In a crowded field, the prince-regent is this week’s worst person in Westeros.

HBO

After each episode of House of the Dragon, Slate writers will gather to answer a crucial question: Who is the worst person in Westeros? This week: senior editors Sam Adams and Jenny G. Zhang answer the call.

Sam Adams: We’re nearing the home stretch of House of the Dragon’s second season—this week’s is the sixth episode of eight—and a big new idea has just been placed on the table: What if Targaryens aren’t the only ones who can ride dragons? Rhaenyra is still looking at the family tree, but she’s at least moved on to some of the more distant branches, which might also have the benefit of putting the most powerful weapons in the realm under the control of people who aren’t inbred loons. This is a real paradigm shift, at least for this show, and the end of the episode suggests that dragonriders may be found even further afield than she’s ready to look.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. We’ve got a task here, and that’s to determine who’s this week’s worst person in Westeros. And since we’re already shifting paradigms, I’m going to be a little shifty myself. What if the worst person isn’t a person at all? I’m talking, of course, about Seasmoke.

I can hear the objections already: Dragons gonna dragon, and it’s not Seasmoke’s fault that poor Steffon Darklyn simply doesn’t have the juice. A distant drop of Targaryen blood isn’t enough to prevent the Lord Commander of Rhaenyra’s Queensguard from getting torched like a dried twig, and he doesn’t even have the presence of mind to slit his own throat and spare himself the pain of death by dragonfire. But the man’s just trying to serve his queen, who’s got more dragons than she has people to ride them. So what do you think, Jenny? Are dragons people, too?

Jenny G. Zhang: Wow, really makes you think. I find the dragon question one of the more compelling ones of the show—as anyone who has paid the mildest attention to A Song of Ice and Fire lore may know, the civil war known as the Dance of the Dragons ultimately decimates the majority of the Targaryens’ dragons, sparking a long decline that would eventually see dragons dying out by the beginning of the events of Game of Thrones. So it has been heartbreaking to see these dragons commanded to kill each other—lots of fans have compared the creatures to beloved dogs that are forced to attack and maim their own littermates at the behest of cruel humans. Poor Sunfyre at the battle of Rook’s Rest; he just wanted to go out for a romp with Aegon!

At the end of the day, though, beasts are beasts, even if they are “domesticated.” Just as dogs—even a well-trained, docile one—may suddenly snap and bite under the right (or wrong) circumstances, dragons, especially ones without the taming force of a rider, will do as they will. You can’t blame a beast for just following its nature. Instead, should we look to who put Seasmoke and Darklyn in this situation to start with? Rhaenyra blames herself for getting the knight barbecued—is she right on the mark?

Adams: Rhaenyra’s in a tough spot. She’s one of the fiercest warriors in the realm—and, atop her dragon Syrax, one of its greatest powers. But queens aren’t meant to risk their lives, and so she’s stuck on the sidelines, a player-coach forced to warm a bench. Even among her supposed loyalists, she’s bedeviled by the sexism that started this civil war in the first place, to the extent that even the spineless Lord Bartimos Celtigar feels free to second-guess her. Barty is too insignificant to merit a WPiW title, but he definitely earns the smack Rhaenyra gives him, as well as the warning that her even temper should not be mistaken for weakness. Just because she’s not abetting war crimes like Daemon or trying to murder her own kin like Aemond doesn’t mean you can shoot your mouth off around her. “It is my fault, I think, that you have forgotten to fear me” is one of the hardest lines in HotD history.

With her male supporters either undermining her or going up in flames, Rhaenyra naturally turns to Mysaria, who offers her an ingenious way of attacking the Greens from a distance: with food. Aegon, Aemond, and their allies have a special lack of flair for the wielding of soft power, from stringing up every ratcatcher in town to dragging a severed dragon’s head through the streets, but their most basic error has been in depriving the people of King’s Landing of simple sustenance. You can make the argument that this season has had altogether too much discussion of vegetables, but when people who can’t fill their pots watch a cart laden with fat lambs pass by on its way to the dragon pit, bad feelings are going to follow.

