👫RHAEGAR
SEND 👫 AND I'LL WRITE FOUR (4) HEADCANONS ABOUT OUR MUSES' RELATIONSHIP. ( NO LONGER ACCEPTING. )
strap in, everybody, i'm about to get cancelled (lmao jk)
one. okay, first things first. i think for a better understanding of the dynamic these two have, we have to go back to where they first met each other — harrenhal. i think this is canon (from what i remember) that the timeline goes like this:
howland reed arrives, three squires bully him
lyanna defends him, takes him to her tent, and tends to his injuries herself
later that night there was a feast. lyanna brings howland to sit with her and her brothers. rhaegar sings his song, lyanna tears up, benjen makes a joke about it, lyanna pours wine over his head
later that same night: lyanna and howland recognize the three bullying squires, points them out to her brothers. benjen offers to find howland a horse and armor, but howland was hesitant because he was no knight and unused to using lances.
following day: first day of the tournament. all three knights who the squires are in service to win their jousts.
next day: second day of the tournament. the knight of the laughing tree appears and beats all three nights in the joust, taking custody of their horses and armor. the kotlt's terms for ransom: teach your squires a lesson and i'll give you back your stuff
kotlt's brief but impressive victory ends here. they were able to defend howland reed's honor, and show their prowess in the joust. but they also attracted the very wrong kinds of attention. both robert baratheon and richard lonmouth wanted to unmask the knight, and the mad king aerys was very unhappy about his presence, claiming that the knight is mocking his rule. in fact, aerys was so mad that he sent his son to track down the knight and figure out their identity:
"The king was wroth, and even sent his son the dragon prince to seek the man, but all they ever found was his painted shield, hanging abandoned in a tree. It was the dragon prince who won that tourney in the end."
and days later, what happens? rhaegar wins, and rhaegar crowns lyanna "the queen of love and beauty" (QLAB) laying down a crown of blue roses on her lap, while the rest of the crowd (including rhaegar's wife, elia martell) watched in horror and "all smiles died". just based off all of this, i think it's fair to assume that rhaegar did figure out the identity of the knight of the laughing tree, after all. it was lyanna stark, the she-wolf, the daughter of winterfell. and he knew.
two. crowning lyanna QLAB was NOT a romantic gesture. it was simply an acknowledgment of lyanna's skill, which was impressive considering that she was fourteen years old at the time. still, it was very politically stupid. the tourney at harrenhal was staged in part because rhaegar is planning a coup, and is therefore hoping to win the favor of various high-ranking lords and ladies. this... did not help his cause. he angered the starks, he angered the baratheons, he angered the martells. he also put lyanna in a very compromising position, which is truly fucked up considering their difference in age and in station. gods only know what's going on in rhaegar's head, but i also think this is where he begins to make the connection when it comes to the song of ice and fire. the suggestion of it starts here. post-harrenhal is when lyanna's greendreams start. she contracts a fever on the way home, and is beset by disturbing dreams. in these dreams, rhaegar would sometimes appear. i have a whole other headcanon post detailing the reason behind this, but essentially, it has something to do with her being a warg and consequently, a greenseer (of sorts, or just someone who can tap into that power) and rhaegar being a dragon dreamer (or someone who occasionally has dragon dreams). they cannot "communicate across half the realm" like what TWOIAF says about greenseers and valyrian dreamers can allegedly do, but they would sometimes have interconnected dreams.
three. this is primarily how lyanna becomes aware of the prophecy, which also foretells her death. when she and rhaegar meet again in the riverlands, she comes with him because she's become convinced she has a role to play in saving the world. once again, i have to reiterate: this is not a love story. there is a good eight (8) year age gap between rhaegar and lyanna, and though yes, the prophecy seems urgent enough, it still falls on rhaegar to act responsibly no matter how willingly lyanna lent her cooperation to their cause. but rhaegar is prophecy-consumed and single-minded in his pursuit of the third head of the dragon. he accepts lyanna's help without heed to consequences because this is what he has been working toward his whole life, since he was a young boy. he's always bent toward the course of the prophecy and followed the signs as he read them (this boy, who was a bookish twink to start, suddenly coming up to the master-at-arms saying "i will require a sword and armor. it seems i must be a warrior" when he showed little inclination towards being one before that.) in short, where the prophecy is concerned, we cannot trust rhaegar to be reasonable. and that is a gigantic points deduction against his character. he is a prince in his twenties and she is a noble lady who falls much further from him in the hierarchy of political power, and she is a teenager. consent is dubious at best, because lyanna also came into the arrangement ASSUMING that rhaegar had a plan. but he did not. to the ruin of everything else.
four. that being said, lyanna's feelings for rhaegar is complicated. she trusted and admired him; lyanna wouldn't have come with him if she didn't. rhaegar maintained throughout their stay at the tower of joy that he loved no one else but his princess wife, and that fucks up lyanna because they're having intimate relations. around this time she's fifteen years old. she's had no experience prior to this, and this is how it's going for her. it's hard to fully separate affection from physical intimacy when you're young and naive and full of romanticism and idealism. and she knew it was wrong. which was why she felt so very guilty about it, and also why she was not sorry about possibly dying, because that seemed like the acceptable penance for what she chose to do to fulfill a prophecy with a married prince. after the battle of the bells, when gerold hightower came to fetch rhaegar as he bore the bad news that rickard and brandon are dead, lyanna was truly enraged at rhaegar for the first time, because he would not allow her to go home, and instead kept her under the watchful eyes of three of his kingsguard, and he was going off to fight for his father, who had just murdered her kin. can you imagine how shattered she must have felt? lyanna trusted herself to be a good judge of character, and here was rhaegar obliterating her trust completely, while she was probably late into her pregnancy as well. that was the ultimate betrayal. she was livid with him, and probably wished him dead. and then... well. he died, you know?
and in verses where lyanna lives, having to come into terms with the fact that rhaegar is alive no longer... that fucks her up severely, too. for better or for worse, they both shared this burden, and now she is left alone to bear it. i don't think lyanna can ever hate rhaegar. she knew him. for all his flaws and his melancholia, he seemed to truly believe he was doing the right thing, what must be done, misguided though he was about it. and she resents him for a lot of things but not for wanting what's good for the realm. and there are also the complicated feelings she harbored for him. in his death, they don't fully go away, but they become even more garbled and even more confusing. they were denied closure. and rhaegar, in a way, will always haunt lyanna. she'd carry the weight of their mistake with her for the rest of her life. she would forever doubt her grasp of people and situations because she was so wrong. so damn wrong about rhaegar. and now they have a son, the third head of the dragon, just like rhaegar wanted. but he is no longer around to father their kid, and no longer around to protect him, so that lyanna had to burden her own brother with the responsibility of keeping her son alive and her secrets to himself. and lyanna resents rhaegar for that, too.
