Deron's reign quickly stabilized the realm, and he soon came to
be called Deron the Good by the small folk and noble Lords
alike. He was widely seen as just and
good hearted, even if some question the influence of his
Dornish wife. And though he was no warrior,
descriptions of the era note that he was small of frame, with
thin arms round shoulders in a scholarly disposition. 2 of his
four sons seemed all that could be wished in a Night Lord or
air. Yet too many men looked upon
Baylor's dark hair and eyes and muttered that he was more Martel
than Targaryen, even though he proved a man who could win
respect with ease and was as open handed and just as his
father. Knights and Lords of the Dornish
Marches came to mistrust Aeron and Baylor as well.
And then they would look at Damon Blackfire, grown tall and
powerful, half a God among mortal men and with a
conqueror's sword in his possession, and wonder.
So as Egon the Unworthy's reign set the stage and sowed the
seeds for the Black Fire rebellions via the fathering of
so many of the main participants, the reign of his
son, Darren the Second, was a time for those seeds to grow,
for them to turn into great Princess, great bastards, and
great problems. As these seeds grew, so did they
begin to flower. The blooms took one of two
colors, red or black. Hello and welcome again to
another episode of History of Westeros podcast, the podcast
dedicated to the Song of Ice and Fire book series as well as
George RR Martin's Game of Thrones.
Not much, rather HB OS Game of Thrones, not much HBO discussion
today. We are all history today and we
have a very special guest with us.
Let me introduce Steven Atwell of Race of the Iron Throne.
You can go ahead and introduce yourself.
Steve, tell us who you are. OK, my name is Steven Atwell.
I write Race for the Iron Throne which is a chapter by chapter
and episode by episode study of the history and politics behind
The Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones.
I also do a podcast on Game of Thrones for lawyers, Guns and
money, and I do guest appearances on a number of
podcasts, including this one. I also write essays for Tower of
Lahan. Yeah, so nice string of titles
there. We're we're really happy to have
you on the show. And this was very fortuitous,
the timing, Steve, you've been working on your own essays on
the Blackfyre rebellions. And as we were working on these
this podcast, it just seemed like a natural fit.
And that's one of the great things about the Assange of Ice
and Fire community. There's good people out there
that are really knowledgeable and we're happy to have one of
the best here with us today. Unfortunately, there's no Shia
today. This is not related to the
illness that she had in our last episode.
She actually wasn't scheduled to be a part of this episode.
We had planned for it just to be me and Steve a while ago.
And that just kind of happened to work out for two in a row her
not being here. But no worries, she'll be back
for Part 3, which will focus on Damon Blackfyre himself, and
that will probably not be too far in the future.
So let us talk about a couple other things before we get
started. One other thing that Steve and
Shay and I have worked together on is the upcoming Tower of the
Hand publication, A Hymn for Spring, which is a collection of
essays by some of the people in the Song of Ice and Fire
community podcasters, essay writers, bloggers, etcetera.
And a lot of the people you guys have heard of before, there's
essays by by Amin Javadi of a podcast of Ice and Fire, Stefan
Sasa, Steven Atwell, myself and Ashaya.
And who else is in that I don't have?
Jeff Hartline. Jeff Hartline, of course, how
can I forget Brendan B Fish and I guess there's a couple others
who's I'm who I'm forgetting, but it's going to be, we're
going to talk about the book more.
The release date is April 15th. We actually have a firm date
finally. We've had a couple of delays,
but we're pleased to announce that it's coming out soon.
And of course, that's right after the TV season starts.
So there'll be lots of things to have fun with.
Now, as far as this episode goes, we're very excited to
continue with the tale of the Blackfyre Rebellions.
Of course, it's a huge topic. There's a lot of different
characters involved, and we've been trying to build up to it
gradually by showing the people that had the most to do with
putting it into the spot that it is now and getting it into the
fantasy history books that we love so much.
So we're going to to a few notes here on how this episode's going
to work. It's a little bit along the
lines of something we've been talking about a while, which is
getting a little bit more open discussion to mix in with our
scripting. Now, of course, the scripting
allows us to deliver things efficiently, but some people
also like the discussion feel, and there's really no reason why
we can't have a little of both. So this is this is a great
opportunity for us to do a lot of that because Steven is
extremely knowledgeable about this topic and we can kind of
just go off and and have conversations and see where it
goes. So we'll have a lot of a lot of
stuff that we prepared and worked really hard on and
researched, but we also have some things that we planned on
just seeing what happens and how it comes out during the episode.
So that should be fun. As with last time, we're going
to call Deron the second the good our Deron at times kind of
hot like how we called egg on the unworthy our egg on because
there's a lot of egg ONS and derons and all that.
The name should be a little easier to handle this time, but
still it can get a little confusing so that that warning
is important. Now the period immediately after
the Dance of the Dragons saw the so-called False Dawn, Hour of
the Wolf and Regents War. These were all little nicknames
for these short lived time periods that followed the Dance
of the Dragons. But after all these troubles
were over and Aegon the Third took over and started to rule in
his own right, there was a bit of an interim.
There were still troubles because there's always some
troubles, but there's there was nothing huge.
It was a bit of a interim period, we'll call it.
The hostilities that we're aware of during the time involved
aggression towards Doran. It was more of the Iron Throne
starting things rather than having a lot of outside or
external threats to worry about. So there may have been while
there may have been other rebellions or trouble during
this time, we don't really know of it, but Tyrion himself
reminded us that some things are inevitable.
I'm certain of nothing but winter and battle.
So part one, the first dragon after the Dragons.
This is the time period of 153 to 161.
Argaron was born on the last day of 153.
He was the first Targaryen born after the Dragons went extinct,
the last dragon having been weak and stunted.
Though the Targaryen line produced great warriors like
Agon the Conqueror, Magor, Damon the Rogue Prince, and the Young
Dragon, there were also a fair share of men from the Anies
Baylor the blessed model. Instead of being tall and well
muscled like his father before gluttony overcame him, Arderon
was spindly limbed and had a very unwarlike belly.
This was used against him later. Damon Blackfyre, whose
supporters saw him as no less than you know the warrior
Incarnate, would frequently point to this huge disparity
between them. It was a major piece of
propaganda, but we all know better than to judge a king by
how well he could fight. Robert Baratheon being the great
best example probably of that. In fact, none of those examples
were shining. In fact, with the possible
exception of the Conqueror himself.
And I'm not even 100% sold on him.
So gods and genetics may have stinted him in physical
characteristics, but think again of Tyrion.
He had a great mind. So Steven, let's start off here
with something simple. Let's let's start off with an
easy discussion topic just to get warmed up.
Who do you think the best 3 and worst three Targaryen kings
were? Especially keeping in mind where
you might rank Deron in reference to these guys, and
where you might rank Aegon in reference to these guys.
Yeah, I was actually thinking about this a bunch today.
I definitely think sort of in my top three.
I mean, Jeharis, the first, Aegon the Conqueror I think are
easy fits just because of how significant and how important
they are. But I was really split between,
you know, Deron and Aegon the 5th, and they kind of are are
similar in a way in that they are both kings who tried to push
a series of reforms, a series of changes very far and very fast
with mixed levels of success. Personally, because I'm on team
small folk, Aegon the 5th gets my pick for for top three and
they're on the second. Just kind of falls a little bit
short. OK.
So he maybe is in the top five, not quite the top three.
Sure. That's, that's about where I
would put him. I think I would, I would have
the Conqueror maybe a little bit lower.
My complaint with him is that he didn't set up his, his son's
very well to handle the problems that were coming.
And those were since those were pretty major problems, right?
I give him, I take a few knocks off of his book.
But Darren did a lot of those same things.
He he had a lot of things that I think saw he he should have seen
coming or did see coming and just didn't handle them
properly. What about your bottom?
So bottom 3 is, I mean Eris. The second is I think an easy,
but you know, he brought his house down.
He tried to murder hundreds of thousands of people.
He was completely insane. Yeah, the one that I, I'm added
on after reading the War of Ice and Fire and rereading the
Dunkin Egg story, Cruz is heiress, the first.
He really does seem to have been someone who sort of
systematically neglected his responsibilities as as King of
Westeros. That's a good point.
Yeah. And the, the, the third slot,
and I don't particularly rank these.
I was a little bit split between Aegon the 4th and Megor the
Cruel in the sense that I mean, Megor did some awful things.
And on the other hand, I don't think we can call him
ineffective. That's a good whereas Aegon the
4th, you know, was certainly kind of less, you know, if if we
stack up the thousands of lives versus, you know, a few 100, you
know, he was certainly less kind of explicitly violent, but more
neglectful and more, more incompetent.
So it's sort of how do you, how do you compare brutality versus
incompetence? Yeah, that is a tough call.
Incompetent brutality would be the worst I suppose.
Yeah. Which a little bit of Aries the
Second comes in there maybe a lot of them.
OK, so, but, but Speaking of Aegon the Unworthy, our Deron's
father, he of course started fathering bastards soon after
Deron's birth and may have already fathered a girl and
Selena Stokeworth before Deron was born.
Now Darren was close to his mother Nerys, and like her, he
was pious, so he most likely despised this embarrassment.
And of course, given how contentious Darren and Aegon's
relationships were in the future, it seems pretty likely
that it that they had these issues pretty early on as well.
It's, it's I'm, I'm of a, I'm of a mind to believe that, that
most things Darren sided with his mother and with Amon the
dragon knight. Would you, would you agree with
that, Steve? Yeah.
I mean, you know, you see at a a number of different points over
different issues that Naris, Amon and Darren will all kind of
agree on similar things. Whether it's, you know, the
relationship between Naris and Agon the 4th, whether it's war
with Dorn, whether it's the Brackens in the Blackwoods, they
all seem to to fall on the same side.
Yeah, and and with Baylor the Blessed a bit mixed in as well.
Of course, he'll he'll eventually die and be out of the
picture. But it does seem that given
personality types, these guys were all kind of natural fits.
His uncle Darren's uncle, the Dragon Knight of course, and his
grandfather Vassaris also would have been on his side at least
in part or in whole on many different issues.
But it doesn't seem like Aegon the Unworthy listened, even
when, say, several of them were, you know, ganging up on him,
telling him that something needed to go a certain way.
But what are you going to do? So basically I would think that
Aegon's treatment of nares, especially later in life with
the how the pregnancies threatened her life on top of
all the embarrassment the the the sleeping around and all
that, would have squarely put Deron in his mother's corner and
against his father very early on.
He was not yet 4 when Egon the Third, the king died.
Not his father obviously. Egon the Third, the Dragon Bane.
And now, though a three-year old is certainly capable of being
impacted by the death of Ken, we don't really know whether our
Deron and Egon the Dragon Bane had any kind of relationship.
Egon the Third was real kind of reclusive and he didn't seem to
have a lot of friends. And of course this was just a
three-year old kid. So it's, it's really hard to say
whether that was an issue or not.
So of course Darren the first was the next king, our Darren's
namesake, I suppose, and he ascended the throne and began
his conquest with Dorn, you know, almost right away.
Basically, he was not even of an age of majority yet.
So it seems that many of Darren's earliest memories would
be of his family of court and everything all being mobilized
to fight Dorn, which is a real interesting thing to think about
when you consider how much he was pro peace towards Dorn later
in life. He grows up as a child.
Everyone's against Dorn except for Baylor, and that is
something that we're going to touch on quite a bit.
So the young dragon was really active and things would have
been really busy, and then all of a sudden the war is on and,
you know, bunch of people are gone, the court is emptied out
and things are a lot different. So it would have been a really
interesting time for a young child to be affected by all
these court things that have all this enmity towards a nation of
these people He's never even heard of.
Deron's father, as we discussed in the last episode, likely
fought in the war alongside the Young Dragon and the Dragon
Night, and that might have been when when Egg on the Unworthy
developed a lot of his dislike for Dorn, which we know burned
very brightly. It may not have been so bad
early on, but eventually it was really bad and his young mind
would have also spun about quite a bit when he was 7, which is
when the young dragon died during a parlay in Dorn, and
that would have set a flame even worse.
All that anti Dornish sentiment. So that is our intro to Darren's
young age. Now we're going to move on to
him as the apparent, heir apparent.
