*EDITED POST* (3/3/24)
I assume that you are talking about this recent REBLOG I just put up about Rhaegar, Elia, Lyanna, and Tywin.
The entire point(s) of that post was to:
- point out how Rhaegar's cheating was not the cause of Elia and their kids' death.
- argue against the idea he was entirely or mostly responsible and also want to say that the entire dynasty's collapse was only caused by his infidelity. That such a thing could be caused by such.
- argue some people have conflated Victorian (a hyperbole) family values of fidelity or their own personal past with a bigger, interconnected political condition that was a maelstrom in Rhaegar's case. While ignoring his concerted attempts to even get rid of his own father before.
- argue that some people think that somehow, just staying with Elia would have prevented her death, or that it was easy to ascertain that Aerys and Tywin and everyone else would act as they did if we were him -> as I already listed in that post.
And this is what I said about Cersei:
The text never once explains or indicates how Elia herself feels about Rhaegar or Lyanna, but we have people claiming that she was emotionally wracked by this? Maybe upset for her reputation or shocked, but we still don't know who this woman was by personality, this all the guesswork based on her heritage, her health and the arrangedness of the marriage itself. One also cannot claim that she was something like Cersei was/would be, feeling totally humiliated, jilted of a perfect and glorious life, hating Rhaegar, etc. Nothing in the text gives strong evidence of that.
She is not only hateful towards Robert because he beats and rapes her (completely justified); she hates him for treating her as second place to someone she sees as inferior to herself and someone who "stole" Rhaegar from her. BUT she is hateful toward Robert & compares him to Rhaegar specifically bc for years she has wondered what life would have been like for her if she married Rhaegar instead of this man who she thought would at least appreciate her for the qualities she's told to have/be the best for a woman...but instead gets an abusive, self-deluded man who lusts for a girl who never even liked him AND was not the idea of a "perfect" woman to Cersei, but is still her competition for male favor (a woman's political key to access to power).
(*I must bring a more nuanced point about this, though and note that aside from Robert whispering some other girl's name on their wedding night, Cersei also has had an issue with not "measuring" up to the masculinized standards of competent personhood, so Robert's revealing that he wants and continues to want Lyanna over her pokes at Cersei's deepest insecurity. GameofThronesHistorian on TikTok notes how Cersei expected to marry Rhaegar after Tywin dumbly got her hopes up and she spent a lot of her time fantasizing about being with him and being Queen but he marries Elia, Aerys basically insults the entire house along with Tywin, and her hopes are dashed along with a bit of her pride ostensibly (nobles get a lot of their pride from their house identity). She finally gets to be Queen (the position dangled in front of her like a prize since childhood, snatched away, and now she "has" it back), but she discovers that the queenship doesn't make up for Robert's clear preference for the same girl "her" Rhaegar got himself supposedly killed for. When Cersei married Robert she expected to finally overcome the haunting legacy both girls left behind her own insecurities & ruined hopes. When she actually gets to be Queen, she discovers that this thing she thought would fix everything and that has been long promised to her cannot make up for the slight Robert gives her and thus traps her in a marriage that quickly becomes abusive. For someone like Cersei, who grew up hearing that she is the most beautiful person around while having almost nothing for herself other than that and later being queen as Tywin always promised to her name [bc her patriarchal society affords way less in terms of prestige, value, and recognized respect to women as it does men & boys AND makes physical features comparatively final measure of worth for girls and women], it's not that hard to see that Cersei's feelings are not baseless or totally irrational. Her already existing insecurities mushroomed into a plague that also sharpened her need to be "perfect" and counteract the feeling of never measuring up. Therefore, her classist-generated need to self-empower evolves into her stomping on others to get power and the self-satisfaction always distant from her*)
Neither her feelings nor Catelyn's for Robert/Ned cheating on them are things one could automatically guess are the exact same as Elia's toward Rhaegar being with Lyanna. Even without the beating/raping, because they are unlikely to be similar women w/exactly the same experiences.
