The Tragedy of Aemond Targaryen: Bully, Warrior, and Broken Second Son

There’s something almost Shakespearean about Aemond Targaryen. He’s not the main character—he’s not even supposed to be—and yet he commands your attention every time he’s on screen. In House of the Dragon, he’s simultaneously the villain of his own story and a victim of circumstances beyond his control. He’s a skilled warrior, a devoted dragon rider, and a cold-eyed strategist, yet he’s also deeply wounded in ways that make you want to hate him and sympathize with him in equal measure. That contradiction is what makes Aemond one of the most fascinating characters in the entire series, and possibly the most tragic.

Aemond’s tragedy begins before he’s even born. As the second son of Alicent Hightower, he enters a world where his existence is almost an afterthought. His older brother Aegon II is the heir, positioned from birth to inherit the Iron Throne. Aemond, by contrast, is meant to be the spare—useful as a backup, but never the priority. This particular brand of royal neglect is more subtle than outright abuse, but it cuts deeper because it’s built into the very structure of his family and his world. Everyone around him treats this as normal, which somehow makes it worse.

The Eye, The Insult, and The Beginning of Bitterness

The pivotal moment of Aemond’s childhood arrives when his nephews, Jacaerys and Lucerys Velaryon—Rhaenyra’s children—are visiting King’s Landing with their mother. Young Lucerys, barely more than a child himself, is riding a dragon named Arrax. Aemond wants a dragon of his own and he wants one badly. While the older kids are at Dragonstone, Aemond succeeds where no one else has: he claims the dragon Vhagar, the largest living dragon in all of Westeros and the former mount of Visenya Targaryen herself. It’s an extraordinary achievement for a child. In any other circumstance, it would be celebrated as a triumph of will and boldness.

But when Lucerys finds out, he’s devastated. Arrax was supposed to be his dragon, his special connection to his heritage, his place in the world. The resentment festering between the Targaryen siblings boils over into that famous scene where they physically fight, and Lucerys, in panic and desperation, slashes a blade across Aemond’s face, taking his eye. It’s a moment of childhood violence that will echo across the entire series, shaping everything that comes after.

What makes this moment so crucial is how everyone reacts to it. Aemond loses his eye, a permanent disfigurement that will mark him forever, and the response from the adults around him is… complicated. There’s sympathy, certainly, but also a kind of acceptance that accidents happen, that boys will be boys, that this is just what happens in a royal family. Rhaenyra’s children, by contrast, are the ones who get blamed more severely, the ones whose existence is treated as an insult to the Greens. The eye wound becomes, in Aemond’s mind and in the minds of his family, a permanent debt that Rhaenyra and her children owe him.

The eye becomes Aemond’s obsession. He wears it like a badge of martyrdom, and in many ways, it’s the root of everything he becomes. In that single moment, he transforms from a neglected second son into someone with a cause, a grievance, a reason to matter. The eyepatch becomes his identity.

The Making of a Warrior

What’s remarkable about Aemond’s character arc is that he doesn’t let his disability defeat him. Instead, he channels his pain and rage into becoming an exceptional warrior. He trains obsessively, driven by something deeper than mere ambition. He’s trying to prove something—to his father, to his mother, to himself, to everyone who ever doubted him. By the time we see him as a young man in House of the Dragon, Aemond is one of the most skilled swordsmen in King’s Landing. He rides Vhagar, a dragon older than some kingdoms. He’s intelligent, articulate, and devastatingly charismatic when he wants to be.

But here’s the tragedy: none of it matters in the way he hoped it would. He’s still the second son. He still doesn’t get the throne. He still doesn’t get to matter in the way that matters most. His father died without ever truly valuing him the way he valued Aegon. His mother loves him, but primarily as a tool to secure the succession of her chosen son. Aemond can ride the largest dragon in the world, he can slay his enemies, he can scheme and strategize, but he cannot escape the fundamental injustice of his birth order.

