#badass lucerys is the real lucerys

[patolemus]

Alright so I am really into the Lucerys putting Aemond in his place agenda right now (blame five stages of grief for that one it’s been consuming me) and I can’t help but think that he would constantly remind Aemond that despite being a prince, he does not behave like someone of their House.

Like, Aemond and his siblings look the part. They all ride dragons, they all have the Targaryen look. But that is the thing. They just look like Targaryens.

Because it is not to the Gods of Old Valyria they pray to. It is not black and red they wear. It is not High Valyrian the lenguaje they feel most comfortable speaking.

Alicent’s children may bear the dragon’s name, but they are more Hightower than they could ever be Targaryen, and Lucerys does not hesitate before saying so.

“You speak of my parentage, but I at least know and honor the traditions of my House. The only thing that makes you different from the common folk is your tainted dragon blood.”

It drives Aemond mad with rage — because a part of himself can’t help but think that Lucerys is right.

[navree]

you know, the one big thing that some of these time jumps really messed up is that, if you think about it for more than five seconds, aemond has the restraint of a saint for not being on the constant edge of murder. 

aemond, at the age of, at maximum, ten, gets set upon by four other people who are angry at him for no reason (“aemond stole vhagar!” the fuck he did, the only reason you should have to actually think that is if you too are a grieving eight year old, anyone else on the planet knows that vhagar chose aemond we literally saw her do it be serious). he doesn’t start this conflict or is the first to escalate it to violence, despite getting a bit too harsh verbally, and after defending himself and getting pissed off, loses an eye. a full eye. in a pseudo medieval society where we have to see him get stitched up with zero anesthetic at all, and where the entire meeting to talk about the fact that he lost a full eye devolves into how the real crime here was a throwaway insult, while he’s standing here without an eye and the only person who seems to care is just his mom (let’s not even touch on the fact that a thirty year old woman starts demanding the ten year old be “questioned sharply” which is basically westerosi euphemism for tortured or at least threatened to be tortured after having lost an eye as if no one else was able to decipher the magic of big b little b)

that’s what we have in canon. and it’s really not that hard to deduce that in the near decade after that, life got really, really hard for aemond. for one, this is a pseudo medieval society where the king has basically been publicly dying a death by a thousand badly treated cuts for multiple years, that cut took a long time to heal and it didn’t do so painlessly, and the fact that aemond didn’t get any infection and die or turn into a mini viserys is a miracle, but also a had to be a very long process. for two, aemond now has to deal with getting his ability to fucking see slashed in half, and likely having to relearn a lot of the way he was just living life in order to function. that’s something that would be hard to do nowadays, if you were dealt with partial blindness or lost vision in an eye in an accident, given that this is a pseudo medieval society, aemond had to do all of that in much more difficult circumstances. how much of life was spent with this kid in pain, frustrated, scared, resentful? for how long did this child have to struggle before he found some semblance of normalcy, at least physically if not mentally, before trying to make up for this sudden shortcoming? 

and having this time jump where the first time we see him after having lost a full eye is him being badass and cool and calm and snide (and weirdly horny for daemon but that’s a story for another time) means that a lot of audience members are going to miss that it is perfectly natural for aemond to be seething with bitterness about what happened, about the injuries and the difficulties that followed and the toll it must have taken on him and the way he was treated throughout the immediate aftermath. of course aemond flew into a rage and nearly hacked out lucerys’s eye himself, if you were bottling up that much pain and anger about having been dealt a lifelong disability for no reason, wouldn’t you be too? of course aemond decided he wanted to scare lucerys and make him feel small and afraid, how many nights did aemond spend terrified that he’d get some sort of blood poisoning or infection and die, or even just scared about the quality of life he’d have in a society that’s already just kinda shitty even if you’re able bodied? 

wanting to do all of their twenty years of set up in a ten episode season screwed this show in a lot of ways, most notably in how the frequent time jumps prevented us from spending any time getting to know a characters who weren’t rhaenyra, alicent, daemon, and viserys (like, i’ve said this a lot, but name me three character traits of lucerys that aren’t “momma’s boy”, how am i meant to care about vhagar full on eating him when the writers haven’t been able to put any effort in making me care about him as a person before that point). but it feels a wee bit galling when it prevents us from understanding the nuances of a character that are kind of important to fully understand the choices he makes that are going to have huge repercussions on everyone in the story.