Killing the ratcatchers was ruthless but smart and I'm tired of pretending it's not.
Killing the ratcatchers was brutal, but from a security standpoint it wasn't irrational, and I'm tired of people pretending it was uniquely senseless.
Aegon knew at least one ratcatcher had participated in the murder of his son. That means the Red Keep had already been compromised from the inside by people with intimate knowledge of its passages, routines, and vulnerabilities.
At that point the issue wasn't just revenge it was that they could no longer be trusted as a group because nobody knew which of them had assisted Cheese or who else might be vulnerable to bribery or coercion.
It was ruthless collective punishment, yes, but it also permanently eliminated an internal security risk after one of the worst breaches imaginable: assassins infiltrating the royal family's private chambers and murdering an heir.
Imo, that's also why no more ratcatchers ever got hired. In the book, they were replaced with cats because having randos know the layout of your castle so well is a big security risk.
If Otto was so worried about public perception, he could have tried to spin it to their advantage. In the book, it wasn't even an issue.
It's so annoying how the show turned it into this big scandal to excuse Alicent and Otto treating Aegon like an unstable idiot unfit to rule.
Meanwhile, the show constantly acts like Viserys was some wise, gentle ruler even though he literally threatened to mutilate people for speaking the truth about Rhaenyra's children. Cutting out tongues for words is also tyranny, but the narrative barely treats it with the same horror.
That's the most frustrating part to me: the moral framing feels wildly inconsistent. Aegon's violence is treated as proof he's uniquely monstrous or incompetent, while other characters' cruelty gets minimized, justified, or ignored depending on who the show wants the audience to sympathize with.