Criston Cole is one of House of the Dragon’s most compelling characters precisely because he’s so easy to hate. He’s the man who started out as an honorable knight and gradually transformed himself into something far darker—not through one dramatic moment of betrayal, but through a series of small compromises and self-deceptions that added up until the decent man was completely unrecognizable. He’s the guy you can’t take your eyes off of even though you desperately want to look away, because watching him spiral is genuinely fascinating in its tragedy.
What makes Criston Cole work as a character is that his transformation feels inevitable but not predetermined. We understand every step of his decline. We can see the logic behind his choices even when we’re horrified by them. He’s not born evil; he becomes evil through the accumulation of hurt, betrayal, and his own terrible decision-making. And somehow, against all odds, the show manages to make us sympathize with him while also making it clear that he doesn’t deserve our sympathy.
The Honorable Knight in the Wrong Place at the Wrong Time
Criston Cole starts out as a genuinely decent person. He’s the son of a steward, not a lord, which means he has no claim to any power or prestige. He earned his position through talent and hard work. He becomes a knight through merit, through being good at what he does. He’s honorable, principled, and he takes his vows seriously. When he takes an oath as Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, he means it. When he swears to protect the king, he’s not swearing to something he plans to betray the moment something better comes along.
The problem is that Criston Cole is too principled, too rigid in his honor code, too unwilling to bend for practical considerations. When Rhaenyra seduces him—and let’s be clear, that’s what happens, she actively seduces him in a moment of weakness—he’s not just dealing with the shame of having broken his oath. He’s dealing with the impossibility of his situation. He loves Rhaenyra, she’s a princess and the heir to the throne, and there’s no possible outcome where their relationship can be anything but destructive to both of them.
Rhaenyra wants him to run away with her, to abandon everything, to become her secret lover. But Criston knows that’s not actually an option. If he runs, he’s a oath-breaker and a coward. If he stays and hides the relationship, he’s living a lie. If he stays and comes clean, he’s dishonoring the king and the Kingsguard. There’s literally no choice available to him that doesn’t involve some form of profound shame.
What makes this moment so crucial to understanding Criston’s character is that he chooses suicide over exile or hiding. He decides that the most honorable thing he can do is refuse to live as an oath-breaker. He’s going to kill himself rather than continue existing in a state of dishonor. And it’s Rhaenyra who talks him out of it, not by offering him a real solution, but by offering him the chance for vengeance. She says, essentially: if you can’t have me, help my family win the throne and then maybe, eventually, you’ll get your due.
This moment is pivotal. Criston Cole doesn’t become evil because of Rhaenyra rejecting him, though that’s certainly part of it. He becomes someone willing to compromise his principles because he’s been given permission to do so by the person he loves. If Rhaenyra had simply rejected him and left him to figure it out on his own, maybe he would have gone through with his suicide plan or found some other honorable way to deal with his shame. But instead, she gives him a path forward that’s built on revenge and the promise of future reward. And Criston, desperate for some way to make meaning out of his shame, takes it.
The Kingmaker: When a Sworn Sword Becomes a Political Player
After his betrayal of Rhaenyra—because that’s what it is, even though he framed it as self-preservation—Criston Cole finds a new role in the world. He becomes essential to Alicent’s plans. He’s the man who can command the Kingsguard, who can advise the king, who can use his military experience to shape strategy. Suddenly, a man who started out as nobody has genuine power and influence.
This is where Criston really becomes dangerous. He’s no longer just a knight serving the crown; he’s a political player, a kingmaker, a man whose opinion shapes policy. And here’s the thing about Criston Cole: he’s not actually that good at politics. He’s good at violence, he’s good at loyalty, but he’s not strategic in the way that someone like Otto Hightower is. His advice tends to be driven by his personal grievances rather than by what’s actually best for the realm.
The cruelty emerges not all at once but gradually, as Criston realizes that he has power and as he uses that power to hurt the people he feels have wronged him. He becomes increasingly cruel to Rhaenyra’s supporters. He commits war crimes in the name of defending the crown. He revels in violence in a way that feels personal rather than professional. And the show does a brilliant job of showing how his justified anger at Rhaenyra’s rejection transforms into this much broader, much more destructive rage that extends to everyone associated with her.
What’s particularly chilling about Criston’s arc is how he rationalizes his cruelty. He tells himself that he’s doing what’s necessary for the realm, that he’s being firm, that he’s protecting the king. But you can see underneath it all that he’s being driven by his wounded pride and his desire for revenge. He’s using his position of power to punish people for wrongs that, in many cases, they didn’t actually commit.
The Duality: Duty and Desire Pulling in Different Directions
One of the most interesting things about Criston Cole’s character is that he never fully commits to the idea that he’s become a bad person. He’s always trying to reconcile his actions with his self-image as an honorable knight. He tells himself that he’s serving the crown, protecting the realm, doing what’s necessary. But there’s a duality there that the show captures beautifully: Criston knows, on some level, that he’s become exactly the thing he always despised. He’s a man driven by personal desire rather than duty, except his personal desire is now wrapped up in the language of duty so thoroughly that even he can’t separate them anymore.
