Last question for today. So lisanna married at 15 and met ellaria at 17. Was oberyn intending on introducing them at any point? Had lisanna been with anyone else by then? Did she resent ellaria and did she still when they met? Thank you again for indulging me with such patience
Oberyn was... very cautious about putting these two together. I guess he figured he couldn’t force them to get along, and they’re so very different types of women that in his mind he could only see it ending in disaster. He most certainly did not expect them to meet in the way they did, nor did he expect the results to be so... passionate. Though if anyone wins in this case it’s Oberyn himself, because now he doesn’t have to arrange his life around having two women in his life that he kind of wants to keep apart indefinitely. Plus the threesomes. That’s a nice bonus.
Lisanna does not tend to stray especially far afield, romantically speaking, certainly by Dornish standards. She is never one to go to a brothel alone, for instance; she goes with Oberyn and Ellaria, usually because she knows that they enjoy it when she comes with them. But at 17? No, she’d only been with Oberyn and he was more than enough to keep her sated. Ultimately he would have always been enough to keep her sated; Ellaria is a gift she wasn’t expecting.
I don’t know that she ever resented Ellaria. If anything she resented Oberyn because of Ellaria. But I don’t know that it was resentment as much as confusion and self-consciousness that resulted from it. She was just a teenager and figured that if he needed to seek pleasure from someone else, there was something she was doing wrong. She wasn’t giving him enough to keep him happy. It’s many many years before Lisanna loses the majority of what her father made her. She’s still very much Tywin’s daughter and has been conditioned to fill her assigned role perfectly. And that’s what she expected of herself: perfection. She doesn’t understand why Oberyn would want someone else outside the possibility that she’s failing him as his wife. I don’t honestly think she’d given Ellaria a second thought because those weren’t the terms in which she had been accustomed to viewing the situation. She saw any extramarital activity of her husband’s as her own failings, completely misinterpreting the culture she’d been basically dropped into without preparation. I don’t think it’s until she meets Ellaria and begins to understand how this relationship works, and that it’s possible to love more than one person at a time, that love is not a pastry to be divided up but something that can grow and encompass new people and experiences, that she starts to grow up as a person and figure out who she is. She’s so used to the very Lannister notion that love is transactional and limited in amount, that you get exactly as much as you’ve earned and no more, that Oberyn alone isn’t really able to chip through that kind of thinking until someone else comes along and breaks the mold. Ellaria is very important in Lisanna’s life; I wouldn’t say she is more important than Oberyn, but she’s definitely a close second (perhaps until the babies start coming. But that’s a different sort of important).
