Valarr Targaryen
The Young Prince: Baelor's elder son, brown-haired with a silver streak, courteous and unremarkable — a champion at Ashford by birth more than by lance.
The fuller tale
Called the Young Prince by a court that never quite let him be anything other than Baelor Breakspear’s son, Valarr arrives at Ashford Meadow already burdened with an inheritance he has not yet had the chance to earn on his own merits — brown hair marked with a single streak of Targaryen silver, as if his blood itself could not decide which side of his ancestry to favor. He is, by every account the tale offers, courteous, competent, and entirely overshadowed, a champion of the tourney more because of whose son he is than because the realm has any particular reason yet to expect greatness from him specifically.
His role in the drama that consumes the tourney is largely to be present at its edges — one of the accomplished young lords whose undefeated record at the lists makes the field prestigious, and whose family’s proximity to the unfolding crisis around Dunk’s trial gives the whole affair its unbearable intimacy. He does not choose the conflict that follows; it simply happens around him, to people he loves, in a summer that was supposed to be about a tournament and a fair maiden’s favor.
What the tale leaves unresolved for its own dramatic purposes is what kind of king Valarr might eventually have made — competent seems the likeliest guess, given everything shown of him, though never destined for his father’s kind of legend. History, characteristically indifferent to potential, does not give him the chance to find out.
The page and the screen
Valarr appears in the show’s first season as part of the tournament’s aristocratic backdrop rather than as a heavily featured player, consistent with his function in the source novella — a recognizable name and face among the champions of Ashford Meadow rather than a figure the plot turns on. Casting details for the role have not been widely publicized alongside the season’s headline names, which fits a character whose narrative weight in The Hedge Knight itself is more symbolic than active.
In the show, season by season
Season One. In Ashford Meadow — The Young Prince: Baelor's heir, a champion by birth more than by lance. In A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms — The Young Prince inherits Dragonstone — and none of his father's greatness.
Where they stand, season by season
Mentioned in the chronicle
- The champions take the field: Lord Ashford's two sons, Ser Humfrey Hardyng, Ser Tybolt Lannister, and Prince Valarr Targaryen, the Young Prince. (S1·E2)
Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.
The books: Taken by the Great Spring Sickness (TSS, ch. 1)
The Young Prince survived Ashford only to die two years later in the Great Spring Sickness, with his own young sons beside him — and the crown that should have been Baelor's line's passed sideways, to Aerys.
Two years after Ashford Meadow, the Great Spring Sickness that kills his grandfather King Daeron II also claims Valarr, along with his own young sons at his side — a single plague erasing, in one season, an entire branch of the succession that the realm had assumed was settled. What should have been a clean line from Daeron to Baelor to Valarr to Valarr’s heirs instead collapses entirely, and the Iron Throne passes sideways to Aerys, Daeron’s surviving second son, in a succession nobody at Ashford Meadow had any reason to plan for.