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April Fools special!
IMPORTANT NOTE: In spite of some silly jokes, this is unironically a genuine PE proposal. Yes/No votes for one half of this character still need to be (mostly) serious.
Another note: I wouldn't recommend structuring proposals like this, let alone making them this long. This may be one of the stupidest things I've ever done.
What is the work?[]
George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire. Violent epic medieval dark fantasy novels where wars, politics, feuding noble families, dark magic, dragons and ice creatures with zombies terrorize the vast "Known World". All because of the Iron Throne (for the most part). Most of it takes place in the continents of Westeros and Essos. Lots of characters die; lots of people die for that matter. Atrocities such as torture, rape, assassination, political corruption, war crimes, slavery etc. are rampant... A Song of Ice and Fire needs no introduction at this point.
But perhaps the Ironborn do. The Iron Islanders are unruly Viking-esque raiders who live on the warrior's doctrine of "paying the iron price", which is slaying opponents for belongings. They also used to practice the "Old Way": raiding and pillaging the coasts for plunder, including capturing "thralls" to carry out labor for the Ironborn (basically slavery with benefits) and taking "salt wives" to bed warriors (forced concubinage; in other words, rape). Naturally, the Iron Islands tends to create some terrible people at times. Luckily, they're long past their prime by the present day and don't really practice the Old Way so much anymore.
Not-so-luckily, that doesn't last. Because a wicked man, even among the Ironborn, would one day return...
Who is he? What has he done?[]
The sadistic but clever Euron Greyjoy, The Crow's Eye starts out as an absolute blight to his siblings, even as a child. As a personal challenge to the Gods to smite him down for kinslaying, he suffocated his elder half-brother Harlon to death. None punished him, so Euron went on to murder another half-brother Robin. The older Euron got, the more cruel he got to his fellow brothers: in youth, he snuck into Urrigon and Aeron's bedrooms to rape the two of them on a regular basis. Experiences Aeron is still haunted by in adulthood when he associates Euron's sexual abuse with the sound of a bedroom door creaking open. By the time he is a grown man, Euron was even evicted from the Iron Islands permanently by Lord Balon Greyjoy because Euron seduced and likely raped Victarion's wife, an incident that causes Victarion to beat his wife to death out of shame... An incident for which Euron just laughs in Victarion's face.
Aside from being terribly psychopathic brother, the Crow's Eye was a cruel reaver by profession, practicing the "Old Way" in his spare time and even pushing his father Lord Quellon Greyjoy to attempt raids on the Reach during Robert's Rebellion. Euron later makes his first stain on Westerosi history by helping Lord Balon instigate the Greyjoy Rebellion by having House Lannister's naval forces burned down. After being exiled, Euron travels all across the Known World in his flagship Silence - the name earned from Euron tearing out the tongues of all his crewmembers. In his travels, Euron and his band of mute psychos became some of the most feared pirates in all of the Eastern world, sacking all across the seas and coastlines of Essos. Thousands of men slaughtered; an untold amount of women raped by the dozen; and kidnapped innocents peddled into slavery. Euron's pride in it is sickening to say the least:
| “ | Euron: Godless? Why, Aeron, I am the godliest man ever to raise sail! You serve one god, Damphair, but I have served ten thousand. From Ib to Asshai, when men see my sails, they pray. Aeron: They pray to trees and golden idols and goat-headed abominations. False gods... Euron: Just so, and for that sin I kill them all. I spill their blood upon the sea and sow their screaming women with my seed. Their little gods cannot stop me, so plainly they are false gods. I am more devout than even you, Aeron. Perhaps it should be you who kneels to me for blessing. |
„ |
| ~ A Feast for Crows - Chapter 18 |
Ordering the assassination of Balon Greyjoy by hiring a Faceless Man to throw him off a bridge at Pyke, Euron suspiciously returns to the Iron Islands to seize Balon's crown for himself in the Kingsmoot. See, Euron wants more than just brainless pillaging; he wants to conquer; he desires the entirety of Westeros for himself and to an extent the whole world, just in time for Westeros destroying itself in the War of the Five Kings so it can be a feast for crows. He brings all sorts of treasure and magical artifacts to the Iron Islands, including a lethally mystic dragon horn capable of binding dragons to Euron's will when blown, wasting one of his own men to blow it as demonstration (the horn's magic fries the crewmember's lungs out when he blows it). Grandiosely promising to steal Queen Daenerys Targaryen's dragons from her and use the dragons to seize Westeros with fire and blood, Euron wins the Kingsmoot in a landslide, convincing them all he can bring back glory to the Ironborn with their old, crueller lifestyle.