But first, we have recently joined the audible.com partner
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You can get a 30 day free trial. Don't doesn't cost you a dime
and you get 1 free download with that.
Why not download the World of Ice and Fire or Game of Thrones?
Try out the audiobooks? That is one of the things I've
done to get myself so well versed in the material is when
I'm doing chores I just listen to listen to the audiobooks and
podcasts of course. Anyway, Part 2 Apparent, heir
apparent. Now this would be the time of
161 to 72172. Mostly the rain of bail or the
blessed. Also the rain of Viserys the
First but or sorry, Viserys the Second, but his reign was only
about a year and there were not a whole lot of that is terribly
relevant to this episode was going to be covered there.
So even though the young dragon was a shining star and was the
you know, the the pride of House Targaryen, it was for a very
short time and he was unmarried at the time of his death and
that caused a big domino effect. Baylor the blessed takes the
throne and immediately starts making huge changes.
He sets aside his wife almost right away, takes Sepsin's vows,
and he did his walk to Doran before this probably.
We're not sure of the timeline. What do you think, Steve?
Do you have a? Do you have a thoughts on which
happened first or does it matter?
I'm a little bit, to be honest, I'm up in the air about that.
After rereading the World of Ice and Fire, the Velor section, I'm
a little inclined to think that that part might have happened
after he got back because a lot of his sort of quote UN quote
madness was attributed to the the the surviving poison that he
he picked up in Dorne. That's a good point because it
when he was bitten by the Vipers, it said that he took
almost half a year to recover and wasn't they couldn't even
get him back to King's Landing. They had, he had to recover in
Storm's End. And while we can't be sure that
the Vipers are what, you know, made him deranged, he's, you
know, it's not like we haven't seen other Targaryens be
deranged. It's a, it's a good theory.
I would certainly not dismiss that.
And it explains a lot of his behavior.
But despite Baylor's derangement and his strange policies,
Arderon was a big fan of him. But more importantly for the
moment, Baylor becoming king meant almost certainly that our
Deron would become king. It went from Deron the first,
the young dragon, a young and vital likely to have children,
eventually, to him being dead and us having a Septon king
who's never going to have kids. And even if they he did have
kids, they would be illegitimate because he took Septon's vows.
That meant that the throne was definitely going to pass to
well, beside the small chance that it was going to pass to
Dana the Defiant. Let's skip that for now.
It passed to Viserys the Second and then to Egon the 4th and
then to Deron our dare on. And from his point of view, this
is probably how what it would look like.
He all he had to do was outlive this Septon king who fasted all
the time. He had to outlive his
grandfather, who's 30 years older, and he had to outlive his
father who drank and ate and hoard his way into an early
grave. So I think this was very
predictable and I would have to say that others would have seen
this coming as well. I mean, what's you think of
ambitious people, What you think of people who look ahead and you
can see who's going to have the throne eventually and people who
noticed that Darren would probably be king within a
10/15/20 years, I think they'd have started to befriend him.
What do you think about that, Steve?
Yeah, I think that makes sense. And we know that he gathered a
large group of supporters around him, especially after his father
becomes king and it becomes very clear that his father is not
very good at administering the country.
You know, it says that basically a lot of Lords who are unhappy
with Aegon the 4th kind of looked to Deron as a potential
kind of beneficial influence and a future correction.
Right on. And of course, it's, it's a, the
the main thing here is that Baylor actually married, was the
one who made the decision to marry Daron to the Dornish.
That whole thing started with him.
And Daron, of course, would continue this pattern later in
life by making another important marriage with with the Dornish.
But we'll get to that. So Princess Mariah would become
Daron's bride, but this wouldn't happen for several years because
this marriage was arranged when they were both very young.
But so again, we're looking at a young boy, a young Prince who
has seen his whole his life is is in in a strange spot here.
He has grown up seeing everything around him devoted to
attacking and conquering Dorn. And by the time he's 7, he's
still processing all this when it all flips.
And within a year or so now he's being told he's going to marry
these people. So I don't know how a young kid
handles that, but. But he, he, he certainly did
somehow, one way or another. So this is the first Targill,
Targill, Targaryen Martel Union. That's what we'll call it,
Targill. That's what a Targaryen Martel
union is from now on. So this would cause enormous
friction. And this is going to be a main
catalyst for all kinds of events throughout this episode that
we'll be discussing. So it's also a, but it's also a
major shift in the type of power that House Targaryen is
wielding. From the time of Aegon the
Conqueror to the end of the Dance, you have the Tar.
House Targaryen is this unbeatable family of dragonlords
who anyone who thought of rebelling in the time of the
Dragons was kind of fooling themselves.
And the ones who did it, they didn't really have, the only
ones who had any sort of real success rebelling against the
dragonlords were other dragonlords.
So the only people who really had any traction were the crazy
religious zealots. And we all know how that works.
So here's another discussion point we want to get into.
Let's talk about some of these marriages, Aegons, Darrons, and
how there was some interesting kind of unusual parallels.
First of all, we have the racism.
People are racist towards the Dornish in the Iron, especially
the people in the Marcher area, certain areas.
But what's funny about that is Aegon the 4th's wife was also a
foreigner. So, Steve, tell me, why was that
not a problem for Aegon, for Aegon, but it is a problem for
Darren? I think it has to do with the
different ways that the, the Westerosi see the Roynar, if you
will, versus the Valyrians that the the Lycini, the Taroshi, the
Mirish, etcetera are come out of that Valyrian freehold and are
sort of seen therefore as kind of quasi Targaryens.
It's a little bit like the House Valeria, which is they're
they're seen as similar enough. And also, you know, it doesn't
threaten the, the sort of internal power dynamics of
Westeros that, you know, if you know, Viserys the second or
Aegon the 4th, they marry outside of, you know, they marry
outside of outside of Westeros. That doesn't change the internal
power dynamics. Darren marrying into Dorn means
that, you know, not only is the relationship between Dorn and
Westeros going to change and there's kind of the interesting
thing of at this time, they're at peace, but they're not part
of the same Kingdom. So, but at the same time, it now
means that the king, the future kings of, of Westeros are going
to be part Dornish. So for for people who you know
fought in Dara on the first war, I imagine for some of them it
might have looked like somehow the Markell's had conquered
Westeros instead of vice versa. Yeah, that's a good point.
Because they got and got what they wanted.
The the Westerosi didn't get what they wanted and the Dornish
are the ones getting getting married to the throne.
That's a pretty big deal. So, yeah, and, and that's a good
point also about the Lysenia is that there is no enmity towards
and there is no built up enmity. There's all kinds of people
throughout Westeros, even in modern times, who hate the
Dornish because they're different, but also because of
ancient grudges and thing, you know, all these old wars,
especially between like the Mart Martels and the Tyrells and the
Martels and the and the marcher Lords, not just the Martels, but
any the the Dornish Lords along the bone way and the Prince's
Pass. But as we alluded to in Part 1,
young, the young dragon and Baylor the blessed were brothers
in extremes, not unlike Darren the second's father and uncle
Wagon the unworthy name Prince Amon the dragon knight, very
different from each other, but also very extreme in their own
ways. These were the people that
Darren the second grew up around.
These were his influences. These were his role models, and
I can only imagine what it's like to have such extreme
personalities of such different types as you know around you
constantly when you're growing up.
I have no idea how to relate to that, but it's very clear that
the one who impressed Daron the most was Baylor.
He took after his cousin in many ways.
He wanted peace. He was.
All throughout his reign, it's talked about how peaceable he
was. He always preferred the more
peaceable solution. That obviously reminds US of of
Baylor. He was the piety of course, is
a, is a good parallel, but he wasn't crazy.
That's the important thing. That's not a parallel.
Daron the second, No, no hint of derangement whatsoever.
He wasn't perfect, obviously, he made plenty of mistakes, but he
was smart. He's clearly a smart guy.
And he wasn't a zealot like Baylor either.
So by 170 Baylor had ruled for about 9 years and had done a lot
of good things, some crazy things, but regardless he still
had a big fan in Deron the Good. Well, he wasn't there on the
good yet in our Deron. So when Deron had his first
child he named him Baylor. Baylor would become Baylor Break
Spear, not at all like Baylor the Blessed, except that he was
a good guy, but not a crazy Septon guy.
And not long after that, though, Damon Waters, soon to be Damon
Blackfire, was born to Damon the Defiant and Baylor the Blessed
fasted himself to death. So things changed really
quickly. So here's another discussion
point. Let's talk about Baylor and
Deron and how Baylor would have mentored Deron directly or
indirectly, and how and what pieces of his personality kind
of lived on in Deron. What?
What do you think, Steven I? Mean, I, I get the sense that
Deron kind of looked up to Baylor, but in a kind of remote
way. I don't get the sense that they
were sort of that Baylor was teaching Darren on a day-to-day
basis, that it's more that he sort of saw him as an ideal, as
an idealist, as someone who sort of example should be striven
for. But I don't get the sense that
he learned everything he knew from from Baylor.
If anything, I'd actually say it's probably more likely that
he had a, a sort of that kind of mentor mentee relationship with
Viserys the second with his grandfather because he was his
grandfather, who is kind of has that same quality of an
administrator of someone who's running the day-to-day and
making sure that, you know, the government is running
efficiently. The you know, the books are
being balanced. That makes sense.
That makes a lot of sense. You know, and that sort of
Viserys the Second strikes me as someone who's always trying to
take that middle path, that sort of the road of moderation.
And I see that as a strong influence on on Deron.
I would also guess that Deron saw so much turmoil in his early
years because of all these conflicts and it may have left
an impression on him showing, Hey, look, Baylor came in and
did things the peaceful way and that worked better.
He may have just been kind of looked at the results and said,
hey, look, they tried to conquer Dorn.
They tried to they did it with Dragons.
They failed all these times. And then the one guy comes in
and does it with peace and it and it looks to be working.
Hey, that that sometimes you know that the influence is a
bottom line sort of thing. He just looked at what was
working even though it hadn't fully worked by that point.
So this, but this would set up, like you said, the relationship
between Darren Arderon and Viserys.
The second. I agree with you that it was
probably a good relationship. One thing that puzzles me a
little bit is that we, we often see the continuation of certain
names. We often see, especially in
these noble houses, They re they'll use the recycle names
that have been used a lot. And you would think that if
Darren had a great relationship with Viserys, you would have
think maybe he would have named one of his kids Viserys, but he
didn't that that doesn't mean a whole lot.
But I do think it's interesting to take a look at these things.
But we'll be talking a bit more about some of their some of the
names and what we can get out of these things.
It is possible, however, that you remember that nares, his
mother had multiple stillbirths. For all we know, one of the
kids, one of those stillborn babies could have been Visaris.
My, my pet theory is that the the first Daenerys, the Daenerys
who was also, you know, the, the daughter of of Egon, she was
born with a twin, a male twin. How about that twin being named
the Saris? Then we have the Saris and
Daenerys the First. That's that's possible.
It it might also be the case that I mean, he might have
admired Viserys in terms of his abilities, but the sort of the
scandal that grew up around Viserys the second, the
suggestion that he poisons his own nephew, that that sort of
might have left too big a sort of, you know, in the same way
that you, if you're a sane person, don't name your kid
Magor that it might have been seen at the time not politically
wise to name your kid Viserys. Yeah, that's a good point.
That's a very good point. Speaking of suspected murders,
we touched on the possibility that Aegon may have had
something to do with murdering either Baylor or Viserys.
And if Deron suspected any of that, well, especially if he
suspected his father or any of his father's cronies of having
something to do with murdering his favorite Baylor, that would
certainly put a big dent in their relationship.
Especially because, you know, there's no way for him to have
proved it or to have gotten any sort of justice for it.
But again, even if that's not the case, there's just so many
things for Daron and Egon to disagree over and to get upset
about. Let's just run through a couple
of them real quick. The danger to his mother Naris,
which we already talked about his father hating Dorn.
This is this is Daron's wife's country.
His own father hates his daughter in What?
Other ones, OK, well, there's the fact that his father had an
affair with Dana the Defiant. That's.