This is what makes Criston Cole so compelling. He’s neither a villain who owns his villainy nor a hero in denial. He’s something more complicated: a man who was capable of being good, who chose not to be, and who has spent every moment since trying to convince himself that he made the right choice. He’s trapped in a loop of self-justification and rationalization that only deepens his spiral into darkness.
The tragedy is that if anyone had told Criston Cole, early on, that this is who he would become, he would have been horrified. He would have insisted that he’d never do these things, never become this cruel, never abandon his principles. But he did, step by step, compromise by compromise, until the man he became was unrecognizable.
The Outsider Complex: Why Criston Always Needs Someone to Blame
A lot of Criston Cole’s behavior can be traced back to his original position as an outsider. He’s not a lord, not a nobleman, not someone born into power or prestige. He had to earn everything he achieved, which gives him a kind of bitterness toward people like Rhaenyra who were born with power and seem to take it for granted. There’s class resentment embedded in his character, a sense that the system is rigged against people like him, that the nobility will always win no matter what.
When Rhaenyra rejects him, it feels like confirmation of his worst fears: that no matter how much he achieves, he’ll never be enough for someone like her. He’s a knight, but not a noble knight. He’s accomplished, but his accomplishments don’t matter because he doesn’t have the right birth. This feeds into his willingness to support the Greens, because the Greens are, in many ways, more like him than Rhaenyra is. They’re people who have to fight for power and respect rather than people who are handed everything.
But here’s the thing: Criston’s class resentment, while real and understandable, is also something he uses to justify increasingly bad behavior. He tells himself that he’s fighting back against a corrupt system, but he’s really just using the system to take power from the people who hurt him. He becomes exactly what he resented when he was at the bottom: an abuser of power, someone who uses his position to hurt people, someone who treats people as less-than because of where they come from.
The Body Count: When Honor Becomes Brutality
As the show progresses and the war heats up, Criston Cole’s body count grows. And it’s notable that many of his victims are people who don’t strictly need to die for military or strategic reasons. They die because Criston wants them to die, because he wants to punish them, because he wants to prove something about his power and his will.
The scene where Criston kills a captured knight in what amounts to a street fight, violating the sacred traditions of chivalry, is a perfect encapsulation of how far he’s fallen. There was a time when Criston Cole would have died before violating those traditions. Now he’s smashing a man’s head repeatedly, not out of military necessity, but out of rage. And the other knights don’t stop him. They watch, and by watching, they implicitly accept his behavior as normal.
This is how institutional corruption happens. One person commits an atrocity, and if nobody stops them immediately, it becomes normalized. Criston commits increasingly brutal acts, and each time he gets away with it, the next act becomes easier. He’s not being constrained by his oath or his honor because those things have become flexible enough to accommodate whatever he wants to do.
The Inevitability of His Fall
By the end of Criston Cole’s arc, there’s a sense of inevitability about his trajectory. He was always heading toward this moment, from the instant he allowed himself to love Rhaenyra and allowed that love to be weaponized against her. He made choices that seemed reasonable at the time but that added up to a complete transformation of his character.
What’s fascinating is that Criston himself seems to know, on some level, how this ends. There’s a fatalism to his character in the later seasons, a sense that he’s chosen his path and is now committed to walking it to its conclusion. He’s not trying to be good anymore. He’s not trying to balance his duties with his desires. He’s just trying to win, to punish his enemies, to consolidate power, to prove that his choice to support the Greens was the right one.
The tragedy is that he’s probably right—the Greens almost certainly need him more than the Blacks do. Without Criston Cole’s military skill and his willingness to commit atrocities, the Green forces would probably have fallen much faster. He’s essential to keeping their side of the war going. But that essential quality comes at the cost of his soul, and the show doesn’t shy away from showing that cost.
Conclusion: The Compelling Villain We Love to Hate
Criston Cole is the most hated man in Westeros because he represents something deeply uncomfortable: the ordinariness of evil. He’s not a man who was born evil or who was shaped by obviously traumatic circumstances into becoming evil. He’s a decent person who made bad choices and then spent the rest of his life compounding those bad choices with worse ones. He’s someone we can understand, someone whose logic we can follow, someone whose pain we can sympathize with, even as we’re horrified by what he does with that pain.
The show’s genius is in never letting us completely hate Criston or completely sympathize with him. We’re always holding both feelings at the same time: the understanding that he’s become a monster, and the knowledge that he didn’t have to be. He had choices, and he chose wrong, and now he’s trapped in the consequences of those choices, using violence and power to try to make the pain go away.
That’s what makes him compelling television. He’s not a villain in the comic book sense, someone who wants to hurt people and enjoys it. He’s a villain in the Shakespearean sense, someone whose flaws lead him progressively toward his doom, someone whose every attempt to fix things makes them worse, someone whose tragedy is that he can see the cliff he’s falling off of but can’t quite manage to stop himself from falling. And that’s far more interesting, far more compelling, far more haunting than any simple villain could ever be.
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