Aerys II Targaryen
The Mad King, last Targaryen to sit the Iron Throne: a burned, paranoid ruin of a king by the end, overthrown in the rebellion that put Robert on the throne.
The fuller tale
History remembers him as the Mad King, which is accurate and also a little unfair to the young man he was. Aerys came to the Iron Throne at twenty, handsome and generous and full of grand schemes — a second Wall, a new city of white marble, canals through Dorne — none of which survived contact with his attention span. What he did have was an eye for talent: he made his boyhood friend Tywin Lannister his Hand, and for nearly two decades the realm was governed superbly by a man the king grew to despise for it. The story of Aerys’s reign is largely the story of that friendship curdling — every achievement credited to the Hand felt, to the king, like something stolen.
The break in him has a date. In the year 277 the lord of Duskendale lured his king into the town’s walls and held him prisoner for half a year, and the man who came out was not the man who went in. After the Defiance, Aerys never left the Red Keep. He refused to be touched by blades, so his hair and beard and nails grew into a matted yellow tangle; he saw daggers in every shadow and treason in every courtesy. His old suspicion of Tywin sharpened into obsession — he refused Cersei’s hand for his son with an insult, and took Jaime for his Kingsguard less as an honor than as a theft, stripping the Rock of its heir out of pure spite.
What replaced governance was fire. Aerys had always liked wildfire; in his last years he loved it, elevating pyromancers to his council and making the flames his headsman. Men accused of treason were not beheaded but burned alive in the throne room while the king watched — and the whole edifice of the rebellion rests on two of those fires. When Brandon Stark rode to the capital demanding Rhaegar answer for Lyanna, Aerys arrested him and summoned his father. Lord Rickard asked for trial by combat; the king named fire his champion, cooked the Lord of Winterfell in his own armor, and strangled his son in front of him. Then he demanded the heads of Ned Stark and Robert Baratheon from the Vale, and Jon Arryn raised his banners instead.
The war that followed was Rhaegar’s to fight and Aerys’s to lose. Paranoia hollowed out his court — he fed his own Hand to the flames on suspicion, dismissed better men, and trusted only the pyromancers and, fatally, the mercy of Tywin Lannister. All the while his true project ran beneath the streets: caches of wildfire seeded under the sept, under the gates, under the Red Keep itself, against the day the city might fall to his enemies. If he could not have King’s Landing, no one would. Let Robert be king over charred bones and cooked meat, he reasoned; the dragon would rise from the ashes, reborn.
He is the tale’s founding ghost. The story proper opens seventeen years after his fall, but every institution in it is shaped like a wound he left — Robert’s hollow kingship, Jaime’s poisoned honor, the exiles across the sea nursing his claim, and the wildfire still sleeping under the capital, waiting for another monarch mad or desperate enough to remember it is there. When the show’s later seasons finally let Bran’s visions show a wild-haired king screaming to burn them all, it was less a revelation than a confirmation: the tale had been arguing with Aerys from its first page.
The page and the screen
The books never show Aerys directly either — he dies before both tellings begin — but they are far richer in the texture of his decline: the Defiance of Duskendale, the burning of his Hands, his brutalization of Queen Rhaella, and the slow chess match with Tywin are all book material the show compresses into a few lines of dialogue. The show’s essential Aerys arrives in two scenes: Jaime’s bathhouse confession in the third season, which carries the wildfire plot and the truth of the kingslaying almost word for word from the novels, and Bran’s flashes of the screaming king in the sixth. The show also gives him a face and a voice in those visions, something the published books have never quite done outside other men’s memories.
Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.
Before the tale: Died in the Sack of King's Landing, before the story
In both tellings Aerys dies in the Sack of King’s Landing, before the story begins, and in both he dies trying to take the city with him. With Rhaegar dead on the Trident and Tywin’s army revealed as wolves inside the gates, the king ordered his last Hand, the pyromancer Rossart, to fire the caches — burn them all, the command went, repeated like a prayer. Jaime Lannister, seventeen years old and the last Kingsguard in the keep, killed Rossart first and then opened his king’s throat at the foot of the Iron Throne, the act that made him the Kingslayer and saved half a million people who would never know to thank him.
The books add the details the show leaves in shadow: that Aerys died still believing he would rise as a dragon; that Jaime, unsure the order might not be carried by other messengers, hunted down the remaining pyromancers of the plot in the years after; and that the truth stayed sealed inside the one man whose reputation it would have redeemed, because Jaime judged that no one — not Robert, not Ned Stark with his cold judging eyes — deserved the story. It finally comes out in a Harrenhal bathhouse, decades late, to Brienne of Tarth.