It’s tough to say because Daemon was probably the one who really gathered the rest of the rebel lords together. He was the one who was best known to the public, and the one the rebels really mythologized. So if he wasn’t that dedicated to the idea then it never comes together. And once he had started telling people what he was going to do, he had to go through with it or risk someone exposing that he had been plotting treason.

Also, though this is harder to say unless we meet him in a later D&E, I don’t actually know how far Bittersteel really goes down that road. Not that he was ever going to be a chill person, but he and Daemon could also have had one of those dynamics where people kind of feed on each other’s grievances. Without Daemon having been so committed to rebellion, Bittersteel may not have latched into the idea so tightly in the first place, and without the sunk costs of fighting that first war and the frustration of having come so close to pulling it off, he might not have spent the rest of his life stuck on the idea. 

I’m flinching a little bit at that wording, but unfortunately I think you’re completely right about how she’d be spoken about.

I don’t know how Princess Daenerys felt, but I would also take the Blackfyre interpretation of it with a massive grain of salt. I do think it’s pretty clear what Daemon’s fixation on the idea was, though. Working himself into an incestuous, polygamous marriage to someone who unquestionably belonged at court would be an exponentially stronger demonstration of his Targ-ness than even having Blackfyre. In a way it’s an emulation of his namesake, right, when Daemon Targaryen pushed that relationship with the crown princess Rhaenyra even while he was married to someone else.

Compare to Littlefinger’s feelings about Catelyn, right: he may or may not have sentimentalized that attraction, but it was in large part an attraction to increasing his own status.

I don’t really know a diplomatic way to say “be a grown-up and pick on someone your own size” so...?

The thing about “potential conflicts” in-universe is that the Blackfyre Rebellion gives a pretty solid object lesson as to what to do or not to to head off future problems, because we have three cases to compare. Bittersteel was sent away, Bloodraven was kept around and made a part of the regime, and Daemon was used by Aegon (and thus perceived by others) as a threat. It makes sense that things happened the way they did. If you don’t want someone to become hostile, don’t alienate them. If you don’t want someone to rock the boat, don’t make their world an insecure place. If you want someone to be loyal to a fault, make a place for them even if you could get away with marginalizing them.

The historical and psychological lesson here is that the best thing she can do is chill out. But Catelyn already has all of this information and she’s not using it, and so helpful advice is a waste of breath.

(I feel like I’ve said this before, but just to be clear, this isn’t me saying Catelyn’s a terrible irredeemable person. It’s me saying she’s a person and sometimes people are gross.)

Well, it’s a piece of evidence. A piece of evidence does not, in and of itself, have to be a bulletproof case, it just has to help support a conclusion. The fact that none of Cersei’s children look like Robert, while all of Robert’s other children look like Robert, is unusual enough to be a clue to the truth and a big part of the case that Jon Arryn would have made to the public. He couldn’t show people all of them, but he could easily locate at least four, plus Stannis, Renly, and (I think) Shireen also have that look. But he’d present it in context of other information about the twins. Cersei’s denials of the accusations tend to be telling because she doesn’t actually want people to believe her denials, and Jaime’s reputation is enough to create a presumption of guilt on his part.

So in-universe, people wouldn’t be considering Princess Rhaenys in that context. Ned, presumably thinking more or less the same way most people would, notes to himself as he reads Jon Arryn’s book that Lannister-Baratheon pairings resulted in children with Baratheon coloring, not that Baratheon children never inherited another parent’s light hair. If you’re asking more about consistent worldbuilding, assuming that hair color more or less follows Bio 101 Mendelian genetics in ASOIAF, it’s not inconsistent. If you assume that the Baratheon coloring is dominant (B) and lighter hair colors are recessive (b), it’s possible that Rhaenys’ mother had (Bb) genes (Orys was probably Aegon I’s half-brother, so the earlier Baratheons could have been carriers of Targaryen traits, and the Velaryons had a history of marrying into the Targaryens so her husband could have been a carrier as well), so Rhaenys and her kids wouldn’t have that look, but Robert has (BB) genes so all of his children will have those traits.