Right. You know, is going to is going
to claim Damon Blackfire as his own son, and that's kind of, you
know, it it it's sort of the reverse of you're not my real
dad. It's like, you know, this is my
favorite son, you know, right here.
There's all of the other bastards.
And, you know, one of the things that I wrote about in in the
black and red essays is that these bastards are not just a
sort of a personal embarrassment.
They're also a political threat. There's a real suggestion that
some of these bastards, you know, Damon being the the most
prominent, might have a claim to the throne and that's a threat
to, to dare on the 2nd. And then there's just sort of,
you know, everything else, you know, corrupt, you know, massive
political corruption, greed, massive weight gain, alcoholism,
general disregard for the law, you know, ego.
The 4th was just not a nice guy to be around.
He is just not. He's an embarrassing father.
Even though he was the king, he's an extremely embarrassing
father. OK, that is that is Part 2.
We're going to move on to the era where Aegon the 4th was
actually king when things got worse, when Aegon's ability to
his corruption and violence and cruelty and apathy for other
people in the realm in general were a much bigger problem
because he was sitting in the driver's seat.
But first, Steven, you just mentioned your essay series, The
Blacks and the Reds, which we didn't talk about too much when
we introduced you. Why don't you say a few things
about those real quick? Tell people where?
To find So if you go to Tower of the Hand, I've done a series of
four essays on the Blackfyre rebellions called The Blacks and
the Reds. Part 1 looks at what are the
origins of the rebellion. Part 2 looks at the first
rebellion, Part 3 looks at the 2nd, 3rd and 4th rebellions, and
then Part 4 looks at the Golden Company and the War of Ninepenny
Kings. And sort of what can we expect
from the Blackfyre causes? And I personally enjoyed reading
them very much and it helped me get some of my own ideas
straight. Some of the ideas that you will
hear today, you'll see in Steve's writings as well.
And if you've already read them, you'll be hearing some of them
again. It's, it's some of these things.
There's just so many angles. I'm, I'm impressed with as as
many people as covered some of these topics.
There's still new insights possible and, and new things
that can be said about them. It's really amazing how how deep
the material goes. But before we start Part 3 real
quick, one way that we have been giving back to people that have
supported the show when we do. When we started our Patreon
campaign, we started giving episodes out early, meaning that
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links are given out to people a few days in advance.
We've started giving the episodes out early also to
people who do the traditional straightforward PayPal
donations. So if you go to
historyofwesteros.com and click on the donate button and you
know, support the show any way you can, we will also e-mail you
the next couple of episodes a little bit early.
That doesn't include TV show episodes because those are going
to come out as soon as we make them anyway, onward Part 3.
Dragon Prince on thin ice. This is the air, the era of 172
to 184, basically the entire reign of egg on the 4th.
How did Darren the second not yet Darren the second?
How did he manage living under his horrible father who he
disagreed with on so much? Quote.
In the last years of his reign, Prince Daron proved the chief
obstacle to Aegon's misrule. No surprise there, right?
We already talked about how many things they disagreed on.
Just imagine how worse things would have been if Daron wasn't
there kind of check his father and keep him back.
So in a very short time, we had Baylor die and a whole bunch of
things happened as a result of his death.
And then Viserys was only on the throne for a year and then
quickly egg on the 4th ascends and things all start to go
crappy pretty much right away. One thing that really stands out
to me here and something that that we, Steve and I, talked a
lot about in in preparing for this episode of some of the
similarities between the situation with Aegon and and
Deron as compared to some other parallels that we're a bit more
familiar with, say, Aries and Rhaegar.
There's a bunch of parallels here.
Steven, start us off. Yeah.
So I mean, one thing that we can definitely see is that both
Aegon the 4th and Eris the second were sort of known to be
initially kind of charming womanizers who kind of get
steadily crazy as time goes on. They're both sort of become
fascinated with wildfire. Aegon the 4th is said to be
cruel and Heiress the Second certainly could be cruel.
You know, I mean, you can see examples of Aegon's cruelty and
things like, you know, what happened to Sir Terence Toyn and
his mistress. And, you know, he just sort of
generally like to use and then dispose of people.
I wouldn't be surprised if he burned a few people too.
We don't hear that. But I wouldn't be surprised if
if if we did hear about that later, it would be like, oh,
well, shocking. I would be like, shrug, what
else? That's just right in line with
the kind of things he did. And of course, there's also the
womanizing. It was their their brand of
womanizing was different. Aegon the force kind of kept
mistresses for a while, whereas Aries kind of got tired of them
within a matter of weeks sometimes or days.
But but they were both womanizers.
They both also had a lot of stillborn children now with
Aries that seem to just really fuel his derangement, his
growing insanity. And anyone who's read The World
of Ice and Fire, you see all these crazy things he did in
response to thinking it to the still burst and accusing his wet
nurses of poisoning the babies and all these just really awful
things. We don't know how Aegon the 4th
handled the stillbirths of his of his sister wife Nerys.
I mean, I doubt it made him happy.
I don't know if it made him really upset either, but he did
seem to like having children. What?
What do you think Stephen? Did he have any humanity?
I think he was a little bit more, I mean, I don't know about
humanity. I think Aegon was a little bit
more secure in his, I don't know, masculinity or or
fertility because he had so many bastards that Eris doesn't seem
to have had any bastards. Very good point, which is kind
of interesting given that he he supposedly slept around a lot.
So I think Akon the 4th sort of felt well, you know, OK, you
know, this woman is clearly not it is less about him than it was
about his wife because he could look to all these other women
and say, well, they've given me so many children and clearly
it's not my problem. But it's also the case that, you
know, that accusation of infidelity is a political tool
as well as a, a sort of an instrument of sort of personal,
you know, frustration or, or, or dislike.
And that you know, it, a lot of it has to do with kind of their
tricky relation or tricky is a, is a really light way to put it.
But their their their bad relationships with their with
their Crown Princess that they sort of an accusation of
infidelity is a way to cast doubt on the legitimacy and
authority of their oldest sons. Absolutely.
And that parallel was something we weren't really aware of until
the World of Ice and Fire. As far as Aries and Rhaegar, we
learned that Aries threatened to put Vissaris ahead of Rhaegar in
the line of succession, which he technically has the right to do.
That's this is a good point to remind people of how that works.
It's a commonly held misconception that the throne
just always passes to the eldest son.
That's tradition, and that's usually how it's handled.
And part of the reason it's usually handled that way is
because it's so traditional that if you don't do that, it often
results in civil war. But technically speaking, the
law states that the king can name who he wants as his heir.
So both Aries and Aegon the 4th had legal right to do what they
were doing. So the threat was not empty.
When Deron the Second hears that he might get, you know, pushed
aside for one of Aegon the 4th's bastards, he has to take that
seriously. So there, you know, there's
other parallels here. There's other eras in the
Targaryen line where there's some similarities.
You don't have to get too deep into them, but consider just the
similarities also between the Blacks and the Greens, blacks
and the Reds, blacks and the greens.
That fits nicely, doesn't it? Also a nice and Magor a nice and
Magor had, you know, Magor was the kind of powerful warrior
like figure and a nice was kind of the weak, like not not
knowing what he's doing kind of situation.
Darren knew what he was doing, but he had the whole kind of
weakling image and surrounded himself with, you know, courtly
types rather than manly types. And that was a problem for
anyone who perceived Daron is weak, even though he was
actually pretty smart. But the first major controversy
in terms of Aegon threatening to set aside Daron for one of his
bastards was not with Damon Blackfyre.
Remember, Damon Blackfyre wasn't revealed to be Damon Blackfyre
until the year 182 and we're still in the early one 70s here.
Damien Blackfyre is only about two to three years old and he
and Aegon hasn't claimed him yet.
So what we had the first controversy was the Bracken
controversy. Now, Stephen, tell us a bit
about this. Sure.
So at this point, Barbara Bracken is Aegon the Force
mistress, and her father has become Lord Hand through this.
This is sort of a kind of a good parallel back to the sort of the
history of Henry the Eighth and The Tudors in which kind of
being a royal mistress is a good way for an ambitious family to
try to get a leg up. And especially, you know, when
Barbara, you know, looks to be giving Egon the 4th a son that
her father and nearest looks like she might be dying in a
child in another childbirth that they the Brackens start to get.
Ideas above their station that they could potentially make
Barbara Bracken the new queen and thus her son, you know, sort
of retroactively becomes a true born Targaryen.
Right on here is a quote that gives a good summarize
summarization of how it all went.
Basically, once Narius recovered this whole plot that the
Brackens had to try and supplant Naris half of the of the
Targaryen line there was kind of blew up in their faces Quote
After the Queen's recovery, the scandal proved Barba's undoing
as young Prince Daron and his uncle the Dragon Knight forced
Aegon to send her and the bastard away.
The boy raised at Stonehedge by the Brackens was called Agor
Rivers, but in time became known as Bittersteel.
This would be one of the many things Bittersteel would have to
be bitter about. The the the list is going to be
really huge by the time we get to his episode, which will be
part four. Yeah.
But notice again that this is an example of Deron and Nares and
Amon the Dragon Knight all kind of being united, sort of a
faction within within the court there.
And this is a good example of them kind of working together on
something that was equally embarrassing and problematic for
all of them, right? And and you can see how how
bitter Steel would resent all of this and that, you know, he gets
the short end of the stick in part because, you know, he must
have looked around to himself. And certainly he probably was
told this by his mother or his grandfather, that you could have
been the Crown Prince if it hadn't been for day or all.
And then he can look to the Blackwoods and and Bloodraven
and say, hang on, why? Why did I get exiled and he
didn't? You know why this unfair, unjust
treatment? So a lot for better Seal to
reflect back on as he's slowly pushed outside of the inner
circle and realizes what could have been.
So when I I mentioned that Agon was threatening to name one of
his bastards ahead of Deron, Bittersteel was the first choice
because there were no other choices.
Remember, Damon Waters was not yet Damon Blackfire.
No one knew who who his father was.
So when Damon or so when rather when Agon the force threatening
to name one of his children ahead of Deron, The only cat or
the only candidate is Agor. So that will really set the
stage later. So.
But these threats continued as Aegon's reign went on.
It got worse after. Here's a quote.
After the death of his siblings, the king began to make barely
veiled references to his son's alleged illegitimacy, something
he dared only because the dragon knight was dead.
His courtiers and hangers on aped the king, and this calumny
spread. As we'll see this this calumny
would continue well into Darren's reign, which won't
start for another 8 to 10 years. We're not exactly sure when this
sorry. Another 5 to 8 years, and then
even beyond that all the way up to the Black Fire rebellions.
What's interesting on top of this though, is how this grew.
Basically, egg on the fourth was pushing these rumors, but he he
they started more minor, but he couldn't go too far because, as
we said, Aegon, or rather aiming the dragon knight and his own
wife were around to stop him. But as these people died off,
Aegon was more free to to name these people and to give give
these accusations and to do these crappy things to his
family. So but ultimately he never
actually did anything. He never he does were just
threats. It it never went beyond that,
but the threat still caused a lot of problems.
But why? Why did Aegon never actually go
through with it? Let's talk about that, Steven.
Sure. I mean, well, part of what's
going on here behind the scenes is that there is a conflict over
what to do with Dorn, that Aegon the 4th wants to go to war with
Dorn. Darren the Second is very much
against it. And, you know, part of this has
to do with, you know, Aegon the 4th is a warrior, or at least
used to be a warrior before he got back.
Daron the Second never was. But a lot of this has to do with
dynastic issues that Daron is going to back his wife's family.
You know, House Martel is behind Daron.
And that means that, you know, even though the king wants war
with Dorn, you know, he's he's not ready for it.
I mean, especially after his wooden dragon.
Crash and burn he did, very. Bad.
So, you know any, so he knows that getting rid of of Deron
means war with the Martels. And especially given that, you
know, Deron has other supporters who looked at him as this kind
of bastion of good government, you know that it would mean a
civil war. And that, you know, however
selfish, and, you know, however much Aegon might actually
believe these rumors, you know, he doesn't feel that he can pull
the trigger. Part of it, I would guess, like
you said, it's he's afraid of these, of their, of his son's
allies and what it might mean. Another part of me just thinks
that he got his butt kicked the first time, he's afraid of what
might happen the second time around.
