‘House Of The Dragons’: New Bratty Prince Just Dropped

Sandwiched between graphic, borderline intolerable birth scenes (one of which ended with dragon-assisted self-immolation, just in case you were getting a little too comfortable) on this week’s House of the Dragon, we met the children of Queen Alicent and King “Let Me Tell You A Story About A Horse For No Reason” Viserys: Aemond, Helaena, and Aegon. While we did see him briefly as a toddler, now Aegon is a full-on annoying teenage brat. Man, that kid sucks. 

It’s not just the unconvincing Twisted Sister hairpiece, Aegon is relentlessly cruel to his siblings and cousins. And if that wasn’t bad enough, in one scene, he’s literally jerking off through an open palace window – which fans pointed out is the second worst thing to happen in said window.

Seeing a horrible young Prince living in King’s Landing obviously calls to mind Joffrey (the character from Game of Thrones, not the one-day-old baby from House of the Dragon), and not surprisingly, people on social media are already gleefully hating on this little monster.

It remains to be seen where all of this goes, but right now, it feels like the show is trying a little too hard to make us dislike this kid; as if having a royal child jerk was something Game of Thrones fans would want, no need to see in the spin-off. But arguably, Joffrey’s awfulness acted, at first, as a subversion of classic fantasy tropes; the fair-haired boy Prince that Sansa wants to marry turns out to be an unrelentingly brutal monster. Whether or not Game of Thrones reveled in that brutality a tad too much is debatable, but it still served a larger point to begin with. Aegon, so far, feels like the show had to slot in another meme-able jerk boy with a punchable face.

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Thumbnail: HBO