House of the Dragon's Best Villain is not Alicent After All
He is deeply ambitious, highly motivated, smart, intelligent, skilled, impulsive and violent. Spice it up with a sapphire eye and you'll get a true villain.
Prince Aemond Targaryen who killed Prince Lucerys during a dragon chase gone wrong can be considered one of the best – if not the best – villains of HBO's House of the Dragon series.
But villains can be different. Compare Aemond with iconic Game of Thrones villains like Joffrey Baratheon and Ramsey Bolton, and you may have a question. Characters like Joffrey and Ramsay have the power and they use it to abuse those weaker.
There's no real motivation behind the type of violence they wield apart from a pure sadistic desire and a need to show their superiority. In this sense Game of Thrones is more black or white as opposed to House of the Dragon where Aemond competing for the title of the best villain is shown as a more complex character.
Redditors tend to agree that the iconic takes from GOT are the villains, aka Joffrey Baratheon, a spoiled brat, and Ramsey, a psychopath. The audience wanted to see these characters dead and really had no sympathy with them. In contrast, Prince Aemond suffered a lot in his childhood, he was bullied and lost his eye – he is not likely to reach their level on screen, they believe. Redditors doubt Aemond will be a new Ramsay or Joffrey.
One of the redditors believes Aemond is likely to fall into that "bad boy" character category some people sympathize with.
"The best example is probably Kylo Ren – who some fans have created a whole world around him being the victim of terrible parents. That might have made Kylo less of a villain than Darth Vader since no one saw an angst teen when Vader was first introduced," says a comment posted by u/twtab.
Still, the series is the product of a team of writers who do not always stick to the original book. In the case of Aemond many commentators highlighted the fact that the showrunners deliberately diverged from the source material i.e. George R.R. Martin's book Fire and Blood to make the Prince a less straightforward character. In the book Aemond's killing of Lucerys was a well-calculated murder, which led to the Targaryen Civil War in Season 3. It was not a killing by accident – remember he cut out both of Lucerys' eyes from his dead body once he landed his dragon.
The filming of House of the Dragon Season 2 isn't expected to end until summer 2023. Hopes are high new episodes will be released in 2024.