House of the Dragon episode 6 builds on Game of Thrones in the best way

polygon.com:

It sucks to be a woman in Westeros. This is no secret; it’s the reason a lot of Game of Thrones women are hardened against the world, and the reason many viewers started to turn against the original show to begin with. A Song of Ice and Fire is a cold, cruel place, and even colder and crueler if you aren’t a man.

House of the Dragon has always united behind that banner as one of its key themes, its second season — and its sixth episode in particular — makes the connection sharp, twisting like a knife between two characters: Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) and Alicent (Olivia Cooke).

After fighting a losing battle in last week’s small council meeting, Alicent starts episode 6 by getting patly dismissed — first metaphorically, as Aemond refuses to listen to her advice, and then more literally, when Aemond relieves her of her small council duties altogether. This is — in the shrewd, cunning way her son often can be — a canny awareness for the makeup of his small council, as we’ll learn later; he can have Otto on his council, or he can have Alicent, but he can’t (optically, politically, personally) have both. But it still stings Alicent deeply.

Which makes sense, when Alicent has had to strive so much to simply be seen, let alone heard by the men around her, even those she gave birth to. When she made her big play to rule as queen regent in episode 5, “Regent,” she was shot down. The reasons were woefully sound: that was peace, this is war. And yet, the underlying message was clearer than that — this is the future she fought for, a future crafted by men. And now she’s found her place in it: on the outside looking in, wondering if her third kid is better simply because he was raised far away from her.

Rhaenyra, by contrast, has the ability to push back in ways Alicent never does. Though her small council repeatedly undermines her (and Rhaenys, and Baela), she commands the kind of respect that Alicent begs for. When one man questions her ability to fight in war, she reminds him