So the newly crowned King of the Iron Islands ensures his leadership remains unopposed by bribing the Ironborn with all his plunder and violently eliminating rivals, such as kidnapping a rebellious Aeron, drowning Lord Sawane Botley in seawater and having Lord Baelor Blacktyde, a believer in the Faith of the Seven, hacked apart. Into seven pieces in fact!... Because Euron loves to do a little trolling... With his power secured, King Euron begins his conquest by having the Ironborn ravage the coasts of the Reach just as he did across Essos, first by personally sacking the Shield Islands. All the defenders are massacred; widows and children are prepared to be sold to Essosi slavers; and several women are raped. Euron goes as far as to humiliate the captive House Hewett: he strips the female Hewetts naked while forcing them to serve food and drinks to the Ironborn, and allows them to be raped at will, all while the bound and gagged Lord Humfrey Hewett is forced to watch. Lord Hewett is later put to the sword.
Later, King Euron goes on to sack the Arbor, hanging an immense portion of the defenders, and orders the bloody pillaging/seizure of several coastal points leading to Oldtown, the second largest city in Westeros. Not only are dozens of bodies left behind, but Euron's forces are creeping towards Oldtown, making it clear he wants to invade it. Suspecting some of his followers to be untrustworthy, Euron rewards four important Ironborn captains the Shield Islands... despite knowing they will be too weak to defend against Iron Throne forces, deliberately setting them up to fall.
Between everything Euron has done since his exile, he has long dabbled in sorcery of some kind. He had dreams of "flying" like a greenseer; he collected magic artifacts like the dragon horn and Valyrian steel armor from the cursed ruins of Valyria; he's been to Asshai, the home of all sorts of dark magic; he regularly drinks Shade of the evening, a magic beverage that gives people psychedelic visions, some of which linked to prophesized future events; he approaches on Oldtown, where more sources of magic is stored in the Citadel. All of it is aimed towards a goal of not only conquest, but Godhood. Furthermore, he's kidnapped dozens of priests from all the Known World's religions, most horrifically tortured over time for Euron's sinister purposes. Here's some examples of the awful things he's done his captive priests:
- Three chained up septons have had their tongues cut out.
- A red priest of R'hllor completely burned alive beyond all recognition. Boney hands exposed. His burned flesh seeping out pus. Rendered blind. And still alive... until he dies a few hours later when left to rot in Euron's cells.
- Four warlocks taken from Qarth. One was killed, so Euron had the remaining warlocks forcibly cannibalize the body. Two are shown to remain, totally starved to the point that they have become skeletal. One had their legs chopped off, and constantly begs for Pyat Pree's help.
- There are more and more priests kept captive. No doubt kept in similarly unpleasant conditions.
