#like i couldn’t be succinct at gunpoint

[dragonseeds]

what are your thoughts on rhaegar and lyanna?

oh i love them! there’s all this talk of them haunting the narrative and they do, but i’d take it further and say they are the black hole at the center of the story. the choices that they made, starting with lyanna’s decision to defend howland reed and what that meant to both him and rhaegar, who was very likely at his lowest point at harrenhal after the ruination of his careful plans, touched or changed the lives of every character and plot line in the series. the story itself is such a fun mashup of tristan and iseult, lancelot and guinevere, helen and paris, the fall of camelot and all of arthuriana really, the classic trope of the princess in the tower and the dragon and the knight: all of that in one couple and we don’t get to experience any of it with them. we can guess and speculate, but we can never truly know them. we experience their story only through the memories the people who survived the war they ostensibly kicked off, and those memories are all heavily colored by trauma, guilt, nostalgia—alternately faded and sharpened by time. it’s this incredibly fun and brilliant reconstruction of some of the most enduring tragedies in folklore and mythology and i adore it.

hate beyond articulation the way asoiaf.tumblr.edu approaches their relationship and the individual characterizations of both of them, though. just absolutely some of the most insufferably sanctimonious disingenuous decontextualized analysis i’ve ever experienced—much of that coming from people viewing this through a historical lense instead of a thematic one. like, imagine approaching the battle of the trident as “rhaegar is a bad person for fighting for his father who was evil! he lost the moral high ground with that one” as opposed to “rhaegar as a character exists to fail and die; he was the last dragon, carrying the unbearable weight of his family’s legacy and the burden of the prophecy for which they conquered westeros: the end of his life is the end of the targaryen dynasty. he must fail and he must die, so that dany and jon can grow up free of that weight and that power. daenerys gets to redefine what it means to be targaryen on her own terms. she and jon separately and unknowingly do the things that he thought he had to do—the things he was conceived and born to do—but never knew how: they do it because of their circumstances, because of the people that they have grown into, because they believe it is their duty, because they have the power to do it.” also, like, re: interpretations of battle of the trident, is there maybe another battle that occurs later in the series that is exactly the same thematically and contextually? where perhaps a character who was missing for a while shows up on the eve of battle, knowing that the opposition is right and their cause is just but that his family will die if he doesn’t fight with them? anything that adds an extra layer of meaning to what happens, aside from dany’s own connection—which is not as thematically similar but is still incredibly meaningful. like i certainly don’t think there’s any one interpretation of a character or story, but the worst ones are consistently applied to rhaegar.

and then with lyanna in particular, it’s like people cannot stomach her or find her sympathetic as a character unless they’re wallowing in her eternal victimhood. the constant dismissal of the importance of lyanna’s actions and what they meant to rhaegar is pure misogyny, by the way. her choices and her agency, the inherent meaningfulness of the struggle for both of those things in a system that seeks to reduce her to her body and the use men can make of it—all of that is important. the person she was and what that meant to people was important, but from the way i most often see her discussed, it’s like her gendered death is the only thing that matters. it’s okay to lament her because she got crushed by the wheel. if she hadn’t, if she wasn’t a victim to write flagellatory meta about, she would be a hypocrite, someone who needed to learn a lesson—as difficult for some of these people to relate to as dany or rhaenyra apparently are.

like, it’s just wild to me because her kindness to howland reed and her choice to defend him, to disguise herself as the knight of the laughing tree and risk her life and reputation to fight for him—is the answer to and the embodiment of one of the most thematically significant questions in the series. we see it most prominently in dany’s chapters because she asks it directly: why do the gods make kings and queens if not to protect the ones who can’t protect themselves? that’s what lyanna did, when no one else was doing it: she had more honor than any knight at that tourney or any man sitting on the small council, and it meant something to rhaegar. like what about this is hard to understand? i think he must have idealized her immediately: she must have seemed like something out of a song or a story to him, and rhaegar was a singer, a songwriter, a bard: he knows how stories are supposed to go—how to finish a song, or at least he thought he did.

