultimate character would be uncertain to her) but she would be a hostage to a hostile power. if she marries aegon, she marries a burgeoning sex pest (which alicent is aware of, to a degree, in 1.06) but she remains at home with her mother. what i was interested in in this fic is alicent’s motivations in choosing the latter, her conviction that staying at home with her mother to protect her makes the price of sibling marriage to aegon worth it for helaena. on the most literal level, it’s a marriage against patriarchal interest, as viserys would prefer helaena to marry jace. it creates - and season 2 bears this out - an alternate mother-daughter centered family-within-the-family, where all affective energy, at least on alicent’s side, is invested in her daughter to the increasing exclusion of her sons by season 2.
that’s really compelling to me, as both sympathetic and selfish. there is genuine concern for helaena’s well-being, but that is also a justification for alicent’s own emotional need, and that’s what i wanted to thread and balance:, the degree to which this is motivated by knowledge of patriarchal violence (alicent’s own trauma as a motherless child bride who did not even have that source of support); is a fantasy of mother-daughter love as antidote to (incestuous) patriarchal violence; is in itself its own act of incestuous patriarchal violence in its possessiveness, confinement, and denial of independence (which reaches its apotheosis in this fic in the sexual utilization of a child); and is formed by that history of incestuous patriarchal violence.
“I told you earlier, how unpleasant a maiden’s wedding night can be. It is a holy thing, the joining of husband and wife in the marriage bed, but men do not know what it is, to be—entered. Women do. I do, and I can not just send you off, my sweet, when it is in my power to make sure that this holy thing is not painful for you. Do you understand me?”
Helaena is not looking at her. Her gaze has landed on the tool Alicent had brought to aid her, laying beside her on the mattress. “Is that one of Aegon’s cocks?”
note what i said about “where all effective energy, at least on alicent’s side, is invested in her daughter to the exclusion of her sons.” what about helaena’s side? i wanted these glimmers of helaena as her own sexual being, formed in unideal circumstances, but the idea is that those unideal circumstances are hers to navigate - not for alicent to attempt to navigate for her.
Alicent flushes with fury, “Had he been showing his disgusting collection to you? That beast—”
this is supposed to be like super darkly funny. alicent is about to molest her daughter out of the not unsympathetic delusion that its her best course in truly wretched circumstances! girl, what! helaena is only seeing the dildo because alicent is going to put it in her! you can’t be enraged at the idea she may have seen it before!
Her daughter shrugs. “He sneaks into my room and messes with my things. So I went into his.”
“How do you know what a cock looks like?” Alicent asks suspiciously.
“We used to take baths together, mother.”
She observes Helaena closely. She says this easily and it is not in her nature to lie. Alicent lets out a relieved exhale. Aegon has not interfered with her, spoiled her innocence.
even as she recognizes what her daughter is going to suffer, her thought process is so structured by misogynistic frameworks, here on ideas of innocence right up to the eve of marriage, even though helaena is about to be married at the grand old age of fifteen. it’s that balance thing again: genuine concern that aegon might have molested her, against the fact that she’s 1) marrying her to aegon as a child 2) about to do…all of this. ultimately that split is something that comes out of forces larger than her, the other paradox that she both can’t do anything to stop this (helaena’s marriage as a child) and also deliberately brought it about (arranged her marriage to aegon specifically). those irresolvable contradictions are what are so interesting about alicent, and what everyone wants to neutralize in one direction or another.
“Yes,” she says, with a deep inhale. She strokes her daughter’s shoulder. Helaena twitches her hand away, seemingly unintentionally, still gazing at the phallus thoughtfully, like a horse flicking away a fly. “It is one of his. I would not know where to acquire such a thing. I have gotten rid of them before, but he just manages to find more. This one was new. Still in a box that was delivered to his chambers. They might as well be put to a good use.”
again all ideas come from the show itself - here, the increcible fact that if you pause on the scene in aegon’s room in 1.08, you can see there are sex toys everywhere. aegon’s semi-canonical dildo collection.
“What purpose does Aegon put them to?” she asks curiously, naively.
The slatterns that stumble from Aegon’s chambers, holding their torn clothes to bruised bodies. If Alicent catches them they are quickly dismissed. They cry and she tries to soothe with a bag of coin. It is for the best. Eventually they would be grateful. Not just one royal cock to suffer but many. They cry and their suffering flashes across her mind, squirming on the cocks that bristle from every orifice like in those horrid tapestries while her son smirks—
alicent IS sexually repressed, and it has very little to do with queer sexuality. she’s a sexual being who because of experience cannot conceive of sexuality extricable from sexual violence. and it leads her to the place of being wretchedly aroused by contemplating her rape baby’s rapes of serving girls. this has echoes of cersei in affc vii, where she tries to experience sovereignty and grasp sexual pleasure (and failing at both) by playing out her own rapes at the hand of her husband as the aggressor this time.