I say this to point out that Cersei, while definitely being a victim of domestic abuse, still has a specific personality, history before him, and expectations of herself from her class position and gender. From those expectations, an idea--and the need to constantly reaffirm that idea bc of how little room it leaves one for developing a constant sense of self apart from it--of her exceptionality. Cersei is a NLOG and very much by a social-inspired inner compulsion.
What we know about Elia apart from her having kids and being married to Rhaegar comes from Oberyn and her Martell family members. And we get barely much from there (compared to other characters) aside from how she had had her own mind (her voicing her desire against a potential match by his farting). We have her in her early/mid-teens at the Lannisters wanting to see baby Tyrion and thinking/acting like she thinks him cute and witnessing child Cersei pinch baby Tyrion's penis (which already shows us a deep resentment against male privilege at such a young age and how it turned to who her father blamed for the absence of her mother). We don't have a PoV from Oberyn, so we get a few sentences of his feelings towards her in dialogue and dialogue is not as rich as the direct inner thoughts of characters. He does not have a reflective view of who Elia was as much as current/adult Ned Stark for Lyanna (who had PoVs) because he's focused on revenge. Even Ned could have thought more about other things that showcased Lyanna's personality independent of her engagement to Robert, but Oberyn seemed much more aware of who Elia was than Ned with Lyanna.
We don't know who adult Elia really is like we do Cersei, just her position, she was sick most of the time, and that she was Dornish. We do not get her life with Rhaegar, we do not get details nor suggestions in-text of her dynamic with Rhaegar as much as we get with him & Lyanna.
In a Con, GRRM has reportedly gone on to state that Elia and Rhaegar's relationship was "complex". Does this mean that there was affection but a mutual understanding that there was no deeper romance? Does this mean that if Elia were healthier, she would want to develop one with him? Either way, would she want it to be monogamous or not? Again, she's from Dorne, she's more likely to be more okay with it being an "open" marriage AND it being known Rhaegar has a side lover as she has enjoyed more body autonomy and a stronger sense of her own political autonomy from childhood.
But while she is Dornish, after she married Rhaegar she had to live in a nonDornish court in a nonDornish region while raising children, knowing that a man versus a woman having extramarital lovers are treated very differently. [a fuller explanation by dwellordream HERE]. For her own image and social standing, would she want him to be discrete even more than if they were just minor nobles? Or is she secure in the knowledge that her kids will always inherit before any of Lyanna's bastards (would she be, how likely is this) and de-prioritize how bad Rhaegar's cheating makes her look for her own safety (she nearly died the last time she gave birth)? We simply don't know for sure, even though I believe that Elia knew about Rhaegar and Lyanna bastard and wasn't against it.
this is essentially just a reception, so you could scroll past if you need. I basically free-write these things.
The answers to all these questions for Cersei are too obvious. We have Cersei's PoVs and her interactions with multiple people with both PoVs and with none--either dead or still alive by the last published book. And we get her own PoVs to draw her motivations and psychological processes and make better, credible conclusions.
Cersei's Lannister self-defensive-exceptionalist mindset feeds into her believing herself to be the paragon of any living woman, especially paramours, and mistresses. That PLUS her own need to have something close to or the same authority and power a man could have in her world, which she buys through sex, giving up some of her agency during some sexual encounters, and making herself NLOG to (mistakenly) gain men's loyalty or at least obedience to her commands. All of which is always in flux and depends on the person. To repeat myself, she very much cares about and is emotionally dependent on her nobility, her titles, her rank, her Lannister name, etc to accrue power for herself to her own detriment and to the abuse of others, which worsens or gains justification under Robert's abuse.
