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navree · 2 years

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@selkiesstories got me thinking about it, so time for yet another round of “y’all tell me you want me to talk about something and i perform a thesis dissertation”, the viserys targaryen is the worst edition.

so, positives i’ll say for viserys is that paddy considine is incredibly in the role. he’s a good actor and he worked really hard to imbue viserys with a lot of layers that, even while hating him, made me feel emotions for him anyway. there are times during paddy’s role where i could see the glimmers of viserys not necessarily being a bad person, just an incredibly stupid one who doesn’t think about how his choices impact others, and had potential to be something better, a better man and better father and better husband and better king (if he had kept his interactions with alicent strictly platonic, i could see the seeds for him filling a kind and nurturing paternal role in her life, to offset the fact that while otto loves his daughter, he will prioritize his ambitions to alicent’s detriment. alack alack, viserys had to go and crush on a fifteen year old). but also he sucks, and i wanna enumerate why in A List to excise all of my rage:

viserys is a bad husband

aemma - i know paddy and everyone else and their mother have been on about how aemma was the great love of viserys’s life, and most likely he did love her, but viserys was awful to aemma. aemma’s function in viserys’s life was entirely to be a brood mare. even before she was named queen during the great council and thus had more of an imperative to try for a male heir, she’s pregnant, and not with rhaenyra, as the show has rhaenyra start off at fourteen and the great council takes place ten years before the start of main events. aemma has to endure a constant life in a hazardous condition, given that being pregnant is no picnic generally, and especially not in pseudo-medieval times, for viserys’s sake. and it doesn’t appear that viserys has stopped to think about how that might affect her, not just physically but also psychologically as ALL of these pregnancies, excepting rhaenyra, have ended badly either through miscarriage or stillbirth or infant death. viserys has to be told, point blank, in the simplest language, that aemma does not want to be pregnant again. it’s nearly twenty years of marriage before aemma is able to just firmly tell him that enough is enough, and it’s apparently been nearly twenty years of marriage before viserys even stops and thinks that maybe reducing his wife to a walking uterus is in fact a bad thing.

and then he kills her. like, that’s the pièce de résistance of viserys’s treatment of aemma, he literally murders her. and the worst part, genuinely the worst part of it, is that he doesn’t let her have any say. he doesn’t even try to talk about it with her, this woman he apparently loves so very much, he does not explain what is happening or offer her the option of choosing, or explaining, or doing anything. he unilaterally makes that decision, and then does nothing to prepare her or help her or even try to comfort her. he lets her die not only in pain but in utter fear, and begging for her life, while people are actively holding her down, on his orders, while she struggles. it genuinely doesn’t matter to me how much viserys loved aemma, or was devoted to her in their marriage, or missed her once she was gone, he was a bad husband to her in her life and was directly responsible for not just her death, but the horrible state in which she died.

alicent - god let me count the fucking ways. so first things first, i’m going to be really brave and strong and not dwell too much on viserys looking at someone his daughter’s age, a young teenager, and immediately deciding that this is someone it would be appropriate to pursue sexually, we all know it’s disgusting and vile and even if he was the best man on the planet in all other aspects i would still hate him for that alone. but viserys is also a bad husband to alicent, even more so than he was with aemma, as he appears to have no particular care for her as a person, for her own wants and desires and interests or anything about her other than as a fleshlight and a babymaking machine. he also doesn’t appear to have learned anything from aemma, as he has no problem impregnating alicent constantly in the early years of their marriage. the age gap for all of his children with alicent appear to be two years between aegon and helaena and two years between helaena and aemond (in the books there’s a four year gap then between aemond and daeron, but seeing as the writers definitely forgot about daeron until it was pointed out to them via twitter who knows what that will be in the show). considering that a pregnancy takes nearly a year to come to term, and that the human body does need a recovery period and can’t get pregnant immediately, it’s easy enough to infer that viserys was just constantly having alicent pregnant as soon and as frequently as possible from ages fifteen to twenty, and only stopped due to increasing infirmity, and likely the fact that they had four healthy children, three of them sons.