“Hurting,” Alicent says. “So now they will be used to make sure he can not hurt you. He likes surprises, nasty surprises. He will not understand that you are his sister and wife and deserve honor and gentle treatment. I will make sure he cannot enjoy that. Your body will be prepared. Do you understand?”
obviously it takes a quite different form in alicent, where instead of imagining herself as the aggressor, she becomes the aggressor through a fantasy of shared victimhood, her act of sexual predation as bonding her with her daughter by enacting a rape where she can exist on both sides, where she can control it to alleviate it in some way. or something.
Helaena does not speak. Alicent feels a spike of frustration. She understands, she does, but she can never make anything easy. Pushing it down she says, “Lie back, my darling,” with a kiss to her forehead.
She lies back against her pillow. When Alicent folds her nightgown above her hips, she’s stiff as she always is whenever her mother touches her. A sweet sleep smell emanates, warm animal girlsmell. She would have her bath in the morning to prepare her for her marital bed. Alicent nudges Helaena’s knees apart and gazes on flesh she has not seen since her daughter was a tiny girl. The thatch of silver hair on her mound. The small pink sex below it. Alicent wipes her tear-blinded eyes with the back of one hand and with two careful fingers of the other parts the closed pink lips and sets the head of the cock to the tiny hole there.
“I understand, mother,” Helaena finally says.
So small, so delicate! How could men only think of fucking it open? How did they not understand that this softest human part, which would do so much, be used so brutally—bear children into the world, continue their names—must be treated sweetly? It was strong, stronger than could be imagined, stronger than their own absurd appendages they used to hammer it apart, and this was all the more reason to honor it.
another spark to this fic was immense frustration at fandom discourse that was so resistant to the idea that women could victimize women, that stubbornly clung to the idea of radiant female solidarity against male oppression, etc. so it’s the fun thing of it being exactly that kind of belief that alicent is using as justification for abuse. but i also did not want it to be mistaken for an obnoxious “what if a mouse was a kia sorrento” ass thing that evacuates patriarchal violence as a factor that does effect women unequally, is enacted by men unequally…alicent is a victim turned victimizer but every part of that chain is comprehensible and traceable, and its mental architecture worth exploring. the vehicle here is this kind of justificatory process where a specific self-protective romanticizing move of reverence for woman’s gendered roles that only other women can understand goes sour. because the base is rotten, as identified here, when what is being reverenced is a capacity to take gendered subjugation, figured as an essentially anatomical truth.
Her hole parts over the head and then Helaena’s channel becomes too tight for the careful movements of Alicent’s hands to nudge it further. “It’s alright,” she hiccups with a smile like a rictus, licking her lip and tasting snot and salt. “Just get used to this, darling.” But the moment she stops pushing Helaena’s body forces it out. Alicent squeaks and, panicked, shoves it back in. Helaena emits a muffled yelp. “Sorry, oh, does it hurt—”
“Yes, I think so,” Helaena says evenly, eyebrows crimped in concentration, as if she’s listening to something Alicent can’t hear.
Alicent puts her hands over her face and one hard sob tears through her.
“I’m sorry, oh, darling, I can’t make it not—"
this is kind of the thesis statement!
“You can,” Helaena says, and Alicent lowers her hands to watch her daughter dazzle through tears. “You know how to make it not hurt. You’re wet.”
but so is this! even though it’s directly contradictory!
She gasps and feels a nauseating guilt, but does not know for what—the sick slickness between her thighs or the fact that Helaena does not share it. Her daughter’s hand comes up to touch Alicent’s drenched cheeks and her fingers come away glinting in the weak candlelight.
Her own hands are wet with tears. She fists the cock and notches it to her daughter’s cunt again. She could force it in with one swift, hard thrust. As Aegon would surely do, burying himself thoughtlessly in his sister’s virgin channel. You know how to make it not hurt. Alicent watches her lower lips strain around their burden and thinks: I made this. It is strangely lovely, as fine and beautiful as the rest of Helaena. She made it: she is responsible for it. She is responsible for her children. Her son, her first boy, will be king. He will have a beautiful bride of noble blood, Valyrian, largely, and that of the Hightowers of Oldtown, blood of the Faith. And Alicent’s girl, her only girl—she has mother.
This delicate flesh. Alicent had overseen Helaena’s baths and as a baby, seen her pink, wet body and thought, ill with her little brother, belly heavy with Aemond, someday one of them is going to fuck that, and hurried from the room, not made it to a basin before she emptied her heaving stomach of as much as it could.
this is an impressively gross line that i was nervous about posting. and this is another key to writing: as i said before, the first part is just asking what an experience feels like, as lived, without moralizing judgement. and the second part is taking that all the way, even when the logical furthest extent is truly repellent. don’t flinch, that’s an important piece of advice. how would knowledge that the baby you have produced as a child bride is destined to grow up and marry another baby you had as a child bride? it would get ugly! as another note, i’m pretty sure this line was an unconcious reference to the one from the incest diary where the incestuous father looks at his newborn daughter being bathed and says “one day that kid is going to fuck”
Her thumb sinks into the curls at the join of her cunt and finds the dewy pearl there. Alicent knows. Viserys was a kind man and yet he hurt her as his body found its proper place in hers. Shamed, every night—he did not call for her every night even then when he could call for her at all—but she prepared anyway, reached between her legs and closed her eyes and touched herself patiently, dutifully, until she grew slick, until her body knew what it must do and prepared itself. She had wanted to tell Helaena earlier, to give her this way to make her body accept its purpose, but thought it was not a mother’s place. How wrong she’d been to fail in this duty.
