"What have I done, but what was expected of me?" Queen Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke) raves in "House of the Dragon." "Where is duty? Where is sacrifice? It's trampled under your pretty foot again."
In the seventh episode, she's fighting with her former friend/current stepdaughter Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D'Arcy), and eventually slices open Rhaenyra's arm with a knife. The ostensible source of Alicent's outrage is that Rhaenyra's son took our her son's eye in an otherwise childish brawl. But the rant exposes her deeper motive: plain old envy. Alicent and Rhaenyra were friends growing up, but turned on each other when their lives took very different paths. Alicent was married off to King Viserys (Paddy Considine), Rhaenyra's father. She must spend the rest of her days in a loveless marriage with a man who physically repulses her, while bearing one child after another without much break. Rhaenyra, meanwhile, is the heir to the throne and indulged by her father. She gets to have sex with cute guys (and her uncle, because this is the "Game of Thrones" franchise), fly around on a dragon, and abscond to another castle when she gets sick of being around her miserable stepfamily.