And he's lazy. He doesn't want to fight a war.
A war might take away from his pleasures.
He might not get to drink the greatest wines anymore.
Like would it? What would it do to his getting
Dornish wine if they were at war with Dorn?
Can he? Is he going to be able to sleep
around as much if he has to do war councils?
I don't know. It's funny to think about
someone's laziness being the thing that's like, I'm going to
start a war, I'm too lazy. It's just kind of AI get a kick
out of thinking about that. What are some other possible
allies for Darren the second because it wasn't just the ones
that wasn't just his natural family eyes.
It wasn't just the Martells and perhaps some other Dornish
houses. We have this quote that shed
some light on it. While some rather while some
took advantage of the king because of his corruptible
nature quote, others who condemned the King's behavior
began to flock to Prince Darren. So it was also just a matter of
honor. And not everyone is just as
ambitious and out for themselves.
A lot of people are, maybe even a huge percentage, but they're
still good people. They're still people at least
openly, who are not going to just be lickspittles and follow
this awful king and and back him.
So Darren got a lot of allies just because his father was so
awful and some of these allies were powerful, like his own
mother and Prince Amon, the Dragon Knight.
Very important people. Who are some other ones that you
think of, Stephen? I mean, I think the best
candidate is, is House Aaron of the veil.
They're a great house, which makes them very powerful.
They're also traditionalists. You know, they're, they sort of,
you know, their motto is as high as honor.
You know, they take the sort of the, the traditions of honor
and, you know, gentility very seriously.
So they would kind of look down on Aegon the 4th, who is very
dishonorable in his behavior. And it's also the fact that they
are tied into the line of succession as well.
Every Targaryen is part errand. So they have this sort of built
in, just built in allegiance to the family.
And they don't want to see the traditions of succession
uprooted so that Aegon the 4th can make some bracken, you know,
his new queen. So I think that would be sort of
your best bet. You know, like allied number
one. That probably was on Darren's
side. That makes sense.
And there would have been of course, a a smattering of crown
lands, houses and some other Dornish houses.
There'd be people on both sides. We can't know for sure.
We don't know who a lot of these Lords were and and who knows
what the ambitions of people at this time were.
But we can certainly cover it with broad strokes.
We can certainly detail what the main point the political points
were, what types of things people would have been aiming
for and what might have pushed them to one side or the other.
Just as there were people who Aegon pushed away by being who
he was and how Deron acquired allies because of who he was and
his family ties that led to another domino falling, there
were plenty of houses strongly disposed towards disliking Deron
for who he was. Now people disliked Aegon
because he was corruptible and terrible, but Deron?
There were people who didn't like him either.
This was a problem for him as the heir to the throne and Aegon
the 4th, not a total idiot, capitalized on this as well
Quote using the hatred for the Dornish men that still burned in
the Marches, the Stormlands and the Reach to suborn some of
Darren's allies and use them against his most powerful
supporters. So we have Lords and Knights
already taking sides and now things start to get divided even
more can really see that even though we're still quite a ways
away from the Blackfire rebellion breaking out, people
are already taking sides. The battle lines are already
being drawn so that I think that's really interesting and
and it's. Yeah, it's, it's not, it's not
blacks and Reds yet, but it's, it's the King's party versus the
Prince's party. Yes.
And you're either in one camper or in the other.
And eventually the the king, people in the King's party, a
lot of them are going to turn into to the blacks, the future
blacks. And a lot of the ones who are
with Darren are going to be the ones that stay loyal to the
throne. And they'll become the Reds.
They'll be some crossover as time passes, people will always
find reason to switch. And certainly some Lords will
die and their heirs will have different attitudes than their
fathers. And of course, late in Egg on
the Forest rain Eamon if the dragon knight dies and Nares
dies a year later, that would have perhaps weakened Deron's
position at court. Some of his most important
allies were were dead. Neither of them were had died of
old age. Of course, Nares died of just
being weak and and sickly and having all these pregnancies.
And Eamon of course died tragically, saving his unworthy
brother from the twins. So one of the biggest questions
of the Blackfyre Abelians in general is what are the actual
like? We kind of have been taking it a
bit for granted, the possibility that Aries Aries that Aegon was
lying. We just sort of assumed that
Aegon was making it all up. Steve, is there any chance that
Aemon the Dragon Knight was actually Darren's?
Father Well, here's the way I look at it.
I mean, I know a lot of people don't believe this, but the way
I see it is it's it's pretty clear that Naris and Amon loved
each other in a way that went beyond the usual brother
sisterhood. And while the argument is often
used that a perfect knight like Eamon the dragon knight would
never violate his vows. One of the things that if you
look to sort of real world chivalric romance and you know,
Arthurian myth is that often perfect Knights do have this
kind of fatal weakness of love. That, you know, Lancelot was
supposedly the best knight in the Round Table and he still
betrays King Arthur with Guanavir and kind of brings the
fall of Camelot so. Very good point.
You know, I, I don't, I don't think it's 100% either way.
And I don't think, I think that's kind of a problem is that
there was doubt but no way to tell.
And that part of the reason why Egon the 4th never pulled the
trigger on this is that he was never quite sure.
And, you know, ultimately, I mean, this is a world without
DNA tests and everyone's brothers and sisters anyway, So
it would be incredibly difficult to tell even that.
So you know, without a witness, how do you prove that you know
Naris and Amon did or did not sire dare?
Yeah, it's it's a good. There's a couple 2 points I want
to add to that. Just because Aegon the Unworthy
was such an asshole who slept around and had a lot of
bathrooms, that doesn't mean that thing.
We're not told the truth of Amon the Dragon Knight a little
differently than is than is accurate.
It's like you said, the Lancelot example is perfect, but it goes
beyond that here as well. Because the Targaryens wrote
history. History is written by the
winners. They're not going to say bad
things about the great Prince Amon the Dragon Knight.
If if he had dirt, you know, if he had skeletons in his closet,
if there were things he did that were covered up, the Targaryens
would probably keep it that way. They don't other than Aegon
himself, the brother who wanted to shame Amon, there's who would
want to throw shade on the memory of this great man when
they're all related to him. They want to say, hey, I'm
related to Amon the Dragonite. He was my ancestor.
That just gives honor to anyone who who makes that claim.
We all know how big a deal ancestors are in in Westeros and
in medieval times. So it's quite possible that what
we know about AIM and the Dragon Knight is at least a little bit
slanted towards him being so perfect.
It it does. I don't know, maybe he wasn't
really that perfect. That doesn't mean he cheated,
slept with his own sister, but yeah.
It's there's, yeah. I mean, it's you know, it's I
think part of the thing that we also have to keep in mind is
that this is George RR Mark. He doesn't make perfect people,
you know, or he and he doesn't make total villains either.
You know, Egon the fourth was a bad person in a lot of ways, but
he was not a kind of mustache twirling villain.
He had motives. He had, you know, things in his
life that he cared about. So, you know, that that
motivated him and Drew and and and sort of, you know, caused
him to do things. So, you know, I don't think he
acted, you know, because for the evils, he didn't do it for the
evils. Right on.
So Deron spent his final years on Dragonstone.
I guess after this time when he lost some of his allies at
court. He also by this time had all of
his sons were born by this point.
We're going to talk about his sons a lot in the next section,
but they were all born by then. There's four of them.
So he had his own family. His father was just getting
worse and worse all the time, and he lost his allies, so he
just stayed. He spent more and more of his
time on Dragonstone, away from his father, maybe thinking that
the the more distance between them, the less friction they'll
be. Maybe his father threatened him
more often when he was around. Maybe just his presence was a
problem, and maybe just by separating the two, it kind of
let things calm down a bit. However, it is from all
appearances Egg on the Fourth was still talking, was still
making threats and and calling other, you know, threatening to
set Darren aside, certainly not doing anything to stop the
gossip. But he did die at age 49.
And what we wonder? This is an interesting question
I have. How much time passed between
this deathbed legitimization of all his bastards and the actual
his actual death and Darren's coronation?
Deathbed doesn't mean you know he's going to be dead within a
couple hours. You can be on your deathbed for
a month. You can be on your deathbed for
longer. And Aegon, from all accounts,
Aegon the 4th died very gradually.
He didn't just croak of a heart attack one day.
He had those crazy fleshworms growing in.
And it's disgusting but sounds like a slow so that's a good
question. Was Daron.
Do you think Daron maybe had some time to prepare?
Do you think he knew in advance about any of this?
I'm a little sceptical just because, I mean, if he had a lot
of time, I think he would have had a better strategy.
He just seems smart enough. I think this was something that
he just did not expect to happen and then just kind of had to
deal with it on the on the spur of the moment.
Yeah, that's that. That makes sense to me.
I, I picture, you know, I picture Robert Baratheon and GR
Mormont and their, their death beds were kind of quick,
relatively speaking. And they made their dying
wishes, you know, take care of, you know, rule forming Ned or,
you know, make sure Jorah takes the black, all those things.
Those were a bit more noble requests than, you know, make
all my bastards Targaryen. So either way though.
Yeah. And, and if we're, if we're
following kind of historical parallels, one of the things
about Henry the Eighth on his deathbed is that he changed his
mind really fast and, and repeatedly he made a lot of
wills and sort of, you know, he would seem to die and then seem
to recover and then seem to die again.
So part of the issue may have just been uncertainty that that,
you know, up until he finally croaked, no one was exactly sure
what his sort of the last will was.
You know that there may have been previous drafts and he may
have made, you know, given orders and then countermanded
orders so that there was sort of uncertainty about what was going
to happen. Well, that's interesting.
I did not know that about Henry the Eighth.
That's really cool. OK, so we're about to move on to
Part 4. In the meantime, real quick, a
couple, I guess a couple months ago, I was told by our Hand of
the King, Cash Craig that he was having a lot of fun with the
Telltale Games, Game of Thrones games.
And so we tried them out on his recommendation, partly because
he mentioned that they had some really cool flavor for the
world. It's it's actually does a good
job of capturing the feel of Game of Thrones.
And of course, there's some of the Game of Thrones actors do
voices for it. Have you tried the games that
Steve? I have I'm way behind.
I did episode 1 and I need to do episode 2 and 3.
I, I kind of didn't like how I did episode one.
There were certain like I wanted to ask more about the N Grove
and I wanted to like make sure that this character was in this
place or that I grabbed these things.
So I think what I'm going to do is like go through and get the
the the run through that I really am sure that I want
before I do episodes 2:00 and 3:00 and then I'm going to do a
write up on race for the. Iron Oh cool, we we just played
Shay and I played Part 2 just about a week ago and we had a
lot of fun with it. We haven't tried Part 3 yet.
And yeah, I recommend it folks, if you're, if you're looking for
a game, you can play it on your phone.
So it's it's kind of fun to be able to just do it out and
about. You can get it through our site,
www.historyofwesteros.com and the bottom right corner there,
we've got links to purchase the Tell Tale games.
They're only like 6 bucks each, so it's a pretty good deal.
Anyway, it's moving on to part 4, cleaning up the unworthy
mess. This is the period of 184 to
187, roughly the basically the start of King Darren the
second's rain. Rain in in a world of ice and
fire, the world of ice and fire. Rather, we have Maester Yandel
who states, quote, he was conscientious in his duties to
the realm and sought to stabilize it in the wake of
Aegon's deathbed decree. So the maesters give Darren some
credit for, you know, trying to do his best.
And in some cases, he did a pretty good job.
I would he did a good job overall in identifying where a
lot of problems were. I think he was good at finding
the problems and attacking them, although he didn't always have
the right solution. I don't think he was, it was it
was. I don't think there were any
cases of where he just didn't want to deal with it and it got
out of hand. I think he either tried to deal
with it or dealt with it and did a did a good job or dealt with
it and didn't do a good job. I don't think he was ever lazy
like his father. I maybe the kind of a maybe a
bit of a Tywin parallel with Tywin's father was, you know,
obviously a week and people laughed at him and that kind of
made Tywin hard and worked harder that that really impacted
his personality. Maybe there's a bit of Deron.
We're seeing a bit of Deron there.
He wanted to not be lazy and corruptible like his father was.
Do you think there's any merit to that, Steve?