Helaena whimpers, hitches her hips up. “Does that feel good, darling?”
A hesitation, then a nod. Her pink mouth is softly open, her lashes tremble on her cheek. “Good, my lovely girl. It’s your body wanting to protect you, to know your duty is good.”
Soon enough, she no longer even had to touch herself; her body was wet and open every night when she was fetched to her husband’s bed. By the time Viserys mounted her and bred Helaena into her it was good. It accepted it. Helaena had been fucked into a womb slicked wide, grateful, hungry. Six-and-ten, a year older than Helaena is now. But Helaena will not have to learn it on her own, as Alicent had not. Hadn’t her father always been right, about Rhaenyra, about everything? Alicent’s mother was dead and perhaps she would not have taught her such a lesson anyway, but her husband had stepped in and shown her daughter what it was to be a wife. Viserys neglected all his children, save Rhaenyra, who had no need of him anyway, so it was up to Alicent.
this is territory that eternally obsesses me, and for which i ultimately have no answers. forced pleasure during rape doesn’t make any less rape. but also pleasure is not only not mutually exclusive with violence, but can also make violence more bearable. pleasure can coexist with violence, and also be a source in itself of violence and trauma, and also compensatory for violence. all at once.
She rolls Helaena’s sweet little pearl around and oh, she does beautifully, she widens her hips without instruction to receive her brother’s cock, her cunt blooms around it as Alicent withdraws and pushes back in, slowly, tenderly.
Alicent is still sobbing, tears dripping down on Helaena’s bared, yet empty belly, her slickening cunt, so Alicent, beaming through it says, “What a good girl, it’s not hurting at all, you will breed, and feel, but feel good, you can touch this pretty little button and think of some handsome knight, my sweet girl—”
“Is that what you thought of?” Helaena says with one of her unnerving thrusts.
“I—”
Silver hair, her uncle’s hair had been long like hers when he entered the list, and Alicent’s curls. Alicent’s cunt slicked to her summons, the night Rhaenyra let him tutor her dishonorably, in a brothel, the night she used her dishonorable knowledge for further foul ends, dishonoring Criston and his office, and while her father took his pleasure in his wife’s body Alicent had sank her eyes into the dark ceiling above and remembered Rhaenyra’s hand on hers, trapped in a castle and forced to turn out heirs, yes, that was what she was for and what Rhaenyra feared, and if only Rhaenyra was the one to trap her, Rhaenyra would be spared and Alicent would have done her duty with yet more gladness, if she had been born a son, a spoiled boy prince, little beast, and was taking her pleasure in Alicent’s warm wet willing womb, then the girl she’d born might have been theirs, the prince Alicent gave her too, and when she was safely pregnant once more and her father came to her once again, smiling, the source of his smile would be Rhaenyra doing as she should and Alicent doing as she should, as she’d been taught—
the fact that helaena is rhaenyra’s sister and looks like rhaenyra but also in a twisted way could be imagined as alicent and rhaenyra’s childhood and how both sides of that are engines for alicent’s frustrated sexual being transmuting into an unhealthy sexual fixation on her daughter is delicious to me. so i had to throw that in there. also fun that alicent can’t really conceive of f/f sexuality at all and has to transmute it into heterosexuality, which again is not so much less about lesbianism than about how lesbianism is foreclosed by really specific social factors here that don’t translate perfectly across cultural lines. also “her father came to her once again” and “as she’d been taught” was supposed to be a reference for the fact that alicent is repeating a cycle begun with otto towards her but i don’t think anyone picked up on it.
“I think I will think of this, mother—”
Frozen, Alicent watches Helaena’s back arch off the bed with her release, the cock so firmly planted in its rightful home the seizings of her cunt do not force it out but seem to pull it in, or maybe it is Alicent’s arm which does that, thrusting it past the tightening band to butt up against the closed entrance to her daughter’s womb.
Then she’s gathering Helaena up into her arms. Usually she rejects Alicent’s touch, but now she is pliant, her head resting easily in the curve of Alicent’s neck. (Later, she will say it, before, you never let me touch you like this, and Helaena will reply, I like touches that are honest.) “That’s right. Just think of mother.”
i just like to write stuff that lives in all of the above and offers zero firm conclusions, and the ambiguity of what helaena means by “i think i will think of this,” and also that it is instantly overwritten by alicent’s injunction - but with a non-linear eruption of another ambiguous piece of helaena perspective with “i like touches that are honest” - as the final note is supposed to enact that. this is a fic from the POV of a perpetrator that doesn’t realize they are a perpetrator, and i remember feeling an anxiety that i didn’t make helaena’s feelings clear enough, or didn’t reassure that those feelings are ones of distress, but that’s kind of the point of this particular offering.
