pairing: daeron i targaryen x fem! martell! reader
word count: 609 words
warnings: arranged marriage, enemies to lovers, war crimes, older sister syndrome iykwim, problematic age gap (he’s 17, she’s 21), loveless marriage, he’s a brat, she’s grumpy
summary: in which… after his conquest of your home, your father offers your new king your hand in marriage.
kenn’s notes: based on this req! i loveeee the young dragon </3 if you want more, just lmk!
𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐫𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭𝐬 𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐫𝐯𝐞𝐝 @𝐫𝐨𝐚𝐫𝐨𝐟𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐟𝐢𝐫𝐞
.𖥔 ݁ ˖ ⟡ ݁₊ .𖥔 ݁ ˖ ✦ ‧₊˚ ⋅.𖥔 ݁ ˖ ✦ ‧₊˚ ⋅
whenever you told foreigners about your home, sunspear, you’d tell of how your ancestors resisted the invasion from the conqueror. unbowed, unbent, unbroken— the words of house martell. these words stayed true until your twenty first birthday.
king daeron the first. he was four years your age. the boy king your father would murmur bitterly. he was a picture of the conqueror, long silver hair flooding down his back, often braided with neat precision. the sheep of westeros called him the young dragon.
he was smart, read the histories, heard the tales. the failed conquests, the mistakes, the inaccuracies. he learned— what to do, what not to do. within a year, your home, sunny and free, was subjugated by targaryen rule.
by the end of a particularly hot dornish summer, you were betrothed; due to the fact that your father, prince nymeros martell, was one of the first to bow in submission— and part of you resented him for it.
the boy king stands before you now. he’s only slightly taller than you, sizing you up. myriah was always rebound for her beauty, and ideally, she’d marry the king. but she was young— so you’d volunteered instead. glaring daggers up at the silver headed pest. he speaks:
“the wedding will be held here, and then you’ll return to the capitol with me to greet the small folk. man and wife.” he was always so cordial, so polite. it made you hate him even more.
yet you nod, eyes focused on your reflection in the mirror. your fingers are dexterous, braiding your hair quickly. daeron turns to you, eyes catching yours in the mirror. “would you give me your due diligence and respond?” he sasses, “i don’t ask you for much. it is the least you could provide me with.” you drop your hands, rolling your eyes.
“if you wanted me to coddle you, your grace, than i am afraid you have married the wrong woman.” you huff, turning in your seat to look at him— your arms crossed over your chest.
instead of lashing out, your husband grins. his nimble fingers reach forward, caressing your cheek lightly. you smack at his hands, but he catches your wrists in his hands, grinning.
“not so fast, princess. this angry facade of yours is cute but you shall learn your limits. i am your king.” his tone is sharp, but his eyes never leave yours. if you were any other woman, you’d shrink beneath his purple gaze.
but you were not any other woman. you huff at him, turning back to your mirror; grumbling under your breath. daeron situates himself in bed behind you, his eyes tracing over you in the reflection of the mirror.
you stand, nudging your seat back in with your foot, turning to the bed. his hands are crossed behind his head, smiling up at you. he looks more like a seventeen year old boy than a king now. it makes your skin crawl.
you sit beside him, nudging the covers over. daeron looks expectant:
“must you make me wait for our wedding night? he smirks, proudly. his pointer finger reaches out, tracing your arm— goosebumps rise in its wake.
“yes, boy king.” you grumble. “i am an noble princess, you are waiting.” beside you, daeron huffs, throwing his arms up.
“must you always call me that? not husband?” he smirks, “not love?” you glare at him. daeron smiles.
“you pretend, little dove, but you’re not as repulsed by me as you may act.” with that, he turns away from you, taking half the duvet with him. you roll your eyes, turning away from him in return.
The way GRRM almost confirmed that even though genetic might have a part on it but the concept of “madness” is mostly part perspective and it is placed in the eye of the beholder like the light we choose to see the characters.
Take Baelor I for example. For godly people, religious zealotry is perceived as the epitome of morality but for others, Baelor sounds mentally ill. Same with 14 years old Daeron I who wanted to conquer a kingdom which his ancestors with dragons couldn’t. For martial people he sounds like a badass, but for others ? They think he’s a madman. And yet, Daeron I is seen as an ideal of martial grandeur and prodigious achievement and he remains as popular among the nobility as his brother Baelor is among the smallfolk.
“Can be interperted in many different ways… I want complexity and subtlety in my fiction”. Boiling everything down to eugenics and determinism is not complex or subtle. The type of things that GRRM hates to write about. ASOIAF ain’t Harry Potter.
