What is your opinion on Rhaegar's relationships both with his wife Elia and Lyanna who was a teen girl?
Specifically about how a lot of people excuse Rhaegar's actions and say: "He fell in love". Like he's a naive teenage girl which Lyanna was actually.
While most of R + L shippers feel sympathy for Elia, they still frame weirdly who was responsible for her death.
They all agree that the mountain, Tywin and people who did or order the murder are responsible. And that's true, they are 100% responsible. But it's always shut down that Rhaegar was responsible.
Now Rhaegar probably wouldn't have planned or wanted Elia, Aegon and Rhenys to have such horrifying deaths, but he definitely did set up something bad to happen to them. If not physically then politically.
One person that was anonymous said that Rhaegar maybe didn't plan for Elia to die but, when he kidnapped Lyanna he definitely took away the system that protected Elia.
And I agree 💯% with this statement.
Honestly I feel like people will never see Elia's death as Rhaegar's fault until or if it's finally revealed to us what kind of relationship Lyanna had with him and how he treated her.
I apologize for a long rant. I wanted this to be a simple question but then felt like I should probably give more info about what exactly I'm interested in.
I think Rhaegar’s relationships are one of the clearest places where ASOIAF shows the “collision” between romantic myth-making and real human harm.
With Elia Martell, the books strongly implies a relationship shaped by duty and physical vulnerability. Elia is described as “sickly” and repeatedly stressed as someone who could not safely bear more children. From a modern lens and honestly even within Westerosi norms it’s hard to read the situation as anything but deeply unequal. Whether Rhaegar personally cared for her or not, he ultimately failed to protect her and their children when it mattered most, and that failure is inseparable from how House Targaryen unraveled in KL. And YES! by taking Lyanna and triggering a succession crisis, Rhaegar removes the political stability that was protecting Elia. As long as he is crown prince with an intact marriage alliance to Dorne, Elia has the backing of House Martell and the Crown’s legitimacy. Once he disappears with Lyanna and the war starts, Elia loses that protection and becomes vulnerable in a way she wasn’t before.
With Lyanna Stark, the issue is different but still very asymmetrical. She is a teenager in a highly patriarchal system, and Rhaegar is a married adult crown prince. Even if ppl interpret their connection as mutual attraction or “love” in a romantic sense, it still exists inside a system where Lyanna has far less power, experience, and freedom of choice than he does. The problem isn’t just the “romance,” but the consequences that her disappearance triggers a war and mass death.
I also think GRRM’s Favorite Trick aka “Make the Romance Look Pretty So You Forget It’s Actually Horror”
GRRM really loves doing this thing where he makes stuff look like a tragic romance on the surface so people get emotionally pulled in, but when you actually zoom out it’s way darker.
Like Rhaegar/Lyanna or Jaime/Cersei or Daemon/Rhaenyra he uses all the “star-crossed lovers” imagery, crowns, songs, tragic prince vibes, etc., so it feels romantic at first glance. But the actual consequences are still war, death, and massive political fallout. And the point is we don’t actually get Lyanna’s POV at all. Everything we know is filtered through other people after the fact, so the story itself leaves a lot of ambiguity on purpose. People fill in the gaps with romance or tragedy depending on what they want to believe.
lyanna probably thought she was in love bc she needed to be, just like sansa does in her own way. by the time she meets rhaegar near the end of 282 AC, she’s already in a situation where she has to convince herself of something to survive it emotionally. he’s the “poetic prince” archetype. he crowns her queen of love and beauty in front of everyone (which is already insane social-wise), n then singles her out at court like she actually matters. like… that would mess w/ any teenage girl stuck in a betrothal she didn’t want. she knows robert is coming, she’s already long betrothed, everything is basically set in stone. there’s no real exit being offered to her except the one thing that shouldn’t even exist politically: rhaegar.
she reached for a fantasy and found a prison.
The story intentionally leaves us with a contradiction that Rhaegar is mythologized within the narrative as a prophetic, almost romantic figure, but the actual outcomes tied to his decisions are horrific for both women and for the realm. That tension between how characters are remembered and what actually happens bc of them is very much the point GRRM is playing with.
As for the fandom, agreed a lot of people will critique everything except the actual trigger for the conflict (esp the men) regardless of how their personal relationship is ultimately interpreted, Rhaegar’s actions still set off a chain of events that dismantled the stability protecting Elia. That broader context gets lost when people focus only on individual intent instead of the consequences.
