#you can even argue it's in line with authorial intention to a certain extent

[lemonhemlock]

I'm probably one of the few who finds the bits we got from Aegon as a character—while "inconsistent", disorganized and tonally a whirlwind—compelling, fascinating and worth inspecting and exploring (and maybe romanticizing and sexualizing :P). And this includes the textual sexual violence, and the heavily implied child sexual assault (whether pedophilic in nature or not aside for now). And though I understand people creating a fanon version expunging these sociopsychologically horrific, and fictionally hard to stomach aspects of his character, I can't say I even want to! I find him compelling because of these aspects, wanting the presentation of it may be for now.

His narrative, arc, symbolism and themes, and not to mention TGC's performance so far, are all just too compelling for me to pass on! Obviously biased, but frankly it's difficult to believe someone would read f&b and not realize the potential of his character and the entailing entertainment... On this note, I do have to say I find the complaints of certain fandom parts (they happen to be Aegon stans, and both team green and team black) about the choice to centre Alicent (both in the narrative and in Aegon's life) pretty disagreeable. It's wack, trite, and bitter. There are clear timeline oopsies and confusions due to the changes, and behind the complaints are genuine arguments to be made for an Update House of The Dragon that could have been, but the game ain't always fair... Just accept you are stanning a minor character, cast villain, stuffed like a pigeon with turkey filling, and eat your 10 minutes of beady eyed screentime. And just make everything about him? When someone takes a sip of wine, it's secretly about Aegon btw. All windows are about Aegon, when they are not about Alicent. Every dragonbond is secretly about Aegon/Sunfyre if you squint hard enough, George told me himself.

I think the major reasons why he comes off as deeply unlikable to the casual viewers (not even addressing the green/black tribalism for now) are due to unflattering framing and POVs that position him as either a gross nuisance, obstacle or clear antagonizing force. Some of this is due to needing certain characters covering certain aspects of a certain themes. How do the royals treat their servants? Good—bad is a big spectrum. Sexual violence is on it, and it happens to fall into Aegon's realm. And while considering the many other unflattering characteristics, u could argue this is overkill or unfair to Aegon, I gotta counter that's a deficient way of looking at fictional narratives. This character-lasered reading misses the forest for the trees. Not every character has to be likeable, relatable, or sympathetic from the get-go. And honestly, I think the many atrocities Aegon is collecting like Pokemon balls to be amusing and kinda compelling.

In another narrative, a character like Aegon's would b a byronic obsession in someone's romantic/gothic story, or a horror villain, or a god harassing poor mortal souls. There are very fun bits and pieces stuck in this guy and even in this age of many studios bucketing under fanbacklash, a guy can just hope the writers find him worthwhile enough a character. And rant into ur lovely inbox ofc.

And at the end of the day, people are just not gonna like a guy LOL. No amount of screentime or birthing scenes or dragonriding can make me find Rhaenyra compelling, and no lack thereof can make me find Alicent, Helaena, or Baela less compelling, speaking of female hotd characters only.

Okay almost.

Being they plan to introduce golden boy turned war criminal Daeron, I believe a both fun and horrific decision would be to make him compassionate towards Aegon's plights and woes and thus give the audience an entry into sympathizing with Aegon, which the writers clearly want us to do, all interviews and panels considered, cope and seethe as I have!

Are we even going to get a Daeron/Greenfam interaction? LOL What a deeply unserious show.

I would like to start off by thanking you for leaving such an interesting ask in my inbox! I think this conversation is a little overdue, since there’s been perhaps an emergence of the school of thought (lol) that suggests that greens upset or critiquing Aegon’s extra dark portrayal in the show are somehow whitewashing him or woobifying him. IMO that fundamentally showcases a divergence in people’s priorities in storytelling and how they interact with this fictional universe. I, myself, am very intrigued by dark!Aegon in fics and most of the works I enjoy tend to deal with taboo topics, so it’s a little unfair to paint everyone with the same dismissive brush.

However, I’m not just a HotD show watcher, I have been engaging with ASOIAF one way or another for over a decade now and I think I can mount a workable interpretation of how this series operates. One of the reasons I actually love it so much is because it has internal thematic logic and because, generally speaking, the characters that inhabit it are appropriately rewarded or sanctioned by the narrative (or at least it seems to be heading in this direction re: its endgame). Believe it or not, I was thinking of answering this ask by ranting about Ned Stark, but I decided not to, because we’d be here all day. 😅

Anyway, point is that I’m not very willing to sacrifice that aspect for the sake of character exploration that contradicts with the main themes and messages of the story. People are certainly free to disagree with me on this, of course. 

I imagine it is a tricky business for authors, trying to decide exactly which and how much of a flavour of awful to assign to a character without ruining the rest of the story. Some might start with an outline or a feel for where they want the story to go, but, if you happen to create a character that veers off your intended path or seems to write itself in a direction you never planned for, it would be honest for you as a writer to acknowledge that and accommodate that accordingly in your story. Which isn’t truly a possibility here, as we need the characters to hit certain beats in the narrative and, ideally, they should do it in a believable way. This is often a problem I have found with Fire and Blood and lord knows I’ve already dissected it enough times here, if anyone cares to take a gander - the fact that characters are sometimes prevented to grow organically, because George needs them to perform certain actions in order to move the plot along. So, ideally, a good story would find a balance between these two scenarios. 

