Indeed. It’s amusing that the Targaryens of GOT are supposed to be shocked at the violence of a Dothraki wedding but if they knew their history they would feel right at home !
I feel a bit stupid in that I didn’t immediately realize what it was that Aemond said that aroused so much fury. By the way, is the name Strong supposed to be a in-joke about the “seed is strong” from GOT ?
I agree that Aemond is the new Daemon and I am looking forward to some spectacular combat between the two with or without dragons.
Viserys is finally dead right? In a show with some fine performances I think Considine has been the standout and this episode was a fitting climax to his character arc.
I don’t fully get the bastard thing, not having read the books. I understand it is considered an undesirable but commonplace thing in society. But in Thrones the stigma could be seemingly removed by parental whim - as was offered to or accepted by several major characters. If it is hidden, therefore tacitly accepted and rarely discussed openly, is the only issue whether the bloodline is involved, or that different places perceive it in different ways, or did the stigma change over the time since House?
Is it just me or did the show completely gloss over the fact that two of Alicent’s children are married to each other? I know that the brother’s were talking about how odd she was and how one of them would have to marry her. I didn’t put two and two together until I had read a few summaries. The multiple changes in actors for the children over as many episodes has made it a bit hard to follow along.
Perfectly normal and expected for Targaryens. It was the excuse Jamie and Cersei liked to throw out in GoT. Rhaenyra is married to her uncle and no one batted an eye at that either.
Well, King Viserys is definitely less fleshed-out, as of the most recent episode.
Another flaw of HotD - there’s no despicable villain. GoT gave us Joffrey right off the bat, who was so loathsome that his actor, Jack Gleeson, literally got death threats.
Let me say that again: the actor got death threats in real life - that is how effective of a villain he played.
It has particular resonance in HOTD because the children of the heir to the throne are widely (and apparently correctly) believed to be illegitimate, which has major implications for an heir already, due to her sex, viewed with skepticism if not outright hostility by the Westeros aristos.
Still given how religious Alicent is it’s weird that we never see her having any sign of mixed feelings about it. The Faith condemns incest and made a special accommodation for the Targaryens at dragon point!
She grew up at Court in Kings Landing. The entire kingdom has spent a century or two learning that this is how they are ruled. And Alicent spent every day of her life in the middle of it, with only the knowledge that this is how things are. She cannot have even contemplated marrying Viserys without knowing that this is how it’s going to be.
It is commonplace for men of high birth to father bastards. There is not even any stigma for the man, so long as he isn’t messing with the bloodlines of other highborn families.
However, for a woman who is in the royal line of succession or who is married to someone in ltoyal ine of succession to even have sexual relations outside her marriage—and any man with whom she might do it with—is literally treason for both of them, because the bloodline of the royal succession must never be in doubt.
To understand the society of Westeros, you need to understand that there is a somewhat race and religion based caste system.
At the top are the Targaryens and Velaryons, as the conquering ruling caste. You could sort of analogise them to the Normans. They are a very small group of related individuals and they arrived from a completely foreign land (Old Valyria) in the Easter continent of Essos. They have their own language (High Valyrian), which Rhaenyra and Daemon use to speak to each other, and the language used to command the dragons. The dragon handlers also speak in that language. They also have their own religion, which they sometimes practice in secret—as shown by Rhaenyra and Darmon’s secret wedding ceremony.
At the time of this show, they have been in charge for only 100-150 years, and they haven’t even conquered the entire continent. Dorne, which was settled by the Rhoynar, a different ethnic group from Essos that have been in Dorne for much longer than the Targaryens have been in Westeros.
Below the Targaryens, you have the Andals. Maybe think of them as the Anglo-Saxons. They are the ethnic group that form the bulk of the nobility and the ruling class of Westeros. They arrived about 6,000 years ago from Essos and they brought with them the Faith of the Seven, which to me has sort of the feel of Roman Catholicism in style, except there are seven deities instead of a Trinity.
The Andals never united Westeros under one king. That’s why the Targaryen realm is called the Seven Kingdoms.
And the vast majority of the people of Westeros are not descended from Valyrian stock like the Targaryens, not Rhoynar like the Princes of Dorne, and have much less Andal blood than the bulk of the nobility and upper classes of Westeros.
They are descended from the First Men. You might analogise them to the Celts. They settled Westeros over 12,000 years ago and they conquered the original humanoid inhabitants, known as the Children of the Forest. The First Men adopted the religion of the Children and worshipped the Old Gods, and you can think of it as a kind of Druidic religion. Their totems are the Weyrwood trees with faces carved into them.
The Andals destroyed most of these trees, but a few still remain, especially in the North, where intermarriage with the Andals was less than in the southern kingdoms and where the Faith of the Seven hasn’t been adopted as completely as elsewhere.
And of course all this is reflected in the full title of the Targaryen monarch: King of the Andals, the Rhoynar, and the First Men.
That mostly happened in the later seasons of Thrones, when the show had veered away from Martin’s story and worldbuilding, and the showrunners were looking for shortcuts.
It still had to be approved by the King or Queen. Roose Bolton got Joffery to make Ramsey his legal son and heir. Stannis, since he considered himself to be the rightful King, told Jon that he had the authority to make him a Stark. And Daenerys proclaimed Gendry the lawful son of Robert and the heir to Storm’s End.
