Who the Heck Is Aeriana Targaryen?

I am generally a great enjoyer of House of the Dragon—which might be somewhat of an understatement since every episode really does consume at least half of my week by being everything I can talk and think about.

I also enjoy the changes it made from book canon for the most part, I find that they enrich the story and make me lose all sense, but I suppose one has to draw the line somewhere. And mine is drawn at “imaginary characters that go against even the most basic of timelines.”

Spoilers ahead for what happens in the sixth episode of the second season of House of the Dragon, “Smallfolk.” Be warned.

The first scene on Dragonstone that we see in “Smallfolk” shows us Rhaenyra explaining to her Small Council her new plan for getting the riderless dragons that live between Dragonstone and Driftmark bonded again. The first person to try this new plan is Ser Steffon Darklyn, a member of her Queensguard—whom Rhaenyra says has Targaryen blood through his grandmother’s grandmother, a supposed princess called Aeriana Targaryen.

So who is Aeriana Targaryen?

The answer to that is “an invention of the show that was not thought out in the slightest because even five minutes more of brainstorming would have shown how massively stupid it is.” There’s no trace of an Aeriana Targaryen anywhere in the pretty detailed Targaryen family tree that we can devise from all the canon sources we have—from Fire & Blood to The World of Ice and Fire and everything in between.

And that would maybe be fine—even though Fire & Blood never bothers specifying on account of what Ser Steffon tries his hand at claiming a dragon so the show could have probably found a way to do the same—except for the fact that crunching even just a couple of numbers shows how impossibly ridiculous this whole “Princess Aeriana Targaryen” affair is.

While we are not given any ages, we can assume that Ser Steffon is around the same age as the late King Viserys—even just going off of the ages of the two actors playing them, Anthony Flanagan and Paddy Considine. 

Viserys’s grandmother is Queen Alysanne—he does have just the one, of course, because these are the Targaryens we’re talking about and everyone is marrying their siblings—and her grandmother is none other than the first Rhaenys Targaryen, who ruled six of the seven kingdoms of Westeros together with her siblings Aegon and Visenya after they conquered them together. There were no Targaryen princesses before that since the Targaryens were “just” Lords of Dragonstone and not royals of anywhere.

So if Ser Steffon is around the same age Viserys would have been had he not died, that would mean that this infamous Aeriana Targaryen would have been in the same generation as the three conquerors. Problem is, of course, that there is no record of her anywhere. There’s no record of her after them, and she can’t have possibly lived before them because again, there were no princesses before the Conquest. And she couldn’t even be a bastard child of Lord Aerion Targaryen—the father of Visenya, Aegon, and Rhaenys—because she’s supposedly known to history as Targaryen, as a trueborn child would. Besides, Lord Aerion did have a bastard child—none other than Orys Baratheon, the founder of House Baratheon—and there’s plenty of evidence of him, so why wouldn’t there be the same for this princess?

The answer is, of course, because she was completely made up by House of the Dragon’s showrunners. And she was made up in what I can only assume was a very rushed way because it doesn’t really take much to see how her place in the timeline simply doesn’t exist and couldn’t possibly exist.

Again, it would probably have been better not to specify who exactly has the source of Ser Steffon’s Targaryen blood—especially because the following scene in that same episode showed that it might not even be a necessary element to claim a dragon. Having some form of Valyrian ancestry might be enough, and there’s plenty of that to go around in the world of ASOIAF without having to invent Targaryen princesses like this is a Y/N fanfic on Tumblr.