Editor’s notice, June 17, 2024: This story was first printed in 2016 and up to date following the season seven finale of Sport of Thrones. Click on right here to examine how the Targaryen household tree pertains to HBO’s prequel sequence Home of the Dragon, and get caught up for its second season right here. Additionally, Maryon is now not energetic on DeviantART, however you possibly can observe her on Instagram, the place she has shared excerpts from the tree.
In Sport of Thrones’ season seven finale, Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen lastly consummated their slow-burning ardour — although the season six finale’s affirmation of the “R + L = J” equation surrounding Jon’s parentage renders their love an incestuous one between aunt and nephew.
The finale additionally revealed that Jon Snow’s actual title is Aegon Targaryen — a twist which may have confused readers of the books Sport of Thrones is predicated on, since that’s additionally the title of Jon’s long-dead half-brother. We all know this half-brother at the very least existed within the present’s universe, as a result of Oberyn Martell famously fought the Mountain partly to avenge his demise and the demise of his sister. It’s not clear, nonetheless, if he was nonetheless named Aegon.
Confused? That’s comprehensible. To know why Lyanna Stark might need needed to call her son Aegon along with her dying breath, you would possibly want a refresher course on the immense Targaryen dynasty — the household that dominated for 3 centuries over all of Westeros. And should you’re having bother remembering what half the unique Aegon, Jon’s namesake, performed on this litany of names, you’re in luck: An enterprising fan artist has drawn all the Home Targaryen household tree, and the outcomes are as academic as they’re attractive.
DeviantArtist person Maryon B.’s work is a attractive take on the difficult, once-mighty dynasty of the Targaryens that doubles as a useful reminder of simply the place Jon Snow matches into all of this (click on right here for the full-size model):
Maryon is a 28-year-old French freelance artist and online game developer presently residing in Helsinki. She’s additionally a die-hard Sport of Thrones fan, which could clarify why she’s illustrated all the lineage of Home Targaryen (house of 1 Daenerys, Mom of Dragons) from George R.R. Martin’s A Tune of Ice and Hearth sequence of novels — although, as she says in her description of the challenge on DeviantArt, “I DON’T EVEN LIKE HOUSE TARGARYEN WHY DID I DO THIS[?]”
“I truly began the Tree out of spite as a result of all their descriptions (and fan representations) make them look the identical — lovely, silver-haired and purple eyes,” she informed Vox by way of e-mail in 2016, after first drawing the tree, “and it pissed off me to see them as elf-clones.”
Maryon’s frustration is comprehensible. The Targaryens are rather more than fairly blondes with huge pets, and their convoluted dynasty has huge repercussions for the current and way forward for Westeros.
The title “Aegon” invokes the lads who united all of Westeros — till Jon Snow’s father inadvertently helped shatter the realm
As Sport of Thrones followers have heard again and again, the highly effective Targaryen household unified the Seven Kingdoms. That is primarily due to the first Aegon Targaryen, often called Aegon the Conqueror. A number of different Aegons adopted — together with the smart and kindly Aegon V, higher identified to guide followers as “Egg” from Martin’s Dunk and Egg prequel novellas.
However although Egg stabilized the nation and dominated over a harsh winter, the top of his reign wasn’t precisely a profession excessive level. And sadly for Westeros, Aegon V’s grandson was the “Mad King,” Aerys II, higher often called Daenerys’s deceased father.
Aerys’s son, Rhaegar Targaryen — Daenerys’s brother, the crown prince and inheritor to the throne, whom we now additionally know as Jon Snow’s father — fell in love with Lyanna Stark, Ned Stark’s sister, although he was already married to Elia Martell. An extra complication: Lyanna was already engaged to Robert Baratheon.
Sport of Thrones season seven revealed essential new context to this backstory: We now know that Rhaegar secretly had his marriage to Elia annulled so he might marry Lyanna Stark someday earlier than his demise and the delivery of their son. However Robert believed (or needed to imagine) that Rhaegar had kidnapped and raped Lyanna — and the ensuing battle culminated in a horrific finish to the peace between the households, because the Mad King burned Lyanna’s father, Rickard Stark, alive whereas her brother Brandon watched. This led to an rebellion that got here to be often called Robert’s Rebel, during which the Baratheons joined Home Stark to combat and finally overthrow the Targaryens.
