HBO's Game of Thrones and its prequel House of the Dragon, adapted from George R.R. Martin's novels, chart House Targaryen — the silver-haired dynasty that ruled Westeros for three centuries astride dragons. At the story's back stands the Mad King Aerys II, married to his own sister Rhaella; their children — crown prince Rhaegar, the cruel Viserys and the exiled Daenerys — carry the bloodline forward into the saga's present.
The Targaryen tree is deliberately knotted, because for generations the house married brother to sister to keep the blood "pure" and the dragons loyal. Rhaegar's love affair with Lyanna Stark produces a hidden heir, Jon Snow, whose true parentage — a Stark mother and a Targaryen father — is the secret the whole story turns on: he and Daenerys are aunt and nephew before they are ever anything else to each other.
More than any family on this site, the Targaryens are a genogram of succession and self-consumption. House of the Dragon rewinds to the Dance of the Dragons, the civil war in which Targaryen fought Targaryen — Rhaenyra against her half-brother Aegon — over their father Viserys I's throne. The same tree that gave the dynasty its power, a concentrated dragon-bonded bloodline, is precisely what tears it apart.
Chart the Targaryens and you are really mapping a warning: a family that folds back on itself, aunt wed to nephew, sister crowned beside brother, until the line between a family tree and a single braided rope disappears. It is the purest illustration of why a genogram — not a tidy list of kings — is the only way to see how a house rises and rots from the very same roots.
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