lmao >Dorne
this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2026
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Pansexual, polyamory, gender-agnostic monarchy featuring Pedro Pascal? The wokest, at least for Westeros standards.
Idk what kind of woke shit they're up to in the free cities
Dorne is already woke
The land acknowledgement is so funny
Egg tried to do this that's why all the lord of Westeros opposed him
Yeah this is what the fortune teller in the show was getting at when she said "all who know you shall rejoice in your dying". She was referring to the fact that all the great lords of the seven kingdoms end up absolutely despising him for his reforms granting the smallfolk unprecedented rights.
Like in the later years of his life the entire continent is basically a powder keg waiting to explode in his face just to rollback his entire reign.
He gets desperate enough that he is willing to try a blood magic ritual to hatch the remaining petrified dragon eggs because at this point he believes dragons are the only thing that will deter the great lords from rebellion in the very near future. It's very likely at some point he has a vague vision of Daenerys hatching her dragons in Khal Drogo's funeral pyre, and he misinterprets it as something he will do.
Anyways, something goes horribly, horrifically wrong involving wildfyre, and he burns to death along with most of the royal family at Summerhall. His only surviving son Jaehaerys II becomes king, and he revives Targaryen incestuous marriage. Jaehaerys II is then succeeded by his son, the mad king Aerys II. Aerys II appoints Tywin as hand and they proceed to rollback all the reforms.
Unironically Aegon V was the best of the Targaryen kings, though the realm does not remember him as such.
Silly Egg, he should have done absolutism instead of a blood ritual
FR the Targaryens needed less Valyrian magic and more institution building. A permanent bureaucracy. A standing national army. A legislative council. Make more lands into royal fiefs. Do something to turn this confederation of warlord kin-groups into some kind of real cohesive nation under a real state.
There's a scene in either Feast or Dance where Cersei is trying to borrow money from the Iron Bank and she thinks Westeros needs its own bank, and it's like the best idea anyone in these books has ever had. If she could have gotten that started it would have been a huge plus for her in the history books.
Aegon I should have annexed the riverlands for better control over the rest of the 7 kingdoms, at least the Targaryens would have a military levy as big as the size of the westerlands, instead of always depending on alliances with great houses for controlling rebellions and showing strenght
The Riverlands at the time was recently under the tyrannical rule of Harren Hoare from the Iron Islands, who built Harrenhal. He brought back slavery, which had been banned since at least the Andals in Westeros. Probably before that given the Wildlings and First Men don't seem to practice much slavery either after the Long Night. Basically the whole place was a ransacked ruins, generations of wealth, taxes, labor and mass conscription/slavery had culminated in Harrenhal, which was burned to the ground and a smoldering ruin. It was probably the most undeveloped, unpopulated and poor part of the Seven Kingdoms. Even the North had better economic infrastructure and trade towns like White Harbor.
While this could make it easier for Targaryens to integrate and take over the area, it would also make them petty lords of the weakest of the seven kingdoms at the time. Plus, Kings Landing was already starting to become a bustling trade port in the Crownlands. They were right to establish in the Crownlands. Aegon's Conquest really was a miraculous feat of leadership and diplomacy and luck even with dragons, I don't know how much different they could have done it than they did. They couldn't really cut it any closer. Keep in mind the scale of Westeros is apparently somewhere around the size of all of Europe and more, when including the North and beyond the wall it's more like taking over Eurasia.
less Valyrian magic and more institution building
Replace magic with "fancy and weird shit" and that's basically the error of most feudal lords, isn't it? They didn't invest their resources in their state, but instead in making tournaments, fancy furniture and cool armor.
The Hell On Earth podcast goes into this in some depth. They talk about the Ferdinands in the 30 years war tried to build some institutions in the holy roman empire, but whereever they pushed is where they got too much resistance to do anything.
Honestly as much as GoT is build on the war of the roses, it's interesting how there's a bunch of parallels to german history in the story of Aegon/the failure of the targaryens.
It's important to note that these sorts of changes towards institutional states took a century or more in most cases. Looking at just Europe, the french had centuries to create their administrative state. Spain tried to do that all at once and that lead to 2 civil wars and the loss of Portugal. The Ottomans had ebbs and flows when it comes to centralized administration and that's because they started 'early' and didn't have a feudal nobility to start with. Meanwhile you have Venice sitting to the side behaving institutionally on the level of the 1960s CIA. History's just not very linear and its very diverse. If you were a feudal landlord would you take some stabs at your autonomy and resources for a generation or two or would you live your best life right now and tell the monarch to deal with the rebelling peasants somehow (don't touch my privileges edition)?
If I were a landlord I'd have a moat filled with gravy and I'd knight every donkey I came across.
i, too, would be the coolest and chillest of landlords
Do something to turn this confederation of warlord kin-groups into some kind of real cohesive nation under a real state.
For someone who asks "but what was aragorn's tax policy", GRRM isn't very concerned with understanding how political power works, even in feudal societies.
For someone who asks "but what was aragorn's tax policy", GRRM isn't very concerned with understanding how political power works, even in feudal societies.
?? He wrote it that way, he wrote the downfall and the infighting and all that coming as a result of the lacking political power. If he didn't understand how political power worked, the civil wars and coups and infighting would all have been results of some idealistic libshit instead.
Dragons are the nukes of GoT. Aegon is Ghaddafi. 
meh gawd its beaudiful