House Of The Dragon Fans Had Some Big Reactions To King Viserys’ Eye Situation

I don’t typically like to comment on people’s appearances, given it’s not very nice, but if we’re being honest, King Viserys hasn’t exactly looked his best the last four or five episodes. He’s steadily gone from being a perfectly fine looking dad to some kind of rotting undead creature with sores all over his body and random wisps of hair. It’s been pretty unnerving to watch him deteriorate, and last night, he took another shaky step in the wrong direction, much to the horror of those watching House Of The Dragon.

King Viserys wore a mask for much of the episode, but during the big dinner scene, he removed it to reveal he’s now missing an eye and part of his cheek. Half of his teeth are also dead, and his head has all kinds of random spots on it. On the bright side though, he still has those random wisps of hair left, and he’s letting them run free like a Medieval Deadhead. You can check out the whole look below…

So, yeah. He doesn’t exactly look like he’s ready for picture day at school, and obviously Twitter had some thoughts. Almost immediately after he removed his Phantom Of The Opera getup, the social media service lit up with a combination of snarky comments and horrified reactions. People could not get over how bad things have gotten for his facial area, and they did not hold back with their musings.

There’s not nearly enough time in the day to embed every single tweet making light of his scariness, but we do have time for me to drop in some of my favorites that fit certain themes. Perhaps my favorite grouping of tweets I’ll refer to as we’re-trying-to-eat-over-here ones. Lots of people felt dinner isn’t really a suitable time to be showing off your eye socket. This tweet hilariously sums it up pretty well…

We’ve all seen Viserys deteriorate over the course of about five episodes. He looked terrible, but that didn’t stop people from exaggerating just how bad things got. There were tons of tweets comparing him to white walkers, vampires or various other undead characters. Many referenced particularly gruesome cartoon characters or historical disfigurements.

Here’s a look at one of the tweets that captured that hilariously exaggerated look…

Beyond the sideshow element of it all, however, there was a lot of symbolism throughout Viserys’ run. In the first episode, he’s literally cut by the Iron Throne itself, as if House Of The Dragon is telling viewers he’s not fit to rule. The throne is literally rejecting him. As the episodes continue and his condition worsens, it’s used quite a bit for character development to show him being manipulated by those around him. 

One Twitter user pointed out how it’s probably not an accident that Rhaenyra and Daemon sit to the left of him in the final dinner scene, which is his good side, and Alicent and Otto Hightower sit to the right of him, which is the part of his face that’s dying. There’s a lot of symbolism in that, as this tweet very deftly points out…

The scenes from next week indicate we’ll be dealing with the aftermath of Viserys’ death in that episode. If we truly don’t get anymore from the King, I’d like to say happy trails to an extremely interesting and complicated character, who encouraged lots of incestuous coupling to further muddy the Targaryen Family Tree. I would not call him a good ruler, though he had some good moments. He was far too weak and easily manipulated, but he meant well and just wanted everyone to get along. Given how bad leadership often is in Westeros, that’s a perfectly fine legacy to have and far better than others we’ll meet later will have.