Yeah, I think that makes sense. I mean, he certainly, you know,
wanted to to start his new administration fresh and kind of
sweep out the old administration with the with the broom.
Yes. So he started in fact by doing
that exact thing. He started by removing all the
members of the King Small Council and replacing them with
man of his own choosing, most of whom proved wise and capable
counselors. It was a year and more before
the City Watch was similarly repaired, so he had to think of
how awful Janos Slint was. It was probably some sort of
Janos Slint type figure. We we hear about all the.
Things that Janos did, even later in the books, we hear
about a few of the horrible things he did, about how a lot
of the guys, a lot of the highest officers were giving him
part of their pay and that was the price of their promotion in
the 1st place. When someone just corrupts so
many people in an organization like that, you can imagine how
long it would to to fix that. What, what, what do you think
about that, Steve? What is the process?
Well, I mean, especially, you know, if if you think about it,
you know, Janos Flint was just the commander of the of the gold
quotes and he caused a big problem.
Littlefinger was just the master of coin and he caused, you know,
he has an enormous number of people, you know, an enormous
amount of corruption under his belt.
Imagine what happens when starting from the top, when the
king himself is just openly corrupt.
I mean it really must have been sort of a root and branch
problem that just like you really how do you, how do you
maintain day-to-day sort of stability and continuity in
government when you need to replace?
Everybody. Yeah, that's bad and it's it's
interesting too, because the more the longer that state of
affairs went on the harder it is to undo it.
Now I'll use it to do gooders, do gooders like Deron here would
all are always going to make foes who of those who thrive on
corruption. And that's we had Aegon.
The 4th reign was all about that.
Littlefinger would hate Darren the Second, like he isn't a big
fan of Stannis's being the idea of Stannis becoming king.
I bet Littlefinger would have completely thrived like mad
under Egg on the 4th. It's the perfect king for him, a
king who doesn't care who's this corruption he shrugs AT.
And Littlefinger would certainly know how to play up the 2 Egg on
the 4th's desires of being a brothel owner and all.
Speaking of that, we even hear that that that's part of what
Egon the 4th did with the City Watch was, was having them
arrange things at brothels for him.
And that sounds like there was often, you know, violence and,
and intimidation involved. So the list goes on.
So these are people who never should have had these jobs in
the 1st place. But we know a human, we know how
people are. Once someone has tasted power,
it's hard for them to give it up.
And so Daron was just rooting all these people out that never
should have been in charge in the 1st place.
But the fact is, they were, they got a taste of that power.
They want to get it back. And the way to do that is to
support anyone else who isn't Daron, anyone who isn't him.
At least they have a chance of getting it back into it.
So Stephen, what do you think some some of the top people
here? What do you what do you think of
what they might have done and maybe some examples of foodies
people that he pissed off were? Sure.
So I think one good example is the Lostons because, you know,
they had gotten their power through Aegon the 4th through,
you know, basically, you know, pimping out their their own
daughters to get hair and all. Daughters plural, yes.
Yeah, I mean, you know, so I definitely think the Lostons
that, you know, an interesting case where it didn't happen, and
I've always been curious about why it didn't happen, is the
Hand of the King blanking on his name.
Butterwell, Lord. Butterwell, Lord.
You'd think that, you know, that would be the most sort of
obvious place to start. But, you know, Aegon was
certainly corrupt, but you can be corrupt and still be good at
your job. So maybe it was sort of a case
of, you know, he was just good enough at his job to avoid that
that broom. Now the the really interesting
case and the sort of the most ambiguous cases is that of Sir
Quentin Ball AKA Fireball. Yes, he we'll give a quote about
him real quick. This this quote also kind of
explains what went wrong. Quote.
King Aegon promised to raise him to the Kingsguard, so Fireball
made his wife join the Silent Sisters.
Only by the time a place came open, King Aegon was dead, and
King Daron named Sir William Wilde instead.
You know, Fireball wound up being Damon Blackfyre's most
valuable commander, with maybe the exception of Bitter Steel.
We'll talk more about him later, but for now, was this a huge
mistake that Daron made? Or was it maybe?
Did he have some concerns about Fireball?
What do you think? Well, this is the interesting
thing about Fireball. I mean, he's known for having a,
a fiery temper, quite literally. So it could be that it was just
a personality clash that, you know, a, a more peaceable sort
of, you know, rational monarch might not have gotten on with
such a passionate night like Fireball.
But you know, in terms of what Fireball's job was, you know, he
was the master of arms at the Black key.
He was clearly very good at that because a lot of the people that
he ended up training, you know, Damon Blackfyre, Baylor breaks
beer, bitter steel, etcetera. They they went on to become very
good warriors. And it may be that it was just a
case of of, you know, guilt by association, not because
Fireball was friends with Aegon the 4th.
That must mean that he was, you know, a bad guy and corrupt and
therefore he doesn't get his post.
I think ultimate, yeah. I think ultimately it it
probably was an estate that you know, he got rid of.
Someone who you know, in terms of what the actual job of being
a Kingsguard is, was probably good at his job.
That's true and there's possibly a political element as well.
Now we pointed out maybe Deron just didn't realize how
problematic this change would be how what an enemy he would make
and fireball. It's easy to to to say, OK, he
didn't see that coming. Who could have seen that coming?
Who could see who could see this guy becoming the top one of the
top generals with black fires? Well, maybe someone could see
that. But if assuming that that we
gave him a pass on that, there's a couple other things.
Possibly it wasn't so much that he was worried about leaving
this man disgruntled. It there may have been a
political reason for naming Sir William Wilde over him.
We we don't know this, but of course, as we're about to see,
this section that we're entering into is Deron making peace
through marriages. That's a very common trope and a
very common strategy as you make you, you the people who get you
into power, you give them positions within your new regime
and they're loyal to you. They've already shown their
loyalty and their loyalty is both rewarded and continued
because you've brought them along with you and given them a
piece of a piece of the power. William Wilde is from a
Stormlands house. The the Wilds are from the Rain
are from rain house in the Stormlands.
The Stormlands is not a marcher house.
I'm sorry, the rain house is not a marcher house.
But the Stormlands still in general are not so happy with
the Dornish. They're kind of, well, not maybe
as bad as the Reach in this part of the Stormlands, but in
general the Stormlands are ancient enemies of the Dornish.
So it might have been kind of throwing the Stormlands a bit of
a bone saying, hey, look, I'm naming one of your own to the
Kingsguard. I'm I'm remembering you guys,
I'm showing you that you're on my side, etcetera.
So it may there may have been some politics involved there
too. And, and, and House Wild is, you
know, House Wild and House Ball are both from the Stormlands,
but the, the Wilds are much more important than the ball.
The Wilds are, you know, they, they have a named castle under
their, you know, under their house, whereas the balls are
just a nightly house. So it may be that he just sort
of said, you know, I need this, this job, this office, this
reward for a more important house.
Well, now one of the other major problems, apart from all these
awful counselors left in place, all these corrupt individuals
that got their appointments through Darren's terrible
father, there's the other problem that has lingered over
his whole reign and during his father's reign, which was of
course the question of his legitimacy that was built up
through his father's rumor mongering.
And of course, we know how everyone loves gossip.
The the story of Daron not being his father's son is a lot
juicier and more interesting than oh, everyone's just their
own father. And you know, there's no, no
questions of paternity at all. That's not interesting.
But we don't get to decide the basis of reality based on
whether something is interesting or not.
The point is, though, that Darren was well aware of this
problem and he attacked it, But like, he attacked a lot of these
other problems, quote, he chose to be crowned with his father's
crown, a decision likely intended to quell any remaining
doubts about his legitimacy. So here's another parallel we
have to the modern timeline of A Song of Ice and Fire.
We all know by now, given Joffrey, Tommen, and others, how
important this legitimacy is. It's a huge problem for any
contender for the throne to be seen as illegitimate, or any
sitting king to have these questions hanging over them.
Darren's children, of course, as well, are cast out just by their
association. Here there, if Darren is removed
from the line of succession by virtue of him being revealed to
be a bastard, that would throw his own sons out of the way as
well. Now Darren's children however,
thankfully for him, they were a big plus for him.
They helped him keep his line and helped him majorly fight
against the black fires. Quote a rather a young Sir
Duncan the Tall thinks. Quote, The Lion of the Dragon
Kings had almost died out during his Father's Day, but it was
commonly said that Darren the 2nd and his sons had left it
secure for all time. So let's look at these lines
securing Suns so so to speak of whom there were four.
We only know the birthday to one of them, which we already talked
about. Baylor breaks beer born around
170 and we have about our we have a loose range for the other
3 between 171 and 178. For the other three, we don't
know exactly. Eventually perhaps those dates
will come out, but it's not terribly important.
Three of them were would would be Prince of Dragonstone.
Eventually the only one of those would sit the Iron Throne.
The the 4th would sit the Iron Throne having never been Prince
of Dragonstone, which sounds weird, but that's just because
of the great Spring sickness where just a whole bunch of
people died at once. But more to the point, three of
the four sons of Darren would have children of their own.
So they did keep the line going. They did keep it secure as they
said quote the eldest Prince Baylor won the name break spear
at the age of 17 following his famous victory at Princess
Daenerys wedding tourney. He defeated Damon Blackfyre in
the final tilt and his youngest son Prince Makar seemed like to
show a similar prowess. Stephen, what do you think about
that? You think that that victory when
they were both 17, this is around 187.
How big a deal do you think that was?
I think that was probably a huge deal.
I mean, for for Damon, it would have been a sort of a symbolic
protest of the the marriage, a way to sort of, you know, show
that he was the champion and that Daenerys was his sort of
queen of love and beauty, as it were.
Yeah. That's who we would have given
it to. Whereas, you know, with with
Baylor sort of defeating him, it's kind of a sign that, you
know, this, this union of, of Targaryen and Martel is going to
succeed, is going to in fact, defeat the older, you know,
Targaryen line because you know, both, you know, Damon, sorry,
Baylor himself is a product of a marriage between a Targaryen and
a Martel. And here he's saying we're going
to have another union of Targaryen and Martel.
Yes, and a much bigger one too. It it also gives us a sense of
how it's standing. These two really were I mean
these guys we we we know that Damon people way people talk
about him, one of the greatest fighters of all time in
Westeros, but Baylor beats him and Baylor was also considered
one of the finest Knights of his era.
So he's clearly no slouch. He might be just a almost the
equal or perhaps beyond Damon Black fire, but never but just
was a lot less flashy and was never a contender for the throne
other than being an heir who died before he got his chance.
There's another comparison here that I want to talk about and
the prone to the problems with Baylor and this this takes us
back to what we were talking about before with the different
races of Darren's. The ethnicity of Darren's wife
being Dornish and the ethnicity of Egon the 4th's wife being
Lysine. Even though they're both
foreigners. We talked about how there's much
more of a predisposition towards adorn and and a -1 in fact,
well, this problem really manifested with Baylor because
he looked Dornish. Despite being a great fighter,
except being honorable, noble and attracting lots of
followers, he looked Dornish and that's just sad.
It's just, it's basically just straight racism.
What do you think about that? Yeah, I mean, I, I think part of
the issue is that, you know, there have been accusations of
bastardy before. I mean, you can go all the way
back to to in his Targaryen, right?
But as long as you had the Dragons, there was always kind
of an ultimate DNA test, right? Like, you know, if you if you
could get the Dragons to recognize you, then there was no
question that you were clearly a Targaryen.
Baylor couldn't do that. Yeah.
Yeah, there were no Dragons. Exactly.
So that would have been a way to get overcome that problem.
But like you say, they didn't have that option.
So he just had to be amazing. And he was, but it still wasn't
enough. So he didn't He didn't have
what? Rainier's kid.
Rainier's kids were even more blatant because Rainier, you
know, Princess Rainiera, she was looked Targaryen and her husband
looked Targaryen, but her three kids, her three strong children
look had brown hair. It's like, how do you how's that
even possible? Well, the only explanation would
have been, besides the obvious, that they were not really their
father's children. Would we have?
They'd have to play it off as their veil, her mother being
from the veil or something kind of thin.
Anyway, the next child would be Aries, Darren's second child.
Aries. He was not particularly
impressive. He was, in fact.
