Fairly sure I discussed this on my season 6 podcast, riffing off of something that Red & Ivan @boarsgoreandswords said:
– Joffrey is less than Ramsay, because when you get down to it, Joffrey was a coward and an incompetent – someone with sufficient willpower and power (Tyrion and Tywin most notably, but even Arya in the moment) could make him back down. He made people’s lives miserable, but usually in small numbers.
– Whereas Ramsay, though a sadist and a bully, is not a coward – if you stand up to him, he’ll just hit you harder. And he’s directly involved in the killing of hundreds if not thousands of people, between the Hornwood Affair, the battle at Winterfell, the Sack of Winterfell, the retaking of Moat Cailin, etc.
– Aerion is somewhere in the middle. He’s personally tougher than Joffrey, hence his spirited effort to try to murder Dunk during the Trial of Seven, although he’s still a bit of a coward as you can see from the fact that he went for a Trial by Seven instead of taking him on one-on-one. However, his bravado will crack if you apply pressure – hence Dunk beating him into submission at the end.
Whereas Maegor and Daemon Targaryen were the worst, because they were brutal on a personal and national scale, they were brutally competent and competently brutal, and completely unafraid.
RFTIT Tumblr Backup 