bran, who also loves stories, says it himself: “and the mystery knight should win the tourney, defeating every challenger, and name the wolf maid the queen of love and beauty.” like obviously bran has some critiques i cut out, but he has the ending right—only the wolf maid was the knight, and she couldn’t have won. in the feudal gender prison, women are rewarded for being beautiful and their worth is derived from that and from what their bodies provide. she should’ve won the whole thing, but the system doesn’t allow that, so rhaegar—in a fit of single-minded capital r romantic hero idiocy—dedicates himself to winning the tourney to honor her in the only way he can: the only way the system allows him to recognize her. it was the worst possible move he could make at that time because of the romantic connotations, but i love him for doing it, as stupid as it was and even though there is no way it didn’t hurt and humiliate elia, or make him look terrible when he desperately needed to make a good impression on the lords of the realm—it’s just such a Moment. being reminded that there’s good in the world—feeling hope in the face of endless abject overwhelming despair—how do you express gratitude for that? the idea that he could only doing it by hurting someone who didn’t deserve it and making himself look like an ass is fucking awesome. i’m genuinely so sorry for people are incapable of enjoying that. could not be me!

but that’s just my interpretation of what happened at harrenhal. like i said, part of why i like them so much is that we truly don’t know. while i love darker relationships in general, the idea that he crowned her at harrenhal because he wanted to impregnate her then does not work for me. it’s a popular theory, but it renders some of the very few contextual clues we are given about what happened meaningless. for one, he didn’t know that elia wouldn’t be able to have more children at that time. this was discovered after she gave birth to aegon, and that is the point at which the question of the third child appears to have become a motivating factor for him. i personally think he left for the riverlands to consult with the ghost of high heart—the one whose prophecy is the reason he was born, the reason is parents were forced to marry, the reason his family burned alive the night he came into the world—and ran into lyanna somewhere near harrenhal. it’s possible he had been in contact with her prior to this (how? without her family knowing? what are the logistics of that?) but i think it’s just as likely it was pure chance. i really like the idea that his crowning her queen of love and beauty caused lyanna’s father to set a date for her wedding to robert or talk of moving it up, maybe even suggest a double wedding at riverrun, which would have almost certainly caused her to balk. either way, high heart is located between harrenhal and riverrun. arya also stops there while she’s kidnapped by the brotherhood without banners on the way to ransom her to her family at riverrun, and they trade songs to the ghost for her dreams and prophecies. i think it’s worth noting because arya’s journey in the riverlands mirrors lyanna’s right down to her “death” as arya stark when she leaves for braavos, paying the ferryman’s fee with the coin jaqen h’ghar gave her—just as jon’s journey at the wall mirrors rhaegar’s in many ways right up until his own death.

i also don’t think rhaegar and lyanna eloped because they were in love—this is implied by lyanna’s famous quote—but that they did come to love each other deeply, which is suggested by the way they died: her roses and him saying her name. notably, rhaegar did not leave the tower of his own volition—someone had to come and get him with news of war, which is hilarious because i think the tower of joy is right in the middle of like three major battles of the rebellion? like quite frankly, if he didn’t love her or care for anything beyond the prophecy and if she didn’t love him despite how badly things went wrong, then where in their story is the heart in conflict with itself?

i do want to clarify that i love the tower entrapment and the power imbalance aspects of their relationship as much as i love (what i interpret as) the genuine respect for each other that grew into love: it’s really the tension of those disparate elements that interests me. a dragon can love the maiden, but he’s only ever a dragon—still liable to hoard her like treasure or burn her up and rip her open trying to be gentle, to protect. that FUCKS, sorry! love is sweet and hopeful, but it’s also at exactly the same time horror, consumption, destruction.

idk it’s myopic to act like the beginning or the ending of their relationship—of their lives—is the summation of it. i think people want their story to be easy when it’s not: a clear case of a villain and his victims where everyone knows who to root for and no one has to think too much about things that are difficult or uncomfortable, questions where there probably isn’t an answer that doesn’t hurt someone. what a sad, tedious way to approach any text, but specifically this one. i’ve sometimes seen it suggested that if their story is romantic then it’s an endorsement or justification of all the “bad” things that happened because of it, and that’s also stupid. grrm as an author is never going to be someone who tells us how to feel about anything: he presents these characters and situations, often as a means of exploring certain facets of the human condition, and each of us has to come up with our own answers and find our own meaning. i don’t think he always knows what he means, or what those answers are, you know? but for me rhaegar and lyanna are one of the most fascinating parts of story, and whatever the truth is—if we ever find out—i can’t imagine a scenario where i don’t love them or find them really interesting and wonderfully sad.