But again, that’s more for the reader. Something as concrete as a paternity test wouldn’t be a part of anyone’s expectations. The queen’s fidelity isn’t something that’s going to be decided by, like, a rational finder of fact operating from a presumption of innocence. In practice, it’s almost the opposite: if she’s in a weak enough position to have to defend herself from scrutiny, she’s probably screwed. The case Cersei tries to build against Margaery in AFFC is transparently bogus to the reader because we witness her inventing it, but it does illustrate the standards here. “She’s been alone with a musician and asked a maester for moon tea” may be less convincing than the hair color of hers and Robert’s children, but it would be taken seriously. (In our world’s history, too. Anne Boleyn died for less.) And that’s not even about the parentage of a child who actually exists! If the queen’s sexual history can be impeached, then that preemptively calls the legitimacy of any children she may have into question, which is potentially catastrophic to the legitimacy of the monarchy.

Cersei’s putting the cart before the horse there, though. Accusations that the queen’s children aren’t the king’s children aren’t exactly a source of power. What they can do is support or justify the overthrow of a ruler by force. Varys isn’t planning to install Aegon just by going public about Cersei’s kids, it’s one of a few things that he’s planing on doing to weaken the regime enough that the Golden Company can take Kings Landing. The more instructive contrast in the histories is the “Daeron Falseborn” story from the Blackfyre Rebellion, for which the evidence was ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. The Blacks thought they had the muscle to take the IT, but they couldn’t keep it if they didn’t preserve the idea that the Targaryens have the right to rule. Delegitimizing Daeron II personally was a way for the Blacks to take up arms against the king without delegitimizing the Targaryen dynasty.

That’s all built in to the “being queen” deal. (And the deal for noblewomen generally, but for a queen consort the stakes are life and death because infidelity is treason.) Margaery’s entourage serves a few purposes, but the most important one is that she always needs at least one credible witness to her chastity. That is to say, the queen lives under a presumption of guilt. Every minute of every day, she has to be creating this really intimate defense from charges that don’t even need to add up.

While I do think that it works as worldbuilding and is reasonable for characters in-universe to buy into, I also think you’re right to feel like something doesn’t make sense about it, because there’s a broader issue here. A system of government which is predicated on state ownership of women’s bodies is fundamentally absurd. It is going to have implications and outcomes that don’t make sense. If it feels off, that’s because, you know, it should.

I think and hope this will be seen in a future Dunk and Egg story, but my current best guess as to why Bloodraven won that second duel is that Bittersteel’s ego caught up with him. Certainly Bloodraven could have improved through training, but fights aren’t solely about technical skill, they’re also about who is more fatigued, or has the sun in their eyes (or eye, as it were), or who is paying closer attention to their own vulnerabilities as well as their opponent’s. Or, and this is a big one, weapons. Bloodraven was carrying Dark Sister, while Bittersteel almost certainly didn’t have Blackfyre with him - if he had, I can’t imagine the crown wouldn’t have taken it back once he was captured.

Generally speaking, though, I think the conflict between the two of them comes down to adaptability. Bloodraven is someone who’s holistically always looking for whatever advantage he can seize. Conventional acts of valor, or more pragmatic warfare like archery and strategic assassinations, or magic, or intelligence, or the use and abuse of diplomatic conventions - this is someone who we’ve seen be open to whatever course of action. By contrast, Bittersteel's major strategic moves are pretty conventional: he is a great warrior, and so he just keeps attacking and failing. He did actually make one more attempt after BR was sent to the Wall, though - the duel was during the Third Blackfyre Rebellion, and Bittersteel was around for the fourth.

Of course, that means Bloodraven actually did have more tools at his disposal, and we know he didn’t have any scruples about using them. Skinchanging probably wasn’t the issue because it does sound like people witnessed the duel between the two of them, which means Bloodraven wasn’t inside an animal at the time. But that doesn’t rule out other types of sorcery - even a glamour to make him appear a couple of inches taller or shorter would give him the edge. And on top of that, Bloodraven isn’t the only sorcerer in the equation, as Shiera Seastar doesn’t seem to have much cared for Bittersteel either.

