#lyannas

[lilymarch]

the woman dies.

[baby-girl-aaron-dessner]

RIP Oscar Tully. You would’ve loved Lyanna Mormont.

[saessenach]

What is honor compared to a woman’s love? What is duty against the feel of a newborn son in your arms… or the memory of a brother’s smile? Wind and words. Wind and words. We are only human, and the gods have fashioned us for love. That is our great glory, and our great tragedy.

Jon Snow - and family that haunts him, because sometimes ghosts make for the best love stories.

[souryam]

some random sketches.. lyanna, my son bran and a young jaime

[corviids]

lyanna <3

[asoiafpalestine]

our thirty-seventh art piece is…

a dance between Rhaegar and Lyanna by @effemar, requested by bynghe on twt

If you’d like a prompt of your own drawn out by a random artist on our team, donate 15 CAD or more to Siraj’s campaign and send us the receipt!

[lyannatropes]

my moon lady knight got a redesign (and i should really come up with a name)

[befooremoonrisee]

the way in which jon and robb's futures are foreshadowed by the mother of the other: robb dying too young and becoming a ghost that haunts their siblings, a reminder of innocence and happier days, and jon dying and being brought back to life, a shadow of what he once was, a dark mirror to himself

[franzkafkagf]

a lament for suns and wolves

[sansacherie]

another reason why I detest the ned-viserys "comparisons" is that ned stark literally lost his almost entire family at the age of nineteen as a result of a predator and his "prophecies".

[visenyaism]

that’s the thing about ned stark to me is that he loves his family so much. and fighting a whole war in their memory and then failing to save his sister created this trauma that is so central to his character that he simply cannot heal from it. and yet he so wholly and unquestioningly trusts the evil systems of his evil society to work that if everything HAD gone to plan and Lyanna had married Robert and gotten stuck in a tower in Storm’s End dying in childbirth against her will. WOULD it even have occurred to Ned to intervene.

[saessenach]

working on a wee storyboard thing - a certain prince gets knocked off his horse while chasing the Knight of the Laughing Tree and shenanigans ensue

[gingersprites]

The funniest thing about fandom wank over whether Sansa or Arya is most like Lyanna is that you’re looking past the most obvious candidate aka Robb. Someone who only exists through other people’s memories, a shrine for people to flagellate themselves at, the beautiful dead girl whose absence defines the narrative more than her presence ever could?? That’s literally Robb’s whole point as a character.

[corviids]

lyanna would’ve loved and protected her jon so much

[llutik]

That night he dreamed of the feast Ned Stark had thrown when King Robert came to Winterfell. The hall rang with music and laughter, though the cold winds were rising outside. At first it was all wine and roast meat, and Theon was making japes and eyeing the serving girls and having himself a fine time…until he noticed that the room was growing darker.

[nightswatchdisbandmentera]

Rhaegar Targaryen is easily one of GRRM’s best deconstructions of the genre and we don’t talk about it enough. He’s prince living in a world full of magic and wonder that has dwindled over time. His own family had a great monopoly on one of the most magical phenomena (dragons) to ever exist, but they lost this control over time and it was due to their own faults. But there’s an all encompassing hope that this magic, these dragons, will come back. They all live within the promise that it will all be back and with a huge bang. It’s all so romantic. Magical forces of ice and fire battling it out in a song.

Then there’s Rhaegar, a prince born for the sole purpose of being this song’s romantic hero. He already has his destiny mapped out and it will be a great one, greater than any other man who ever lived. It’s a song of ice and fire, and Rhaegar is its bard. You’d expect this to give him joy. Yet by all accounts, he was depressed as fuck. I think he’s unfairly earned the reputation of having an ego so big to think that he will be the hero….but that’s quite literally the point of his existence. He was born to be the hero. He paid the price at birth to be the hero. How can he revel and glory in this destiny when he has no say in it?

So it’s genuinely funny that when given the chance, Rhaegar immediately pivots to someone else taking on this burden. But how tragic for him that he cannot escape it too far. Because it will be none other than his own son who, under a “bleeding star”, is marked at conception for this great destiny without a say. More than his ego, Rhaegar is marked by the inability to escape this duty. His whole life is dedicated to fulfilling a duty he can never escape. He isn’t just a future king, prophecy dictates that the world’s survival is placed squarely on his shoulders. Even when he isn’t the hero, he’s now responsible for raising him…

…but then he makes one decision and it all comes crumbling like a pack of biscuits. He escapes this burden…but dies. And his successor dies too. And now the ones who will inherit his legacy are two people who never knew him. They never knew of his burdens, of this prophecy. But they too cannot escape its jaws. I think this does bring up some interesting questions about the nature of fate and destiny in the world of ice and fire. Can you really escape it? Rhaegar tried to, and paid the price for his defiance, but he never truly made it out because the burden instead jumped to the son (and sister) he never knew. Funny thing is that in a bizarre (and tragic, in its own way) twist of fate, this son was brought up entirely without the trappings of power that depressed Rhaegar. Rhaegar was a dazzling prince, Jon is a bastard. Rhaegar was marked by his great inheritance, Jon is marked by the lack thereof. Does fate say “well the first one got too depressed by having too much so let’s give the next one nothing?” Even Dany, who grows up a princess does not have the privileges that Rhaegar did. So how does upbringing craft a hero and the choices they make? Welll, GRRM had given us two versions of Rhaegar’s tragedy in Jon and Dany for us to see.

Rhaegar’s impact on the meta-narrative is honestly so massive. Like I’d put him right up there with Quentyn, Sansa, and Bran as one of the best genre deconstructions in the series and no one can tell me otherwise.