viserys also shows an astounding lack of care for alicent’s physical wellbeing at all. he drags her to and fro around the kingswood while heavily pregnant, to the point where rhaenyra’s the one noticing that alicent’s uncomfortable while he doesn’t give a shit. not only that, he also summons her for sex in the dead of night at a whim to the point of demanding that she be woken up. alicent’s nineteen years old, she’s just had a baby she’s shown to be active in raising, most people would look at that and think “damn, let’s let her have a break, get some rest and a full eight hours of sleep”, but no, viserys needs to exercise his marital rape license so he has her woken up and brought to him and then doesn’t even give her the benefit of disassociation by trying to check and see that she’s engaged during the assault (i hate him i hate him i hate him i hate him). he also doesn’t compensate for this by caring about her emotional wellbeing. he is repeatedly and publicly dismissive of her and humiliates her in front of other people without a care to how it makes her feel, not just in front of family but in front of the entire court as well. he doesn’t give a shit about times she’s in distress, like on driftmark, or attempt to engage with her about her own feelings or take anything she says into account at all even in their private discussions. alicent is barely a person to him, let alone a wife, she’s a vehicle for him to satisfy his sexual urges, a functioning womb (honestly big “napoléon saying ‘it is a womb i am marrying’ when he married his second wife after divorcing his first solely for her apparent infertility vibes, and guess what i hate napoléon too) that gives him the sons he killed aemma for, and then a nursemaid for the bulk of the marriage.

viserys is a bad father

rhaenyra - so first of all, let’s be clear that the gap in viserys’s relationship with rhaenyra vs. his other kids is such pitch perfect “golden child and the scapegoat” that it should be required viewing for half of parents who don’t understand why their children don’t get along. but even with viserys’s clear favoritism and the detriment it causes to his other kids, that doesn’t mean that he hasn’t failed rhaenyra miserably. because he has. for the first fourteen years of her life, viserys appears to have somewhat ignored rhaenyra. she’s his cupbearer, yes, but by all counts they aren’t necessarily the closest behind perfunctory love from a parent to their only child and a daughter to her father, and he was just constantly not caring about her throughout her childhood. rhaenyra seems infinitely closer to her mother, and vice versa. this isn’t something that goes away even when rhaenyra is named heir, as they still seem to have a very stilted and cold relationship with each other, and it isn’t one that gets better, he doesn’t even try to connect with her after his marriage to alicent until she forces his hand through acting out. viserys never tries to foster any sort of personal relationship with his child, the child he’s supposed to love the most, even with the fact that he prefers her over all of his other kids, and even then his personal favoritism is highly likely a manifestation of his guilt over having killed her mother. and in spite of all his love and favoritism and guilt, he doesn’t have any qualms in completely decimating her friendship with the only close companion she appears to have, not to mention doesn’t even care enough to give her the decency or consideration of any prior warning of what he was doing to prepare her for dropping that nuclear bomb on his relationship with her and her relatinoship with alicent, and certainly never attempts to try and repair the damage he’s caused and the pain he’s inflicted on his daughter, or even apologized for the position that put her in.

viserys has also done an abysmal job in helping rhaenyra at all politically. we see this in episode 2, when he doesn’t want her actually participating in small council meetings, he doesn’t want her engaged in political happenings at all or doing anything an heir would be doing. this only gets worse once he has sons. viserys knows that the legal assumption in westeros is male primogeniture, it’s why he was willing to kill aemma just to have a son even though he already had a daughter in her teens. so viserys knows that, after having aegon, that the entire country is going to assume that aegon is now heir, and he knew that this would only be reinforced one aemond and daeron were born in turn. but viserys doesn’t do anything. he does not publicly state that rhaenyra isn’t going to be supplanted, in spite of what he said to her privately, he does not issue any sort of edict or official code or add and addendum to the targaryen doctrine of exceptionalism that says they’re also allowed to follow absolute primogeniture rather than male dominated primogeniture. he does nothing to publicly support her position at all beyond the original oathtaking, and that is the only thing he does for her in the TWENTY YEARS between proclaiming her as his heir and his death (no, his condition in episode 8 is not an excuse, given that it was apparently a recent enough of a final decline that vaemond needs to inform rhaenys of it as if it’s not entirely common knowledge, and even if we assume that he dropped straight into imhotep mode the second they returned from driftmark after episode 7, that’s still fourteen years of him being healthy enough and coherent enough and mentally agile enough to do his job and as such try to do anything to shore up rhaenyra’s succession and help her out).