So, yeah. Bloodraven had more resources and was more inclined to maximize their effectiveness; Bittersteel had hubris and tunnel vision and he brought a normal knife to a Valyrian steel swordfight.

Daemon is a weird character to speculate about because we’re never going to know him, but we kind of already know him?

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And once you draw that comparison, it’s actually remarkable, how well we know this song:

I’m trying not to get too invested in personal fanon for Bittersteel because the postscript for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms mentioned plans to take the characters to the Disputed Lands, and I don’t know why the series would do that other than to get an inside look at the Golden Company. I’m really looking forward to that and I think it will be most enjoyable with minimal preconceptions.

Am I succeeding in not having an opinion about him? Of course not.

He has to have been an exceptionally impressive personality. There’s this sense of gravitas that hangs around everything we hear about him, and for good reason. I kind of have to admire the resilience of someone who deals with having their ass handed to them by charging through hostile troops and building their own army. That’s some ruthlessly efficient egomania right there.

I am curious as to why he didn’t just kill Bloodraven during that first duel. I mean, *I‘m* glad he didn’t, but if you’re close enough to tear someone’s eye out, you’re close enough to just do them in. Did his men pull him away? Did he arrogantly assume that he’d scored a kill when he hadn’t? Could he just not cross that line of killing a brother, when it came down to it? Did he get some sadistic pleasure out of making another person live with being maimed, rather than killing them? That’s really a defining moment, IMO far more than any steps he might have taken to incite or continue the rebellion, and we haven’t gotten his perspective on why.

But we haven’t found out yet if he was for anything, if he wanted anything more than to externalize that overwhelming resentment. The fact that he wanted to be gilded and used to inspire more war, rather than be laid to rest, suggests a life and identity built on a deep unhappiness. Strength for the sake of strength, not in service of anything but itself, can be as inwardly corrosive as it is externally destructive.

I do think that the Whitewalls fiasco tells us that there’s something self-defeating about this character. I can understand why he wouldn’t want to put Daemon II at the head of an invasion, but that doesn’t mean the guy wasn’t an asset. He had dragon dreams! He could see the future! And you just let him get away?

He’s an incredibly powerful character, even though we barely have even second-hand information about him. I really hope we find out more.

Yeah, I have a conflicted response to this particular strain of fandom analysis. It’s valuable to understand what arguments were selling people on important choices like rebellion. And frankly, this is a perspective that I wouldn’t have thought too much about, so I really enjoy seeing it drawn out. But it’s also helpful to keep perspective on, you know, whether or not those arguments were objectively destructive, and if so, to hold the people who chose to exploit these ugly attitudes accountable for themselves. Bias is powerful, and it’s often unconscious, but it isn’t some impersonal force of nature, either.

I don’t have a longer post in the works about the Yronwoods and the Stormlanders, but I do agree that those alignments can provide some pretty telling arguments against this idea of honor and misplaced patriotism being sincere motivations rather than pretext for xenophobia and opportunism.

Admittedly, we don’t yet know the alignment of a lot of the Stormlands houses (History of Westeros recently did a write-up but it’s a lot of guesswork for this region), but it’s worth pointing out that the Stormlands marcher houses are the people who stand to gain the most from Dorne being integrated into the realm as quickly and smoothly as possible, precisely because they are the people most affected by these generations of fighting. The Stormlands are nowhere near as large and wealthy as the Reach, with a higher proportion of that land being covered by the border with Dorne. Continued hostilities cost the Stormlanders more than they do the Reach. If you’re a lord in the Stormlands marches, you’re bearing the brunt of this emotional “let’s keep fighting it out” policy. How much would you care if some Tyrell second son had a little more competition for a seat on the Small Council? I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them were swayed by that knot of bias and grudges, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if more of them prioritized their concrete self-interest. Like anything else, xenophobia has significantly greater appeal to people who see some short-term benefit in it.

