Hi, sorry for this, but I just need to rant about this, or I'll explode. Feel free to delete this 🩷
I saw somewhere it was written that Elia Martell deserved her fate while Lyanna and Rhaegar were just in love and deserved to be happy...
THIS PISSED ME OF SO BADLY LIKE WHAT THE HELL !!!
Lyanna was 16 and even if we overlooked the part where she’s a westerosi woman at that age you know it's wrong to run away from your home to be with a married dude who's got two kids !
As for Rhaegar, I believe he was as mad as his father. leave your kind, beautiful wife and two kids for a 16 year old girl who's about to get married herself !? Yeah, there's definitely something wrong with your brain !
Also, that person painted Lyanna in such an innocent light like I do not believe she was that dumb she knew Robert would be furious, plus her father and brother's did this girl ever consider them ? The answer is no. Lyanna didn't want to marry Robert, and when Rhaegar showed interest, she decided to run away with his stupid ass !
The biggest victim of Rhaegar/Lyanna actions is ELIA MARTELL AND HER CHILDREN !!!
I can agree with Rhaegar being the most responsible for all the shit that happened, but at the same time, I don't believe Lyanna was just a little girl who fell in love with him.
And Yes, Lyanna is considered a child in our timeline, but in her universe and timeline, she was definitely not a child who didn't know how things worked given that she was also a noble woman and educated as well !
hello kitty 🐱🐱🐱
yeah, some rhagar/lyanna stans would do anything to justify rhaegar's actions because they have it in their minds that he was this fairytale prince charming. and, to be fair to them, that's how he is mostly presented in the text, heaped in praise and regret (apart from robert obviously but many fans disregard robert's appraisal because they see him as biased)
i don't hold it against people if they have a particularly idealised view of rhaegar, because you never know how much they've actually studied the text or thought about this issue in the first place. but if one does engage with the fandom on a general basis and reads meta/takes, it's very difficult not to eventually interact with critical analyses of rhaegar. so, even if his story didn't ring any alarm bells from the start, for whatever reason, if you do start thinking about the practicalities, the shadier elements emerge.
leaving all of that aside, if someone were to try and justify rhaegar's actions, then blaming his brutally-murdered wife is not the kind of stance that will win over the fence-sitters 🧍♀️ even if elia were an awful person who made rhaegar's life miserable (though there is no proof of this, on the contrary), then she still wouldn't "deserve" a violent murder and to witness her children being murdered in front of her. you'd think a reasonable person would agree with that, but this is the kind of fandom in which fans tell others to kys because they disagree with their opinion on fictional people, so for them it's only natural that being annoying (or any other some such dumb infraction) is such a huge and problematic crime that can only be sanctioned by death.
so it's like. i feel there are some huge behavioural issues at play here or at least an unhealthy amount of internalised misogyny or bully fantasies that are the real culprits here :))
i've outlined my general opinion of lyanna here for whomever is interested