Mysaria, who has made a living out of understanding people’s desires, comes up with a fiendishly simple plan: Send out a flotilla of waterborne care packages to show the smallfolk that their true queen still cares about them. But she has to anticipate what happens next, which is that the scrabbling for a few boatloads of cabbages turns into a full-scale riot. Alicent and Helaena are very nearly torn apart by the angry mob, and several members of their guard suffer what sound like extremely painful deaths. Mysaria’s aims are ostensibly humanitarian, but it seems more like that she’s exploiting the people of King’s Landing no less than their current rulers; she’s just better at it. Can feeding the hungry still make you the worst?

Zhang: Mysaria’s plot is admittedly pretty ingenious: Maintain the blockade and cut off food routes, starve the people of King’s Landing, foment unrest with rumors that the Greens are feasting every night, and send in those flotillas that will cement Rhaenyra as the savior. I think Mysaria empathizes with the smallfolk and understands their plight in a way that no noble ever will, but, like Varys in Game of Thrones, the road to her vision of a better world for the common man is paved with pragmatism. She will scheme her way to her long-term goal, even if it takes short-term (one hopes) suffering of the very people she is supposed to be fighting for. Bonus if the enemy court suffers any losses along the way.

Helaena, as one of the show’s few innocents, doesn’t deserve the brush with danger as the mob goes justifiably wild. But I think the fault here lies more with the Greens. You’re telling me they didn’t anticipate their subjects would feel less than happy about the lack of food? They didn’t think to dip into their own larder and distribute the bare minimum of sustenance? That’s just poor foresight. Prince-regent Aemond clearly doesn’t even care—he’s too busy humiliating his mother and doing the mental calculation of whether he can get away with pressing a pillow on his elder brother’s face and finishing the job he started back in Rook’s Rest. That has to be enough to warrant a conversation about him being the WPiW, right?

Adams: We wrestle every week in this column with not naming one of Westeros’ ruling creepazoids the worst, but it’s hard to get around Aemond this time. For one thing, the competition basically sat this one out: Aegon is laid up in bed, recuperating from the wounds dealt him by his brother and his big-ass dragon, and Daemon is busy communing with imaginary dead people in Harrenhal (this time the late king Viserys—hello again, Paddy Considine). First, Aemond makes the rash—and, let’s just assume, soon-to-be-disastrous—decision to form a temporary alliance with the Free Cities, essentially lawless marauders who he argues will be driven by their historical animus toward Daemon and the Sea Snake to attack their blockade. Then he ousts his mother from the Small Council, with such casual contempt that I wanted to serve him a piece of poisoned pie. And then he pays a visit to his convalescent brother, whom he already tried to murder once, for another round of threatening and gaslighting, with a little torture on the side. He’s always bad, but this week Aemond is truly awful.

Anyone else we should consider, Jenny? Maybe Larys Strong, who plays a small role in this episode but does make a characteristically weaselly play to be Aemond’s Hand of the King. (The one thing I enjoyed watching Aemond do is toy with Larys’ screamingly obvious ambitions and then shut them down, calling for the return of Otto Hightower instead.) Or maybe it’s Alys Rivers, the creepy witch-lady who I increasingly suspect is not just helping Daemon interpret his lunatic visions but causing them instead? Or maybe it’s Lord Corlys Velaryon, simply for anchoring the most boring, go-nowhere plotline of the entire season? Do any of them merit considering, or is the obvious answer also the right one this time around?

Zhang: All compelling candidates. (Especially Corlys, for the reason you named—come on, let’s not waste Steve Toussaint like this!) But, with just a few episodes left in this season, I think it’s finally Aemond’s time. Maiming your brother, pursuing ill-advised alliances, and killing your nephew and your aunt are all bad, but treating your mother like she’s a shrill nuisance in need of a retirement home? Aemond Targaryen, you are this week’s worst person in Westeros.