viserys also doesn’t seem to care about rhaenyra participating in the political process, which is a huge misstep on his part. he should be wanting her regularly at small council meetings, he should be wanting her to get some experience as a ruler, as a poltician, as a strategist, hell even as a battle commander, given that she’s a dragonrider and has been since the age of fucking seven. but viserys does nothing to try and help her or prepare her or give her any kind of guidance on what it’s like to be a ruler, to make decisions for other people, to really have any kind of experience in something approaching queenship to prepare for what’s to come. viserys basically ignores rhaenyra not just as a daughter, but as a political heir, except for occasionally telling people to ignore their lying eyes on whether or not a platinum blonde white woman and a platinum blonde black man can have two brunette children with skin so white it might as well be translucent. and given that rhaenyra’s inability to actually govern well is a direct cause to her downfall and eventual gruesome death, viserys is basically 0 for 2 in “not being responsible for the horrible ways his loved ones have died”. not to mention that the entire issue of the animosity between rhaenyra and his other children is due to the fallout of his own favoritism, maybe they’d hate her and her kids less if viserys wasn’t constantly holding up his precious golden child and her kids at the physical and emotional expense of his four other fucking children, god he sucks. good going with your favorite kid viserys, now let’s look at the ones you don’t even give a shit about.

aegon - i don’t even know if i have the words to describe all the ways that viserys has screwed aegon up. imagine, for a minute, you’re aegon. your relationship with your mother is already gonna have issues, by sheer virtue of the fact that your mother had you at the ripe ole age of sixteen due to unwanted sexual advances by a man old enough to be her father, who is in fact your father. you probably spend a lot of your formative years hearing about how much your father has been wanting a son all his life, to the point where the wife he had before your mother died in the process, but now he’s got a son, and that’s you. but he doesn’t pay any attention to you. he doesn’t nurture you or love you or care about you or even seem to like you that much. is kid aegon going to have the emotional intelligence to think about whether or not there’s something deficient in viserys’s character and to not see his father’s lack of love as a failing on his part? no, he’s a kid. what aegon likely did was blame himself, was think that there was something so lacking in him, so horrible, that his father who is renowned for wanting a son, decided that he was such a bad option that he’d rather have a daughter after all, and would favor rhaenyra over aegon and all the rest of his siblings for the remainder of his life. aegon likely feels responsible not just for his father not caring about him, but for his father not caring about helaena and aemond and daeron in turn, because he somehow messed up. viserys’s abandonment and negligence of aegon is a huge part in why aegon turned to various different vices to try and cope; he has a complicated relationship with his own mother (discussed at length here) and his own father doesn’t give a shit about him.

and when viserys does deign to remember that he has a kid, it’s never positive attention. we see viserys actually interact with aegon twice, and neither of them are good. in the first interaction, he’s scolding aegon, so already we’ve got an idea that when viserys notices aegon, it’s mostly just to point out his flaws or ways he’s failing, which does a number on anyone, let alone a kid. and the second is at driftmark. viserys at driftmark is a post unto itself because of how abysmally he behaves throughout the entire episode and how he’s the worst man in all westerosi history in that scene, but imma focus on aegon. aegon gets blamed for telling aemond that rhaenyra’s bastards are bastards (understandable of aemond, he wants to protect his mother from his piece of shit father, god bless you my boy), and viserys’s reaction is to get up in his face and scream at him and pull rank, talk to him not as a father to a thirteen year old, but as a king, the supreme law of the land who has the power of life and death over everyone, including his son. it’s the middle of the night, aegon’s not entirely sober, his father’s angry and potentially volatile, and he’s got to make a decision. does he say aemond’s lying and put the onus of the situation back on his ten year old little brother who has been grievously injured and permanently disabled? does he do what aemond couldn’t and blame his mother and potentially shove her at the king’s mercy, knowing it could end badly for her? viserys hasn’t created an environment where aegon can tell him any sort of truth and not have it end badly for people he loves, and he chooses instead to lie, because viserys doesn’t care about the truth, doens’t care about him, and doesn’t care about aemond or alicent. when viserys isn’t completely ignoring him and giving him twenty different complexes, he’s apparently terrorizing him, and forcing his own son to view him not as a parent, but as the head of state, and only the head of state, and to react accordingly.

