Otto Hightower
Hand to the Old King, to Viserys, and to the grandson he manufactured ÔÇö the second son of Oldtown who plays the long game better than anyone alive, and loves his family most usefully.
A soul of House Hightower, born at Oldtown, sworn to The Greens ÔÇö the King's Party.
The fuller tale
Season One
In The Heirs of the Dragon ÔÇö The Hand who moves his daughter like a cyvasse piece. In The Rogue Prince ÔÇö Wins the queen's chair for his blood and calls it duty. Otto leads a party to the island; steel is bared on the bridge until Rhaenyra lands Syrax and dares her uncle to kill her. In King of the Narrow Sea ÔÇö Sent home to Oldtown with his ambitions folded in his baggage.
Otto brings the king a whisperer's tale of his daughter and his brother; Viserys will not hear it ÔÇö and sees at last whose ambition the Hand serves. Otto Hightower is stripped of the Hand's badge; Rhaenyra swears her innocence on her mother's memory ÔÇö and drinks the moon tea the Grand Maester brings anyway. Rhaenyra and Daemon come back to a changed Red Keep ÔÇö Otto restored as Hand, Alicent ruling a king kept swimming in milk of the poppy. In The Green Council ÔÇö Twenty years of moves, one morning of checkmate.
The king is dead, and only the greens know. The Red Keep is sealed while Otto's council ÔÇö planning this for years ÔÇö moves to crown Aegon. Otto comes under the peace banner with terms; Rhaenyra answers with the words of a queen, not a rebel ÔÇö and holds Daemon's war back.
Where they stand. King's Landing and Oldtown.
Season Two
In Rhaenyra the Cruel ÔÇö Loses the badge to a king who prefers rage to chess. Otto turns Jaehaerys's funeral into a procession through the streets ÔÇö grief as statecraft, 'Rhaenyra the Cruel' on every crier's lips. Aegon rages past his grandsire's counsel; Otto is stripped of the Hand's badge for the second time in his life, and Criston Cole takes it. In The Queen Who Ever Was ÔÇö In a black cell, watching his life's work run out of his family's hands.
How it ends for them
On the page. Executed when the queen took the city (F&B, ch. 5)
The architect of the green crown did not long survive the city he built it in: when Rhaenyra took King's Landing, Otto Hightower was among the first to the block. He met it, all accounts agree, with his ledgers balanced and his face composed.
The series has not yet reached the fall of King's Landing to Rhaenyra's forces, where Otto's story ends; his fate on screen remains ahead of the current seasons.
When Rhaenyra's forces finally take the capital, Otto Hightower is among the first men marked for the block ÔÇö the architect of the green crown does not long survive the city he built it in. He is executed within days of the city's fall, and the book notes, with the closest thing it offers him to a compliment, that he met the headsman with the same composure he brought to forty years of council chambers: his affairs in order, his face arranged, betraying nothing to the crowd that had gathered to watch the Hand finally answer for his king.
Their chapters, book by book
Where the page and the screen part
The show, especially in its earlier season, gives Otto a courtly, almost avuncular menace ÔÇö perpetually reasonable in manner, which makes his maneuvering land harder than open villainy would. Fire & Blood's Otto is more purely a political animal viewed from history's cooler distance, his interiority almost entirely absent; readers are left to infer his feelings about Alicent, about Viserys, and about his own grandson entirely from his actions, since the chroniclers who recorded him were interested in his results, not his heart.
Their journey
Where the two tellings send them to the same place the road runs whole; where they part, the screen keeps the left and the books the right.