The Greens — the King's Party
The party of Queen Alicent and King Aegon II, named for the Hightower green she wore to a black court. Oldtown, the Rock and Storm's End march under the green king's dragon.
The fuller tale
The Greens are named for the same afternoon that names their rivals — Alicent Hightower’s green gown at the council following Viserys’s death — and the color sticks to a faction built around a different center of gravity entirely: the crownlands court itself, plus the great western and southern houses whose loyalty runs through marriage and office rather than distance and old grudges.
Otto Hightower supplies the faction’s strategy and Criston Cole its sword arm, and between them they move faster than their rivals at the one moment speed matters most — Aegon crowned in the Dragonpit before Rhaenyra, still at Dragonstone, has even confirmed her father is dead. That head start defines the whole first half of the war: the Greens hold the capital, the machinery of government, and the initiative, while the Blacks spend the opening act simply trying to catch up to a coronation that has already happened.
What the faction has to spend that advantage on is blood it can less easily replace than its rivals — Aemond and Vhagar carry most of the Greens’ dragon strength alone for long stretches of the war, Ormund Hightower’s death costs the Reach’s relief column its commander, and a king who never wanted the crown in the first place proves, on the whole, a less effective wartime leader than the men who put him there assumed he would be.
By the war’s final reckoning the Greens hold the throne on paper and very little else — a capital gutted by its own mob, a king ruling in constant pain over ashes, and a faction whose founding coronation, so swift and so decisive at the start, buys it barely more time on the Iron Throne than the rival claimant it was designed to preempt.
The page and the screen
The competing chroniclers behind Fire & Blood disagree more openly about the Greens than about almost any other faction in the war — Mushroom’s account is frequently hostile to Aegon II and Alicent both, while Munkun’s is comparatively more sympathetic to the crown that eventually commissioned histories of its own reign. The show, needing one consistent read for a continuing cast, largely resolves that argument in the more sympathetic direction as the war wears on, particularly for Aegon himself, in a way the book’s dueling, unreconciled sources never fully commit to.