So to me my main anti-argument is that the Dance was never a story just about Aegon, this is not the exploration of a fucked-up psycho rapist and why he does the things he does and how he thinks the things he thinks. While that certainly might be an interesting avenue, I am not super convinced the Dance of the Dragons could offer the appropriate space in which that kind of exploration could be pursued in a satisfying manner. This is an ensemble piece, and while Aegon is an important part of it, he also exists in relation to other characters. This exaggerated degradation of his would inevitably bring down his entire “side” with him and that, in turn, ultimately throws off the balance of the entire story. 

Let’s stop for a minute and take a look at what they decided to go with in the show. Rhaenyra has consistently received the framing that her “mistakes” amount to (at most) victimless crimes (she is absolved from murdering Vaemond and the show makes no effort to explain the havoc caused by screwing up inheritance laws). Whereas what do we have for Aegon? 1. raping and terrorizing servants to the point of panic attacks; 2. enjoyer of the child-fighting sport; 3. implied sexual assault of children. This is beyond caricature. The addition that he enjoys watching his own children fight and that they file down their teeth to make them more formidable, stuff that wasn’t even in the books, is just downright infuriating. 

These are not traits you endow a character with because you’re interested in exploring the deep dark depths of human depravity. That task was always impossible in the first place with a character who has so little screen time anyway and I would argue it was never really a priority anyway. The intention was always to make Rhaenyra look good by comparison and that’s not something I can respect from a storytelling perspective. 

Note that this is the starting point for Aegon and Rhaenyra. This is supposed to show how they behave before the war, in a relatively stress-free situation, when they’re unburdened by war trauma and their family dying - explanations that could be given as reasons for their later ruthlessness. But nothing show!Rhaenyra (or even book!Rhaenyra) has ever done could ever hope to amount to the trifecta of awfulness that they assigned to show!Aegon. 

So, what exactly are we doing here? The point of Aegon and Rhaenyra as direct adversaries was always that they inhabit a similar plane. It’s not even about Aegon being likable or sympathetic, it’s about the fact that it separates him too much from Rhaenyra and it positively sanctifies Rhaenyra by comparison. You could certainly prefer one over the other, but their differences are meant to inspire conversation; they cannot be so completely removed from one another as to operate in different leagues of morality. If we monsterize Aegon too much, we don’t even have the space to properly explore that in the story and it would mess too much with the way his character needs to evolve in order to hit the particular narrative beats that George decided are set in stone. So giving him these massive transgressions as a starting point and turning him basically into the Antichrist throws the rest of his arc off balance for me and the thematic parallels become too off-kilter for me to be able to enjoy it. 

To me Rhaenyra’s story is very reminiscent of (white) feminism, very “rights for me but not for thee”: a rich, white, privileged woman fighting for her own advancement and not caring about the plight of anyone else. The Dance of the Dragons is meant to inspire conversation and debate, both on the legal front and on the political utilitarian front. Is male primogeniture fair, even if it maintains stability in the realm? Can we change that? How? Does shifting to simple primogeniture when it comes to royal succession engender progress in some way? Should royal succession reflect inheritance laws for the rest of the population? How are laws changed in a medieval common law system? Is it fair for the King to change laws however he wants, at the drop of the hat, or should the lords have some say? What can/should the King do if his vassals refuse to abide by his choices? When it comes to waging a destructive war to replace one “unworthy” candidate for the throne with another “unworthy” candidate, where do we place that on the moral spectrum? Is the population thriving/not dying in war more or less important than maintaining male primogeniture? Is it really worth it just to have a nominal female successor that won’t really bring about systemic change? These questions are really worth exploring and there are no straightforward answers to them, but if Aegon is Satan on Earth, none of these questions matter anymore, because Rhaenyra automatically becomes the better option and no price is steep enough to pay to get rid of Aegon. And the point never was that Rhaenyra would make a better ruler than Aegon or is even a better person than Aegon; trying to shoehorn her into that narrative only hurts the story overall.

There’s something to be said for the fact that in the last stages of the war, Aegon’s and Rhaenyra’s journeys inversely parallel each other: while Rhaenyra is rejected by the population and kicked out of King’s Landing while she’s occupying the Iron Throne, Aegon manages to convince people on Dragonstone to fight for him and he takes the castle with little resistance. There is something to be said for the fact that it’s Aegon who gets to kill Rhaenyra, not the other way around. That he’s the one who gets to live that little while longer. The author could have simply chosen for them to have one last battle and end up killing each other, but he doesn’t. And IMO we would not be able to get to that point in the story in a way that feels true and organic to the internal logic of this fictional universe if we corrupt Aegon’s development and make him so reprehensible to begin with.

TLDR: I take issue with HotD’s portrayal of Aegon in direct comparison with the text of Fire and Blood, but I am open to dark!Aegon explorations in fic. However, I do not feel like this is appropriate in canon, as it messes too much with the balance of the story and corrupts the wider themes and messages, both of the Dance of the Dragons and of the ASOIAF series in general.