maybe a weird question but i was wondering about this earlier: as an aerion connoisseur, what mental illness(es) do you think he has?
NO this isn't weird don't worry this is my favourite question and I've been wanting an excuse to make a post about it for ages... My thesis statement re: Aerion's brain is that I think he's schizophrenic. My main reasoning here is the wildfire drinking so I'll start with that; otherwise I might agree based on his actions at Ashford that he was just tyrannical and cruel and vain (not that he isn't all of those things). But in ASOS Stannis says:
"Nine mages crossed the sea to hatch Aegon the Third's cache of eggs. Baelor the Blessed prayed over his for half a year. Aegon the Fourth built dragons of wood and iron. Aerion Brightflame drank wildfire to transform himself. The mages failed, King Baelor's prayers went unanswered, the wooden dragons burned, and Prince Aerion died screaming."
Which implies to me that death by drinking wildfire isn't an instant thing as might be assumed; Davos also mentions the "shrieks of dying men" when he thinks back on the Blackwater. So it's less like going up in a puff of smoke, and more like drinking oil and then setting yourself alight... the main difference between wildfire and real fire seems to be the length of time it burns, and that it can't be put out with water, or anything but sand, really. What I'm saying is that you have plenty of time to feel pain before you die, with this method. And I don't think someone who was only cruel and vain and tyrannical would want to die so horribly! Mentally well* people—or people who were using "I am the dragon" as an excuse to hold themselves above everyone else, and didn't truly believe it—don't kill themselves like that. Ergo there's something there!
(*I'm aware that he's said to have been drunk at the time... but we've all been blackout drunk before and none of us reading this have burnt ourselves to death, and he was sober enough to tell everyone there of his intentions for the history books.)
Wildfire aside, I want to mention that hallucinations & delusions can be affected by the culture one grows up in; this article has several points I find interesting:
"We find that culture can affect what is identified as a hallucination ... that hallucinations are often culturally meaningful..."
"There is robust evidence that unusual sensory experiences have been given great importance as foundational spiritual experiences throughout the world—Moses and his burning bush, Paul on the road to Damascus, Arjuna’s vision of Krishna, Buddha beneath the Bo tree. Bourguignon examined data collected from the Human Relations Area File (HRAF) from 488 societies worldwide. In 62% of the cultures studied, hallucinations played a role in ordinary ritual practices. These hallucinations were positively valued, could be understood in the context of local beliefs and practices, and the presence of hallucinations was not usually associated with intake of psychoactive chemicals."
"Typically, such sensory experiences of the immaterial are understood as contacts with gods, spirits, or the dead. While many such experiences never enter the historical record, others take on broad public meaning."
"When someone’s experience matches cultural expectations, this is often taken to demonstrate that the unusual sensory experience is of the spirit world and not madness."
Culture and Hallucinations: Overview and Future Directions
In AFFC, Aemon says:
My brothers dreamed of dragons too, and the dreams killed them, every one.
I'm assuming he's including Aerion here; this gels with the above quotes. Culturally—and personally to Aemon, who is dreaming of dragons himself—a Targaryen going "mad," especially re: dragons, was probably dreaming of them. As Bloodraven says in TMK, "there have always been Targaryens who dreamed of things to come, since long before the Doom". They're aware of dreams and a great deal of Targaryens have them, unlike HOTD's framing of them as rare and borderline unheard of.
Onto the specific illnesses I think Aerion has... I'm going to be quoting a lot from discussion forums from people who have the same diagnoses, and for some semblance of privacy I'm not going to include their usernames. From schizophrenia discussion threads:
"It's not fear, it's knowledge. You're not worried your friends are plotting to kill you. You know your friends are plotting to kill you."
The first sentence, I think, we can assume was Aerion's thought process when he downed a cup of wildfire, since we've established that an extremely fiery and painful death wasn't in any way what he was expecting, and there's also this comment:
"Then there's what they call "delusions of grandeur" where you think you're powerful or genius or supernatural. These make you do crazy shit, often EXTREMELY DANGEROUS, and ungodly embarrassing later on in life."
Which is also very relevant to wildfire-dragon-gate. The part about knowing people are plotting to kill you also makes me think of his insistence at Ashford that the puppeteers are committing treason, and Daeron's later comment ("He thinks he's a dragon in human form, you know. That's why he was so wroth at that puppet show.") seems to support an interpretation that he did indeed believe what he was saying. Another commenter also mentions having paranoia so bad it makes them want to lash out and hurt people
All in all to summarise he comes off as incredibly paranoid and unhappy to me in THK; even Daeron knows that he considers himself to not be human, but rather a dragon; the entire wildfire thing; and strangely, a common reoccurrence in these comments is people's parents and loved ones (Maekar) refusing to see that something is wrong, whilst those at more of a distance can see it more clearly...
But the wildfire thing really is the lynchpin of it because #ToMe it confirms he's not well and from there the rest falls into place. I did also have an entire section about my deep dark and secret Aerion (and Daeron) theories but I triggered myself like some sort of freak and couldn't keep typing. So you will have to DM me for that one...
I feel like I ought clarify that I do not have schizophrenia myself. My occasional hallucinations really bother me so I might be projecting re: that, but I don't have an abnormal amount and they're the sort that everyone has
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at this point i think just liking it (or at least s2) is an unpopular opinion skjdhkfs like obviously i have criticisms, like cutting characters like nettles and aly/sabitha as well as shafting helaena and the dragon twins and jace's world tour, but i still overall enjoyed it idk i'm looking forward to season three (well except for. you know.)