Which brings us to the Yronwoods. I generally agree that their primary motivation was about challenging House Martell’s dominance, but it’s also true that the Yronwoods, and the other north and western houses who seem to have been the Dornish allies of the Blackfyres, are stony Dornishmen - that is to say, they’re the least Rhoynish. I strongly suspect that’s an issue at play as well, kind of bolstering the power play.

I think your comparison of Aegon IV to Tywin Lannister is an especially apt one - narcissists  who only care about their children insofar as those children reflect the way they want to see themselves.

It’s certainly possible he had major gratitude/love for Daeron and that’s what he’s talking about. I’m not sure there’s anything which suggests Daeron was responsible for Brynden’s status, though? Aegon did legitimize him, after all, not Daeron, and he wouldn’t have done so based on Daeron’s influence (if anything, he would have left Daeron’s favorite out, just to spite him). And acto the worldbook, Melissa Blackwood was popular enough that he also had some friends at court who were still loyal to his mother after she left.

Thank you very much, I’m glad to hear you’re enjoying the posts.

It’s certainly possible that he’s talking about Daeron, and admittedly I haven’t read the Dunk and Egg stories yet, so I’m going off of what is in TWOIAF and what feels right thematically, but I think I can defend it.

Daemon was also raised at the Red Keep, like Bloodraven and Daeron II. He wasn’t officially acknowledged as the king’s son until he was 12, but his mother was Princess Daena Targaryen. Presumably, he would have had high enough status at court that they’d get to know each other young, and Brynden Rivers was only 7(?) when Daemon was acknowledged and given the sword, so yes, I think that from Bloodraven’s perspective, he and Daemon were brothers.

They’re all still Bloodraven’s half-brothers, Daemon and Aegor and Prince Daeron, but because Daeron was the future king, he wasn’t really in the same boat as the others, even if they were close. I think an imperfect but useful comparison is to Arianne and the Sand Snakes. Arianne clearly considers the older Sand Snakes to be like her sisters; the big difference between them is less that they have different fathers and more that Arianne is the princess and they are bastards so her lifestyle sets her apart, with different privileges and different limitations. The peculiar situation of being royal bastards affiliates them more closely with each other than with anyone else, and as Jon says, “nobody said you had to like your brothers,” be they royal or otherwise. And so when Bloodraven names three people as being the most important in his life, it would feel a little weird to me for 2/3 of them to be other Great Bastards and one to be the king. I also like the idea that even the feared and terrible Bloodraven was susceptible to Daemon’s gift for inspiring love and admiration - but even that wasn’t enough to win his loyalty when push came to shove.

I tend to think that Bloodraven’s loyalty to the throne, while it could have been in part about affection toward his half-brother Daeron, was also about politics, and possibly also something he’d learned in his magical studies (maybe believing he had to preserve the Targ line for the PtwP?). I doubt it’s entirely about personal devotion to Daeron because he is just as ruthless against later generations of Blackfyres after Daeron’s death. If anything, he doubles down and shows more ruthless loyalty to subsequent Targaryen kings, which reads to me like he’s digging his heels in with I Did What I Had To Do, which in turn suggests that he felt some ambivalence about killing Daemon. If he hated Daemon, or didn’t know Daemon except as the pawn of his rival Bittersteel, I think he’d have felt a lot more comfortable with having done his duty.

Bloodraven being given Dark Sister also feels to me like a political move, rewarding him for being ~one of the good ones~ and supporting the establishment against his fellow Great Bastards. A clever one, too, because if another Great Bastard legitimized by Aegon IV is walking around out there serving the Targaryen king with one of the legendary Targaryen weapons, then it makes “the king who bore the sword” and his heirs a lot less special and compelling.

Bloodraven still being haunted by the whole thing a hundred years later, even having seen what he’s seen and knowing that the stakes are so much higher than Blackfyre vs Targaryen, suggests to me that his actions were in conflict with his heart, that he went to war against the brother he loved. (I’ve seen it theorized that Daeron was actually the brother he hated, though lbr, this is Bloodraven, if he’d “hated” the king there would’ve been a new king much sooner.) I think that he hated Bittersteel more than he loved Daemon, and that this great regret is one of his last ties to his human identity.