Aegon II Targaryen

Alicent's firstborn, rider of Sunfyre the Golden — a king who never asked for the crown his grandsire spent twenty years arranging, and wears it mostly in taverns until it is nailed on.

The fuller tale

Aegon the Elder spends his boyhood being compared, unfavorably and often within his own hearing, to a sister three years his senior who has already been named heir to everything he might otherwise have inherited. He answers the way an unloved second-favorite often does — with taverns, brawling, and a marriage to his own sister Helaena that the family treats as custom and he treats as one more arrangement made without consulting him. Sunfyre, the most beautiful dragon anyone alive has seen, is the rare thing in his life that seems to want him specifically rather than his title.

His crowning is less ambition than ambush. Dragged from a night's carousing on the morning his grandfather's council has decided to move, Aegon is hauled to the Dragonpit and crowned before he has fully processed that his father is dead, wearing a title his mother's faction spent years quietly arranging and he personally did almost nothing to earn. The show and the book agree on the essential picture: a reluctant, unprepared king, thrown into a war he did not choose by relatives who very much did.

War does what war does to him — it costs him steadily and specifically. His young son Jaehaerys is murdered in his own nursery as payment for a death on the other side's ledger; his rivalry with his own brother Aemond curdles the greens' command structure from within; and his body is broken at Rook's Rest, where a trap meant to draw out the blacks' dragons costs the greens more than they bargained for and leaves Aegon himself burned and crippled, propped up thereafter by pain and stubbornness in roughly equal measure.

What authority Aegon retains after Rook's Rest drains steadily to his council and to Aemond, who runs the war in his brother's incapacitated name with considerably more discipline and considerably less mercy than Aegon himself might have shown. The king who never wanted the crown spends the war's back half mostly absent from its decisions, a wounded figurehead whose signature is required and whose judgment increasingly is not.

By the time the fighting reaches its cruelest hour, Aegon has spent almost everything the crown demanded of him — a son, a brother, his own body, and any illusion that being king was ever going to make him happy. He ends the Dance nominally victorious, his rival fed to his own dying dragon on his orders, and reigns afterward over a capital in ashes: broken, addicted to the poppy that dulls his pain, and increasingly isolated even from the council that put him on the throne in the first place.

Fire & Blood's judgment on him is unusually gentle by the book's standards — less a villain than a man conscripted into a war built for someone else's ambitions, who never once seems to enjoy wearing the crown he is killed defending. The peace that follows him requires his death and everyone around him, very plainly, knows it before it happens.

The page and the screen

The show, still working through its early seasons, presents a somewhat more sympathetic and interior Aegon than the book's secondhand chronicling allows — his reluctance, his need for his father's approval, and his complicated rivalry with Aemond are all given screen time and psychology that Fire & Blood, narrated by chroniclers with little sympathy for the greens' least impressive king, mostly declines to offer. The book's Aegon is judged almost entirely by his actions and their costs; the show's is allowed motives.

In the show, season by season

Season One. In The Green Council — Found in a sept, crowned in a pit, wanted by no one — least of all himself. Until the crowd roars.

Season Two. In A Son for a Son — Plays at kingship on his father's throne until grief comes to his own nursery. In Rhaenyra the Cruel — Answers one murdered child with twenty hanged fathers. In The Red Dragon and the Gold — Rides to his own battle unannounced to feel like a king. Carried home in pieces.

In the books

Fire & Blood — The Dance of the Dragons. In The Dance Begins — Flew to his own trap uninvited; carried home in a litter. In The Boy King's Peace — Outlived his sister by half a year, his conscience by rather more.

Where they stand, season by season

Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.

The books: Poisoned by his own council (F&B, ch. 7)

He outlived his sister half a year, king of a realm of ashes, and refused every counsel of mercy toward her son. His own lords poured the strongwine: Aegon the Elder died poisoned in his litter with the Wolf of the North two days from the gates.

The series has not yet reached Aegon's final chapter; his fate remains ahead of the story as currently aired.

Fire & Blood gives him roughly half a year as sole king over a realm he can barely govern — broken in body, dependent on poppy milk for the pain of his burns, and increasingly a liability to the same council that crowned him. The book is characteristically blunt about the ending: his own small council, weary of an incapacitated and unpredictable king standing between them and a durable peace, has him poisoned in his wine. The murder is, by the book's own account, the least mysterious in the whole history — everyone benefits, and no one is ever formally named for it.