User blog comment:The Dragon Demands/The History of House Targaryen. Part IV: The Dance of the Dragons/@comment-5014364-20131202195642

Let me be explicit for the Westeros.org folks who got this confused:  women are not "barred from inheritance". Royal inheritance laws were changed after Aegon III to put a female heir "behind all possible male ones". If there's a single living male cousin, he's the heir. Normally, a daughter inherits ahead of a younger uncle....not so in the new Targaryen royal laws. This is why Aegon III's daughter Daena was skipped over for her uncle Viserys II.

Indeed, Robert Baratheon's new dynasty apparently intended to follow these same royal inheritance laws -- probably due to the legal conceit his side imployed that his right to the throne was based on being a second cousin (his grandmother was a Targaryen).

Loras even explicitly states in the TV show that Robert's line of succession was: Joffrey, Tommen, Stannis, Renly --- skipping over Myrcella entirely (under normal inheritance laws, she'd come before Stannis).

Daenerys is indeed the heir of Viserys from the closed perspective that no male Targaryens are left......but then again, the Baratheons are basically being considered a branch of the Targaryens.

From a politically blind standpoint, Stannis is indeed ahead of Daenerys in the line of succession....but Daenerys is ahead of Shireen. The problem of course is that the surviving Targaryen exiles simply declared that Robert and his brothers were usurpers and all claims invalidated. Viserys always had a better claim than Robert did, as a son of Aerys II would always inherit before a second cousin.

....so....yeah....as Renly said, "who cares about the bloody line of succession?! It didn't matter what Robert took the throne"

It's all just a legal conceit. Power lies where men think it lies.