Then there's Euron's own brother Aeron Damphair. Having taunted Aeron about how he used to rape him, Euron commits extended torture sessions on Aeron, where he forces Shade of the evening down Aeron's throat. By forcing him to drink Shade of the evening, Euron subjects Aeron to terrifying, prophetic hallucinations while he is present:
| “ | Euron: The bleeding star bespoke the end, [He said to Aeron.] Euron: These are the last days, when the world shall be broken and remade. A new god shall be born from the graves and charnel pits. [Then Euron lifted a great horn to his lips and blew, and dragons and krakens and sphinxes came at his command and bowed before him.] Euron: Kneel, brother, [the Crow's Eye commanded.] Euron: I am your king, I am your god. Worship me, and I will raise you up to be my priest. Aeron: Never. No godless man may sit the Seastone Chair! Euron: Why would I want that hard black rock? Brother, look again and see where I am seated. [Aeron Damphair looked. The mound of skulls was gone. Now it was metal underneath the Crow's Eye: a great, tall, twisted seat of razor sharp iron, barbs and blades and broken swords, all dripping blood. Impaled upon the longer spikes were the bodies of the gods. The Maiden was there and the Father and the Mother, the Warrior and Crone and Smith ... even the Stranger. They hung side by side with all manner of queer foreign gods: the Great Shepherd and the Black Goat, three-headed Trios and the Pale Child Bakkalon, the Lord of Light and the butterfly god of Naath. And there, swollen and green, half-devoured by crabs, the Drowned God festered with the rest, seawater still dripping from his hair. Then, Euron Crow's Eye laughed again, and the priest woke screaming in the bowels of Silence, as piss ran down his leg.] |
„ |
| ~ The Winds of Winter - The Forsaken |
| “ | The dreams were even worse the second time. He saw the longships of the Ironborn adrift and burning on a boiling blood-red sea. He saw his brother on the Iron Throne again, but Euron was no longer human. He seemed more squid than man, a monster fathered by a kraken of the deep, his face a mass of writhing tentacles. Beside him stood a shadow in woman's form, long and tall and terrible, her hands alive with pale white fire. Dwarves capered for their amusement, male and female, naked and misshapen, locked in carnal embrace, biting and tearing at each other as Euron and his mate laughed and laughed and laughed ... | „ |
| ~ The Winds of Winter - The Forsaken |
The implication from these visions? Euron in his quest of Godhood and world conquest aims for some seriously apocalyptic scenario for Westeros, no matter how many religions he defiles, and no matter how many thousands die. And all these visions begin psychologically tearing Aeron down to the point of questioning his own faith in the Drowned God. After Aeron loses his sense of time passing, Euron has Aeron and the dozens of priests he's kept captive bound to the prows of his fleet. Falia Flowers, a woman from the Shield Islands that Euron seduced, is fully pregnant with Euron's child... and bound next to Aeron. Falia's tongue has been ripped out, and she and the unborn child have been abandoned by Euron to die with the rest of the bound priests. Euron and his fleet head out to clash with the Redwyne-Hightower fleet defending Oldtown. To remind ourselves of what the hell Euron is doing with all these priests? Well:
| “ | The Crow's Eye has fed your Drowned God well, and he has grown fat with sacrifice. Words are wind, but blood is power. We have given thousands to the sea, and he has given us victories! | „ |
| ~ Left-Hand Lucas Codd, The Winds of Winter - The Forsaken |
"Blood is power". Yup, it seems as though Euron is planning a massive blood ritual in his battle with the incoming Redwyne-Hightower forces. For what purpose? We have yet to know until The Winds of Winter releases.
Mitigating Factors[]
I'm not sure what many of you could expect from a psychopathic Viking overlord desiring Godhood and bloody conquest. Euron is a terrifying, malevolent demon of a man: sadistic, manipulative, heartless and rotten to the core. In private, he hates all of his fellow Ironborn because they don't adhere to his level of ambition, and only generously gifts them with plunder to bribe them into serving him (if they're really unlucky, he'll even reward enemy land to them and leave them for royal forces to deal with just to eliminate "untrustworthy" elements in the ranks). He's sired numerous bastard children in his cross-country escapades, yet treats all of them as little more than insects. Hell, he doesn't even give a toss about the rest of his legitimate family, always doing something horrible to his siblings and playing mind games with them. Nothing justifies any of his actions or goals, since even the Old Way is an elaborate excuse to rape, pillage and burn... And yet, why he's like this makes him fascinating.