This is where Aemond becomes truly dangerous. Not because he’s evil, but because he’s desperate. He’s spent his entire life being told that he’s not enough, that his older brother matters more, that his existence is secondary. And now, when it might finally be his moment—when chaos is breaking out and the realm is tearing itself apart—he still can’t be the one in charge. Aegon II is king, not him. He has to be the right hand, the loyal brother, the loyal subject. Even when he’s arguably the more capable leader, even when he’s the one with the military skill and the political acumen, he’s still not quite enough.

The Warrior’s Burden

What makes Aemond particularly sympathetic, despite his cruelty and his spite, is that we can see the moment he accepts his limitations and tries to be the brother that Aegon needs. Early in the series, Aemond is arrogant and dismissive of Aegon, treating him with barely concealed contempt for his younger brother’s weakness and lack of discipline. But as the war progresses, Aemond steps into the role of primary military strategist and dragon rider. He’s the one flying Vhagar, the one winning battles, the one actually holding the realm together while his king brother stumbles through the responsibilities of the throne.

There’s something almost tragic about watching Aemond surrender to his fate. He knows what he could be. He knows that in another birth order, in another family, he could have been a great king. But he accepts his role as second-in-command, accepts that he will serve his brother’s vision rather than pursue his own. It’s a form of nobility, in its way, which makes his later actions—the decisions he makes as the war drags on—all the more devastating.

The episode where Aemond commits what amounts to a war crime by incinerating an entire castle full of people shows us the breaking point. He’s been containing his rage, channeling it into duty and service, and it finally explodes. The provocation might be relatively minor—a slight, a insult, a moment of disrespect—but it’s the culmination of a lifetime of accumulated slights and insults. When Aemond snaps, he doesn’t just snap at the immediate situation; he snaps at the entire universe that has denied him his due.

The Complexity of a Second Son’s Rage

What separates Aemond from being a simple villain is that we understand his rage. We might not excuse it, but we understand it. Throughout his life, Aemond has been told that he matters less, that his pain doesn’t count as much, that his achievements will always be secondary to his brother’s birthright. He’s internalized these messages and turned them into something even more dangerous: not self-pity, but a righteous sense of injustice. He doesn’t see himself as a bad person acting badly; he sees himself as someone finally taking what he deserves and punishing those who took it from him first.

The brilliance of House of the Dragon’s portrayal of Aemond is that it shows us how a sympathetic person can become unsympathetic through the accumulation of wounds and the refusal to process them in healthy ways. Aemond never gets the therapy session where he talks about his eye, where he processes the unfairness of his childhood, where he acknowledges that his rage is partially rooted in paternal neglect and sibling rivalry. Instead, he bottles it up, weaponizes it, and eventually unleashes it in ways that are genuinely horrifying.

By the end of Aemond’s arc, he’s a tragic figure in the truest sense. He’s capable of great things, and he’s accomplished great things, but he’s also become the worst parts of himself. He’s a victim who has victimized others. He’s a broken person who has broken others in return. There’s no redemption available to him, not really, because he’s made choices that can’t be unmade. But there’s also deep sadness in seeing what he could have been if his family had simply valued him equally, if he’d been born first, if that eye had never been lost.

Conclusion: The Tragic Depth of a Secondary Character

Aemond Targaryen is the most fascinating character in House of the Dragon because he occupies that rare space where he’s simultaneously pathetic and powerful, sympathetic and culpable, a victim and a villain. He’s not the protagonist of the story, but he’s the emotional center of it in many ways. His tragedy is not the tragedy of great ambitions thwarted by fate—it’s the tragedy of a capable person systematically made to feel insufficient, and his eventual breaking is not surprising so much as inevitable.

What makes him fascinating is that we can see ourselves in him, in some small way. We’ve all felt like the second son at some point, like we weren’t enough, like our achievements didn’t matter as much as someone else’s potential. Aemond takes that universal feeling of inadequacy and turns it into something dark and dangerous, and that’s what makes him compulsively watchable. He’s the character you hate but can’t stop thinking about, the one whose motivations you understand even when you abhor his actions.

In the end, Aemond Targaryen is a masterclass in tragic character writing, a testament to what happens when a system crushes someone gently enough that they don’t realize they’re being crushed until it’s far too late. He’s the most interesting character in House of the Dragon not because he’s the most powerful or the most clever, but because his pain is the most relatable, and his darkness is the most human.