House Baratheon
The youngest of the great houses, sprung from an Orys Baratheon who was rumored a Targaryen's bastard brother, seated at storm-battered Storm's End on the narrow sea. A crowned black stag on gold ÔÇö strong, proud, and famously stubborn lords of the Stormlands.
The fuller tale
The Baratheons are the youngest of the great houses and the proudest of it, which tells you most of what you need to know about them. Orys Baratheon ÔÇö rumored, never confirmed, to be a Targaryen king's bastard half-brother ÔÇö took Storm's End from the last Storm King in Aegon's conquest, killed him in single combat, and married his daughter to knit the old Durrandon blood into the new arrangement. He kept the fallen house's words for his own, Ours Is the Fury, and the crowned black stag on gold has stood for exactly that ever since: a house that answers challenge with temper, and rarely loses the argument by half-measures.
Storm's End itself is the house's whole character built in stone ÔÇö a fortress that has never fallen to siege or storm in a thousand years of both, curtain walls a hundred feet thick weathering the worst the Narrow Sea can throw at them. It bred lords who treated stubbornness as a virtue rather than a flaw, and nowhere is that clearer than in the rebellion that put a Baratheon on the Iron Throne for the first time: Robert Baratheon, fostered at the Eyrie alongside Eddard Stark and Jon Arryn, went to war less for a crown than for a grievance ÔÇö the abduction, as he saw it, of the woman he loved ÔÇö and turned a doomed uprising into a dynasty by killing Rhaegar Targaryen in single combat at the Trident. He never much liked the throne he won; he liked winning it.
The house's rot set in exactly where its unity was thinnest: three brothers who agreed on nothing but their own right to rule. Robert drank and hunted and mortgaged the realm's finances rather than govern it; Stannis, the middle son, treated duty as a debt owed regardless of cost, correct in law and beloved by almost no one, not even his own family; Renly, youngest and most charming, built a crown out of popularity and an army he never had to earn the hard way. When Robert died leaving no legitimate heir ÔÇö his queen's children were never his to begin with ÔÇö the house did not descend into succession, it fractured into civil war, brother arrayed against brother's memory as much as against each other.
None of the three lines that mattered survived to inherit what Robert won. Stannis burned his own daughter on a pyre for a victory that never came and died with his cause; Renly fell to a horror out of the fire and the shadows before ever striking a blow; Robert's throne passed to children who were never Baratheons at all, born of his queen and her brother, and the crown he had bled for a generation earlier ended up worn by exactly the dynasty his rebellion had been fought to end. By the war's final reckoning the direct line is extinguished entirely ÔÇö a bastard son legitimized too late to matter, a scattering of baseborn children with no claim the realm will honor, and a storm-battered seat with no storm lord left to hold it.
The page and the screen
Stannis's ending is the single largest outstanding question the published books have left hanging. The show resolves him with total finality ÔÇö his army broken outside Winterfell, cut down by Brienne of Tarth in the snow with Renly's murder still between them. George R. R. Martin's own novels stop his story mid-battle, wounded and surrounded, in a chapter deliberately titled to leave the outcome ambiguous; readers have argued for a decade over whether he lives, and the author has confirmed the ambiguity was intentional. It is the rare case where the show did not adapt an ending so much as write one the books have pointedly declined to supply.