(“i like touches that are honest” - i.e. helaena prefers sexual touch from alicent because it is honest about her mother’s sexual desire toward her, as opposed to the lie of touches that purport to be wholesomely maternal but with undercurrents that unnerve her but are also unspoken. it’s not super oblique, and yet alicent does not think about it, and the final line performs a similar act of camouflage).
“Helaena,” Alicent whispers, smoothing her hand down her sleeping daughter’s back, over her nightgown and beneath her starspun hair. “Wake up, sweet girl.”
Her girl jerks awake, flying upward. Alicent puts one hand over Helaena’s heart and feels its frantic beat. With the other she pushes back the curls escaping from the braid she’d plaited before putting her to bed. Dull with sleep, she doesn’t flinch back from the touch. How could she slumber so deeply, this night of all nights?
Alicent could not sleep. Earlier that evening she’d come to Helaena’s chamber and discharged her long dreaded maternal duty: to inform a maiden daughter on the cusp of her wedding of the facts of life. Alicent had not been able to prevent herself from crying, a little, looking at Helaena’s lovely face, her delicate skin with its fine dusting of freckles. She had never been able to understand how she and Viserys, some unworthy night, made something this beautiful, a Targaryen girl with silver hair that curls like Alicent’s own. Every time she was pregnant, all Alicent could think of was it being over, of getting the babe out, but the second they’d put Helaena in her arms for the first time, delirious with pain, she’d slurred politely to the midwife, “Put her back, please.”
the “put her back” line is definitely the one from this fic that got the most attention from commenters. and maybe the crux of the fic that answers your question. what is interesting about alicent and helaena is that she dooms her daughter to her own sad fate, because her own sad fate is literally the conditions of her daughter’s existence i.e. a life sacrificed to dynastic reproductive mandate. she was born to have a daughter like helaena, and helaena was born to continue that chain. and here is the hinge of the moment of helaena’s birth, where alicent expresses this desire to undo it, and all the rest. which as imagined would condemn helaena not to non-existence which is sort of unfathomable, but to never separating their flesh, as a gesture of love and grief and protection. and all that is present with the rest of the fic, where she, you know, has sex with her daughter. whose body she will be inside. there’s probably something there with that.
Helaena had cried as a babe, constantly, as if she too protested her subjection to the world’s brightness, its vastness. She was clumsy: her milky skin spoiled with sickly green bruises. She clasped her hands over her ears at any sudden noise. “It hurts, mama.” The world hurt her.
the suggestions of helaena’s (prophetic power-induced) neurodivergence - sensory overload, aversion to touch - are really interesting. this comes entirely out of a moment in show itself. she flinches and claps her hands over her ears when vaemond is killed in 1.08, even though its not accompanied by any loud noise, and alicent instantly puts her hands on her in an attempt to comfort. this was written pre-season 2 and what i allude to here, that alicent’s clinging over-protectiveness comes out of a sense of helaena’s special fragility (on top of the fact that she’s alicent’s only daughter, which she does state in season 1), is confirmed in season 2 in her conflict with aemond over helaena doing dragon battle: that she’s the “gentlest” of them, the “most worthy of protection” and that it might “destroy her mind.” to your question about not knowing where to start, this is where everything starts for me. identifying things in the text itself and then asking “how can i explore that through porn?”
Mama had explained that earlier, back across the bleak hours she’d spent tossing and turning in her bed, unable to think of anything else, images of Aegon forcing his way into her girl playing across her closed kids. It would hurt. Her brother would hurt her, Alicent said, even if he didn’t mean to.
another engine of writing for me in this fandom specifically is asking what specific really odd experiences might feel like to live. so in this case, being a mother whose children get incest married.
Her daughter cocked her head to the side and said with an actual laugh, sounding fond, “What experience of Aegon makes you think he ever doesn’t mean to hurt?”
helaena was a real challenge here, but a delightful one. she especially was after season 1, where she got so little screentime. she still is after season 2, where she also got very little screentime. but also i was pleased in the ways i think season 2 bore out my characterization of her. she seems to not quite exist in time with everyone else, so people are surprised by how sharply perceptive she can be, because it is exactly her position of being out of joint that allows her a clearness of vision. helaena and aegon’s relationship also presents a challenge, because again it’s basically totally non-existent, and the tack i took in this was that it’s interesting because they are like, normal siblings, not targaryen siblings, and yet are, you know, married.
helaena has experienced aegon as her big brother bully, but there is a fondness that comes from being inmates in the same shared prison of your family and childhood. helaena is fond because aegon is so perfectly known, even if what she knows is that aegon delights in causing pain to those weaker than him. but also she’s oddly zen about this, because of sheer familiarity that makes that cruelty taking sexual forms not daunting. it’s playing out the implications of the incest marriage structure. this is not saying this would be everyone’s reaction to marrying their mean older brother, but it could be one response, and from very little material, it seemed the one that read as most accurate to the helaena we got, the one who is so tragically unruffled giving a toast that references her marital rape in 1.08.