You see, Euron "flying" in his dreams has made an ambitious cog in his brain click. He's seemingly learned that he can achieve a higher purpose in the most selfish of ways possible, and has regularly dabbled in magic, invited "wizards" into his crew and taken so many priests hostage. As a true challenge in his blasphemous beliefs towards all the Gods, he engages in the serious crime of kinslaying at a very young age:
| “ | Harlon was my first. All I had to do was pinch his nose shut. The greyscale had turned his mouth to stone so he could not cry out. But his eyes grew frantic as he died. They begged me. When the life went out of them, I went out and pissed into the sea, waiting for the God to strike me down. None did. | „ |
| ~ Euron Greyjoy, The Winds of Winter - The Forsaken |
"None did" indeed. He fully embraces his own depravity as a result of no God smiting him for his crimes, perceiving all taboos as trivial. Euron genuinely believes he can become a God... a God of "Woe", desiring Westeros and beyond entirely under his bloody boot. A God surrounded by an ocean of blood, littered with dozens of violated women and thousands of dead men. And he doesn't care for any of it.
Now yes, The Winds of Winter isn't out yet and Euron's story is still ongoing. But we have no idea when that book will be released or if "The Forsaken" chapter (George R.R. Martin previewed it and other chapters himself, mind you) will be changed at all. So going off the information we've been given so far in A Feast for Crows and "The Forsaken", Euron has shown zero indication of developing any redeeming qualities.
It's incredible that one of the most interesting villains George has crafted in ASoIaF is one of several without a single good bone in his body...
Heinous Standards[]
It's A Song of Ice and Fire. Heinous standards are enormous. But holy smokes, does Euron shatter it. Though guys like Ramsay Bolton, Gregor Clegane or Rorge slaughter, torture and rape quite a number of people for kicks, they remain local to Westeros. Euron on the other hand has gone on cross-country pillaging sprees across the Eastern world, slaughtering people by the hundreds or possibly thousands, raping an untold amount of women (likely the source of most of his bastard kids, mind you), and selling innocents such as widows and children to the ruthless Slave Masters of Essos. And just when being a global terror to Essos wasn't enough, he continues his plundering, his massacres, his rapes and his slavery along the coastlines of the Reach with no plans of stopping. Even Oldtown, the second largest city in all of Westeros, is a settlement he intends to reave his way towards. All of this alone is atrocious.
Yet there's all the other splashes of cruelty Euron is responsible for. He's murdered three of his brothers despite kinslaying being a taboo. He friggin' raped two of his brothers in their youths on a regular basis, scarring Aeron for life and quite literally rubbing it in Aeron's face. He supposedly raped Victarion's salt wife and laughed in his face about it, causing Victarion to kill his wife and feel haunted by it. He loves cutting people's tongues out, be it his own crew, his captives or even his temporary girlfriend Falia Flowers. He's captured many priests and had them agonizingly tortured, burned, mutilated and starved. He gleefully toys with Aeron's mind by forcing him to drink Shade of the evening, causing him to suffer from visions so eldritch that H.P. Lovecraft himself would've raised a glass. He begins prepping some huge blood sacrifice with his priest hostages. He subjects Falia Flowers to the same fate even though she's months pregnant with a child of his. He's planning on binding Dany's dragons to his will so he can unleash dragonfire on Westeros in his efforts of conquest... I could go on.
Lastly, some of those prophetic visions Aeron has isn't completely for show. Prophecies are a fairly important theme in the books, and some of those prophecies of Euron coming for Dany in some way are marginally accurate to his plans. The warlocks drink Shade of the evening for the psychedelic visions of past or future. Because Aeron was force fed Shade of the evening, the scary shit he sees may or may not be a window into what Euron plans for Westeros and other parts of the world: something semi-apocalyptic. Gratuitous spillage of blood. Religions defiled. Death. "Woe". Reducing land to "charnel pits" to rise again as a God at the expense of countless lives.
There's a lot of theories surrounding Euron's intentions, but it can't be a coincidence how these visions line up with Euron searching for powerful methods of magic to achieve a higher purpose (e.g. getting his mysterious "black eye, shining with malice", dragon binder, going to Valyria, going to Asshai, supposedly targeting Oldtown, the "wizards" he invited onto Silence, the captive priests and warlocks, other magic artifacts etc.) Needless to say, I think we're good here.
Final Verdict[]
Legitimately believe he's one of the most evil characters in the books, with enough evidence to back it up. Keep.
