![]() When Luke rejects his offer to settle the score, Aemond decides that some price must be paid, even if he doesn’t intend for that price to be death. House of the Dragon and Game of Thrones aren’t really part of the same timeline anymore What House of the Dragon’s Dance of the Dragons means for the show’s future Daemon is too complicated to just be House of the Dragon’s ‘villain’ It may be violent, but in a strictly biblical sense, it’s also fair. But for Aemond, this is also a chance for revenge - an eye for an eye. The Baratheons will support Aegon as the king, instead of Rhaenyra. By the time Luke arrives at Storm’s End, Aemond has already won the prize. The result is a teenager who’s clever enough to win over a house to his mother’s cause, smart enough to study more than his brother and train harder than him, but also one that’s impulsive enough to grab a rock in a fist fight against his little cousins and threaten to kill them.īut the tragedy of Aemond’s place in the center of the series’ villains means that, like the schemers, he is unable to fully recognize the power he actually wields, but like the monsters, that power is limited to violence. ![]() Photo: Ollie Upton/HBOĪemond pulled Daemon’s princely bluster, cleverness, and haughty pride, but he ended up with the also-ran inferiority that drives Daemon’s more destructive impulses. But like most intergenerational relationships in A Song of Ice and Fire, Aemond’s youthful view of his uncle’s heroics led to an amplified version of Daemon that exists only in Aemond’s mind, and only tells half of Daemon’s story. ![]() Daemon found that power in his penchant for violence and the strength of his dragon, and because Aemond seems to have modeled his life after his uncle, that’s where tries to find it too. Much like House of the Dragon’s other malcontent second-son, Daemon Targaryen, Aemond feels that he is deeply deserving of more than his careless and weak brother - particularly after a childhood that we’ve seen was full of bullying from that same brother and his (possibly) bastard cousins. He is deeply ambitious, highly motivated, intelligent, and skilled, but also driven by a sense of revenge that (especially in episode 10) is fundamentally violent. House of the Dragon’s Aemond Targaryen comes in somewhere in between these two extremes. The game of thrones is less interesting to them than the sport of sadism. Such brutality is rarely ever retaliatory or even motivated beyond sadistic desire and a needy expression of superiority. Characters like Joffrey and Ramsay understand the power they have only as the ability to wield violence against those weaker than themselves. These monstrous characters are the opposite of the schemers in that they have power and they recognize it, but they have no ambitions beyond cruelty. When the series does choose to make a main character truly awful, on the other hand, it tends to do so by highlighting their violence. Even when, in the case of Tywin and Cersei, they are the most powerful people in Westeros, they crave the recognition and title that their power, intelligence, and influence should come with, but rarely does. The stories of the series’ best schemers, like Littlefinger or Varys, are almost revenge tales, as they grasp for power that they, in their minds, deserve, but from which they’ve been unjustly deprived by the world. But they’re always well-reasoned and understandable, and outright violence is rarely their prefered method. Instead, it gives us self-interested characters who are villainous only insofar as their ambitions toward power outweigh their morality, and when those ambitions often conflict with the story’s main characters. But its most interesting addition is Aemond Targaryen, whose mix of cleverness, impulsiveness, and a sapphire eye makes the show’s version of him one of A Song of Ice and Fire’s best and most tragic characters.Ī Song of Ice and Fire is a series that rarely trades in pure villainy, at least among its most prominent cast. House of the Dragon adds great characters to the series’ legacy on both fronts. While the most memorable tend to be the cruel and unrepentant monsters like Joffrey Baratheon or Ramsay Bolton, the ones that make the series special are its ambitious and complex schemers - a broad range that makes up everyone from Littlefinger and Cersei, to Tywin Lannister. A Song of Ice and Fire has never lacked for compelling villains.
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