House of the Dragon boss explains why Aemond Targaryen is more than an 'anime villain'

The first season of House of the Dragon introduced us to a large number of memorable characters, including Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D'Arcy), her husband/uncle Daemon (Matt Smith), and her best frenemy Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke). Daemon was probably the breakout character of the show; everyone is compelled by a violent bad boy in a love affair with his niece, I guess. Towards the end of the season, a couple of characters we met as children grew into adulthood, which gave us a whole new cast to fall in love with. The standout of that group may have been Aemond Targaryen (Ewan Mitchell), a very intense young man determined to make his mark on the world.

Plenty of folk have looked at Aemond and compared him to the kind of villain you might see in a Japanese anime. (This home-drawn Aemond manga is especially memorable.) I think it's how intense and dramatic he is. Aemond is incredibly self-serious and focused, an agent of chaos who mounts the largest dragon in the world when he's just a child and then runs down his own nephew Lucerys (Elliot Grihault) on it years later, a chase that results in Luke's death. Plus he has installed a sapphire where his eye used to be. The guy has flair.

The comparisons have even reached the ears of House of the Dragon showrunner Ryan Condal, who brought it up on an episode of the official Game of Thrones podcast when talking about how important it was to build up all of these characters in season 1 so we understand where they're coming from going into season 2. "We don't have to backfill and explain everything," Condal said. "You guys know the deal: everybody has been through a really tough experience and they're all very complicated and you understand the relationships that they have and here we go...I'm very excited for people to see it."

"Aemond doesn't just come out of the mold as a fully formed anime villain. He had a real interior life as a child when he was afraid and bullied, and we understand him as a character now. So when you see the big bad, you understand where he came from and you understand this core injury to him."

Condal applies this same thinking to Daemon, who has done "some horrible things in this story, but you also understand that there's a core wound at the heart of that with his relationship with his brother."

In this case, Condal is saying that Aemond didn't just emerge from the womb as an anime villain, but has a backstory behind him that explains why he is the way he is. That kind of implies that anime villains are shallow by nature, which is a little derogatory, but I get it. Aemond isn't just a flamboyant psychopath; he's a relatable flamboyant psychopath.

It's also interesting that Condal talks about Aemond and Daemon in tandem here, since those two are being set up as rivals. We'll see how much of the anime villain comes out when House of the Dragon season 2 premieres on HBO and Max on Sunday, June 16.

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