(pt. 1/2)
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 viserys’ 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.
what cinches it is the entirety of 1.04. daemon is still bitter and furious that his brother rejected him and disinherited him. the route he decides to take for revenge is highly suggestive. he takes viserys’ virgin daughter, that now (heartrendingly young) adult woman who was the child he so loved, to a brothel, in an attempt to deflower her. whether that is the intended revenge entire, and whether the morning after gambit that since he has “ruined” her viserys should marry them off was the plan all along or improvisation is unclear to me. either way, it’s haunting - even in getting revenge, he wants closer to his brother. their relationship as brothers has failed because daemon could not be a societally validated sister-wife, so he wants to become his brother’s son-in-law instead and be enfolded back into the family. the line for me is clear: viserys used daemon as a targaryen brother does a sister, but this rips the relationship apart in part because of a perception that this did not buy the complete gendered mastery signified by sanctioned, normative marriage and reproduction.
this is what i had in mind when watching the visions daemon has of viserys in 2.06. in the first, he is trapped in a memory of when viserys’ castigated him for his failure to provide him emotional support (daemon was having a sex party on the day of his brother’s wife’s funeral instead of comforting his bereaved brother), and then disinherited him. the two are connected, the emotional failure related to inadequate intimacy and the political dispossession. daemon fails as a brother because he was not there emotionally for viserys. to be clear, this is true, and i think daemon’s clear, excruciating, lingering guilt over it is correct…outside of my headcanons, which is the trail which we’re following here. so to go with me on that trail if you want, it is interesting to think about the way viserys looks to the satisfaction of his needs from his family, from his women, and the implications of that. after all on the night of his wife’s funeral, when daemon wasn’t comforting him, who was? his daughter’s 14-year-old best friend. viserys is not evil for any of this. like daemon, he has been raised to a specific place in this culture, and this is all understandable if tragic.
but the end of that scene is interesting. daemon begs him not to disinherit him, and then turns and flees. on the most obvious and intended narrative level, he flees from his failure, and from his brother’s pain. on the second level i am pursuing for my own enrichment of my engagement with the constituent themes of the show or whatever, daemon flees from viserys’ demand that daemon succor him for his grief over the wife who is dead because he cut her open in a non-consensual c-section to try to secure the son and heir he was desperate for to displace daemon and redeem the inadequacy of his living daughter. there is a desperation to this bit that is fascinating and distinct from the reaction daemon has had to the rest of his visions. he usually is woken up or brought back to reality by others. he doesn’t usually attempt to end it. (the rhaenyra beheading scene in 2.04 is an interesting variation - he perhaps tries to end it by murdering dreamnyra, but it doesn’t work: the head keeps talking). here, he ends up rattling the doors, pleading to be let out. he goes on his knees and says “please, please let me out.”
when i made my initial post about this scene, i was obviously not saying daemon was literally being sexually assaulted by viserys as he comes face-to-face again with viserys’ anger that daemon failed him here. i was simply saying a scene that ends with daemon banging on doors begging to be released from the room where he is trapped with his brother and his throne and his crown (as the script for 1.10 said, the symbol of his “power and control” over daemon, and which the vision of viserys drops, the ring as it hits stone echoing over daemon’s frantic attempts to escape), where he is confronted by his brother and king with the failure to be the emotional support his brother needs, the structural failure that shattered their relationship so it never recovered, is resonant. we are supposed to be thinking about daemon’s psyche and past as harrenhal does a magical deep dive into what makes him tick. so daemon is locked in to a dynamic that can never be fulfilled, pleading for some release from its very painful contradictions and tensions, the broken bond it produced, is suggestive.
…but wait! daemon gets out. he comes back to his present. but he goes back in. the next vision is a rewrite. instead of failing his brother and fleeing the home and his duties by its patriarch and lord for a sex party/baby wake (celebrating the death of the patriarchal heir in an antithetical, mirror site, in the antithetical way of sexual excess unrelated to legitimate dynastic reproduction), what if daemon stayed in the room with brother and throne crown and all it engenders? what if he stayed with his brother, gave of himself as fully as he could, everything he could? daemon envisions himself comforting his brother over the corpse of his sister-in-law with this incredible heartbreaking tenderness, cradling viserys and kissing him softly, a flow of all the love he had to give and couldn’t, which was longed for and could not be received, and finally finds some peace and catharsis in it, as shown when he comes out of vision to sob at the news of lord grover’s death, at last giving in to his grief for his brother. he wants out; he never wants out. he escapes and he comes back. he leaves for pentos, he rejects his brother’s offer of a place at his side in 1.07; he marries his brother’s daughter, and will die fighting to put her on his brother’s throne. it is the great tragedy of his life he was locked out, and he would have resented being kept in, as he continues to struggle throughout season 2 with the painful contradictions of his societally ordained yet incomplete subordination as second son and living weapon and spouse to targaryen kings.
it's just interesting to think about WHO was actually comforting viserys on one of the grief-stricken nights daemon imagines himself into, what it suggests about the role viserys imagines daemon is made to fill (since this is what he explicitly accuses daemon with, that he wasn’t there for viserys in his grief), that daemon also imagines he is made to fill, but flees from to his "whores and lickspittles", that he flees from again in the first vision of 2.06, only to finally embrace it in this redeeming script, fulfilling viserys' need over the corpse of his dead wife, in place of the child bride that was actually there to fill the place that daemon denied and was denied.