So why isn't the proposal over? Could there be another version of Euron that qualifies?
Wait a minute...
Oh no...
Oh nooooooooo... It's Ocean Man! And he's the real reason why I'm making this proposal!
Here we go again...
What is the work?[]
Game of Thrones is the HBO TV adaptation of A Song of Ice and Fire, following the same principles of medieval dark fantasy where all the war, feuding families, cutthroat politics, intrigue, tragedies and the supernatural threaten the lands of Westeros and Essos. As we all know, it was one of the best shows on television... until the showrunners David and Dan (D&D) slacked off, got past the point the books left off and diverged from the source material. Then degraded the writing of the show... Then spawned one of the most disappointing and rushed final seasons to a TV show ever.
There are also the Histories & Lore animated shorts where a lot of George R.R. Martin's lore is narrated from the POV of the show's many characters. Served as supplementary material to every season of the show, yet the shorts ironically do better justice to George's worldbuilding than the later seasons of the show do.
Doesn't save some of the characters getting hit hard with bad writing though. Speaking of which...
Who is he? What has he done?[]
The Ocean Man...
This version of Euron Greyjoy is not the Crow's Eye; he's not a man who sodomized two of his brothers in youth; he's not a creepy "one-eyed" blue-lipped mastermind who looks way younger than his actual age; he does not dabble in sorcery, torture priests or desire Godhood. Instead they mishmashed him with Victarion and the result is a bombastic, cackling, sex-craving pirate with a fascination for bloodlust and plunder like his fellow Ironborn. Just more cruel and ambitious about it.
From advocating raids against the Reach during Robert's Rebellion to helping elder brother Lord Balon Greyjoy instigate the Greyjoy Rebellion by burning down the Lannister fleet as an excuse to "kill the best knights in Westeros" for fun, Euron is a proud practitioner of the Ironborn's "Old Way". Said practice translates to rape, pillage, burn, and take innocents, children included, as slaves. After somehow getting exiled from the Iron Islands, Euron fully embraces the Old Way in the worst way he could, reaving all across the seas and coasts of Essos. Hitting places such as Oldtown, the Summer Islands, Ib, and Qarth, Euron massacres what seems like a countless amount of people and takes dozens of women to rape. He even visits the various pirate dens of the Basilisk Isles where black market slavery is the norm, which he no doubt dabbled in. Euron recounts his adventures of pillaging sprees in some Histories & Lore segments and goes out of his way to admit this:
| “ | My brother vowed to return us to the Old Way as well. He sat on the Salt Throne and sent our reavers to the shores of Westeros, just as he remembered from the stories he heard as a child. An old way for an old man. But while he listened to the stories, I lived them. It was never the Old Way to me. It was the only way. | „ |
| ~ Euron Greyjoy, Histories & Lore - The Old Way |
At one point, he loses his senses in the middle of a storm, for which his men have to tie him to a mast to keep him from throwing himself over his ship. He eventually comes to and is unbound... but decides to punish all of his crewmembers by cutting out all of their tongues. He needed "Silence", hence his ship is called Silence.
Euron eventually returns to the Iron Islands and murders Balon by tossing him over a roped bridge to his death so he can become King of the Iron Islands. He interrupts the Kingsmoot and completely clowns on Yara and Theon's claim over the Iron Islands, winning the favor of the Ironborn with his payment of "the iron price" and by, uhhh... cracking "you have no dick lol" jokes at Theon's expense... admitting to being a kinslayer in spite of it being a grave taboo to the Ironborn... promising to take Westeros with fire and blood by "seducing" Queen Daenerys Targaryen with his fleet and his, and I quote, "BIG COCK". Despite acting like a tit the whole time, Euron is unanimously elected as the King of the Iron Islands anyway! Yara and Theon flee the Iron Islands with their men to beat Euron at winning an alliance with Daenerys, to which Euron gleefully wishes to kill them despite them being his niece and nephew.