helaena - we don’t know as much about helaena and viserys’s relationship, because they haven’t done much to develop helaena as a character, which is annoying, but we still know that viserys is a failfather even with her. for one, he never interacts with her. not as an adult, and not even as a baby, which is put into stark contrast with alicent actively taking a role in nurturing and raising helaena as a baby even though she’s only eighteen or nineteen when helaena is born. but one thing i think is another point int the long list of points against viserys and how messed up his negligence of his kids is, helaena is a dragondreamer. you know, the thing viserys is? if viserys spent any time trying to bond with his daughter, or get close to her, or even just learn anything about her, he likely would have figured it out. can you imagine how nice that would have been for helaena, how much that could have helped her, to have someone who can understand what these random dreams and visions she has sometimes are? we don’t know how helaena feels about her prophetic abilitites, because again, lack of characterization, but we know that a lot of what she sees is violent imagery that she struggles to express properly, like foreseeing aemond’s attack and disfigurement, or getting frustrated trying to tell her mother about the imminent threat of rhaenys at aegon’s coronation. having a present father who would be able to tell that she’s talking about likely would have gone a long way with her, but viserys doesn’t give a shit about his children so he doesn’t even know that his own child shares this ability with him.

aemond - listen, i am not the first, and i will likely not be the last, to point out that viserys’s treatment of aemond is horrendous. i am not reinventing the wheel by pointing that out, but i am going to talk about it, because it’s truly one of the worst things viserys has ever done. like all of his siblings, aemond suffers from viserys’s neglect and lack of love, he suffers along with aegon and helaena, watching viserys heap praise and devotion on rhaenyra while ignoring them and repeatedly demeaning their mother and he has issues that arise when you’ve got a parent in your life that isn’t present and doesn’t care about you, it’s left him with a constant desire to prove himself and an inability to express his emotions except in times of extreme emotions. but unlike his siblings, aemond doesn’t just have to deal with viserys’s neglect, he also has to deal with the ironclad, irrefutable knowledge that his own father doesn’t care whether he lives or dies. because when aemond is attacked on driftmark, he could have died. and not just in the immediate aftermath of losing your eye, but afterwards, from the possibility of infection or any number of issues that can come from treating a severe wound in a pseudo-medieval society. aegon is, at maximum, ten years old, in a tremendous amount of pain, having to come to terms not just with a long recovery process but a permanent disability that’s going to require him to relearn absolutely everything about the way he lives his life, and does his own father care about it? no, viserys decides that the real issue here is that someone called rhaenyra’s kids bastards.

viserys’s son has been the victim of an unprovoked attack, he was not only beaten but had his eye slashed out, and viserys does not care. he does not think about comforting his son, or trying figure out what the prognosis is, or do anything to try and help him. he doesn’t even ask that luke apologize for maiming his kid! no, the real crime is that someone said something mean that might reflect negatively on rhaenyra, so he yells at aemond and forces aemond, a child, to make tough calculations, to choose who to sic viserys on next in order to keep himself alive, to have to try and protect his mother at the expense of his brother, to then have to actually be the one to de-escalate the situation in the face of alicent’s distress and viserys’s complete disregard for her emotional state, or aemond’s himself. that’s the position viserys puts aemond in by not caring about anything other than the potential insult to rhaenyra. aemond is now going to spend the rest of his life not just dealing with any trauma from having been physically assaulted and losing an eye at the age of ten, but dealing with the literal proof that his father truly doesn’t give a shit about him. it wouldn’t be that much of a stretch to look at who aemond is as an adult, stoic and implacable (with bursts of real rage and hatred like we saw at storm’s end when he lost it at luke) and always keeping himself in check and in control, and extrapolate that aemond realized that he needed to be as strong (pardon the pun) as possible because the only parent he has to protect him is someone who needs protection herself from an uncaring spouse, who is his own uncaring father.

and then, after years of aemond having to pick himself up and not getting any sort of support from him, or even an ask for someone to try and right this wrong done to his own son, viserys has the gall, the nerve, the audacity, to stand up and basically just say “why can’t we all just get along? for me?” in front of god and everyone. as if his son isn’t sitting right there, dealt a lifelong blow with constant consequences for the crime of...doing exactly what viserys did. viserys claimed the riderless balerion, and aemond claimed the riderless vhagar, viserys should be proud of his son, should be bonding with him over what it’s like to have something so ancient and powerful under his control, a dragon from the conquest itself. but aemond was punished for it because two little girls were grieving and irrational and two idiot boys didn’t stop to point out that they were being ridiculous and instead gang up on someone who hadn’t done anything wrong, and viserys doesn’t give a shit. viserys tells his family to love each other, he’s telling aemond to forgive someone who hasn’t even apologized for the huge wrong he did aemond and doesn’t seem to care that he did it at all. viserys is focused on harmony, for rhaenyra’s sake, at aemond’s expense, and aemond has to sit there and take it because if his sons do something he doesn’t like, viserys will pull rank like he did at driftmark to get them to fall in line even if their physical and emotional wellbeings are at stake (seriously, if you crank the volume at the start of the last supper scene, aemond’s bitching about how much he hates the idea of dinner and aegon’s attempting to offer advice, bad advice yeah but an attempt was made, cuz they both know that there’s no way they can try to get viserys to see their side and let them beg off, because he wants rhaenyra to have happy subjects within her own family).

