#i get why rhaena and baela were acting irrationally upset their mother died and they're young

[navree]

Let's be honest, and I say this with full offense, Lucerys Velaryon is the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of the Dance of the Dragons. He is meant to be a sacrificial lamb to kick off the entire war proper. If we had gotten a full season of development with him like we did with the younger cast in Game of Thrones, I guarantee more people would've felt something. The only reason I personally feel bad is from a baseline level of empathy, because he was a child who was placed in an unwinnable situation due to his mom being completely irresponsible with him and his brothers.

However…

The comparison between Lucerys and Aemond is no contest. Love him or hate him, Aemond has an actual personality and goals when we first meet him. There's enough dimension in Aemond as a child to showcase the potential for sympathy between him and Jace at the funeral, a scene they didn't need to put in, but they did, which emphasizes his own innocence. Even before he breaks bad fully in S1E10, he's still far more compelling to watch due to the number of scenes allocated to him and his dynamic with other people.

This is where you and I are going to disagree just a bit, because Lucerys does do something in S1E07 and S1E08. He gouges out the eye of a family member and petulantly whines that he “didn’t do anything!” when confronted with the possibility of getting in trouble for it, then years later has the nerve and complete lack of sense to giggle at the person he permanently maimed only hours after his legitimacy was publicly called into question (again) and resulted in a murder. The narrative (perhaps unintentionally) glosses over these moments in favor of portraying him as good, whereas if you read between the lines, you can see that as being an oversimplification. The problem is that because S1 was truncated, secondary characters like Lucerys don’t receive screentime dedicated to portraying anything other than a single personality trait. Unfortunately, because of his role in the text and the way it was adapted for television, there was never a chance that Lucerys would be interesting.

I don't even have anything to add, this is just objectively correct.

#personal #answered #anonymous #and yeah lucerys refusing to take any responsibility or even show a hint of remorse for what he did is so galling to me #i could never care about him after that #like first of all you were in the wrong in the fight period #aemond did nothing wrong he claimed a free dragon who let him bond with her #i get why rhaena and baela were acting irrationally upset their mother died and they're young #grief makes you act weird #jace and luke had absolutely no reason to act the way they did #like it's not your fight and also again aemond literally did nothing wrong #but because he made a nasty comment after already being yelled at for doing nothing wrong y'all decide to gang up on him #with your cousins #and then this little idiot decides to take a whole knife to someone's face and refuses to ever feel bad #luke could have KILLED aemond #aemond could have DIED #not just from the immediate wound but also any issues that arose during a really long and arduous healing process #it's why fics with luke where he feels bad or contrite don't work for me #because he literally doesn't??? #he doesn't care at all #he doesn't care he almost killed a person for no reason and left them with lifelong issues as a result of his fuck up #out here kicking his feet and giggling over maiming another human being #again vhagar eating him was too easy #he should have gotten his eye poked out first anyway #literally only feel kinda bad for rhaenyra cuz i'm neutral leaning positive towards rhaenyra and losing a child hurts #luke himself can rot i feel nothing