nothing i say gets people so heated as my "daemon is a csa survivor, and it's most personally interesting TO ME if the perpetrator was viserys, because that makes the triangulation of hurt and need between viserys/daemon/rhaenyra juciest" headcanon. often this seems to be based on the fact that daemon in turn causes harm to various women in his life, specifically female family members, most significantly of course the way he traumatizes rhaenyra as a teenager in 1.04 (i have literally always consistently maintained this), as well as marrying laena when she is a teenager. this is pretty inane, as of course many victims of csa go on to either be victimizers of it or just cause interpersonal harms more generally stemming from their trauma. it does not absolve daemon in any way, merely is one way of making sense of him. it's not needed - the fact that incest marriage is institutionalized within his family and marriage and sex to pubescent girls normative in his society provides adequate reasoning on his own - but it allows me to explore things i find compelling. the other problem seems to be that i don't ship viserys/daemon, really - partly because of this, although i don't think abuse and shipping are mutually exclusive at all (see above) - and i think there's this idea i'm insulting it, but i actually have a lot of close friends that ship it. i do not care.
but i do, with the way 1.04 plays out, find it a fascinating headcanon. it is ultimately exactly that - i am NOT claiming its text. but the social order of the westerosi aristocratic class is thus: the inheritance of power is based around male primogeniture. the eldest son inherits, and all men in his family owe him fealty and total loyalty. it's an intensely patriarchal society, so women are subordinate to men, and especially to the lord as patriarch. the targaryen family is structured thus: the boys marry their sisters, and so the men targaryen women are subordinate to are their brothers, who they are made for, for sexual, emotional, and reproductive use. viserys and daemon's parents (and grandparents) were full siblings, and they have no sisters. by the ideology of their upbringing, a sister would have been viserysâ wife, and provided his heirs. as a younger brother, daemon is expected to give viserys that fealty and total loyalty.
it creates an interesting psychological wrinkle: if daemon had been born a girl, the loyalty he would be expected to provide would be that of sexual access. he would not be a threat to viserys, in this framework, because his social identity would be totally subsumed to that of his brother, as his wife and queen. but this is not the case for second sons, who however are still men, still expected to resent they are denied the fullest expression of patriarchal prerogative possible, embodied in being a lord. (this does not mean that younger sons lack patriarchal prerogative - just according to the ideologies of masculinity as entire mastery and power over others, at the aristocratic level, they are denied the ultimate expression which is the unattainable model for everyone else). this is even more intensified when the eldest brother and heir is a targaryen king, possessing ultimate power.
as a second son, daemon is a threat for that perceived grasping at what is denied to him by virtue of his birth order, with historical, familial precedent, in the form of maegor's usurpation and murder of his older brother's children. he cannot be subsumed, but that also means he cannot be treasured. that is the sick purported tradeoff of patriarchal marriage generally, and awareness of this would be sharpened by targaryen marriage practices. as many have said, this would have a huge effect on daemon's psyche. he wants his brother's love, and cannot have it because he can't have his full trust, because of the tensions of feudal law. with the example of his parents in mind, the thought of how he would be enfolded and kept close to the person he loves most if he was a sister and thus a wife would be very present.
what interests me just as much is the often ignored flipside. if daemon thinks the above, no less would it occur to viserys about how much easier it would be to control a sister, and thus keep her close because she is not the possible threat to his reign, a desire for control that is also tragically a desire for love and intimacy. i am interested in these lines getting crossed. if a sister was made for you to fuck, and a brother was made to serve you with his sword arm, if in both cases their bodies and lives are made for your use, it would be easy to appropriate a brother to another use because of the inherent feminization of being a second son in westerosi society (this sort of anxiety about the gendered contradictions of being a younger son is really present everywhere in the books), for a man as viserys is canonically demonstrated to be: a man who uses the bodies of very young women for his own sexual, emotional, and reproductive needs. (at the age of 40, he marries a 15-year-old alicent and immediately gets her pregnant; in the book aemma is 11 when they marry and 13 when she has her first child, and going by the script the age difference, at least, is perhaps maintained, as she is listed as "in her 30s" in the pilot script, to viserys' "40s"). this is reflected in how daemon in turn uses women: his failed attempt to attain a 19-year-old rhaenyra as his wife, clearly because he conceives of her as made for him, and laena who he marries and has a child with when she is ~16 and he is in his early 30s.
what evokes this for me is a constellation of stuff that appears disconnected to others but comes together to form something powerfully suggestive to me of daemon's status as both victim and victimizer: daemon's position as almost a scapegoat in 1.01, when we don't get a ton of possible reasons for his distance from court aside from the way otto's intense suspicion of him has crowded him out of a place at his brother's side; the framing of him as monstrous, a disease or canker on the family line (literally something that makes its home outside the family home, in its ideological opposite and mirror image of the brothel, but also festers in the walls itself as in one fascinating shot); the fact that he provides the justification for it himself by his own cruel, impulsive, violent actions (see above about being able to perpetuate harm in turn); his protracted adolescence that keeps him at viserys' side while also keeping at a distance (he is married but lives apart from the wife his brother both fails to succeed in sending him back to while also scorning his extramarital realtionship with mysaria and not allowing him to legitimize it as daemon attempts to do in 1.02); this eternal boyishness and its implications of gender failure (as is revealed in 1.05, he never consummated his marriage); his sexual dysfunction; his relationship with his 14-year-old niece in an inappropriately intimate bond, a beloved child who he connects to with a disturbing ease; matt's smith's very childish affect in daemon's scenes with viserys, expressed most poignantly in that one moment where he rests his head on his shoulder in 1.04. again, it's compelling grist for a headcanon, mingling stuff that's in the text in elusive form in a fun alchemy with my own projections and interests, as fandom is so rich for.
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