Had he been the first son, it might have really probably would
have exacerbated Daron's problems with securing his
throne because he was bookish similar to his father who's
really interested in arcane stuff higher in the higher
mysteries. He although he we don't hear him
being pious at all. We hear this is 1 very minor
quote here from Jamie of all people quote the realm had not
had a Lord confessor since the second Daron and Lord.
Confessor. Well, actually, the Lord
Confessor is not a religious physician.
The Lord Confessor is an official torturer.
Interesting. Yeah, you're right.
Confess. Of course.
Forcing people to confess. I miss I.
My mistake. But but the thing about Eris
that's interesting is that you you'd think that someone with
his interest might have done something similar to what later
Eamon Targaryen will do. Like why didn't he join the
maesters, for example. And it it may be that his, you
know, that Deron kind of looking at his dynastic situation said,
I need this kid around as a symbol of, you know, if anything
happens to Baylor, there is another kid.
And you know, that I can use him as a marriage piece and make
sure that, you know, I get another ally.
So, you know, he may have actually wanted to be a, a, a
maester and that might explain, you know what, what went on with
his marriage. So the next child would be
Regal, and Regal was even as unimpressive as Arias was.
Regal was even less impressive. He's a kind of a poster child
for insane Targaryens, but harmless.
Thankfully he wasn't Magor or Aryan Bride Flame, but he was
apparently known for dancing naked in the halls of the Red
Keep, so. And he might be the Targaryen
who dressed up a a monkey I. Agree.
Yeah, that's that's the best guess that I've seen for who
that one was. Now, the final son of Darren was
Makar. And we we've probably all heard
of Makar. He's the most famous, most
certainly because he's the one that the line continued through.
And he was also a fine warrior himself.
And he was the most Targaryen looking.
And thankfully, no, none of Daron name none of Daron's
children were also named Daron. That saved us a little bit of
ethic, though I guess it would be too much to expect that none
of Daron's grandchildren will be named Daron.
In fact, Daron the second his last son Makar again did have
did name his first born Daron. Matt Daron turned out to be
Daron the Drunkard. But Makar did of course also
Father Maester Amon and Egon the 5th.
So overall, his so his sons were a real divided.
You got Darren the drunkard, an Aryan bright flame, and then you
have Maestra Aim and an egg like that's a poof, that's feast or.
Fan It's that coin getting flipped.
Yes, that's definitely true. So onward now the there, there's
a little something to be said about their names.
I don't want to get too deep into this because it's just
really esoteric, but Makar rather Baylor Breakspear named
his children Valar and Mataris, which those sound vaguely like
Valyrian, but there's no AE in them, which is so common for a
Targaryen. Now that's not going to like
people of the era aren't going to know that.
I mean, most commoners can't read or spell.
They have no idea about what these these naming conventions.
But from our perspective, it's this it's it's an interesting
academic question. We wonder if that's if people
saw that as even more dornification of the court or if
it was of these are actually traditional names.
We just we don't have prior examples of those names being
used. What do you think about that,
Steve? Do you think there's anything?
To that I mean, I'm, I'm not sure you know, Valar sounds a
lot like Valar. Mataris sounds a lot like
Montaris. These same.
These seem pretty Valyrian to me.
They may not be Targaryen names necessarily, but they do sound
like Valyrian names. Yeah, that's true.
So it might have, that might not have been a problem, but it's
interesting to look at. Now let's turn our eyes to
Darren the Second's marriage strategies.
As I said before, the way he sort of paved the the road to
peace was through a series of marriage alliances, not just not
just his own with it to his Dornish wife, but with his sons
and some other members of his family.
So basically looking from looking from the perspective of
of outsiders as well, marriage to a royal family is highly
sought after. Even if you're maybe not a big
fan of Deron, the second you you're a, you might be flexible
enough if you had a chance to marry into his family because
that's the royal family. Basically, a king who makes good
choices with his marriages can really stabilize the realm.
On the other hand, bad marriage choices can have the opposite
effect. Marriages do mean powerful
allies. A strong and a strong king can
get more done. When a king doesn't have to
worry about rebellions and discontent, he can take a strong
firm hand and and remake the realm the way he wants.
For better or worse. That has played out a number of
ways of Targaryen history. So let let real quickly, let's
talk about how marriage has been used in the past in the
Targaryen dynasty. We have a variety of examples.
Jaharius the Conciliator had thirteen children.
All right, let me let me just grab my my world of ice and.
Fire Jaharius, like I said, had 13 children.
So he was, as we have said multiple times, we would
consider him the best Targaryen king and he was able to make
marriage alliances and he did a good job of it.
Of course, it helps to have 13 children to marry off.
That's just a huge advantage. On the other hand, we have
Viserys the First. Right.
And, and you see, you know, look, well, I, I was just going
to say, you know, if you look at Jeharis, the first, right, he
gets one of his children married into house Aaron that, you know,
helps cement their loyalties. He also marries one of his kids
into House Baratheon. So there's that link there.
You know, he's, he's looking for great houses and making sure
that you can build a sort of a national power block.
So moving on, we have Vissaris the first, probably the one who
arguably made the worst decisions with marriages,
including his own, and he set up the Dance of the Dragons, even
though the problems he caused didn't affect his own reign so
much, they were kind of something he'd left for his
successor. Yeah, I mean, the, the, the, the
problem with or the issue with dynastic alliances is that you
have to make them work with one another.
You know, you're dealing with potentially rival houses.
So Desirous's problem is that he marries into house Aaron doesn't
have a son and then marries, or at least a son that lives and
then doesn't and then marries into the high towers.
And now you have two competing lines that if he'd been a little
bit, if he'd been a little bit luckier with his children or a
little bit more careful about which houses he was marrying
into and what they were expecting from their marriages,
that he might have had a better time of it.
Then we have egg on the 5th, of course, make our son who would
eventually sit the throne. And he had a seemingly good plan
for marriages. He looked like he was going to
make a bunch of marriages that were going to be good for peace.
But of course his children all refused to accept them.
And that caused the opposite problem.
We all, we had all kinds of fallout from eggs, children
refusing to marry. But that is clearly outside of
the scope of this episode. But it's good to be reminded of
that. You can see how many ways this
can go now. So Ardaron did rely on marriages
as much as any King Targaryen king, as far far as we can tell.
The piece with Dorn, like I said, was built almost entirely
on these marriages. His own, his sister, Daenerys's,
and his sons. Even though even though his sons
didn't all marry Dornish people, they did marry important houses
that helped keep the peace. So that is our next step here.
We're going to work on Part 5. But first, a little preamble to
that. The uneasy peace may have had
the opposite effect where it's an interesting thing how people
don't always want peace and the people who didn't want peace who
were being forced into it, well, they had somewhere else to go.
So we can say that maybe Dorn the Damon Deron came out ahead
in the long run because the peace did stick.
We all know where things are now.
Dorn is a part of the realm, but did Deron cause or at least
exacerbate the problems of the Blackfyre rebellions?
Because even though Doran stayed in the realm, there were five
generations of Blackfyre Rebellions.
Yeah, that's a high price. So we we're going to have to
examine that and see what kind of mistakes there on made.
After all, the red grass field happened 13 years into Deron's
reign. It's not like it just broke out
right away right after Aegon died.
So that'll be part 5. But real quick here, interesting
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that. So that's a good way to support
the show if that is your thing. But onward, part 5A forced
piece. This is where things really come
down because this relationship with Dorn is probably the most
important factor here. We'll we'll see.
It's it's it's if it, if it's not the most important, it's
tied at the top. Yes.
Quote one of these. One of his earliest significant
acts after assuming the throne was to begin negotiations with
his good brother Prince Maron to unify Dorn under Targaryen rule.
2 years of negotiation later, an agreement was reached and when
Prince Maron agreed to be betrothed to Daron's sister
Daenerys once she was of age, they were wed the following
year. And with that marriage, Prince
Maron knelt and swore his oaths of fealty before the Iron
Throne. So this period of a forest piece
we're discussing is the time of 187 to one. 96187 was the year
that Maron married Daenerys. So in addition to clearing up
his father's corruption as best as he could, Daron did through
peace what his forebears could not accomplish through war.
Even when they had Dragons. There was much credit given to
the Seven Gods and to Baylor the Blessed, perhaps the man most
responsible for breaking the cycle of violence and starting
this whole ball rolling. He started off by marrying our
Darren to Princess Mariah, as we said, and probably expected more
marriages to seal the piece tighter.
But Baylor died, you know, before he could accomplish a lot
of these things. He wasn't very old.
And the next Targaryen Martel marriage came, didn't come for
another 20 years after Darren's marriage.
So that was a little probably longer than Baylor had in mind,
but Darren was very clear as to who he credited with this.
We have this quote. He proclaimed this as soon as
the marriage vows were completed.
They apparently they're on 2nd proclaimed quote.
Baylor, your work is done. And the World of Ice and Fire
says that it was a great moment at last unifying the realm from
wall from the wall to the summer sea as egg on the Conqueror it
once dreamed. One of them, the best things
symbolically to come out of the peace was the Water Garden,
something that we are experiencing in the in the
current series. What do you think about the
Water Gardens as a symbol, Steven?
Well, I mean, you know, if you think about the Water Gardens
are a symbol of peace. They are a symbol of, I mean, if
you think about it sort of prosperity or bounty.
I mean, especially in a desert climate, to have not just sort
of water available, but so bout sort of plentiful that you can
use it for something other than drinking or, you know, keeping
crops alive. Yeah.
You know, and it's it's even a symbol of of equality that, you
know, we have this quote from from Daenerys Targaryen in which
she says to her son and heir, you know, this is your realm.
Remember them in everything you do, because when children are
running around naked, you can't tell who's a high born and who's
a low born. I love that little.
I love that little tidbit. Doran Martel's a good guy, but
meanwhile Daron had a a peaceful sort of symbolic building
project of his own in the works. I wouldn't say it's a, a, a
parallel to the Water Gardens, but it is in a sense mostly
because it was built for a similar purpose kind of to mark
the piece. And it was also built around the
same time. It's not normally what you think
of though when you hear the name Summerhall.
That was its original intent. It's kind of now you think of
Summerhall. It's like, whoa, this great
tragedy, this great mystery is trying to rehash Dragons and the
deaths of some really important historical figures.
But originally it was a, a place of peace.
It's a palace, not really a castle.
We have this, we have this quote here when it was completed in
188, a year after the marriage, Deron grazed a great grazed.
Deron was also a horse. Deron raised a great seat in the
Dornish Marches, near to where the boundaries of the Reach, the
Stormlands and Dorn met, calling it Summer Hall to mark the peace
he had created. It was more palace than castle
and lightly fortified at best. So he's got a palace, a peace,
marriages, children. Things are looking pretty good
for Deron, but as we know, things went wrong.
Basically every single one of these positive things we just
talked about had a negative side.
They all had a downside. Nothing went over perfectly.
Starting with this quote. However, Prince Maron had won a
few concessions in the accord, and the Lords of Doran held
significant rights and privileges that the other Great
Houses did not. The right to keep their royal
title first among them, but also the autonomy to maintain their
own laws. The right to assess and gather
the taxes due to the Iron Throne, with only irregular
oversight from the Red Keep and other for such matters.
Dissatisfaction at these concessions was one of the seeds
from which the first Black Fire rebellion sprang, as was the
belief that Dorne held too much influence over the King for
Darren. The second brought many Dornish
men to his court, some of whom were granted offices of note.
So a lot of people hate the Dornish and the Dornish get to
marry into the royal family and they get special treatment and
running the realm. This tale of disgruntledment
kind of sells itself. It's kind of obvious to see why
some of these Lords were so upset.
So that's when we really start to question Darren.
Do you think that he shouldn't have allowed this special
treatment? See what do you do?
You think this was a mistake on his part or was it necessary to
get Dorn in the realm? Or I mean, I think offering
concessions was necessary to give them to Dorn.
I think the mistake was more not spreading it around, more that
if he had given these concessions to other Lords
Paramount and other Lords in general, you know, or, you know,
not necessarily just sort of doing it blanket across the
Kingdom because that's a lot of power getting away.