Spawning a huge armada out of nowhere between Seasons 6 and 7, King Euron switches to forming an alliance with Dany's enemy Queen Cersei Lannister instead with a marriage proposal to get close to the Iron Throne... and to shag a Queen, I guess... To this end, Euron launches a violent ambush on Yara and Ellaria Sand's joint Greyjoy-Dorne fleet. His fleet and his crew of mute psychos slaughter their way through Yara's forces, and Euron leads the charge himself by personally cutting down a few of Yara's mooks with as many cackles as he can muster. He murders two of the three Sand Snakes by impaling Obara Sand with her own spear and strangling/lynching Nymeria Sand with her own whip. So Euron gets the whole fleet annihilated, lets his men torture any wounded survivors (e.g. cutting out ears and tongues for trophies) and captures Yara, Ellaria and the last Sand Snake Tyene. Handing Ellaria and Tyene over to the vengeful Cersei so they can face whatever punishment Cersei has in store for them (they killed her daughter after all), Euron successfully earns Cersei's trust and joins her in the war against Dany so he can share the Iron Throne with her as her to-be-husband.
Euron contributes to Cersei's war effort by wiping out the rest of Dany's fleet at Casterly Rock to cut the Unsullied off from the bulk of Dany's forces. Then when he sees the Wight demonstration at the Dragonpit parlay, Euron joins in on Cersei's plan to let Dany's forces die/weaken to the Army of the Dead and ferries the Golden Company over to King's Landing to replenish Cersei's army... but not without murdering a few of the mercenaries during transit because either they or Euron cheated in a dice game... and bangs Cersei because being a horny frat boy is one of his motivations, I guess. Given scorpion ballistas by Qyburn, Euron destroys yet another one of Dany's fleets and personally slays one of Dany's dragons Rhaegal with aimbot scorpion bolts.
Thankfully, Euron's luck runs out. Dany manages to wipe out Euron's entire fleet with the power of plot armor during the Battle for King's Landing. He miraculously washes up and finds Jaime Lannister trying to find and rescue Cersei with secret entrances to the Red Keep and... Euron doesn't give a single shit about the fate of Cersei and King's Landing! So he then gleefully tries to kill Jaime for no God damn reason! He really wants to bring Jaime's head to Cersei so he can kiss her one last time or whatever, despite it probably being against Cersei's wishes... I digress.
Euron manages to wound Jaime badly in his stupid brawl with the Kingslayer, but Jaime skewers Euron through the stomach and leaves him to bleed out. Euron looks at the camera and dies with pride knowing that he was the man that killed Jaime Lannister...
He didn't. Bricks did LMAO
Mitigating Factors[]
Let's kill the elephant in the room: Yes, TV Euron, Mister "A FINGER IN THE BUM", is a stupidly written character and a smack in the face to the original version. Pilou Asbæk wanted to portray him as more akin to the book version, but D&D clearly didn't want to adapt Euron properly. So D&D instead made Euron a hammy, childish, evil Jack Sparrow knockoff who really wants to fuck the Queen with his "BIG COCC". However, being a badly written character is not a disqualification for being Pure Evil as long as the character has no in-universe redeeming qualities.
For what it's worth, TV Euron is always portrayed as a lustful, sadistic beast without a smidgen of standards. The Old Way he loves so much is just an excuse to loot, kill and rape people for his own gain, proclaiming himself as "the Drowned God" for his "devotion" to the Old Way. His relatives are so meaningless to him that he's fine with kinslaying, as he kills his own brother to usurp him, tries to kill his niece and nephew and... doesn't bat an eye at other members of his kin dying at the hands of the Iron Throne forces during the Greyjoy Rebellion because the Iron Islands was "getting crowded". Plus, he still hates his home land, his religion, his fellow Ironborn and his crew of mutes like the original.
"I'm getting old, and I find myself wanting to sit down as my father and brother did in their time. They just chose the wrong chair." - Euron Greyjoy, Histories & Lore – The Greyjoy Rebellion (Season 8)
Now he does have a consensual (but very creepy) sexual relationship with Cersei and charms her several times, but that's all it is: a sexual relationship, not a "I care about you as a human being" one. As Cersei is Queen of the Seven Kingdoms, Euron sees her as not only a lust object but also as a vehicle for power; a free ticket to the Iron Throne (see image for further proof). Also, keep in mind that his original plan was to seize the Iron Throne for himself with Daenerys as his mistress rather than Cersei. It wasn't until Yara and Theon took off and beat Euron to forming an alliance with Dany that Euron decided to switch up his plans by going for Cersei instead.
