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.
A soul of House Targaryen, born at King's Landing.
The fuller tale
How it ends for them
Died in the Sack of King's Landing, before the story ÔÇö before this story begins.
In both tellings Aerys dies in the Sack of KingÔÇÖs Landing, before the story begins, and in both he dies trying to take the city with him. With Rhaegar dead on the Trident and TywinÔÇÖs army revealed as wolves inside the gates, the king ordered his last Hand, the pyromancer Rossart, to fire the caches ÔÇö 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 kingÔÇÖs 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 ÔÇö not Robert, not Ned Stark with his cold judging eyes ÔÇö deserved the story. It finally comes out in a Harrenhal bathhouse, decades late, to Brienne of Tarth.
Their chapters, book by book
Where the page and the screen part
The books never show Aerys directly either ÔÇö he dies before both tellings begin ÔÇö 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 showÔÇÖs essential Aerys arrives in two scenes: JaimeÔÇÖs 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 BranÔÇÖs 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 menÔÇÖs memories.