But, you know, if he'd at least kind of held it out as a quid
pro quo that he could have kind of allowed people to see that
this, this new sort of status is something that they themselves
can have. You know, there's an old quote
from LBJ that it's always better to have someone inside the tent
pissing out than outside the tent pissing in.
I think that's kind of the problem is that, you know, it's,
it's not that making these, these agreements was necessarily
a bad thing. It's that when you restrict it
to just one group of people, it means that only that group of
people are going to be your allies.
And everyone else now has a grievance.
That's a very good point. So he probably drove away some
of his some of those people that came to his camp either because
of his father being crappy or because they just wanted to
attach themselves to the future king.
He may have driven some of them away by setting the Dornish
above them and by by some of his other behaviors.
We have this we we mentioned the the aspect of him having quote
too much Dornish influence at one quote on that going beyond
that, it wasn't just that he had too many Dornish people around,
quote Darren surrounded himself with maesters, septons and
singers. We've all heard that before.
That's not who kings are supposed to surround themselves
with. That's not what I mean.
I'm using the word supposed in terms of what Westerosi a want.
You know, obviously personally I think that's cool, but from a
point of view of the Lords and Knights of Westeros, that's just
unmasculine. It's not kingly to do these sort
of things. And so that was.
And I think the larger, the larger problem is that it means
that no one has a lot of people among the Lords and Knights
don't have a vested interest in his monarchy.
Yes. And, and this is where I sort of
see a, a parallel with Jon Snow, which is they're both pushing a,
a, a sort of a revolution in thinking, You know, John is
trying to bring in the wild Wings, Darren is trying to bring
in the Dornish. It's kind of both ends of the
Kingdom, if you were. But what they're not doing is
building a constituency around the, you know, a majority
coalition in support of these reforms.
You know that if you had brought in, you know, yes, obviously,
you know, if Dorn is now going to be part of the realm, they
need to see it on the small council.
But why not give a seat in the small council to the Tyrells?
Why not give a seat to the Lannisters?
Why not, you know, bring it, you know, or the Aaron's?
Why not bring in more of the realm who have a vested interest
in this new order of things continuing as opposed to leaving
them outside with nothing to gain from this?
I agree with that and let's let's take it a step further
here. A main point of favor it's get
it's considered a positive thing, and I wouldn't entirely I
would mostly agree with this is that quote without that rather
the Darren brought Doran into the realm quote without the
terrible cost of life that Darren the second's namesake,
the young dragon had paid. But there's a problem with this
interpretation. Like Steven just said, the piece
didn't completely work. And we titled, That's why we
titled this part a forced piece because there were far too many
who just didn't want it. That large number of Lords,
Knights and others, quote, began to look more and more to the
quote, old days when Dornish men were the enemy to fight, not
rivals for the King's attention or largesse.
On the other hand, yeah, go ahead.
Well, I, I was just going to say, and I, I write about this
in, in the first essay I did on the blacks and Reds, which is
that huge cost of life that Darren the first had had
incurred. Those are people's relatives.
Those are their fathers and their brothers and their uncles
and their cousins. And with a peace that's kind of
so on one side, you know, in terms, I mean, you know, the
Targaryens get a lot out of the peace.
No one else really does. And so there's no sort of
reckoning for these losses. There's no kind of way for
people to grieve and deal with it.
And, you know, I, I think of, you know, look at all the
violence that happened during the War of 5 Kings, you know,
people aren't ready to make peace on that unless there's
some way of making sense of those debts, unless there's
something that they can sort of look to, to say, this is what my
relative, you know, my, my father, my son, my brother,
whatever that they died for. And this is what gives their
life mean. And I think that's where Darren
screwed up is that he didn't, he didn't give them an
understanding of the world that they could use to help them
grieve. That makes sense now.
So we're like we're saying a lot of the things that Darren did,
they had a downside or they turned bad.
Summerhall, of course, is a perfect example of that was
entirely out of his control. We don't, we can't blame him for
that. But the other thing about these
marriages, we're going to talk about his his, his sons in
particular, his strategy with who he married them to.
The thing that is apparent with all of them was that that none
of them were Targaryen style marriages.
And there's probably 2 reasons for this.
He may have been against the incest tradition in the 1st
place because we see that with a lot of the pious Targaryen
kings, because they follow the Seven and the Seven are very
against incest. But also there's the politics
you don't get. There's no political advantage
by marrying your children to each other.
They could get away with that a lot more when they had the
Dragons and they didn't have to worry about the political
advantages as much. But now that's such a constant
consideration as we see later in the Targaryen line, they went
back to the brother sister marriage, but this was kind of
an era where that was done less. So let's take a look at some of
these things, some of these marriages and his, his, his
strategy for these very specifically the as well as some
of the things that are given up by going this route.
For one thing, there's this this elevated status thing that they
fall off with. Before it was like a weird kind
of duality where the most of the people in the realm are against
incest, yet the Targaryens were allowed to get away with it
because they're the Targaryens. That's everyone just kind of saw
it that way. They're above everyone else.
They're kind of like demigods. Maron was kind of giving that
up. He was kind of setting that
aside and that kind of made the Targaryens a little more human,
which kind of undermine and. Especially when you lose.
Especially when you lose the Targaryen.
Look, yes, that's huge. That, you know, the marrying
brother to sister, I mean, that was that used to be done to sort
of keep the whole dragon riding magic thing going.
But now it's got a role to play in that the symbols of, you
know, white hair and purple eyes are now symbols of royalty, and
you're kind of losing that a little bit.
That is true. And it's also looking at the
other side of this. You see Damon this this also
just pushes more people towards Damon blackfire because a Damon
has the symbol of blackfire very a a symbol that gains so much
more in value without the Dragons and without with the
Targaryen look having more meaning.
So the Blackfire is just so much more important than it used to
be. And it's Damon's already kind of
got that above demigod thing going for him.
He's got the Targaryen look. The Warrior.
The freaking, you know, Adonis, you know, abilities and and look
and all that. So and he's the product of
incest too, even though his parents weren't married.
So it's weird how he's a bad this guy actually, it's weird
how that guy actually play to his advantage in Damon's case
and against Aaron, the incest thing.
It's it's it's kind of backwards.
So, but speaking to what you said about the look as well,
it's like a the future could be seen.
Baylor breaks beer didn't look Targaryen.
Baylor's sons didn't look Targaryen.
Baylor's eldest son was Valar and valor had a little streak of
silver, kind of like dark Star almost.
But that was the only real nod to his Targaryen look.
Oh. God, not more, not not more.
Secret Targaryen we've got, I do not believe.
For the record, I not believe Dark Star is a secret Targaryen
but but a Valor had. I believe Valor also only had
blue eyes, so he he really just the Targaryen look was kind of
fading, but it ended up going through Makar after all, and
that kind of kept the gold, silver and purple going.
So let's look at these marriages specifically though, first of
all. So, so Darren's strategy was
kind of a mix of marrying his sons to important Dornish houses
and to Marcher houses or other houses that were important to
him. But you can kind of see a bit of
a funny pattern. Baylor and Makar were the kind
of the choice sons. Baylor because he's the heir and
because he's a great fighter, and Makar because he's a great
fighter. And look, Targaryen, so Baylor
was married to Jenna Dondarian, A Dondarian.
Now the Dondarians, of course, are an ancient marcher house
that have been fighting the Dornish for thousands of years.
So by giving his air to the marchers, he was saying, hey,
look, I'm balancing this out. I'm married to the Dornish, but
my son here is married to the ancient Dornish enemy.
So that was probably a good decision, don't you?
Think, yeah, no, that makes sense as a a balancing act.
It's again, it's building the coalition.
Right. And then we also have Makar was
married to Diana Dane. So Makar was married to a Dane.
That was a great revelation from the World of Ice and Fire.
And we don't know it what Diana looked like, but she probably
looked like a the the Danes tend to look at least somewhat
Targaryen, not as extreme, but but they have the purple eyes
frequently. They have the, you know, maybe
not silver gold hair, but like ash and, you know, honey colors
like the milder versions of silver and gold, which is
interesting because make our first born son didn't look
terribly Targaryen. He had sandy hair and a blonde
beard, but he definitely had the dragon dreams.
So he was he. Yeah, but it did, it did work
out for, you know, Egg and Arion certainly do have the full
Targaryen look. That's true, yes.
So the the the genetics mostly stayed strongly Targaryen, but
we don't want to get too deep into that.
We but the point being that Darren was very aware of how at
least maybe not very aware, but at least somewhat aware of how
some of these people would get upset based on these new
alliances and how he had to balance it out.
So I would say that. He.
Had the right idea, but he didn't go far enough.
Like you said, he didn't bring the Tyrells to the table, he
didn't bring the Lannisters to the table.
He he did bring some of these people to the table, but not
enough. Right.
And if you look at these houses, they're not great houses.
They're I, I don't mean that they suck.
I mean, they are lesser houses, the Dondarians, the Penroses
that the Danes are, with the exception of the Aaron's, who we
haven't talked about yet. He's not, you know, if you, he's
not reaching very high, if you get the, the Tyrells on your
side, if you get, you know, the, the Lannisters on your side,
those are houses that can bring 10s of thousands of soldiers.
They have, you know, they, they speak with a, a, a, a powerful
voice in great councils. So, you know, he's not kind of
he's having a regional impact. He's not having a national
impact for the most part. I mean, the the Erin marriage
aside, I think that's the kind of the one exception.
That's where he he really does kind of strike lucky.
That's a good point. The next two marriages were to
his less impressive sons. Aries was married to Eleanor
Penrose and Regal was married to, I forget which, Aaron.
But Alice I. Think Alice yes, you're right,
Alice, Aaron and but we're not sure that those marriages
actually happened before the red grass field.
A bunch of Penroses died. All but one child, male child of
the Penrose has died during the red grass field.
So we're more maybe leaning towards the idea that they got
the marriage to Aries kind of as a reward.
But also we know that Eleanor, Eleanor Penrose, who married
Aries was Aries's cousin, although we're not exactly sure
how. That's a whole other thing that
we don't want to get into. But it's it's deeper than that
with Aaron, with the Aaron marriage, like we said, Regal,
they get the Aaron's get this crazy Targaryen Prince, which is
nice. I guess maybe not there.
He wouldn't have been their first pick, but considering the
Aaron's were already hyper loyal, I guess they didn't need
to have, you know, this shining star Prince as they're, you
know, brought in their family. But this like I said, this
marriage could have happened after the.
Regret, yeah. And and they're already kin to
begin with. So it's sort of, you know,
they're they're to a certain extent they are less, they're
less up for grabs. They're they're not exactly free
agents. So you can sort of they they
don't you don't need to woo them as much as you might other
house. So, but there's this, this is
kind of this overwhelming sentiment.
We'll actually be back up for a second.
Makar definitely married Diana Dane before the black, before
the red grass field. We know that much.
And the Danes were probably somewhat important and made the
color their coloration may have had a may have been played part
of the role in that decision. But the Danes are a fairly
important house in Doran and they're on the other side of
Doran from the Martels may have been a regional thing going on
and they want to make sure they have that area covered.
But for that reason, we're, you know, 99% sure that the Danes
fought for Deron during the during the war.
But just like we talked about how there's the Selmies and the
Karens and the Don, like before the Dondarians got married to
Deron, all these other marcher houses that just hate the
Dornish, they don't want to stop fighting them.
They're not thrilled with this idea.
Hear them think, hear them saying things like, if I can't
fight the Dornish, how will I earn glory?
All their ancestors are. There's so many other ancestors
that are famous, they're known that have songs sung about them
because they fought the Dornish. This is a complete like
thousands of years of lifestyle that they're just giving up.
They're they're losing it. We have this quote here from
Arias Oakhart. He was a man of the Reach, and
the Darnish were his ancient foes.
As the tapestries at Old Oak, Old Oak bore witness, Aries only
had to close his eyes to see them still.
Lord Edger and the open Handed seated in splendor with the
heads of 100 Dornish men piled around his feet.
The three leaves in the Prince's Pass pierced by Dornish Spears.
Alistair sounding his war horn with his last breath.