On the whole Helaena took it calmly. She had not cried. She said she had watched her little beasts mate and she could tell Alicent all about it, and she started to, awful things, creatures that laid eggs inside corpses so the offspring had to eat their way out—
“It will not be like that,” Alicent snapped. “You aren’t a bug. You’re a girl. Bugs don’t feel—”
“Oh, they do,” Helaena said, letting one of the worst ones, the kind with many many legs, scuttle up her arm—Alicent had permitted her to take one from its cage, thinking it might grant her daughter comfort. “When Aegon came and tore off their wings, my dragonflies felt it. I felt it. All the way in the Dragonpit, I felt it. I knew it wasn’t in my head, because Dreamfyre cried out and I ran all the way back, but alas it was too late. They feel, feel, feel,” she sang softly under her breath. “I wept, that they hurt, but not that they died, because I knew the ones that remained would breed, breed, breed.”
making helaena a bug girl is so fun and there’s a lot you can do with it. here i’m using it as a metaphor to evoke the sense of targaryen dynastic reproduction, as experienced by those within it, as an unalterable natural law, a compulsion to mate and breed that is as unconscious and instinctive as the reproduction of bugs. i remember thinking it was too on the nose, but whatever.
Alicent had shuddered, but here was something Helaena understood, that she could use. “Yes. I suppose in that way—you are a Targaryen, a princess, and you will bear your brother many fine, strong children, and among them a future king.”
experienced as the above, despite whatever rationale is given for it as a distinctive human act that builds human culture, as alicent hastens to provide. like i said, too on the nose, but i think it works on the level of alicent trying to find a shared language, that makes it much less so than it first appears. it calls forth this horror of senseless animality for her - but that is not stated, except implicitly, with her trying to assert her own worldview through appropriating imagery she imagines helaena understands. but it’s actually perhaps a misunderstanding - helaena may well just mean “yay, more bugs.” or not! we’re locked very firmly in alicent’s POV, which is one thing i hoped to achieve here. the above litany by helaena is thematically suggestive to both alicent and reader, but what it means to its speaker itself must remain hers and our projection, in a way that i wanted to bring home by the anthropomorphic symbolic use of animals (i.e. human projection of meaning on other forms of life that we only use as mirrors which obscure the independent irreducible reality). the sense of helaena’s unknowability, which alicent is frustrated by but also is able to convince herself she can overcome, that she can know what is best for her daughter - important to what happens below.
Now Helaena stares at her unblinkingly. Alicent sniffs back the tears that have started to flow freely. “You are right, my darling. Aegon—he is not a gentle boy. He will hurt you. But I am here. I know, marrying your bro—marrying Aegon is not what you might have chosen, but at least this way I am here. This is a world for men. Mother is here.” She is rambling. Hadn’t her entire body reacted with revulsion to the idea of giving away her daughter to the eldest of Rhaenyra’s bastards? Viserys had treated her as if she was hysterical. Weren’t they all one family? But she had known, somehow, that it would mean losing her daughter, Helaena beyond reach of her help or comfort. Alicent can do Rhaenyra’s whelps enough justice to recognize they were of sweeter natures than Aegon’s, their base servility outing. Still, Viserys was of a gentle nature. It did not matter. Alicent would not be able to be there for Helaena. That was vital. Thank gods, she regretted what Larys had done, but thank gods, her father, her guide, her defender, was back. And look, Rhaenyra had taken the whole lot off to Dragonstone and her uncle had taken up residence shortly thereafter and they were surely now well underway in turning it into a whorehouse and Helaena would be alone in the midst of all that.
what’s endlessly fascinating about alicent and helaena is that alicent dooms helaena to reproduce her fate in both unagential and agential ways. obviously, alicent had no agency in helaena’s birth. but she does, as her mother and a queen, have agency over the course that life takes. a line of alicent defense is to insist this is not the case, and there’s a degree of truth there insofar alicent also doesn’t have much choice in whether her princess daugher marries or not. but she does choose who her daughter marries and thus really directly shape the direction helaena’s life takes. she intervenes, entering into conflict with her husband (which she ultimately wins) in rhaenyra’s proposal to betrothe jace and helaena, and from aemond’s statement (“if only mother had betrothed us”) it appears she is the one responsible for her subsequent engagement to aegon.
it’s really complicated! i’ve talked about this all before - she’s between a rock and a hard place. if helaena married jace, we the viewer know she would marry a nice boy who treats women well (alicent knows this less well, as jace is 10 at the time, and his ultimate character would be uncertain to her) but she would be a hostage to a hostile power. if she marries aegon, she marries a burgeoning sex pest (which alicent is aware of, to a degree, in 1.06) but she remains at home with her mother. what i was interested in in this fic is alicent’s motivations in choosing the latter, her conviction that staying at home with her mother to protect her makes the price of sibling marriage to aegon worth it for helaena. on the most literal level, it’s a marriage against patriarchal interest, as viserys would prefer helaena to marry jace. it creates - and season 2 bears this out - an alternate mother-daughter centered family-within-the-family, where all affective energy, at least on alicent’s side, is invested in her daughter to the increasing exclusion of her sons by season 2.
