#y'all are more than willing to ask me stuff about interests other than the targs

[navree]

About the Targaryens again… So George said that Rhaenys was a “flirt” (and we know it for sure because she obviously loved the company of males and it was a part of her extroverted personality) and Visenya was a “seductress”, but ASOIAF doesn’t portray her as a seductress at all, nor is it clear who she would be seducing. It doesn’t seem to have been Aegon, or she obviously didn’t succeed in seducing him, nor it seem to be anyone else at all. All we know is that she was cold, dark, serious and had a little sense of humour (like torturing a monkey for fun could count ok). What do you think about that?

"About the Targaryens again" I mean, do I ever really get questions about anything else, lol?

So, I think the "So Spake Martin" stuff tends to fall into the lines of "semi-canonical" rather than out and out canon from the official texts we have, which would be ASOIAF (which Visenya and Rhaenys aren't in due to having been dead for three hundred years) and Fire&Blood, where they're really only referred to because it's a historical text covering past events, not a contemporaneous narrative. But it does seem like the "So Spake Martin" description of Visenya ("Visenya is both stern and sensual, more voluptuous than her sister, more passionate, but with a dark and unforgiving side") is still meant to be taken in conjunction with her F&B official description ("Even those who loved her best found Visenya stern, serious, and unforgiving") since Rhaenys's "So Spake Martin" description ("Rhaenys, the younest of the three, is slender and graceful, playful, with a mischievous aspect to her personality than Visenya lacks") follows pretty closely with her F&B description ("Rhaenys, youngest of the three Targaryens, was all her sister was not, playful, curious, impulsive, given to flights of fancy"). So the idea that Visenya might have had a seductive aspect to her personality that she wielded when it suited her doesn't seem to be entirely out of bounds.

As to who she was seducing, that's more unclear. If you follow the conventional wisdom surrounding Aegon's relationships with his sister-wives, then she might have tried to be "seductive" towards him to try and sway him into being more attracted to her, as opposed to Rhaenys, and it simply didn't work. Or maybe it did at least once, we have no idea what the circumstances of Maegor's conception were beyond the fact that it happened at an opportune time for his parents. If you have my specific set of brain worms, then she might have tried to seduce Rhaenys somehow and whether or not she succeeded depends on how sad I want to make myself on any given day. And while there were never any rumors about her going after anyone while married (though she very well could have, just kept it incredibly on the down low), Visenya did spend a significant amount of time widowed. And while some might say "OK, but she was in her sixties and seventies when widowed so who was she seducing" I will respond with a) GILF rights and b) Visenya was said to dabble in dark sorceries and blood magic, she could have easily used some of that to make her look more youthful than her years, potentially even explaining why she suddenly had such a steep drop-off health and looks wise in the last year of her life (something something magic always has a cost something something). So it's entirely possible that, now that she was unencumbered by marriage, and powerful enough in her own right (even more so after Maegor became king) that no one would brook any argument against her for doing it, that she took some lovers in the last decade of her life, and probably seduced them into bed with her. There's also this quote that "To most of the world, she presented the grim face of a warrior, stern and unforgiving", which could easily mean that Visenya had a more sensual side to her that she didn't show in battle or on progresses or to much of open court, aka most of the world, but was present enough to be accounted for by other people, including whoever was in the inner sanctum of the Conquerors time as rulers.

Of course, just because she's described as a "seductress" doesn't necessarily mean she went around enticing everyone she met 24/7. It could easily be a description of her personality as much as it is about her actions. People generally contain multitudes, Visenya can absolutely be both stern and serious as well as using wiles to try and get people to do what she wanted. It's an element of her personality that we can actually see in how she took the Vale, tempting Ronnel with Vhagar and the promise of flying around on her, and using just that to get Sharra to realize that she needed to submit and surrender to the Targaryens. Visenya could have been a seductress in more ways than just sexual, and had her own purposes behind it, just like Rhaenys's flirty patronage of singers also served as masterful propaganda to prop up Aegon and their dynasty.

As for the monkey thing, I don't think there's any suggestion that she tortured the ape she took as the second Lord Monkeyface (even though we as modern Earth humans now know better than to try and dress animals up in little outfits that they don't want), just that she had a fool named Monkeyface and then replaced him with an actual monkey that she thought was funnier.