Euron Greyjoy
The Crow's Eye: Balon's exiled brother, a swaggering, black-humored pirate king feared even by his own kin — the show's grinning terror of the seas.
A soul of House Greyjoy, born at Pyke.
The fuller tale
Season Six
Arrives at his brother's Kingsmoot mid-vote, unmourning, and announces without much ceremony that he is the one who killed Balon — a confession delivered like a boast, to a crowd that finds it more persuasive than threatening. He out-promises his niece by promising more: not restraint but conquest, a fleet given to Daenerys Targaryen along with a marriage proposal, dragons brought home to finish what Balon's rebellion never could. The captains salute him for it. His own niece and nephew rob him of the ships before he can sail anywhere, stealing the fastest hulls in the fleet out from under his new crown, and he is left to build another one and swear he will finish what he started.
Season Seven
Makes good on half his promise the hard way: not Daenerys, but a fleet built fast enough to catch his niece's at sea and break it, taking Ellaria and Tyene Sand prisoner and delivering them to Cersei Lannister as a gift he was never asked for. Cersei names him master of ships for it, and he proposes marriage in the same breezy register he uses for everything, undeterred by her lack of an answer. When the war council at King's Landing turns to fighting the army of the dead, Euron sails off rather than commit his fleet to it, telling Cersei plainly that he has no intention of dying for a corpse.
Season Eight
Returns to King's Landing with the Golden Company in tow, making good, finally, on the one promise he never broke — not dragons, but sellswords bought with Lannister gold while everyone assumed he had simply run. He collects on the marriage he proposed the year before, at least for as long as it amuses Cersei and irritates her brother, which seems to be most of what he wants from it. He mans a scorpion himself against Dany's fleet in the crossing and puts bolt after bolt into Rhaegal until the dragon goes down over open water, the cleanest blow anyone lands on a dragon all series. His own fleet is burned to nothing when Daenerys turns her last dragon on the city, and he crawls from the wreckage to find Jaime Lannister waiting for him — the fight he has wanted since Jaime took his place beside Cersei. He wounds Jaime badly enough to die believing he has killed him; it is close enough to true that no one bothers to correct him.
How it ends for them
On the screen. Fell on the beach at King's Landing (S8·E5)
The crow's eye shot a dragon from the sky and washed ashore in time to duel Jaime Lannister beneath the falling Red Keep. He died grinning at his own wound: 'I'm the man who killed Jaime Lannister.' He wasn't.
The show kills him with the same swagger he lived by. Thrown into the sea when Daenerys annihilates his fleet in Blackwater Bay, he washes ashore beneath the collapsing Red Keep just in time to find Jaime Lannister hurrying to reach Cersei — and attacks him for the pure sport of it, grinning through a duel amid the falling ash. He deals Jaime mortal wounds; Jaime drives a sword through his belly and leaves him. Euron dies alone on the sand, delighted with himself to the last, crowing that he is the man who killed Jaime Lannister. He wasn’t — Jaime dies of a falling city, holding his sister — but Euron never let truth spoil a good story.
In the published books he is alive, crowned, victorious and accelerating — no death scene awaits him yet, only the battle off Oldtown and whatever the horn and the visions are for. Whatever end Martin has planned, readers broadly agree the beach brawl was written for a much smaller man.
Their chapters, book by book
The Crow's Eye: Balon's exiled brother, blue-lipped from shade-of-the-evening, who claims to have sailed to Valyria itself. A sorcerer-pirate with a dragon-binding horn and crew of mutes, dreaming of far darker crowns than driftwood.
A Feast for Crows 3 chapters that name them
Where the page and the screen part
No character diverges more between page and screen. The show’s Euron is a leather-clad corsair with quips — a knowing, almost modern rogue whose ambitions run to fleets, crowns and Cersei’s bed. The books’ Euron is a sorcerer-king in embryo: the shade-of-the-evening, the Valyrian plunder, the dragonbinder horn, the mute crew, the hints of an eldritch design behind the piracy — none of it survived the adaptation. Even his election differs in texture: the show’s kingsmoot is a brisk shoreline vote among three speakers, while the books stage a great assembly on Old Wyk beneath the bones of Nagga, claimants and priests and the horn’s scream, with Aeron’s whole faith arrayed against the Crow’s Eye and failing.
Their endings part company completely. Show-Euron dies on the beach beneath the falling Red Keep; book-Euron, alive and ascendant in the published volumes, has just baited the fleets of Oldtown into battle while he readies something worse. Readers waiting on The Winds of Winter regard him, with reason, as the books’ most dangerous living man south of the Wall.
Their journey
Where the two tellings send them to the same place the road runs whole; where they part, the screen keeps the left and the books the right.