House Baratheon
The youngest of the great houses, sprung from Orys Baratheon, the Conqueror's rumored bastard brother, seated at storm-battered Storm's End on Shipbreaker Bay. A crowned black stag on gold ÔÇö strong, proud, and famously stubborn, and courted by both crowns the moment the Old King's peace breaks.
The fuller tale
The Baratheons of StormÔÇÖs End are, even by the DanceÔÇÖs standards, a house that has learned to let other peopleÔÇÖs wars come to it rather than the reverse ÔÇö Ours Is the Fury sits over a fortress that has never fallen to siege or storm, and Lord Borros Baratheon intends to keep both records intact by making the crisis over the Iron Throne someone elseÔÇÖs problem for as long as the crownÔÇÖs two halves are willing to bid for the privilege of asking.
That bidding is the houseÔÇÖs whole role in the opening act of the war. Borros has four daughters and one young son ÔÇö the Four Storms, the court calls the girls, Cassandra, Maris, Ellyn and Floris ÔÇö and a marriage into any of them is worth an army the crown badly needs. Both sides know it, and both send a Targaryen prince south to StormÔÇÖs End to ask.
Aemond arrives first, or arrives better, and leaves betrothed to Floris ÔÇö sealing StormÔÇÖs End for the Greens in the same season that Lucerys Velaryon, sent south on the same errand for his mother, meets AemondÔÇÖs dragon over Shipbreaker Bay instead of a wedding contract, and never completes the journey home. Whatever chance the Blacks had at StormÔÇÖs End dies with him, at almost the same hour the pact that closes it off is signed.
Even bought, the Baratheons fight cautiously ÔÇö Borros holds his own counsel about how hard to commit, and the stormlandsÔÇÖ levies arrive to the warÔÇÖs later campaigns more as a slow reinforcement than a decisive strike, a house content to have picked a side without betting its whole strength on the outcome.
The caution pays off in the ledger that matters most to a great house: survival. Where Velaryon and Targaryen both come out of the Dance gutted, StormÔÇÖs End comes through with its line and its castle both intact, a rare great house that gambles on a marriage instead of a battlefield and finds the smaller wager the wiser one.
The page and the screen
The chronicle behind Fire & Blood is openly unsure whether LucerysÔÇÖs death over Shipbreaker Bay was murder or a fatal accident of storm and temper ÔÇö MushroomÔÇÖs account and the more measured chroniclers disagree on how much Aemond intended, and the text preserves the disagreement rather than settling it. The show removes the ambiguity almost entirely, staging the pursuit and its outcome with enough visual clarity that AemondÔÇÖs intent, however conflicted in the moment, reads as considerably less accidental on screen than the competing sources ever let the page confirm.
