in episode 4 of the show daemon takes his niece rhaenyra, who is 19, to a brothel with the intent of seducing her, publicly, so it gets back to his brother viserys who has disinherited and exiled him, as an act of revenge.
rhaenyra is very into it. he’s her favorite relative, she clearly has had a crush on him for a long time, and he’s returned a dashing war hero.
daemon looks into her face, sees a sweet, eager desire - and stops. he can’t go through with it.
when confronted by his brother, daemon brings up the fact that when they were rhaenyra’s age “we fucked our way through every brothel in the street of silk.” implicitly - together.
viserys is, of course, married to his his teenage daughter’s best friend. he has already impregnated her twice. we see him maritally rape her in the same episode, intercut with the brothel scene.
viserys and daemon of course come from a family that marry brother to sister. but daemon was born a brother.
daemon - and this is something he still obviously finds painful - was married off at 16 himself, and sent away from home.
in episode 5, after viserys refuses daemon’s plea he be allowed to marry rhaenyra (to make this all right?) on grounds he is already married, daemon kills his estranged wife. he spooks her horse - it’s unclear whether this was intentional. her spine is broken, and although the scene cuts away, it’s strongly implied he finishes her off with a large rock.
he then returns to court, unencumbered, obviously with the intent of marrying rhaenyra. at her betrothal banquet to another man, in hurt fury at his abandonment and from a genuine desire, she dares him to steal her away and make her his wife. again, he cannot do it. when violence breaks out, he flees again. he knows if he did this he would destroy rhaenyra’s political prospects and relationship with her father.
10 years later, after their marriages to other people and after daemon has been widowed (natural causes, this time), they reunite. rhaenyra confronts daemon about his abandonment and he says: “i spared you. you were a child.” rhaenyra initiates both their sexual encounter and their marriage.
in episode 9, we get a depressing anecdote about daemon’s nephews, rhaenyra’s brothers, the ones by viserys and that teenage girl he married. the elder, aegon, took aemond, the younger, to a brothel when he was 13, saying “time to get it wet.” it’s clear from the way aemond tells this story he found this an upsetting experience and first experience of sex.
in episode 8, we learn aegon only pays attention to his sister-wife helaena “when he’s drunk.” we learn he has raped a teenage maid.
the point i’m trying to make is we are shown a society, a class, a family, where relationships with sex, between men and women, older generations and the young, are warped at pretty much all levels. it’s a story about patriarchy and incestuous families and intimate violence. i’m not trying to say daemon is some paragon for stopping with rhaenyra. i can hear the refrain - what does he want, a medal for being a decent human being? the point is - we see no other man in the series do this. no other man in this family realizes brothel dates with close family is probably not the best thing to be doing. no other man has a sense of sexual responsibility, especially with young women, at all. and it’s meaningful to me - genuinely very moving - in this story about how everyone is trapped in a patriarchal hellscape, in this family, to have daemon repeatedly - while still fucking up hugely and being a fucked up guy - have this ability to look into rhaenyra’s eyes in that brothel and be unable to act selfishly if it means hurting her. it means more to me than some bloodless depiction of flawless sexual ethics. it’s an important story about abusive family dynamics and cycles of violence and the absolute power of men over women within the family.
so it sucks to see sara hess say of aegon, very explicitly a rapist, that we should have sympathy for him because he was never taught about consent, while also being unable to understand why people might be drawn to daemon as the one man who for one second, even warped as it is, even compromised as it is - put a woman’s well-being above his own lust. the only one.