daeron - we don’t know anything about daeron because the writers apparently got a 404 error while looking at his side of the targaryen family christmas wreath they call a tree, but safe to say that daeron was probably neglected by him too, and likely made the calculation to spend what appears to be the entirety of his life at oldtown with his hightower relatives rather than be around a father who treats him and his siblings like furniture. but god, viserys has screwed up his entire family beyond repair.

brief sidenote: viserys is the worst father out of all of hotd’s fathers. no i am not kidding. lyonel, by all measures, is a good dad to his sons, from the little we see of him, daemon in pentos at least was an actively present father who cared about his daughters and the third child he was gonna have with laena (and didn’t make choices on her bodily autonomy that left her dying painfully in absolute terror as people hold her down on his orders, finally daemon doesn’t fuck up, shocking), and otto, for all his myriad of failings and how much he sucks, clearly loves alicent dearly, wasn’t an ignorant or dismissive father to her in spite of actually having male heirs, and was as close and devoted a father as he could be before his own bad choices traumatized his child for life. and then viserys is there, ignoring his children until guilt makes him pick one as his golden child at the expense of all the others, and acting as if any emotional problems of physical traumas they endure are a mild inconvenience from strangers rather than his own children.

viserys is a bad king

the only thing close to a smart decision viserys ever made was appointing otto as hand, as otto is actually a smart politician who knows how to do his job properly. in all other aspects as a king, viserys sucks. like, he’s just genuinely, incredibly, bad at his job. like, there’s a reason why he needs otto in order to function half the time, because all the things he does are really bad

daemon - viserys should have dealt with the situation better than he did. nearly every episode has daemon fucking up in some respect, but because daemon is his brother, viserys overlooks serious flaws that could cause him problems. daemon’s public contempt for rhea royce puts runestone’s, and the entirety of the vale’s, really, loyalty to the crown in question, and thus viserys’s reliance on one of the major houses of westeros at risk. viserys keeps on trying to give daemon political positions he’s bad at, such as master of laws and master of coin, and we have no reason to disbelieve otto that he was a problem in both positions. and when he was commander of the city watch, he could have seriously turned the population of king’s landing against the targaryens with the way he was acting (and if you don’t think that would be a problem, might i remind you that losing the support of king’s landing was what got rhaenyra in serious trouble, killed one of her sons, forced her off the throne, and ultimately helped lead to her death?). and he continuously lets daemon do whatever he wants, like occupying dragonstone even though it makes him look weak, or waltz back into court after being banished, which also makes viserys look like a king not worth respecting, and a weak politician. and before i get any “daemon’s stronger than viserys and a dragonrider that’s why viserys can’t stand up to him”, viserys is an absolute monarch in a pseudo-medieval society where his word is absolute law and nothing he does can be considered illegal with seven of the finest elite warriors in the country at his beck and call and multiple armies at his disposal, if he wanted to decisively deal with daemon like any decent leader might, he could have. easily.

the velaryons - the issue with the velaryons is where i get to point out one of the reasons i hate viserys the most, which is ironically why i dislike historical figures like mark antony, or louis xvi: i hate stupid politicians. there is nothing that irks me as much as a stupid politician. viserys is a stupid politician (sorry dave and dan but however much you thought the “i’m not a politician, i’m a queen” line slapped, being a reigning monarch makes you a politician as it is a political position that requires you to participate in politics), and nothing exemplifies that as much as how he’s handled the velaryons. viserys (somewhat) isn’t a stupid man in general, and he’s aware of the fact that the velaryons, particularly corlys, have a chip on their shoulder about the great council and how both rhaenys and any of her heirs were sidelined for viserys’s sake. and in spite of that, viserys completely bungles that relationship time and time again.