Lastly, Euron admits to Yara that when it looks like Cersei is losing, he'll abandon her at a moments notice and take his efforts of conquest somewhere else (but not without boning a Queen for bragging rights, apparently). And indeed, once the now insane Daenerys goes scorched earth on King's Landing, Euron is gleefully apathetic that the city he was tasked to protect is being burned to ruins and that his to-be-wife Cersei is royally screwed. In that moment, he cares more about trying to cut Jaime's head off in a dumbass scuffle and gifting Jaime's head to Cersei... than about Cersei herself.
Heinous Standards[]
This is where he failed initially, since Book Euron is heads and shoulders above this version in depravity. So much so that I thought TV Euron was kind of a "Ramsay-lite". On re-evaluation, this doesn't quite hold up in my opinion.
He's got quite a bit of brutality under his belt, such as helping kickstart the Greyjoy Rebellion, a pointless civil war against the Iron Throne, with the burning of the Lannister fleet; cutting out his crew's tongues for no reason (none of them speak and indeed, Euron states they're all mutes); throwing his brother off a bridge so he could usurp his leadership; gladly annihilating entire fleets during the war against Daenerys, racking up a hefty body count as a result and chopping his enemies up with his battleaxe; getting creative when killing Obara and Nymeria; having his men torture/mutilate wounded survivors; and being the first normal man in centuries to kill a dragon with aimbot. This all seems pretty bad as is, though I understand if some of you don't see this as convincing, especially when comparing him to Ramsay.
"From Oldtown to Qarth, when men see my sails... they pray."
But what really pushes TV Euron into PE territory are the details we missed in Histories & Lore tie-ins, narrated from his perspective. Euron describes all the nasty elements of the Old Way like pillaging, kidnapping people for slave labor ("sobbing children" included) and sex slavery (in the form of salt wives). And indeed, he has lived the Old Way throughout Essos with the shorts backing up his claims of his raiding and taking of women. He's sacked and pirated all across the seas from Oldtown all the way through Essos (especially the Summer Sea), striking the fear in major settlements he’s raided like Oldtown, the Summer Islands, Ib and Qarth.
| “ | When we take them by surprise, our rams splint and crack against their hulls, carved from rare hardwoods of the Summer Islands, and fitted together without a single nail. Worse, every swan ship carries a company of archers armed with goldenheart bows, which can hurl the shaft hard enough to pierce steel plate. After all that trouble, we often find their holds filled only with maps, fruit, and wooden trinkets. Hardly worth our time and blood, except for their women. To worship their god, all women of the Summer Islands learn to fuck. It's enough to make a man devout. | „ |
| ~ Euron Greyjoy, Histories & Lore – The Summer Sea |
Euron has been doing what's been described above for years in exile. The result is an untold amount of men massacred and many women taken to be raped until Euron finally showed up in Westeros again, where he continues his horrific violence in his battles with Dany's forces. There's a dark implication in Histories & Lore that his twisted fascination for the Old Way means that should he and Cersei defeat Daenerys, he will get to be one of the top dogs of Seven Kingdoms unopposed and introduce his brutal reaving to Westeros. Oh, and, he's indicated to have regularly mingled with the slave trade in a number of unsavory, underground pirate hideouts at the Basilisk Isles.
Call me crazy but... given the supplementary information? The funny Ocean Man might have a shot at qualifying in my opinion. Ramsay Bolton may have had thousands massacred, flayed people alive for fun and hunted down girls with dogs; and Gregor Clegane may have sacked his way through the Riverlands, butchered people to satisfy his bloodlust and tortured many civvies to death. But even Ramsay and Gregor didn't have the ships to go on cross-country "rape, pillage and burn" sprees across the world like Euron did.