Aemond is House of the Dragon’s most tragic character, and best villain

A Music of Ice and Fireplace has by no means lacked for compelling villains. Whereas essentially the most memorable are usually the merciless and unrepentant monsters like Joffrey Baratheon or Ramsay Bolton, those that make the collection particular are its formidable and complicated schemers — a broad vary that makes up everybody from Littlefinger and Cersei, to Tywin Lannister.

Home of the Dragon provides nice characters to the collection’ legacy on each fronts. However its most attention-grabbing addition is Aemond Targaryen, whose mixture of cleverness, impulsiveness, and a sapphire eye makes the present’s model of him one in all A Music of Ice and Fireplace’s greatest and most tragic characters.

[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for House of the Dragon episode 10.]

A Music of Ice and Fireplace is a collection that hardly ever trades in pure villainy, at the least amongst its most distinguished solid. As a substitute, it offers us self-interested characters who’re villainous solely insofar as their ambitions towards energy outweigh their morality, and when these ambitions usually battle with the story’s fundamental characters. However they’re at all times well-reasoned and comprehensible, and outright violence is never their prefered technique.

The tales of the collection’ greatest schemers, like Littlefinger or Varys, are virtually revenge tales, as they grasp for energy that they, of their minds, deserve, however from which they’ve been unjustly disadvantaged by the world. Even when, within the case of Tywin and Cersei, they’re essentially the most highly effective individuals in Westeros, they crave the popularity and title that their energy, intelligence, and affect ought to include, however hardly ever does.

Picture: HBO

When the collection does select to make a fundamental character really terrible, then again, it tends to take action by highlighting their violence. These monstrous characters are the alternative of the schemers in that they’ve energy they usually acknowledge it, however they don’t have any ambitions past cruelty. Characters like Joffrey and Ramsay perceive the facility they’ve solely as the power to wield violence in opposition to these weaker than themselves. Such brutality is never ever retaliatory and even motivated past sadistic need and a needy expression of superiority. The sport of thrones is much less attention-grabbing to them than the game of sadism.

Home of the Dragon’s Aemond Targaryen is available in someplace in between these two extremes. He’s deeply formidable, extremely motivated, clever, and expert, but additionally pushed by a way of revenge that (particularly in episode 10) is basically violent. Very similar to Home of the Dragon’s different malcontent second-son, Daemon Targaryen, Aemond feels that he’s deeply deserving of greater than his careless and weak brother — significantly after a childhood that we’ve seen was stuffed with bullying from that very same brother and his (probably) bastard cousins. Daemon discovered that energy in his penchant for violence and the energy of his dragon, and since Aemond appears to have modeled his life after his uncle, that’s the place tries to search out it too. However like most intergenerational relationships in A Music of Ice and Fireplace, Aemond’s youthful view of his uncle’s heroics led to an amplified model of Daemon that exists solely in Aemond’s thoughts, and solely tells half of Daemon’s story.

Photograph: Ollie Upton/HBO

Aemond pulled Daemon’s princely bluster, cleverness, and haughty delight, however he ended up with the also-ran inferiority that drives Daemon’s extra harmful impulses. The result’s a young person who’s intelligent sufficient to win over a home to his mom’s trigger, sensible sufficient to check greater than his brother and practice more durable than him, but additionally one which’s impulsive sufficient to seize a rock in a fist combat in opposition to his little cousins and threaten to kill them.

However the tragedy of Aemond’s place within the middle of the collection’ villains signifies that, just like the schemers, he’s unable to completely acknowledge the facility he truly wields, however just like the monsters, that energy is restricted to violence. By the point Luke arrives at Storm’s Finish, Aemond has already gained the prize. The Baratheons will assist Aegon because the king, as an alternative of Rhaenyra. However for Aemond, that is additionally an opportunity for revenge — an eye fixed for an eye fixed. It could be violent, however in a strictly biblical sense, it’s additionally truthful.

When Luke rejects his supply to settle the rating, Aemond decides that some worth should be paid, even when he doesn’t intend for that worth to be dying. When Aemond loses management of Vhagar throughout their mid-air duel with Luke and Arrax, and the dragon eats them each, Aemond turns into one of many few characters in A Music of Ice and Fireplace to drastically underestimate his personal capability for enacting hurt, and the results his impulses would possibly embrace.

“The Black Queen” could be very intentional about its portrayal of Luke’s dying: Each boys battle to get their dragons underneath management, and sadly neither understands what it means to carry such a beast to a battle. Within the second, Aemond’s cool resolve offers technique to determined cries to get the largest and oldest dragon to take heed to him. Lucerys’ dying isn’t a case of spoiled princely sadism like Joffrey, or a coldly calculated transfer up energy’s invisible rungs. It’s a tragic accident by the hands of a young person who, after a lifetime of being bullied, didn’t perceive how the stakes had modified. After a lifetime of feeling inferior — together with through the crowning of his personal unworthy brother as king — Aemond now wields the facility to finish lives and begin wars. He’s an anime villain, if an anime villain was the one answerable for inciting World Struggle I. And sadly, with all of Westeros headed towards battle, doubling down on his worst instincts would be the solely approach for him to thrive.