that’s really compelling to me, as both sympathetic and selfish. there is genuine concern for helaena’s well-being, but that is also a justification for alicent’s own emotional need, and that’s what i wanted to thread and balance:, the degree to which this is motivated by knowledge of patriarchal violence (alicent’s own trauma as a motherless child bride who did not even have that source of support); is a fantasy of mother-daughter love as antidote to (incestuous) patriarchal violence; is in itself its own act of incestuous patriarchal violence in its possessiveness, confinement, and denial of independence (which reaches its apotheosis in this fic in the sexual utilization of a child); and is formed by that history of incestuous patriarchal violence.
“I told you earlier, how unpleasant a maiden’s wedding night can be. It is a holy thing, the joining of husband and wife in the marriage bed, but men do not know what it is, to be—entered. Women do. I do, and I can not just send you off, my sweet, when it is in my power to make sure that this holy thing is not painful for you. Do you understand me?”
Helaena is not looking at her. Her gaze has landed on the tool Alicent had brought to aid her, laying beside her on the mattress. “Is that one of Aegon’s cocks?”
note what i said about “where all effective energy, at least on alicent’s side, is invested in her daughter to the exclusion of her sons.” what about helaena’s side? i wanted these glimmers of helaena as her own sexual being, formed in unideal circumstances, but the idea is that those unideal circumstances are hers to navigate - not for alicent to attempt to navigate for her.
Alicent flushes with fury, “Had he been showing his disgusting collection to you? That beast—”
this is supposed to be like super darkly funny. alicent is about to molest her daughter out of the not unsympathetic delusion that its her best course in truly wretched circumstances! girl, what! helaena is only seeing the dildo because alicent is going to put it in her! you can’t be enraged at the idea she may have seen it before!
Her daughter shrugs. “He sneaks into my room and messes with my things. So I went into his.”
“How do you know what a cock looks like?” Alicent asks suspiciously.
“We used to take baths together, mother.”
She observes Helaena closely. She says this easily and it is not in her nature to lie. Alicent lets out a relieved exhale. Aegon has not interfered with her, spoiled her innocence.
even as she recognizes what her daughter is going to suffer, her thought process is so structured by misogynistic frameworks, here on ideas of innocence right up to the eve of marriage, even though helaena is about to be married at the grand old age of fifteen. it’s that balance thing again: genuine concern that aegon might have molested her, against the fact that she’s 1) marrying her to aegon as a child 2) about to do…all of this. ultimately that split is something that comes out of forces larger than her, the other paradox that she both can’t do anything to stop this (helaena’s marriage as a child) and also deliberately brought it about (arranged her marriage to aegon specifically). those irresolvable contradictions are what are so interesting about alicent, and what everyone wants to neutralize in one direction or another.
“Yes,” she says, with a deep inhale. She strokes her daughter’s shoulder. Helaena twitches her hand away, seemingly unintentionally, still gazing at the phallus thoughtfully, like a horse flicking away a fly. “It is one of his. I would not know where to acquire such a thing. I have gotten rid of them before, but he just manages to find more. This one was new. Still in a box that was delivered to his chambers. They might as well be put to a good use.”
again all ideas come from the show itself - here, the increcible fact that if you pause on the scene in aegon’s room in 1.08, you can see there are sex toys everywhere. aegon’s semi-canonical dildo collection.
“What purpose does Aegon put them to?” she asks curiously, naively.
The slatterns that stumble from Aegon’s chambers, holding their torn clothes to bruised bodies. If Alicent catches them they are quickly dismissed. They cry and she tries to soothe with a bag of coin. It is for the best. Eventually they would be grateful. Not just one royal cock to suffer but many. They cry and their suffering flashes across her mind, squirming on the cocks that bristle from every orifice like in those horrid tapestries while her son smirks—
alicent IS sexually repressed, and it has very little to do with queer sexuality. she’s a sexual being who because of experience cannot conceive of sexuality extricable from sexual violence. and it leads her to the place of being wretchedly aroused by contemplating her rape baby’s rapes of serving girls. this has echoes of cersei in affc vii, where she tries to experience sovereignty and grasp sexual pleasure (and failing at both) by playing out her own rapes at the hand of her husband as the aggressor this time.
“Hurting,” Alicent says. “So now they will be used to make sure he can not hurt you. He likes surprises, nasty surprises. He will not understand that you are his sister and wife and deserve honor and gentle treatment. I will make sure he cannot enjoy that. Your body will be prepared. Do you understand?”
obviously it takes a quite different form in alicent, where instead of imagining herself as the aggressor, she becomes the aggressor through a fantasy of shared victimhood, her act of sexual predation as bonding her with her daughter by enacting a rape where she can exist on both sides, where she can control it to alleviate it in some way. or something.
