#hey can we talk about maegor and aenys’ relationship actually

[aeriondripflame]

want to make a little pushback on the idea that visenya made maegor for the sole purpose of usurping aenys as heir. like, visenya presented the rhaena/maegor marriage as a way to fix the apparent succession issue they never had a premeditated plan for usurpation. maegor patiently served aenys as hand up until his exile. he didn’t even think of usurping until after the death of his brother and the subsequent rebellions all over the continent. maegor wasn’t made to replace aenys, he was made to support him.

[navree]

Hey I was wondering about kind of relationship between visenya and aegon in dragon s wrath xause we see them suddenly having maegor after 1 year of rhaenys death visenya became pregnant so they were inseparable and they may have started acting like lovers and aegon moved on of rhaenys to make a family for his sons until the letter came and visenya left him for signing peace ??? What do you think

I've talked a bit about Visenya and Aegon's relationship before, so I'll just leave that response here so that anyone who wants to know more about my thoughts on their relationship in general has that along with this answer.

So, when it comes to Maegor's conception and birth, I think that was largely practical. In general, it's accepted that you do need an heir and a spare when it comes to hereditary thrones modeled after our historical monarchies, so even though Aegon already had Aenys, he would have likely wanted at least one other son, to ensure that the line was secure (similar to the way that Viserys keeps foisting kids on Alicent even after Aegon II is born, or the way the historical Henry VIII still kept searching for wives to give him another son even after Jane Seymour had already given him his son Edward VI). There's also the fact that Aenys wasn't the most robust kid, and that part of why you want a "spare" even after getting an "heir" is in the likelihood that the heir dies and thus you still have a leftover kid, which was a possibility on people's minds even before the war, where bounties were put on Aegon's head and it became very reasonable to be worried that the life of his only child and heir was also in real danger, it's why one of the most popular theories about Nymor's letter was that the Martells had threatened to hire a Faceless Man to kill Aenys, even though it doesn't necessarily hold up to much scrutiny. Aegon likely was planning on having more kids, just on having them with Rhaenys and expanding their family, with that plan only going out the window once she died in Dorne and was no longer an option. Rhaenys's death was also followed by two events that would have strongly motivated Aegon to have another child, even beyond just proving that his line and his reign was secure. For one, Rhaenys's death destroyed her son not just mentally but physically as well, to the point where even Aegon was concerned that he wouldn't survive it and he'd be left childless as well. For two, people were already starting to suggest that Aegon take a new wife and were presenting many young women to him (which like, considering Maegor's conception was in 11 AC and Rhaenys died in 10 AC, did these people just not want to allow the man a single mourning period????) in the hopes that he'd take one of them to bride because they assumed Visenya was "barren". So it's entirely likely that, in wanting to secure his line along with wanting to get people to get off of his back about marrying someone else and genuine fear that his son could potentially die, Aegon decided to try for a child with Visenya so that people would leave him alone and at the very least the child would still be pure Targaryen.

(and there's also the rumors that visenya used dark magic to get herself pregnant as well, which is why it only happened once in their entire marriage and part of why maegor is the way he is)

Aegon and Visenya's relationship during the Dragon's Wroth in specific is a bit harder to speak to with any certainty, just because the Dragon's Wroth is very sparsely documented, and it only documents things like "and then the Targaryens burned Sunspear to the ground and everyone started placing bounties on each other", not even actually specifically mentioning how Visenya and Aegon felt. We can very confidently infer that they were clearly grief stricken by what happened, considering that the extreme reaction that was the Dragon's Wroth and how disproportionate it was to anything else they'd done or would subsequently do in their entire lives. And they probably were united in their grief, in being the two remaining heads of the dragon, and just in the feeling that comes when you lose a family member and want to be around people that get it, so it's not impossible to imagine that they got closer than they were used to, that they did rely on each other to try and get through the quiet moments when they were nuking Dorne. But I don't think it was necessarily that strong a bond even with those external pressures. For one, the main source of their unity is unimaginable grief for this one person, that's not the strongest foundation to a relationship considering that it's built on "oh we both felt similarly about this person and we have similar feelings now, let's commiserate on that" primarily. For two, Aegon and Visenya as people don't seem to have been the most open emotionally. Visenya is described as serious and stern, likely not the sort of person who could provide the best comfort even in her own grief, and Aegon was incredibly reserved and seems to have kept most of his feelings to himself, and out of his family he appears the least closest to Visenya (probably went Rhaenys then Orys then Visenya, with the Velaryon relatives really not taken into consideration for him at all) and was probably also primarily focused on Aenys's health. We know that they cared about each other, enough that the Kingsguard was formed in reaction to Visenya's fear for Aegon's life, and again, fair to assume they were bonded for a fair amount of time. But it obviously didn't last. And I want to be clear, the idea that Aegon agreeing to peace with the Dornish was what caused the rift between him and Visenya isn't undisputed canon fact, that is my own personal interpretation of the events. All we know for certain is that the relationship between them was described as never having been very warm, and that it grew incredibly more distant following the Dornish War, to the point where there's open speculation that Aegon refused to even want to be in the same city as her. My personal theory, which ties into my theory on what exactly was in Nymor's letter, is that Aegon's decision to seek peace, and how he went about doing it, did significant damage to an already bad relationship with Visenya as she felt excluded from the decision and was rankled by being left in the dark and treated as lesser than even unintentionally, but this is just a personal theory.

The inner lives of the Conquerors is incredibly open to interpretation, and at a certain point we're all just lobbing headcanons back and forth at each other that we either agree or disagree on. But I think, from my own point of view, that Aegon and Visenya grew closer as siblings in the aftermath of the tragedy and their grief, but that the decision to have Maegor was by and large entirely practical as the two just seem to be fundamentally incompatible and the relationship clearly grew worse and worse more than it did better. I also personally believe that the decision to end the war played a part in that worsening, but that is just a personal belief based on headcanons more than textual proof.