The way in which people in this fandom talks about mental illness just puts me off. Pretty much everyone equates cruelty and violent behavior with mental illness. The fandom tend to use “mad” as a shorthand for any Targ that behaves in an extremely cruel or violent way like them insisting that Maegor was a mad Targ as well. But it so interesting that you still don’t see them calling Aemond a madman.
shots fired. (the tags are just ways of org, and sometimes they are sarcastic/ironic)
Yeah, I've noticed the fandom's tendency to both demonize mental illness & conflate mental illness (characterized as a pejorative) with straight up willful cruelty when it wants to vilify a Targ. Like you can still hold mentally ill, cruel people accountable for their cruel actions, but the fandom tends to preemptively assign any Targ who acts cruelly and violently as "crazy". AND then in a way meaning "they are a menace that needed/s to be put down", rather than when they assign victimhood-mental illness to another non-Targ or just male who does a cruel, vicious, and/or selfish act and they try to explain that away with mental illness. As if the person doesn't know or cannot stop themselves from doing horrific actions, a slave to their own afflictions.
And it's bec this habit is inherited/continues to be used to reason why Dany should not either survive nor rule anything. People use mental illness (real or not) to claim that women should not live and be present amongst "normal" society and villainize her emotions or though processes, esp when she's being confrontational or trying to go against expectations and desires of the public/men. As a way to get collective consent for her punishment by banishment or death, a way to get her out of the way and for it to be seen as morally righteous. And with Dany, the way to do that is to keep constantly referring to her lineage as inescapably and "naturally" "mad"; so it's very easy and often that when they wish to express a certain Targ was not worth studying or understanding and just be hateful, they will use this tactic against women or the Other against them.
I said before that it's not just nonTargs but men people tend to assign this "is crazy, no empathy or attempt at intellectually assessing for understanding of human shit". So why not SOME Targ men like Maegor or Daeron? And when do people decide that a man's violence & cruelty is not salvageable, understandable, or excusable? Basically:
Maegor went far beyond the boundaries that men in/out world would consider "necessary"; violence against the majority status quo males of the Seven and his own court (he beheaded one male courtier who said he didn't get the thorn legitimately or something, I forget) AND he was helped by Visenya
Maegor was also aop suffered a massive head injury that only Tyanna of the Tower was capable (as by record) healing, so one might say that much of his willingness post-injury to be violent also came from that injury...before that injury, he was pretty intimidating, but not violent...but at the same time, even before said head injury, he displayed pretty machismo, self centered actions [taking Blackfyre with little protest, leaving Visenya's sword she gifted him when he got the "better" one, killing a horse at 13-ish?, taking Alyssa Velaryon's teasing abt not having a dragon way too seriously, etc.]
Daeron wasn't "crazy" nor mentally ill - he was just extremely ambitious, young, and eager to prove himself/be the one to first bring the Targ dynasty a new sort of prestige in their dragonless beginnings, esp--as you said I said in another post--in the light of his family having lost the dragons - Daeron had the same social condition as many other young men who want to make a hero out of themselves AND that personal desire to be "Great", Alexander the Great style.
Baelor I constantly did stuff that were annoying to nobles or about to be harmful while also granting smallfolk some alleviations to get that "loved" factor among the most hapless of the population, which I think def fed into his religiosity-ego even as I think that he DEF had an mental illness...
I think that a lot of machismo/masculinity compels men to do extreme, stupid shit bc Western masculinity itself means that one must push boundaries, dominate, take, confront, etc. with other men knowing about it in order to "prove" you are "strong". "Strength" = masculinity; it works to be very flat and that flatness gets disguised as "naturally" simple, which lends to its own credibility as "real" strength. So whether they do some things that are logically illogical in a spectacle or publicly, it's so easy for people to try to claim men are just being boys and/or switch that up with "he was just mentally ill" when he decides to shoot up an Asian nail salon or a school. To be a man--esp a white one, but white masculinity = default masculinity--IS itself to be the real type of "crazy" that they will characterize as "bad" crazy in women or minority races/ethnic groups.
Thus Valyrians/descendants can also easily get this "madness" thing even if they are male.
Male "strength"--which is the general Western idea of "strength", period--is a very loaded double standard in that it's automatically assigned to the vague notion of masculinity as if the two are one thing, but it constantly shows itself to be two-trying-to-be-one through this notion of "proving", and this is the eternal conflict with men that they never want to actually address or think about bc thinking and self reflecting is not necessicity when masculinity is assigned as perfect in of itself. Some men do, but they are/have been a minority. Most/enough men will either flagrantly deny, attack, or not speak at all.
I wrote a whole post about religion, Baelor I, and Daeron I HERE.
