#thus making something hard to separate and erase lines that I don't want

[krys-does-art-stuff]

WIPs for coloring on the previous post.

November 2023

[horizon-verizon]

Honestly as a neutral party I would prefer Jaehaera living to Daenaera being introduced. Jaehaera is an innocent, mentally disabled child and her death is needlessly cruel. Her death is the least plot relevant of all of the child deaths that have happened in the dance and it's reasonable for people to want that changed since it comes off as pointlessly cruel. Killing Alicent or even just focusing on her imprisonment more is enough to show that the greens have paid for their betrayal. At least Daenaera can still be introduced and do something else in the narrative even if she doesn't marry Aegon.

I've already explained why Jaehaera's death was plot relevant HERE and HERE.

A)

Daenaera's entire narrative purpose was to marry Aegon and have his children to propagate the Targ line AND to become part of Aegon's mental rehabilitation from the effects of the civil war and watching his own mother get eaten burned/alive by a dragon. This is also reason why she's a fan fav in the first place; it's seen as a noble undertaking to some and a way for the Targs to move away from the greens finally. What other narrative use would you have her have?!

We can't bring up how after the War of the Roses the two fighting houses (Yorks and Lancasters) were successfully brought together in marriage to justify Jaehaera marrying and having a family with Aegon. Because:

Elizabeth of York wasn't disabled like Jaehaera

neither her nor Henry Tudor were little kids when they married

this is a fictional tale that, while modeled after some real events and people, is using them as springboards for a specific, purposefully created "message" unique to the author's

and imagine what it would being pregnant several times really be like for a very mentally incapacitated and traumatized girl like her?!!

Much less the other traumatized boy who's to be her husband? What the consummation and all the...impregnating times looked like?! Then, imagine what the family life would have been like, with these parents unable to ever connect thus the resentment is worse and their kids seeing that?

This doesn't justify Unwin Peake murdering Jaehaera, but no she never should have been married off to Aegon or anyone in the first place and that was not Unwin's doing but a larger group's--Aegon's council/patriarchal feudalism. This is what GRRM's trying to tell you, stop resisting it.

B)

I can believe that it is the way she died and the other context of so much violence men and adults perform against women and girls in this world is what really offends people enough for them to say that somehow, this a narratively irrelevant death. Because they're just that horrified.

The feelings are valid. But the action to erase the significance of the death is not valid. You definitely can wish for a much less violent one, like a poisoning that puts her to sleep or something. The death is supposed to be tragic and make you feel that it wasn't deserved, was horrible, etc. Because it was all those things.

And to say such an untrue thing as "not narratively relevant" also leads me to suspect that some people don't like Jaehaera's death either bc they just:

wanted the greens to win in some way bc they favor them and their cause (my second linked post)

you--knowing that Daenaera will likely be black in the show IF they ever get to the Maiden's Ball--go so hard for Jaehaera bc she at least is a white girl in the universe of HotD

want excessively centrist politics to sway the story at the expense of actual understanding of why we should change and upend the status quo entirely (here the feudal entrapment of girls and women); deny a reality, discourage learning to the oppressive status quo can prevail [on this trend of neutrality]...the truth is the villains/antagonists were always the greens

AND/OR, are avoidant of facing ugly, sordid truths of oppression because they are close to it in real life and haven't found ways of separating that from collective understanding of oppressive systems/coping mechanism

Look anon, Alicent's imprisonment doesn't make up for mass death. Because it's not even just about Alicent as the individual, the grandmother, the mother, etc. It's the effect of her actions on a population. Jaehaera was one of many girls Otto AND Alicent endangered (another being Halaena). Though her actions became something much bigger than her & things went out of her control, that doesn't stop them from being hers AND having affected thousands of lives. Her main aim was to accrue power through her kids and grandkids--who she chose to risk by usurping Rhaenyra and beginning the war--the consequence is she loses said kids and grandkids through other's similar ambition. Again, bc even though those kids were noble and were supposed to be relatively safe, because they are all technically heirs or adults around them can use them accrue power (whether by killing them or through marriages or whatever), they were also targets. We could say similar for Rhaenyra's children, as what happens to her youngest 2; all of them in one way or another die because they were or could be used. however, they AND the greens' kids were all safer if the greens had not usurped Rhaenyra.

The greens were the aggressors and transgressors. The ones who started this war and looked for something out of it. They tried to act worse against Rhaenrya before/during the war AND the whole of Westeros before/during/after, thus they get the worse punishment and lose more than she did.

The entire point is that the greens lose everything, because they went after "everything". They lose everything, including their kids bc they relentlessly and hypocritically ran to obtain more power for themselves by attempting to exclude a woman from the position she never would have had without the will of a man.

They went on the basis that a girl/woman should not rule or become an heir before any direct male relatives...so Jaehaera was cut out of the line of succession by her own side of the family, thus she was also less prioritized, thus she was made into a baby factory for Aegon III. She became their last chance to get their blood to at least be part of the future line, but even that's dashed by a man who had similar ambitions as Otto and Alicent.

In trying to go against the king's word/an actual law, the greens also made it much more justified for someone to not care much for Aegon II's claim or authority...bc if you can so easily flout a king's word, why should you care about the guy you're trying to make king?! And using people who themselves are willing to be so dishonest creates a higher likelihood that they'd betray you, as similar to Ulf and Hugh betraying Rhaenyra. (And somehow, Rhaenyra is the only naive one when she expects people to follow through with their oaths 🙄)

Have you ever thought, anon, about those other girls who were maimed or terrorized into not appearing before Aegon III in the Maiden's Ball? Sure, most of them weren't disabled (Priscella Hogg was, I think), but what happens to Jaehaera is because she was girl in the way of a man's ambitions and not because she was disabled. What about all those Tumbleton folk, Bitterbridge refugees (the raped septas and girls as young as 8!), and riverland peasants--most of them children! Undoubtedly, you will have disabled children in those populations, anon. Why is Jaehaera's death so much more valuable than these mass deaths of also children? Remember that Alicent raised her kids to easier justify committing these atrocities. Maelor and Jaehaerys' deaths also reflect these events. Jaehaera's death was markedly different in meaning from theirs (to open up space for another girls who's being used) because she was female. In the first linked post, I talk about why and how people used Jaehaera's marriage to Aegon and how that reflects on her death being unique from her brothers' because of her gender.

GRRM comments, through Jaehaera and these girls and Rhaenyra what one pattern of F&B has: being female is dangerous because it is to be more of an object or property in lieu of self-concerned ambitious men to the point where the most vulnerable and those who cannot practice some of the same sort of agency can experience gruesome consequences--sometimes to become terrors themselves in their attempts to gain denied agency or defend themselves.