Helaena does not speak. Alicent feels a spike of frustration. She understands, she does, but she can never make anything easy. Pushing it down she says, “Lie back, my darling,” with a kiss to her forehead.
She lies back against her pillow. When Alicent folds her nightgown above her hips, she’s stiff as she always is whenever her mother touches her. A sweet sleep smell emanates, warm animal girlsmell. She would have her bath in the morning to prepare her for her marital bed. Alicent nudges Helaena’s knees apart and gazes on flesh she has not seen since her daughter was a tiny girl. The thatch of silver hair on her mound. The small pink sex below it. Alicent wipes her tear-blinded eyes with the back of one hand and with two careful fingers of the other parts the closed pink lips and sets the head of the cock to the tiny hole there.
“I understand, mother,” Helaena finally says.
So small, so delicate! How could men only think of fucking it open? How did they not understand that this softest human part, which would do so much, be used so brutally—bear children into the world, continue their names—must be treated sweetly? It was strong, stronger than could be imagined, stronger than their own absurd appendages they used to hammer it apart, and this was all the more reason to honor it.
another spark to this fic was immense frustration at fandom discourse that was so resistant to the idea that women could victimize women, that stubbornly clung to the idea of radiant female solidarity against male oppression, etc. so it’s the fun thing of it being exactly that kind of belief that alicent is using as justification for abuse. but i also did not want it to be mistaken for an obnoxious “what if a mouse was a kia sorrento” ass thing that evacuates patriarchal violence as a factor that does effect women unequally, is enacted by men unequally…alicent is a victim turned victimizer but every part of that chain is comprehensible and traceable, and its mental architecture worth exploring. the vehicle here is this kind of justificatory process where a specific self-protective romanticizing move of reverence for woman’s gendered roles that only other women can understand goes sour. because the base is rotten, as identified here, when what is being reverenced is a capacity to take gendered subjugation, figured as an essentially anatomical truth.
Her hole parts over the head and then Helaena’s channel becomes too tight for the careful movements of Alicent’s hands to nudge it further. “It’s alright,” she hiccups with a smile like a rictus, licking her lip and tasting snot and salt. “Just get used to this, darling.” But the moment she stops pushing Helaena’s body forces it out. Alicent squeaks and, panicked, shoves it back in. Helaena emits a muffled yelp. “Sorry, oh, does it hurt—”
“Yes, I think so,” Helaena says evenly, eyebrows crimped in concentration, as if she’s listening to something Alicent can’t hear.
Alicent puts her hands over her face and one hard sob tears through her.
“I’m sorry, oh, darling, I can’t make it not—"
this is kind of the thesis statement!
“You can,” Helaena says, and Alicent lowers her hands to watch her daughter dazzle through tears. “You know how to make it not hurt. You’re wet.”
but so is this! even though it’s directly contradictory!
She gasps and feels a nauseating guilt, but does not know for what—the sick slickness between her thighs or the fact that Helaena does not share it. Her daughter’s hand comes up to touch Alicent’s drenched cheeks and her fingers come away glinting in the weak candlelight.
Her own hands are wet with tears. She fists the cock and notches it to her daughter’s cunt again. She could force it in with one swift, hard thrust. As Aegon would surely do, burying himself thoughtlessly in his sister’s virgin channel. You know how to make it not hurt. Alicent watches her lower lips strain around their burden and thinks: I made this. It is strangely lovely, as fine and beautiful as the rest of Helaena. She made it: she is responsible for it. She is responsible for her children. Her son, her first boy, will be king. He will have a beautiful bride of noble blood, Valyrian, largely, and that of the Hightowers of Oldtown, blood of the Faith. And Alicent’s girl, her only girl—she has mother.
This delicate flesh. Alicent had overseen Helaena’s baths and as a baby, seen her pink, wet body and thought, ill with her little brother, belly heavy with Aemond, someday one of them is going to fuck that, and hurried from the room, not made it to a basin before she emptied her heaving stomach of as much as it could.
this is an impressively gross line that i was nervous about posting. and this is another key to writing: as i said before, the first part is just asking what an experience feels like, as lived, without moralizing judgement. and the second part is taking that all the way, even when the logical furthest extent is truly repellent. don’t flinch, that’s an important piece of advice. how would knowledge that the baby you have produced as a child bride is destined to grow up and marry another baby you had as a child bride? it would get ugly! as another note, i’m pretty sure this line was an unconcious reference to the one from the incest diary where the incestuous father looks at his newborn daughter being bathed and says “one day that kid is going to fuck”
Her thumb sinks into the curls at the join of her cunt and finds the dewy pearl there. Alicent knows. Viserys was a kind man and yet he hurt her as his body found its proper place in hers. Shamed, every night—he did not call for her every night even then when he could call for her at all—but she prepared anyway, reached between her legs and closed her eyes and touched herself patiently, dutifully, until she grew slick, until her body knew what it must do and prepared itself. She had wanted to tell Helaena earlier, to give her this way to make her body accept its purpose, but thought it was not a mother’s place. How wrong she’d been to fail in this duty.
