Targaryen monarchs compared to Roman emperors
this started as a half-baked shitpost at midnight but took on a life of its own, and the wonderful @winterstarfall bullied me into posting it, so.
AEGON THE CONQUEROR and TRAJAN OPTIMUS
first of his name and of his dynasty/the man whose name was invoked as a blessing
considered the gold standard of their nation's leadership, both were considered foreigners despite being raised in the land they would come to conquer thanks to their parentage (of valyrian and hispanic descent respectively), and they expanded their empire's borders with almost shocking ease. pragmatic and less prone to egomania than the average member of their profession. overseeing a long period of peace and prosperity to accompany their asskicking, they also both happened to die of a stroke.
AENYS THE FIRST and ALEXANDER SEVERUS
the abomination king/the last of the severans
rulers who were better suited for more peaceful times, ultimately both wound up being seen as weak-willed due to showing reluctance in battle. they wound up defined more by their mothers than their fathers (aenys taking after his in personality and alexander having his mother do most of the ruling) resulting in assassination (probably in one case, definitely in the other).
MAEGOR THE CRUEL and COMMODUS
he who tried to drown the land in its own blood/the slayer of the golden age
the son of a highly competent father, neither of these men thought it beneath them to do their own dirty work committing mass slaughter and ruining a perfectly functional nation. they also made sure to have a lot of sex and torture plenty of people along the way before their premature, if not predictable, violent deaths, leaving everyone else with a massive mess to clean up.
JAEHAERYS THE CONCILIATOR and AUGUSTUS CAESAR
the architect of the golden age/the gravedigger of the republic
the other gold standard of leadership for their nations! both wound up involved in a massively bloody civil war as a teenager and came out victorious despite being more of an intellectual figure than a straightforward warrior. despite this, they were able to use their great political savvy to usher in an era of peace and prosperity, eschewing the ornate imagery of their predecessors in favor of a more humble, but effective propagandistic image. yet for all their accomplishments, they couldn't stop their preferred heirs from dying off before them unexpectedly. on top of that, they got pissed at their daughter for having sex and wound up kicking her off the continent, then grew depressed at the death of most of their loved ones before dying of old age.
VISERYS THE FIRST and CONSTANTIUS CHLORUS
the young king/the midwife of christianity
two men who you'd struggle to call bad leaders. their administration was competent in the face of adversity, if not genius, and in some ways they could even be considered to have progressive values. the successor they wound up choosing and the civil war that followed wound up overshadowing everything else they ever did, however, and so they are often left as a side character in another's story rather than a protagonist in their own right.
AEGON THE USURPER and VITELLIUS
the man who lost everything for the throne/third of the year of four emperors
rulers whose reigns existed entirely within a civil war, they still managed to stand out on account of their pointless violence even for an extremely violent era. too cunning to be content, too cruel to loved, and too incompetent to be respected, ultimately their own followers became their downfall.
AEGON THE BROKEN KING and VALENTINIAN THE SECOND
dragonsbane/the caged bird
¿what other word can you use for them besides puppet? maybe sorrowful. elevated at a young age and talked over by their advisors, they lived isolated lives and died lonely deaths (possibly the result of what little agency they were granted in their lives). their lives can also be seen as the end of an era of greatness that had once defined their nation (the death of the dragons and the rise of the puppet emperors).
DAERON THE YOUNG DRAGON and JULIAN THE APOSTATE
would-be great conqueror/would-be great reformer
after unexpectedly proving their competence in battle, these men's promising starts to their reigns were cut off by a surprise attack. one of the great what-ifs of history, the legacy that they wound up stuck with was "won some fights before starting a pointless war then left us up shit's creek with no paddle".
BAELOR THE MOST BELOVED and THEODOSIUS THE GREAT
the blessed king/the last ruler of a united empire
two monarchs with a surprisingly high-quality reputation despite all the cruelty and religious zealotry they wound up participating in. their impulses overrode commitment to their duties and common sense at key moments, leaving their nations worse for the wear, yet they remain beloved.
VISERYS THE SECOND and CLAUDIUS THE FIRST
the hand of the king who bore the weight of the crown/the conqueror elevated from behind a curtain
both men who were never particularly well-liked, they found success after being elevated at a surprisingly old age after a life of surviving their predecessor's bizarre excesses. they were both scholarly and very likely disabled (viserys with a spine condition and claudius with something like cerebral palsy).
AEGON THE UNWORTHY and HONORIUS
a vacuum of excess/the emperor more interested in chickens than the sack of his city
two pathetic excuses for a head of state, offering less help than a screaming toddler in a dirty diaper during an era when the people really needed not that. the only thing worse than their constant lack of action was the astoundingly terrible decisions that they did manage to make. two morons so useless that nobody even bothered to assassinate them.
DAERON THE FALSEBORN and HADRIAN
the good bastard/the bloodthirsty peacemaker
a pair of rulers who were unconventional for their era, disappointing many of their peers by sorting out several crises peacefully and introducing much-needed reforms to the state that undoubtedly preserved it. this didn't stop them from coming down hard on rebels, with their foreign policy defining conflict for centuries to come. although their rise to power was of dubious legitimacy, both are generally considered quite good at their jobs, even if many of their peers hated their obsession with a foreign culture (dorn and greece). they also both died of illness.
AERYS THE FIRST and HOSTILIAN
two idiots who accomplished basically nothing and then died.
MAEKAR and DOMITIAN
the anvil of summerhall/the damnatio memoria'd
the unfavorite sons who were never expected to take on the throne, they still rose to the occasion and proved themselves to be competent, even if they were never good at gaining the respect of others or predicting other people's moves. military men at heart, they were passed up for a promotion often enough that the fact that they didn't do as much murder as expected is surprising.
AERYS THE MAD KING and CALIGULA
he who would burn his own kingdom to ash/the conqueror of neptune
when they ascended to the throne, everyone was fairly optimistic about their prospects. any hope they had evaporated after a close encounter with death escalated these men from "impractical" to "batshit murder-happy clowns", resulting in a reign of terror that ended in their assassination. also they had surprisingly goofy nicknames (scab and baby boots).