the dismissive and outright rudeness we see him use on alicent in social situations is the same way he treats corlys’s legitimate policy concerns in small council meetings, even though corlys is a major ally and powerful lord who shouldn’t be the constant butt of the joke in front of other political actors in the realm. viserys also publicly humiliates corlys in the ending of episode 2 when he says he’s marrying alicent, not just in having strung corlys along with the potential of the match with laena before pulling the rug out from under him, but also by springing it on him there. what viserys should have done was tell corlys beforehand, in private, that he can’t accept laena’s suit, citing the fact that she’s young and something something can’t wait that long yada yada, and given corlys room to process that in private, so that he’s not taken off guard and make to look a fool in a public setting in front of other lords.

viserys’s favoritism of rhaenyra also posed problems for him with the velaryons, politically. we know that corlys didn’t care that rhaenyra’s kids weren’t actually laenor’s, but rhaenys and vaemond clearly did, and if corlys had listened to them more, viserys’s stubbornness not to see the truth could have been seen as a massive insult towards them and retaliated, could have decided that house targaryen had broken faith by this point with house velaryon and that they don’t need to be beholden to them anymore, certainly not when house targaryen and westeros at large are dependent on house velaryon and their fleet. and while this is mostly conjecture, as the aftermath is all in the time jump, the fact that viserys appears to have done nothing about laenor’s murder, which becomes egregious when you remember that the prime suspect for laenor’s murder is viserys’s daughter and her husband, viserys’s brother, and that the whole thing reeks of institutional coverup for the sake of rhaenyra and daemon’s reputations. it’s entirely possible that part of what drove corlys off (again, corlys being a powerful ally in the realm and on the small council) was the fact that his own king, who is a stupid politician, isn’t doing anything about this crime committed against his own family, for the sake of his favorite child, and that this is just the straw that broke the camel’s back in a long list of slights that corlys has been putting up with from viserys for his entire reign. viserys’s failure on the velaryon front is extraordinarily bad politics, and bad kingship that could have put himself and his entire line in jeopardy if the writing for the velaryons wasn’t so fucking schizophrenic.

the succession - i’ve touched on it in why viserys is a shitty father, but viserys’s failure on the succession is a huge political problem as well. viserys all but lit the powder keg of the dance of dragons on fire by not doing anything to shore up rhaenyra’s succession. it’s not just about him being a bad dad, it’s him being a bad king. a good king wouldn’t have just made the lords swear an oath, he would have prepared rhaenyra for power and given her responsibilities and showed her how to rule and planned for her transition into power, like i mentioned above, all of which he didn’t do. a good king would have looked at the time passing since the oath was sworn, and figured out a way to renew it, such as making every new lord come to king’s landing and swear the oath once they inherited, or having a big renewal like it’s a vow renewal ceremony. a good king would have codified rhaenyra’s succession into law, so that it’s not just one man usurping tradition, but the legal qualifications of the realm, especially after sons started being born to him. and if viserys were a good king and a smart politician to boot, he would have, as mentioned, added the idea of absolute primogeniture to the doctrine of exceptionalism (the doctrine of exceptionalism is the general rule jahaerys worked out to explain why targaryens were allowed to marry incestuously even though it was sin in the eyes of the seven, and seriously how hard would it have been for viserys to go “yeah not only are we allowed to do that but we can also go with whoever was born first regardless of gender, #closertogodsthanmen” and be done with it!). but instead, he does none of this, and allows the situation to fester and does nothing to rectify it on any level and lets the problems of the succession build and build and build, doesn’t even put any safeguards in place for when he dies. somewhere in the seven hells, in between the beatings aemma’s ghost should be allowed to give him for what he did to her, viserys cannot be surprised at the outbreak of civil war, he all but ensured that there WOULD be a civil war by not doing anything about all the situations he’s caused with regards to rhaenyra’s succession and the lack of follow through.

viserys targaryen is a bad husband to both his wives, a bad father to all of his children, and a bad king to westeros, and as much as i love paddy in the role, the idea that he was a good man who was trying his best and as lovable as ned stark himself needs to fucking die.

#personal #house of the dragon #hotd #anti viserys i targaryen #sorry for the absolute novel but i'm tired and i'm so angry and all the feelings came bubbling up lol #it's the way he's fucked over his children that's particularly egregious to me #like i'd written viserys off the second he started viewing alicent as a plausible romantic option #because that was so fucking disgusting i was never gonna see past it #but if you think about how he's hurt his own kids it's basically unforgivable #i'm glad he's dead and rotting i hope aemma gets to smack him with a fire poker forever and ever amen

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