Tag: a song of ice and fire

Friendly reminder:

Baela Targaryen deserved better than to be cheated on (”while he was married to another”) by a dickbag who may have groomed a teenager while she was imprisoned (”the fairest treasure of the Maidenvault”). Baela the Burnt is canonically disabled and survived fucking DRAGONFIRE as well as a fall from the gods only know how many feet up, and in this house, we love her.

I’ve finally found words for why I hate Tywin Lannister so much: he’s a rape-minded, murderous asshole with delusions of grandeur like many of the other men in Westeros (as others have pointed out), but he manages to hide that behind a veneer of competence because he’s surrounded by fellow rape-minded, murderous assholes who also happen to have idiotic delusions of grandeur and are louder about it.

My headcanons for what happens if Elia and Lyanna both live (because I love them)

  • Rhaegar and Robert die – too bad, so sad. Jaime takes off after killing Aerys and kills the Clegane/Lorch duo of evil before they can do anything to Elia, Rhaenys, and Aegon.
  • Elia sets things to rights, beginning with calling off the siege of Storm’s End and officially Ending the War in her son’s name, and let’s admit it, in her own as well. She is so competent that it’s scary.
  • Lyanna is brought back to King’s Landing alive and relatively well, because she has an actual maester that the Crown sent.
  • Lyanna swears fealty to Elia and to the crown, making it clear that she and baby Jon will never have any designs on the throne – all she ever wanted is not to marry Robert, which will not happen anyway because he’s awful and now he is also dead.
  • Elia declares that Lyanna’s “punishment” is to stay in King’s Landing and raise Jon under the auspices of the Crown, to double-ensure no rebellion. Lyanna is completely fine with this. While she’ll miss Winterfell, she doesn’t think she belongs anywhere anymore.
  • Elia pardons Stannis, Ned, and Jon Arryn. All they ever did was rebel against unjust acts of the Crown, but she makes it clear that should they ever do it again, she’s going to go medieval on all of their Houses. Pun intended. They agree to this.
  • Rhaenys and Aegon don’t think all that much of their little half-brother, Jon Waters. He’s tiny, and Rhaenys is old enough to be vaguely aware that he’s part of the reason for all the upheaval. But he and Aegon are only a year and change apart, so they eventually do become good friends (with the usual complement of hitting and crying over toys they don’t want to share).
  • Elia eventually realizes that Lyanna has been hanging around King’s Landing long enough to raise eyebrows, so she proposes that Lyanna might marry Oberyn – he’s on the small council as Master of Whispers. Oberyn’s okay with this, as long as he can make it clear that Ellaria stays right where she is.
  • Lyanna and Oberyn have relations approximately once a year, but they like each other well enough. There’s someone else that Lyanna likes better, and Oberyn sees that – she’s patently obvious about it.
  • Eventually, Elia and Lyanna have their happily ever after, and Aegon is a wonderful king whose reign sees the defeat of the White Walkers for good. Rhaenys is NOT married to him, and is married to a husband of her choice. As for Jon, well, maybe he’s on the Wall, maybe he’s a Kingsguard, but these headcanons aren’t about him. 😀

A small defense of Lyanna Stark (which has probably already been made, but whatever)

It’s important to
remember that Lyanna was not only a kid, but a kid with canonically romantic –
although well-founded – ideals, even if she did have a practical side. People
wonder why she would have run away with Rhaegar, a married man, when she
rightfully excoriated Robert for being unfaithful. It’s a good point, but…

…well, Rhaegar probably
spun a tale of a prophecy that only she could help him fulfill, and that would
have seemed a LOT more romantic to her than the idea of Robert the Canonical Cad, who swaggered around and whose motto can
be best summed up with “If she’s female and she’s breathing, stick it in” (best
sung to the tune of If You’re Happy and You Know It). So she chose what seemed like the only way to get away from him, and Rhaegar sold it to her as ‘well, it’s not really a bad thing at all if you help save the world, wife, what wife?’ She enabled Rhaegar, but
I’m firmly of the idea that it was entirely unintentional, and she’s not to
blame because she was fifteen years old.

On a side note, Lyanna
being upset over Robert siring a lot of known bastards, and wanting him to be
faithful to her, is not dissimilar to what Catelyn feels about Ned having sired
Jon and raised him alongside their kids. Both perspectives are entirely valid, and both should be defended more than they are.