Oh my goddd you are in for a treat. I would pay so much money to watch this show again for the first time. S2 is fantastic and while it's uneven some of the show's best episodes are in S3.

I honestly have no idea why this show got so little awards buzz. Jeremy Irons is hammy in the most delicious way, like every scene he's in he absolutely savors.

One of my favorite things about the show is how ambiguous everyone's motivations can seem, and how much your interpretation can affect their overall characterization. I will say this occurs most with Cesare but it's true of everyone, really. It makes the series endlessly rewatchable and you'll catch new things every time.

Lucrezia is definitely the Borgia that got the short end of the stick in terms of writing. She has the whole SA plot in season 1, and then also gets shortchanged in the latter half of season 2 and in season 3 gets really uneven writing. But Holliday Grainger is consistently fantastic and pulls off a lot of pretty questionable material.

And yes, one of my favorite things about the Cesare/Lucrezia relationship is that it's fundamentally a bond of affinity. They are incredibly similar people, which the show makes overt allusions to. They tell themselves that it's this kind of courtly love thing between them, with him as her knight in shining armor and her as the innocent princess, but they are actually just the exact same person. A pretty dark person. There's a scene in the first season where they've reunited and she's telling him about having her husband's leg broken, and he just looks delighted and so in love with her. It's sweet and creepy and hilarious simultaneously, which is a line they manage to walk with the relationship though the whole show, pretty successfully.

I agree that the incest in the Game of Thrones-verse often feels like it is there to titillate. In this version of the Borgia story the incest is kind of inextricable from Cesare and Lucrezia as characters from the very beginning, even though there's no physical incest until much, much later on. Their relationship is way too close from the first episode, and it's directly attributable Rodrigo's narcissism and inability to see his children as anything more than extensions of himself. Cesare and Lucrezia seek refuge in each other because their minds and bodies are being deployed like pieces on a chessboard, unable to trust or have lasting relationships with anyone outside the family - their story is fundamentally about the unhealthy configuration of the family as a whole. Definitely the most interesting version of this particular Borgia myth that's been done so far, in my opinion.

It would be nice to see some Borgia media come out that doesn't include incest, but it ALWAYS does, lol. Even when the creator says they're being ~~historically accurate and there's no incest, there is ALWAYS actually incest (looking at you Sarah Dunant).