#rhaegelings

[princessaelora]

Pls yap about the Rhaelings! I love hearing more about Aelora, Aelor and Daenora!!!

oh i have so many thoughts. so here are some guesses based on the canon info we have and some personal hcs:

aelor and aelora

✷ i think they had to be roughly the same age as egg considering their possible birth dates on the wiki and how sefton refers to them as children in the sworn sword. because of the ages and the good relationship between rhaegel and maekar they probably played a lot with the younger maekarlings; i think they were egg’s favorite cousins and very close to him and daella. they were everyone’s favorite cousins/nieces/nephews/grandkids really, spoiled and sweet. grandpa daeron doted on them a lot.

✷ they adored their parents and looked like dbz fusions of rhaegel and alys, down to their one blue and one violet heterochromic eyes, but aelora had dark hair and aelor silver. they each braided a strand of the other's into theirs. aelora's hair started turning white from stress and grief after aelor's death though, and every time she looked in a mirror she thought it had to be a window and aelor was on the other side. as her mental health deteriorated she sometimes believed herself to be aelor and wandered the red keep looking for aelora. only her mother or her cousin daella could bring her back to herself.

✷ on the surface they were near perfect at everything, kind and gracious and clever and fearless and beautiful. but they were heavily codependent and got very distressed if they were not together for more than a few hours. it was why their parents let them marry, they would have crashed and burned if separated, but together they were all anyone could ask for in a prince/ss, and that made people overlook their strangeness. they weren’t really interested in relationships either, their (platonic imo) twin bond was their whole world. they totally had a secret twin language that kinda became the shared family language for a while after rhaegel picked it up.

✷ they loved doing everything together and having everything match and their parents indulged them. so aelora had her own suit of armor and sword and trained in the yard with aelor, and aelor did needlework and dancing lessons with the girls. aelor either refused to get knighted unless aelora could too, or took his oaths and immediately went to knight his sister and was furious when that wasn’t officially recognized. they both had a relationship to gender that would probably be considered nonbinary in modern terms.

✷ they adopted a two headed dragon with feathered wings as their personal coat of arms. they also kept the blue crescent moon rhaegel added to his sigil when he married alys.

✷ they inherited rhaegel’s dragon egg and became obsessed with hatching it after his death as a form of maladaptive coping with the loss. one of their attempts ended in the accident in which aelora got aelor killed. aelora started having extremely vivid dragon dreams and psychosis after it, similar to rhaegel and similarly unable to tell one from the other. the dragon egg got passed down to daenora but was lost to history with her and maegor.

daenora

✷ i believe she was born very close to rhaegel’s death, and my guess is her marriage to aerion happened because she was passed over in the succession due to being a toddler. so maekar placated the arryns by promising to marry her to the son he counted on daeron and kiera having within the next few years so their lines would rule together. which of course never happened, aerion ended up being his heir instead, and it was either him and daenora marrying or giving the realm a reason for another succession dispute.

✷ i think daenora was raised more by aelinor penrose than alys for roughly the first 5-6 years of her life. alys lost rhaegel and the twins in very quick succession, she was depressed, possibly suicidal, and in absolutely no place to parent a young child. so aelinor was the stepmom who stepped up, and daenora remained very close with her. alys, to daenora, was more like a tragically beautiful idolized figure than an actual mother. the closest equivalent to a father she knew was maekar, who projected his grief for rhaegel onto her even more than alys did. ouch.

✷ the proximity to aelinor made her come across aerys’s books and research on sorcery and she got really into studying that. she’s so spooky goth girl coded to me idk. always serious beyond her years. i think she was hoping to find a way to commune with the father and the siblings she never really knew (she felt like she knew aelora though with how much she dreamed of her) but who haunted her and her mother at every step and turn. but she never could. she lit a glass candle though, if only for the briefest flicker. there were some tiny, flawed bits of actual magic she did manage to discover, and they eventually played a part in the tragedy of summerhall.

✷ alys was against her marrying aerion regardless of agreements between maekar and her family, and tried to send daenora to the free cities instead. but daenora was young and scared to leave everything and everyone she knew and bitter at alys for being absent during her early childhood and wanted power both for herself and to protect alys (hello youngest daughter with eldest daughter syndrome). so she refused to get on the ship.

✷ her marriage to aerion was… well. they had a significant age gap, and it was arranged for political reasons. i do believe aerion was not exempt from the love all the targaryens had for rhaegel, so i want to think he did treat her with the closest approximation to gentleness he could manage, but ultimately he married her because he was strong armed by his father. meanwhile daenora was a 17-ish year old marrying the crown prince; she probably knew of his penchant for violence mostly by rumor, privately thought she was the more fucked up one, and had unhinged fantasies of them falling in love and fixing each other that were to some degree inspired by the great love story of her parents. their marriage was a bizarre two year fever dream that ended in wildfire and an heir who was immediately passed over.

✷ she used aelor and aelora’s bird winged dragon sigil, but hers only had one head. she had a dark sense of humor, so after aerion’s death she added a breath of green flame to it.

