Contains spoilers for “House of the Dragon” Season 2 Episode 8 — “The Queen Who Ever Was”

Fans of “House of the Dragon” are ready for two major characters to just kiss already after this major Season 2 scene. The characters in question? Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke) and Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D’Arcy).

In the season finale “The Queen Who Ever Was,” the series takes a serious deviation from George R.R. Martin’s source material, the Targaryen family history “Fire & Blood,” by staging a secret meeting between Alicent and Rhaenyra at the latter’s stronghold Dragonstone. Alicent tells Rhaenyra in no uncertain terms that she’s desperate for the war to end and even agrees to kill her own son and heir, King Aegon II Targaryen (Tom Glynn-Carney), who stands between Rhaenyra and the Iron Throne. Why does she promise this? As Alicent puts it, she simply wants to leave King’s Landing with her daughter Helaena (Phia Saban) and her grandchildren … and that’s when she asks Rhaenyra to go away with her.

There’s been tension between Rhaenyra and Alicent from the very beginning of “House of the Dragon” — particularly when they were played as teenagers by Milly Alcock and Emily Carey — and fans are thrilled at this latest development. “really love how condal n co reimagined alicent’s omission from [‘Fire & Blood’],” @faiIwife wrote on X (formerly known as Twitter). “ultimately she went against her family and as punishment she’s erased from history, voiceless in their narrative. the beauty being they’ll never know that alicent wanted nothing more than to be forgotten.”

On X, fans of the ship known casually as “Rhaenicent” went wild over “The Queen Who Never Was,” honing in on Alicent’s impulsive request to Rhaenyra. “alicent listing all that she now wants for herself – to go unnoticed, to live a simple life with her daughter and grandchild, away from the scheming of men – and ending it with a desperate and irrational ‘come with me” because rhaenyra, too, is what and who she wants,’ @lesblumy wrote on the platform. @flickrsoflight pointed out that Alicent’s yearning for Rhaenyra completely changed the potential trajectory of the show: “her homosexuality was so compelling it completely nullified the source material and irrevocably changed the direction of the series adaptation for seasons to come. show-stopping, never been done before, my jaw is still hanging.”

Others paid equal attention to Rhaenyra, like @ellipsixm — who pointed out that after Alicent asks the queen to escape with her, Rhaenyra doesn’t dismiss it out of hand. “We’re ignoring the craziest part, rhaenyra’s response,” they wrote. “she basically said i want to but i cant… she still wants alicent, part of her still yearns to escape together even after everything.” Other users took a more irreverent approach to the whole thing, like @guoaei: “what if you were GAY, went to your EX WIFE to turncoat to her during a CIVIL WAR and she asks you to KILL your son and you AGREE. and then you ask her to RUN AWAY with you like how you dreamed of when you were YOUNG and IN LOVE and HAPPY.”

In an interview with TheWrap, Geeta Patel — who directed several episodes of the second season of “House of the Dragon,” including “The Queen Who Ever Was” — opened up about the scene between Rhaenyra and Alicent, making it clear that it’s meant to show that the two still love each other after years of bitter, bloody conflict. “It’s about two people who love each other, who think they loved each other and they’re trying to pretend that they don’t,” Patel told the outlet. “That’s what keeps us at the edge of our seat.” Elsewhere in the interview, she does compare them to a couple: “It very much reminds us of a divorced couple or a broken-up couple. You can be as professional as you want, you can turn 50, 60 years old but when you see that person who broke your heart you think in the way of a 15-year-old.”

Not only that, but Patel engineered the visuals of the episode’s final moments to make one point clear: after making her deal with Rhaenyra, Alicent feels freed from her royal life, whereas Rhaenyra will always be trapped in, well, a “game of thrones” (so to speak). Alicent ends the season alone in the wilderness, while Rhaenyra is seen through bars in Dragonstone indicating that she’s confined, and Patel says this was definitely on purpose. “That came to me just in terms of how they both were feeling in the end,” she says of the imagery. “One of them was trapped […] and that would be Rhaenyra. The other one has lifted the burden off of her own shoulders and is now free having given it to Rhaenyra. Visually my thought was: Rhaenyra is caught in a web and Alicent is free.”

Ever since the show began, fans have been wondering if Alicent and Rhaenyra were ever in love … and it’s certainly not an absurd idea. As teenagers, it’s clear that Alicent and Rhaenyra are extremely close friends, and in a moment echoed by the Season 2 finale, a young Rhaenyra wishes, in Season 1, that she and Alicent could fly away from King’s Landing on dragonback and spend their lives exploring and eating fine cakes. Plus, as Season 2 revealed, Rhaenyra is canonically queer; in the sixth episode of Season 2, “Smallfolk,” she shares a steamy kiss with her confidante Mysaria (Sonoya Mizuno). 

Still, the idea of Alicent and Rhaenyra getting together, at this point in the Targaryen civil war known as the Dance of the Dragons, is probably an impossibility. Sure, Alicent offers to kill her child to put Rhaenyra on the throne, but unbeknownst to her, Aegon has already fled King’s Landing at the behest of his loyal footsoldier Larys Strong (Matthew Needham). Still, it’s quite clear in “The Queen Who Never Was” that there’s a lot of love lost between Alicent and Rhaenyra, and it’s both heartbreaking and affirming to see these two people who still love each other express that and, yet, grapple with their extremely different destinies.

“House of the Dragon” is streaming on Max now.