Asked by Anonymous

If Aegon the Unworthy legitimized all his bastards why they were not given the last name Targaryen? When a bastard is legitimized he/she takes the house name... right? If Aegon did it as a last attempt to have Daemon as his successor, I think.

Well, Aegon’s decision to legitimize all his bastards was rather unorthodox even within the usual form of legitimization. It’s a rare process, legitimizing a bastard, and in the only two examples we have of it beyond Aegon IV - Addam and Alyn of Hull being legitimized and adopted as Velaryons, and Ramsay Snow being legitimized as a Bolton - there were evident succession crises for the Houses in question (the (legal) male line of Corlys Velaryon being ineligible by death or other inheritance, and Roose Bolton’s only trueborn child having died some years prior). Comparatively, for all Aegon IV’s strident efforts, he had never been able to prove that Daeron was not his trueborn son and the clear heir to the Iron Throne after him (indeed, the gods themselves had apparently proven Ser Morgil’s claims false in his trial by combat). The only succession crisis of House Targaryen was in Aegon’s own spiteful and cruel mind, a scenario he had wholly invented so that he could forget that he had ever been forced to marry his hated wife and produced a son with her. His act of legitimization, far from the solemn elevation of a single bastard or two when a House was otherwise lacking heirs, was a final “fuck you” to a son he loathed and had completely failed to disinherit.

So once Aegon IV died and his final act became known, it would have been far from certain what to do with these dozens (if not hundreds) of newly legitimated bastards. The vast majority, of course, might not even know of their new status - the sons and daughters of those smallfolk women Aegon had briefly slept with - and would certainly have no means to try to claim inheritance rights in the Targaryen dynasty (no Westerosi lord would champion the rights of an unacknowledged, baseborn bastard simply because a king’s blanket decree made him legitimate). However, the real danger were the Great Bastards, those of high birth who had been acknowledged by the king and, to varying degrees, doted upon by him. Young Daemon would have been the greatest danger in this group: not only was he the son of two Targaryens (as Daeron himself was), but he had been publicly acknowledged as the king’s son and given Blackfyre, the sword which up to that point had only been born by Targaryen kings. He, more than any of the other Great Bastards, had the potential to take the Targaryen name upon learning of the late king’s decree.

Luckily, I think, for Daeron II, he had reason to believe that these newly legitimated bastards would refrain from using “Targaryen”. After all, the Great Bastards were all still quite young when Aegon IV died: Ser Daemon was 14, Aegor around 12, Brynden nine (and his sisters somewhere between 10 and 12), and little Shiera no more than six, and probably younger than that. Their young ages meant not only that they would have less clout to demand the right to use the Targaryen name (especially against the very much adult, and still legitimate, Daeron II and his own growing brood of legitimate princes), but that Daeron II could more easily control them. Yandel notes that Daeron treated the Great Bastards honorably and continued the incomes Aegon IV had distributed to them, but I think there was a subtle warning in this ostensibly kind gesture: Daeron II was letting the Great Bastards know that he controlled the purse strings, and that they could be tied shut in an instant if any of the Great Bastards started to act out of line - like, say, if one or more insisted on being known as Targaryens. If they played nice, acknowledged him as the legitimate king, and kept mum about their arguable right to use the name “Targaryen”, then he’d play nice too, keeping them on the crown payroll and treating them as well as any king ever treated a bastard half-sibling.

For the Great Bastards, it might have seemed an easy choice to make. For the price of a name, they could have nearly all the honors and incomes their doting father had bestowed on them in life, and perhaps even more (a marriage and land to build a keep for Ser Daemon, Dark Sister for Brynden). Even if any of them believed that Daeron II was not the rightful king (and Barba, if she were still around, might have repeated the tales to little Aegor, bitter as she was about how close she had come to replacing Naerys as queen), they were largely powerless to protest; early in Daeron II’s reign, as the realm welcomed a reversal of the corruption and decadence of Aegon IV (and had not yet begun to question Daeron’s heavily favoring treatment of the Dornish in general and the Martells in particular), there was too little ground to foment a movement to acknowledge Aegon IV’s other sons as Targaryen dynasts in their own right. They could choose their own surnames, and make their own destinies under those names, knowing they had the careful approval of the king and connections to (and incomes from) court - about as good a fate as any well-born bastard could expect.