On the other hand, Cersei, her whole life, has been externally defined through a sexual lens. Yes, even in childhood. Sex and reproduction. She isn't a "whore" or a "slut" for then using what people used to objectify her into a weapon or device for her own intentions when she has learned that that is a direct way of accruing others' interest in her own and her kids' advancement. Cersei, while loyal & protective to her children, also--from her own experiences with powerlessnes from her gendered value in her family and society--tends to be less patient with them and be less able to address their emotional distresses. She seems abusive towards at least Tommen. And yes, in a feudal world, one can gain much political power & resources through their kids' claims and/or positions of power -> Tommen or Joffrey were kings and she could be Queen Dowager/Mother, the highest female rank a noblewoman could have...at least how GRRM wrote Westerosi society.
This is the crux of her motives: she learned that power-as-masculine AND power = male sexual dominance. Unlike the Tyrells, who have a better grasp of using both actual soft power and hard power (mostly yhr first) to maintain social dominance, Tywin is more the silent, golden rock that intimidates you into following him. Power, she learned from her father, is less diplomatic and more forceful and fear-inspired, violent, physical, and from Robert, sexual. All traditional qualified as masculine and assigned to men, who are given the privilege to hold/lead armies and wield weapons in battles:
In medieval times a woman could not bear arms; therefore a woman could not take on a role which, even symbolically, required her to carry arms. In medieval times a woman who took on an overt military role was an aberration.
Lyon, A. (2006). "The place of women in European royal succession in the middle ages."
From childhood, she absorbed this ideology and "decided" to essentially prove she was "not like the other girls." And the loss of her mother to childbirth, how her father never truly coped, would have had her rush to gain his love, and when that didn't work, to gain his respect. But she is female, so Tywin never will. She learned that being anything "feminine" is inherently "weak", and so she tried her entire life to differentiate herself from the "weak" women around her. Cersei is the ultimate NLOGs.
She gave up her sexual agency for her children (yes, the same ones who she abused at one point) to shore up defenses for their/her own position and safety, as she wouldn't in a hundred years have sex with some people willingly if it did not come with the expectation of their support, resources, etc. Class/masculinity-perceived-through-hypersexuality is to her, strength even as it puts her at a disadvantage as a woman, as she's that much more open to scandal if the odds go out of her favor and the Lannisters lose much of their power and the others' fear of them.
She imagines herself as Robert/in the male/"dominant" position (she herself imagines that position as male, the place of power she internalized as prime her whole life) when she's sexually rubbing and fingering Taena of Myr. She continues to finger her painfully despite Taena protesting in pain, thus herself becoming a sexual abuser so she can feel the power and defy Robert/men. Power that she learns directly resides in using sexual ties or performing sexual abuses. Taena also, as Cersei's "spy" on Margarey, and as one far beneath her rank, is also a person who acts as socially lower than Cersei herself, which feeds into Cersei's ego. So Cersei banks much of herself and self-worth on her class to a dangerous fault.
She has basically felt compelled to buy into that exceptionalism at full speed to compensate for her lack of power and feelings of inferiority from that lack. Cersei is rather a pretty complicated woman, while also being very simple. Her class position as aristocratic and Queen Dowager/Mother and her desire for power in the aristocratic space are directly related and inspired by her long sexual objectification. This is where gender and class intersect. Her hatred of Robert is obviously justified and comes from her long struggle to gain and keep autonomous power from men; that doesn't mean that she also doesn't eventually use her class and internalize female inferiority as her final crutch.
Cersei's personality and her abuse from others and against others are two related and unique things informing each other from her young childhood, especially evidenced by her thoughts and actions of her youth before she married Robert, how her father & those others around her treated her, and her observations of the events before Robert rebelled concerning women's abilities. Elia is, by contrast, a silent victim so it's easier to project a lot onto her the way it isn't for Cersei. Or Catelyn.
Even with the societal setup of misogyny put up against her since birth and her trying to collect power for herself, the consequences of how she does it, the carelessness of it, and the losing control of her impulses are going to be reasons for her downfall anyway.