It was throughout Robert’s Rebel that Robert defeated Rhaegar in battle. After Rhaegar’s demise, Robert’s fearsome henchman Gregor Clegane murdered Rhaegar’s spouse — or, as we now know, his former spouse — Elia Martell, and Rhaegar’s two younger kids, Aegon and Rhaenys. The season seven finale revealed that shortly thereafter, Lyanna informed Ned Stark that her youngster, Rhaegar’s final remaining son, was additionally named Aegon.
Will Jon Snow fulfill the fame of the title of Aegon the Conqueror and Aegon V? Given all of the violence and battle that led to his delivery, we are able to solely hope.
Should you assume this a part of the Targaryen legacy is complicated, wait til you see all the lineage
The complete Targaryen household tree accommodates greater than 100 characters and spans 16 generations of totally fictional historical past.
Right here’s a take a look at just one character from this broad tapestry: the second Rhaenys Targaryen. Recognized within the annals of Westeros historical past because the “queen who by no means was,” Rhaenys was a dragon rider whose declare to the throne was handed over in favor of her brother. She married Corlys Velaryon and died preventing a battle on dragonback on the age of 52:
Rhaenys’s great-grandmother was Alyssa Velaryon, who joined the Targaryen dynasty by marrying Aenys I, a politically wily man who took the throne amid nice upheaval. They’d six kids earlier than Aenys was killed and Alyssa taken hostage by her husband’s half-brother Maegor. (And from there, issues get actually difficult.)
Additional down the household tree, there’s Home Blackfyre, an illegitimate home sanctioned by the lust-ridden King Aegon Targaryen IV, who’s typically thought of the worst king ever. His determination to legitimize the entire bastard kids he fathered along with his many mistresses — introduced from his deathbed — prompted 5 generations of battles for the throne often called the Blackfyre Rebellions.
Maryon says she received into Martin’s Tune of Ice and Hearth novels and associated writing in the course of the lengthy hiatus between seasons two and three of Sport of Thrones. She began the Targaryen household tree challenge roughly on accident after drawing Baelor Breakspear and Maekar, characters who determine prominently in Tales of Dunk and Egg, Martin’s aforementioned assortment of associated novellas set within the Tune of Ice and Hearth universe. Naturally, the challenge spiraled:
[I]t received me involved in their ancestors, so I labored from there. At first I by no means thought I might do the entire bunch, but it surely’s after I realized that I used to be already midway by means of simply by making Maekar’s descendants that I gave in: “Whereas I am at it, would possibly as nicely do the remaining…”
Maryon says the challenge turned out to be “a really difficult inventive train, to maintain on arising with facial selection all whereas sustaining the identical ‘silver hair-purple eyes’ options and a few genetic similarities.”
“I needed to discover inspiration and research some actual folks’s faces so I realized loads since I began.”
Above all, a take a look at the total household tree reveals how typically and the way strategically the Targaryens secured the way forward for their line by marrying into different highly effective households just like the Martells, the Baratheons, and the Velaryons, simply as many figures in real-world historical past have achieved. And when Maryon was completed, she says she’d truly develop into fonder of the Targaryens than she was when she started:
“[I]n the top it made me recognize Home Targaryen rather more since now I share a private story with each one in every of them, and I might counsel anybody who likes Sport of Thrones to be interested by them as a result of they’ve plenty of tales to inform.”
You’ll be able to see these and lots of extra excerpts from the Targaryen household tree, in addition to different Sport of Thrones portraits, on Maryon’s DeviantArt web page. She’s acknowledged that she hopes to ultimately produce a print model of the total household tree, however within the meantime she’s achieved a couple of extra difficult Sport of Thrones initiatives, together with a set of Main Arcana tarot playing cards.
