Victarion Greyjoy
Balon's brother, Lord Captain of the Iron Fleet: a huge, pious, unimaginative warrior who lives to obey the will of his king and the Drowned God (book only).
The fuller tale
Victarion Greyjoy is the strongest man in his family and the least equipped to notice what his family is. Lord Captain of the Iron Fleet, master of the Iron Victory, he is a tower of plate and piety who has organized his entire existence around obedience — to Balon, to the Drowned God, to the Old Way — because obedience spares a slow man the agony of deciding. He fought through the Greyjoy Rebellion with distinction, burned the Lannister fleet at anchor in Lannisport, and asked for nothing afterward but to keep sailing where his king pointed. Among the tale’s point-of-view characters he is unique: a genuinely dangerous man with almost no interior resources whatsoever.
The wound at his center bears his brother’s fingerprints. Years before the story, Euron seduced — by Euron’s telling — Victarion’s wife and left her carrying his child; Victarion, bound by the ironborn’s one inviolable law against kinslaying, could not touch him. So he beat the woman to death with his own hands instead, wept over it after, and has carried both the grief and the unspendable hatred ever since. Balon’s exile of Euron was as much for Victarion’s sake as anyone’s. When the Crow’s Eye sails home over Balon’s fresh corpse, Victarion is the one man on the islands who fully understands what has come back — and still cannot lift a hand against him.
At the kingsmoot on Old Wyk he makes his claim — sound, dull, dutiful, exactly like him — and watches his brother buy the crown with plunder and a hellish horn. What follows is the tale’s bleakest comedy of servitude: the new king hands Victarion the Iron Fleet and an errand, sail to Slaver’s Bay and win Daenerys Targaryen as Euron’s bride. Victarion accepts, and somewhere in the long miles east resolves on his one act of rebellion in a lifetime of service — he will take the dragon queen for himself, horn and all, and let the Crow’s Eye choke on it.
The voyage remakes him into something stranger than he was. Storms scatter his fleet; a festering sword-wound in his hand is healed — transformed — by the red priest Moqorro, leaving the arm charred black and smoking, stronger than before; and the captain who set out serving one god arrives hedging his bets between two, giving the Drowned God his due and R’hllor his burnings. The published books leave him at the mouth of Slaver’s Bay with the dragon horn aboard and the battle of Meereen forming ahead — an unimaginative man sailing an occult weapon toward a dragon queen, on an errand of betrayal he thinks of as justice. Nothing about that sentence ends quietly, and readers have been waiting years to find out how loudly it doesn’t.
The page and the screen
Victarion never existed on screen — the show has no third Greyjoy brother, and his functions were split among the survivors: the fleet command and the eastern expedition went, in altered form, to Euron, while the kingsmoot lost its dullest and most honest claimant. What the adaptation loses with him is deliberate: his chapters are the books’ study of the ironborn as they see themselves — pious, wronged, magnificent — written from inside a skull with no irony in it, while every reader sees the manipulation he cannot. Cut him and the ironborn become a fleet; keep him and they are a religion with ships.
Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.
The chronicle records no death for this soul — they are living when the tale leaves them, or their ending is a page the maesters have yet to turn.