Helaena whimpers, hitches her hips up. “Does that feel good, darling?”
A hesitation, then a nod. Her pink mouth is softly open, her lashes tremble on her cheek. “Good, my lovely girl. It’s your body wanting to protect you, to know your duty is good.”
Soon enough, she no longer even had to touch herself; her body was wet and open every night when she was fetched to her husband’s bed. By the time Viserys mounted her and bred Helaena into her it was good. It accepted it. Helaena had been fucked into a womb slicked wide, grateful, hungry. Six-and-ten, a year older than Helaena is now. But Helaena will not have to learn it on her own, as Alicent had not. Hadn’t her father always been right, about Rhaenyra, about everything? Alicent’s mother was dead and perhaps she would not have taught her such a lesson anyway, but her husband had stepped in and shown her daughter what it was to be a wife. Viserys neglected all his children, save Rhaenyra, who had no need of him anyway, so it was up to Alicent.
this is territory that eternally obsesses me, and for which i ultimately have no answers. forced pleasure during rape doesn’t make any less rape. but also pleasure is not only not mutually exclusive with violence, but can also make violence more bearable. pleasure can coexist with violence, and also be a source in itself of violence and trauma, and also compensatory for violence. all at once.
She rolls Helaena’s sweet little pearl around and oh, she does beautifully, she widens her hips without instruction to receive her brother’s cock, her cunt blooms around it as Alicent withdraws and pushes back in, slowly, tenderly.
Alicent is still sobbing, tears dripping down on Helaena’s bared, yet empty belly, her slickening cunt, so Alicent, beaming through it says, “What a good girl, it’s not hurting at all, you will breed, and feel, but feel good, you can touch this pretty little button and think of some handsome knight, my sweet girl—”
“Is that what you thought of?” Helaena says with one of her unnerving thrusts.
“I—”
Silver hair, her uncle’s hair had been long like hers when he entered the list, and Alicent’s curls. Alicent’s cunt slicked to her summons, the night Rhaenyra let him tutor her dishonorably, in a brothel, the night she used her dishonorable knowledge for further foul ends, dishonoring Criston and his office, and while her father took his pleasure in his wife’s body Alicent had sank her eyes into the dark ceiling above and remembered Rhaenyra’s hand on hers, trapped in a castle and forced to turn out heirs, yes, that was what she was for and what Rhaenyra feared, and if only Rhaenyra was the one to trap her, Rhaenyra would be spared and Alicent would have done her duty with yet more gladness, if she had been born a son, a spoiled boy prince, little beast, and was taking her pleasure in Alicent’s warm wet willing womb, then the girl she’d born might have been theirs, the prince Alicent gave her too, and when she was safely pregnant once more and her father came to her once again, smiling, the source of his smile would be Rhaenyra doing as she should and Alicent doing as she should, as she’d been taught—
the fact that helaena is rhaenyra’s sister and looks like rhaenyra but also in a twisted way could be imagined as alicent and rhaenyra’s childhood and how both sides of that are engines for alicent’s frustrated sexual being transmuting into an unhealthy sexual fixation on her daughter is delicious to me. so i had to throw that in there. also fun that alicent can’t really conceive of f/f sexuality at all and has to transmute it into heterosexuality, which again is not so much less about lesbianism than about how lesbianism is foreclosed by really specific social factors here that don’t translate perfectly across cultural lines. also “her father came to her once again” and “as she’d been taught” was supposed to be a reference for the fact that alicent is repeating a cycle begun with otto towards her but i don’t think anyone picked up on it.
“I think I will think of this, mother—”
Frozen, Alicent watches Helaena’s back arch off the bed with her release, the cock so firmly planted in its rightful home the seizings of her cunt do not force it out but seem to pull it in, or maybe it is Alicent’s arm which does that, thrusting it past the tightening band to butt up against the closed entrance to her daughter’s womb.
Then she’s gathering Helaena up into her arms. Usually she rejects Alicent’s touch, but now she is pliant, her head resting easily in the curve of Alicent’s neck. (Later, she will say it, before, you never let me touch you like this, and Helaena will reply, I like touches that are honest.) “That’s right. Just think of mother.”
i just like to write stuff that lives in all of the above and offers zero firm conclusions, and the ambiguity of what helaena means by “i think i will think of this,” and also that it is instantly overwritten by alicent’s injunction - but with a non-linear eruption of another ambiguous piece of helaena perspective with “i like touches that are honest” - as the final note is supposed to enact that. this is a fic from the POV of a perpetrator that doesn’t realize they are a perpetrator, and i remember feeling an anxiety that i didn’t make helaena’s feelings clear enough, or didn’t reassure that those feelings are ones of distress, but that’s kind of the point of this particular offering.
(“i like touches that are honest” - i.e. helaena prefers sexual touch from alicent because it is honest about her mother’s sexual desire toward her, as opposed to the lie of touches that purport to be wholesomely maternal but with undercurrents that unnerve her but are also unspoken. it’s not super oblique, and yet alicent does not think about it, and the final line performs a similar act of camouflage).