Sir Olivar, the green oak all in white, dying at the side of the
young dragon. Dorn is no fit place for any oak
heart. Perfect example of how even
without the pieces. Hundreds of years old. 120 ish
years old that there's these memories are still very strong
in the minds of these of these families that that lived through
all this. Yeah, and you know, and we can
see some, some reals here. I mean, especially Alistair
sounding the war horn with his last breath.
I mean, that's, that's a pretty clear parallel to Roland and the
the Chancellor de Roland and which again, that's about a
battle in the mountains between, you know, France and Spain,
which at the time, you know, was, was under the, the control
of the Moorish. So, you know, there is that kind
of historic, you know, resemblance going on.
Yeah, George is certainly a fan of history, and it shows through
things like this. There's all these little things
that bleed through. And Speaking of, of, of in world
history, though, we have another character that everyone knows.
Prince Oberyn Martel had his own quote relating to these ancient
grievances. That is, I think is is
illuminating. It goes like this in Dorn of
old, before we married Daron, it was said that all flowers bow
before the sun. Should the roses seek to hinder
me, I'll gladly trample them under foot.
So old habits die hard, we say. Even amongst those who weren't
even alive during these periods of of the most of greatest
enmity, they're still passed on. It's like it literally stays in
their blood. So, but there's only so much a
king can do on his own. Another is part of the point
here. These ancient grievances,
there's what can Deron do about that?
There's only so much he it's almost like he just has to wait,
keep these guys a check and and let these generations die off
and just try to reach the new generations and try to make them
peaceable. You just can't teach an old dog
new tricks and back. And this all dates back again to
his father. We have another quote as
Darren's major problem here. The seeds of war, of course, can
be credited and are credited to his father.
In truth, the seeds found fertile ground because EV Aegon
the Unworthy. Aegon had hated the Dornish and
ward against them, and those Lords who desired the return of
those days, despite all the associated misrule, would never
be happy with this peaceable king.
That kind of says it all, doesn't it?
Some people just want to fight. We've been fighting there for
thousands of years and that's how it should be.
I hope we keep fighting forever. It sounds ridiculous, but to us
modern, peaceful people that live, you know, where we live
now, or it's just kind of, it's just kind of blows the mind.
But it's important to take a look at things from the other
side. Steven, Let's take a look at how
the Dornish felt about all this. There's just as many people on
the Dornish side that wanted to keep fighting too, aren't there?
Right? For let me start it off with a
quote here. The disunity the disunity of the
Dornish is apparent even from our oldest sources.
The great distances between each pocket of settlement and the
difficulties of travel across burning sands and rugged
mountains help to isolate each small community from all the
others. The point of that is, just
because the Martels married the throne and a couple other houses
got in on it, doesn't mean the rest of Dorn is excited about
this. So on the other side, just like
there's Karen's and Tarly's and Celanese who wanted to keep on
fighting, there's Dornish houses like the like the Fowlers of
Skyreach, the Black Moths of Black Moth, the Man Woodies of
King's Grave and the Wiles of Wild and the Ironwoods of
Ironwood. They wanted to keep on killing
marchers rather than making peace with them.
We've got another quote that that speaks to this from the
other side. I mentioned him a minute ago,
Dark Star, and this is this is him.
What I know is that Danes has been killing Oakharts for
several 1000 years. His arrogance took her breath
away. It seems to me that Oakharts
have been killing Danes for just as long.
We all have our family traditions.
Ah, Dark Star, he is of the night.
He is Darkwing Duck. He is Darkwing Duck.
OK, so as we move into part 6, we're we're we're getting close
to the end here. We've only got 2 hours.
We've only got a few minutes left, so we're going to make
this brief. Remember that you can do
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You will not pay any additional money for any shopping you do at
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So if you're going to shop there anyway, might as well help us
out, right? OK, Part 6, The Great Bastards,
most of what we're going to talk about with the Great Bastards,
we're going to devote with their individual episodes.
It's going to be a Bitter Steel episode.
It's going to be a Damon Blackfyre episode.
It's going to be a Blood Raven episode.
So just real quickly, we're going to cover what how Deron
tried to handle them before they were of age and to set things
up. So, although he could not and
would not rescind his father's last wishes, he did what he
could to keep the Great Bastards close, treating them honorably
and continuing the incomes that the King had bestowed on them.
Not a bad idea to keep them happy, I suppose.
But was it enough, or did he go too far?
So what do you think, Steven? We're we're going down to some
of these issues here, like what do you think with his handling
of Damon and and, and allowing him to have a castle and going
through with his marriage that he went through?
What do you think was did he did he handle it well or did he did
he screwed? Up my position with with Darren
is that I feel like he tries to have things both ways and that
doesn't always work out very well.
So for example, you know, he he gives Damon this land, he gives
him, allows him to build a castle, but then you get this
conflict over over Daenerys. And you know, this kind of, you
know, one of the things that historians always talk about
with revolutions is that they almost never happen when things
are at their worst. They usually happen when things
have gotten better and then suffered A reversal.
And it seems like that with a lot of the great bastards that,
you know, he gave Damon just enough of the the taste of the
good life that he came to expect it.
And then when he got crossed, he felt like it's not that he'd
reach for something out of his reach.
It's more that he felt that something that he deserves,
something that was rightfully his, had been taken away from
him. I mean, especially in the case
of Daenerys. And now we also talked about
earlier, we talked a bit about why bitter steel would be upset.
So we don't need to re re go over that too much.
But it it seems likely that from Darren's point of view, he
probably didn't like Bittersteel much himself.
It seems like they would probably.
They both had reasons to dislike each other.
Deron may have resented the Brackens for their attempts to
push him out of the way and his mother out of the way.
That that that is an emotional thing.
And even though Bittersteel was just a child, you could still
have a grudge towards the Brackens for that.
On the other hand, we have Blood Raven, Brendan Rivers.
They're both scholarly types and they seem to get along.
Obviously Bloodraven was a loyalist and remained A loyalist
and eventually became hand for King Aries, Darren's son.
He may have been gifted with Dark Sister as part of this this
keeping the great bastards loyal.
We don't actually know when he first acquired Dark Sister,
though it may have been a reward for the Red Grass field.
He may have had it ahead of time.
The only thing we know for sure is that he had it by about two O
4, but that's seven years after the war, so it's probably more
fun to assume he had it during the war.
Then we get to imagine him fighting bitter steal Black Fire
versus Dark Sister. But we'll talk about that a
little more in their own episode since we are fast running out of
time here. Real quick, Stephen general
grade on his handling of the great pastors.
What do you think? Do you think he'd get a good job
or do you think he could have done a little?
Better, I think ultimately he's he screwed up.
He tried to have things both ways and that, you know, I mean,
you know, I'm, I'm thinking here of the sort of the discussions
of the Small council in dealing with Daenerys.
It's not a nice thing to do, but, you know, either make
someone your friend or kill them.
Don't try to do things both way. You know, both ways that you
know, you if you make Damon powerful enough that alienating
him can lead to a civil war, you've just caused problems for
yourself. You haven't solved anything.
So, you know, either kind of go with them all the way and make
sure that they are as loyal to you as they could be, or
eliminate them completely so that they can't possibly pose a
threat. Yeah, it doesn't seem like
Darren was cutthroat enough for that.
It seemed like he was a little too nice to be, to take those
kind of steps. He didn't have that kind of cold
streak like Tywin or Stannis, like doing what had to be done
because of the dangers. What's interesting that a
complicate matters though, is you talk about how important it
would have been for him to make friendships.
It seemed like a friendship with bitter steel was just out of the
question. Damon.
However, there is that decent bit of evidence that they that
Daron liked Damon. There's there's a mention of him
finding fond He was being fond of him in a lot of ways, and I
can see that Damon was a very charismatic guy, even though
like he could. I could see Daron blaming his
father for the problems and saying oh, this child is
innocent. Even though eventually they came
to be at odds when they were younger together.
It may have been different and and that.
May and they grew up to be. Tragic.
Yeah. They grew up together.
Exactly. And.
Right. I mean, there's a difference
there with bitter, which is that, you know, Bitter Steel was
in exile. He would have known, you know,
Damon Damon's entire life. Yeah.
And that's and and so that that can go a lot of ways.
When you people you grow up with you, it can go well.
It can not do well, but you you definitely can have an opinion
one way or the other. It's you're not going to be
like, oh, I don't know anything about him.
You know, you grew up with somebody, you're you're going to
have an opinion. These things are really going to
matter, especially when you grow up at court in a position where
in a place where there's ambition and power floating all
over the place and being pulled in multiple directions.
OK, the last few things, one thing that I think is really fun
is we talk about a lot of these topics and we talk about kind of
what ifs, what could have happened, what might have been.
Well, one way that this can be played out is by gaming.
One of my favorite games and I that I've ever played in my life
is Crusader Kings 2. And we've talked about it
briefly on the show before. And it has, it's a wonderful
game set in the medieval periods and you can play a number of
different times. And it has a there's a mod out
there that you can find links to on our forum.
And it is it turns the game into a Westeros, It turns it into
Westeros and Esos. And you can even replay the
black fire rebellions with this game by taking control of Damon
Blackfire or bitter steal. Or have you played this game
much? I have.
In fact, not only have I played this game, I tried to win the
Black Fire Rebellion as Damon Blackfire.
Did you succeed? Not so successful, Oh no.
But I I was just, it was my first experience with Crusader
Kings too, and I didn't really understand a word to the
warning. It's a fun game, but it is very
complicated and you need to know, you need to learn,
especially dynastic claims and rules of succession.
Otherwise, you just don't know what you're doing.
Shay and I have both spent plenty of time in that game.
I recommend it for people that have plenty of time to kill
because it is a time sink. You can actually purchase it
through our site. Go to historyofwesteros.com and
it's on the on the right in the sidebar, Crusader Kings 2.
And like I said, you can find the mod through our forums.
There are lots of links to it. Or you can just type Crusader
Kings Game of Thrones mod in Google and you'll find it that
way. But this is yet another way to
support the show and have a lot of fun in the meantime.
OK, we got to wrap things up. Thanks again.
We we have I have a one last one or two little things to say here
before we get out of here. We only have a couple minutes
left. The story of Deron doesn't end
here. Deron's fate will be discussed
later as part of our coverage of what happened after the final
conflict of the first black Fire rebellion, the battle of Red
Grass field. So next in the series on the
road to Red Grass is the man who epitomizes all the complaints
against King Deron. The man who represented the
solution to so many problems plaguing the realm.
The man who was too many. Seeing the way Bran saw Jamie
early in the Game of Thrones quote, this is what a king
should look like. The black dragon himself, the
king who bore the sword, Damon Blackfire.
All right, thanks, Steven for for joining us today.
It was really awesome having you.
You're obviously very knowledgeable for this topic.
It was great just be able to go back and forth without having to
do to script every line. It was it's wonderful to to talk
to somebody that has really deep knowledge of.
The My pleasure. So tell everybody again where to
find your essays. Okay, you can go to
racefortheironthrone.wordpress.com. You can look me up on Tumblr.
I do a lot of sort of writing there.
Race for theironthrone.tumblr.com and you
can look at my essays on Tower of the Hand.
Great. Last real quick, we have our for
for $2.00 a month on Patreon, you can get each episode one day
early. That's a way to join the History
of Westeros Army and I want to thank those people who are our
top Patreon supporters. Hand of the King, Lord Cash
Craig AKA Vaxis on the High Street Westeros forums.
Our warden in the north is Lord Parker the Bastard of
Starkville. We do not have any other wardens
at this time. Those spots are open.
The master of Coin is Lord Robert Jacobs, the Master of
Whisperers, Lord James the Scholar.
Grand Master Itai wears the jeweled collar of many medals,
Rosie the Clever is our master of Laws, and Lord James Tuttle
is our Master of Ships. The History of Westeros Night's
Watch Lord Commander is Lord Commander George the Golden
History of Westeros Kingsguard Commanded by Lord Commander
Shepard. We have Sir Andrew the Prophet,
Sir Paul Greenhand, Sir Dolorous Dee, and Sir Lars Henry as the
rest of the Kingsguard. There are still a couple open
spots. Valor Morgales means all men
must die, and so do all episodes of History of Westeros come to
an end. So until next time folks, thanks
for tuning in and we'll see you next time.