✷ i think alys died roughly around the end of maekar’s reign and the beginning of egg’s under very suspicious circumstances, and daenora started a slow descent into paranoia that eventually led her to take maegor with her and disappear into essos where she continued her study of sorcery. i think she traveled all the way to asshai, my personal crack hc is that she is connected to quaithe somehow.

[sansa286]

At least in the show-verse, Daeron is def the oldest of Daeron II's grandchildren. I think it goes:

Daeron

Valarr

Aerion

Matarys

Aelor & Aelora

Aemon

Daella

Egg

Rhae

Daenora

I think Daeron is about 2-3 years older than Valarr, and Aerion is only around a year younger than Valarr. Matarys came the year after Aerion. I think Aelor and Aelora were born before Aemon, who was born in 198 (confirmed), and then we also know that due to Egg being born in 200, that means Daella was born in 199. Rhae is probably only 1-2 years younger than Egg. The real wildcard is Daenora, who could've been born roughly around the same time as Rhae or much later when everyone would've been in their teens, which is sad to think about as she would have no siblings or cousins around her age; but that unfortunately happens with kids born later in their specific generation of their family (poor girl probably spent her whole childhood wishing she had cousins to play with, only to then be wed to Aerion).

[princessaelora]

what are your headcanons for rhaegel, alys and the rhaegelings in a modern au?

(also i love ur rhaegel posts btw)

so fun to get this question because i was just thinking about a modern au the other day! (also thank you i am kissing you on the forehead xo)

i think the targaryens would be doing something like big fancy law firm and rhaegel is the one son who did something artistic. based on his canon uhh passion for dance i’m convinced he’s a ballet dancer specializing in modern/contemporary. he’s an absolute star, nureyev who??? but always really sweet and humble. until the pressure and the physical demands become more than he can take and he has a major crashout in his 20s at the height of his career. he had mental health issues before but the combination of rich family and insane talent always shielded him from the worst right up until he has his first major psychotic episode in public and suddenly it doesn’t and his family has to fight to keep him out of institutions. he probably completely disappears for a year or two and once he figures out how to live with it in a way that works for him he comes back with some insane choreo project and then disappears again, rinse and repeat. he mostly avoids publicity but he’s very passionate about mad liberation/anti psych and disability rights and does some activism related to that. his other big thing is music, he’s been releasing beautiful dreamy lo fi tracks on some obscure soundcloud acc since his teens and no one knows it’s him except alys and maekar.

i’m going to say he met alys when he was starting out as a dancer, she randomly happened to be in the audience for his first solo thing and it made her cry and their eyes met and from that second he was dancing for her. and they ran into each other outside and it was just inevitable that they fell horribly in love but it took them a bit to realize it was mutual because they’re audhd4audhd and shy and a bit stupid. fortunately baelor eventually gave rhaegel a little nudge. when rhaegel has his big burnout he’s so scared she’ll leave but instead they get married. alys would fight god for rhaegel.

i’ve read a fic where the arryns have a big plane company and i really like that so i’ll borrow that. i think alys was just burning through that trust fund money being an eternal not particularly serious college student bouncing around between all her different interests for the longest time. art, music (especially composition), ornithology, aerospace engineering, cosmology. she’s kinda reserved with most people but rhaegel loves hearing her go on and on and on about everything she likes. she does the music for some of his later projects and some visual arts stuff that has a devoted niche following. her career does kinda come second to her relationship but she doesn’t care, she’s like one is just work she does more out of interest than need and the other is the love of her life. she knows exactly that she’s rhaegel’s priority too. they spend a lot of time away from everything and everyone doing nothing, just existing and experiencing life together. occasionally their peace is interrupted by family obligations or a troubled maekarling who needs adults who won’t ask if their parents know where they are and maekar is always like please just call me when one of my kids shows up and please stop giving them your credit card. which rhaegel forgets he promised to do the second he is faced with the child in question. and maekar can’t even get mad because no one can get mad at rhaegel.

like in canon they have the twins in their late 20s/early 30s. there is no world in which aelor and aelora aren’t spoiled codependent little weirdos, but this is a modern setting so they have more space to grow into themselves and explore their genderqueerness. their parents are essentially rich hippie artists so their education is waldorf school type shit and egg who has to go to like eaton or something is so jealous. they’re really artistic too, kinda like jaden and willow if they were a bit less hollywood. i think aelora goes into music and aelor makes some kind of cool abstract kinetic sculptures.

daenora is the baby, she actually gets to grow up with everyone and her big siblings dote on her so much. when she’s little she wants to do ballet like papa, but eventually it’s the activism she really gets into. silvia federici is her big hero. she does have a questionable relationship with aerion but it’s not romantic. like they’re just always at each other’s throats at family dinners in the most savage way they can get away with, but an hour later they’re smoking daeron’s weed together on the porch. daenora is kinda trying to rebel against her parents but they’re either so supportive or so detached depending on the situation that it’s basically impossible and she keeps hanging out with aerion because that’s the one thing that will actually get a rise out of alys.

i want them to be happy forever but realistically rhaegel and the twins would still die. but this post is long enough already so i’m going to pretend they don’t.