Anything is possible, but it’s awfully convenient if what he felt in his heart just so happened to serve a narrative that obfuscated the ugly reality of a violent attempt to overthrow a peaceful government while dog-whistling the old “they’re stealing our women!” canard to anyone who could be motivated by anti-Dornish sentiment. Even if not outright propaganda, the whole thing reminds me a lot of Littlefinger’s fixation on Catelyn. The idea of taking his sister as a second wife would be an unequivocal validation of his Targaryen-ness. So even if there had been some real attachment, the impetus behind it is pretty suspect.

If you asked a maester, they would probably tell you that the title of prince goes down at least two male-line generations from the king. At the time of The Hedge Knight, Prince Maekar was a fourth son, and sixth or seventh in line from the throne, and his sons are still referred to as princes. So a king’s son’s children are princes and princesses. The title does not appear to pass through the female line, because when Egg’s daughter Rhaelle married into the Baratheons, her son was a lord rather than a prince. That might indicate that the abstract rule is “everyone who’s formally in the line of succession is a prince, and their daughters are princesses” but I don’t think any line lasted long enough to test that. From what I can tell, the princesses themselves don’t tend to give up the title or the royal name, they just can’t pass those things on to their children.

This is neither statutory nor scientific, obviously. Daenerys had every intention of calling Rhaego a prince and nobody’s going to stop her. It’s also a relatively recent grafting of Andal culture onto the Targaryen family. Their older Valyrian traditions didn’t distinguish between princes and princesses, and they usually married each other, so they didn’t have different branches to distinguish. 

Are you referring to Rhaenys’ father Aemon? They wouldn’t have had a Great Council if he was around to show up. He was the crown prince; that’s why Rhaenys was in the running.

He is a good villain in a story. The Dance of the Dragons didn’t exactly produce heroes, but Daemon stands out as a particularly dark figure in the histories.

Look at his closest parallel in the main story. He’s a charismatic, innovative commander. He causes trouble for his older brother and is exiled, so he goes east to become a pirate. He sexually exploits one relative, grooming Rhaenyra from childhood for a sexual relationship that starts before she comes of age, and sends assassins after another. He’s Euron, just lazier - a dragonrider doesn’t need to chase his dreams to fly.

Viserys I’s unorthodox decisions about succession actually make a lot of sense in context of Daemon’s malevolence. Viserys had refused to recognize Daemon as his heir and make him the prince of Dragonstone. Partly he must have been holding out hope for sons, but he also knew that his brother was bad news. Legally, though, that doesn’t really matter. From his ascension until Aemma’s death, when Viserys didn‘t have a son to succeed him, the Great Council’s precedent means that Daemon was his heir. Even if that were ambiguous, Daemon has military resources and the City Watch, so if he has any argument for a claim, there’s nothing stopping him. Wrangling all the lords in line to explicitly acknowledge Rhaenyra as the crown princess put someone between Daemon and the throne.

But if he never remarries and has a backup heir, she’s the only person between Daemon and the throne. Presumably he wants his daughter to outlive him by more than a couple of hours, so remarriage it is. When Aegon was born, he could have disinherited Rhaenyra for the sake of the Great Council’s precedent, but that defeats the purpose of having a spare, because those rules put an uncle before a daughter. His hands are pretty much tied until he has a second son, and by that point he’s been binding the lords to their oaths for years. Changing his mind would be tantamount to admitting that the whole thing was about his brother being a menace, which is going to strain relations with the lords just as it pokes the bear by pissing off both Daemon and Rhaenyra.

In hindsight, sure, Viserys underestimated the existential attachment the Andals had to patriarchy. To his mind, the Great Council was a one-off thing due to a lack of clarity and he had made himself perfectly clear. But in fairness to him, he was, consciously or unconsciously, acting consistently against the much more immediate threat of his brother on the throne. (IMO his big mistake was marrying into the Hightowers, who were strong enough to pose a real threat on behalf of one of their own. He should have found a second wife abroad or from among their Velaryon cousins.)

I agree and I don’t. Certainly the queens’ lives do, and should, provoke a lot of visceralsympathy. They’re extraordinarily privileged in lots of ways, but are also subjectto this terribly intimate experience of being controlled. And AWOIAF very muchdoes emphasize that aspect of the Targaryen queens’ lives.

But I actually don’t think it’s the whole story. AWOIAF readslike a textbook, but it’s not. It’s written through the POVof a character who’s operating from a specific framework. Like all the othernarrators in the series, Yandel has his blind spots. Specifically, he’s aproduct of not just a medieval-ish world, but of that world’s conventionalacademy. That means he has fundamental assumptions about what counts as power,or influence, or even personal agency. His depiction of the queens’ lives asbeing limited to the painful things that are done to them is at least in partbecause he doesn’t know where to look for a lot of the things they could haveaccomplished within their own spheres of influence. If Yandel sat down to writean entry on, say, Catelyn Stark, she would come across in the same way. Hewould understand that her death was a terrible violation of social norms, buthe wouldn’t grasp Catelyn as the subject of her own story who influenced eventsin her own right.

That taps into a real life discourse about how we understandfemale historical figures, right? It’s absolutely true that, say, CatherineParr had to walk on eggshells around an unhinged despot while ducking fire fromthe powerful men around him. It’s also true that she was an influentialcourtier to her husband to a point where he trusted her to effectively ruleEngland in his absence, an early role model for her stepdaughter, and a prettyradical religious philosopher. People are a lot more likely to know the formerset of facts than the latter.

This is for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that hardpower/soft power is a distinction that is pretty distinctly gendered in thiscontext, and that’s going to affect how someone like Yandel would understandevents after the fact. A king putting an army into the field is something thatmakes it into the history books; a queen talking a king out of putting an armyinto the field doesn’t usually make it into the record. AWOIAF is written fromthe perspective of someone who’s not only limited in what they can know aboutthese historical events, but who isn’t even disposed to look for the dimensionin which the queens might be most disposed to operate. I don’t want tooverstate this, as I think we’re sometimes tempted to do when it comes to typesof influence other than conventional hard power. The queens aren’t the ~secretpuppetmasters. But they’re not as lacking in agency as Yandel believes them tobe.

Yandel’s blind spots track onto mundane preconceptions of how todefine power or influence. But the queens most closely profiled in AWOIAF areTargaryens, and the Targaryen conception of royal power veers off in adirection that challenges both of those dichotomies. “Dragonsare neither male nor female,” right? The Targaryen dynasty, its approach to andconstruct of power, is shaped not around kings, but dragonlords. A dragon isthe ultimate weapon. Three dragons are stronger than tens of thousands oftroops. But that’s actually pretty difficult to turn into the leverage that youneed to rule, because your only option in a conflict is to go scorched-earth.If you want to destroy a country with dragons, that’s pretty straightforward.If you want to rule a country by way of dragons, you need a lot of finesse.

That distinguishes the Targaryens in a lot of ways, but asubtler one is that there’s less daylight between Targaryen kings and queensthan there was in the Andal dynasties. Dragons don’t care if their riders aremale or female, which means that queens or kings can wield their greatestweapon. The early Targaryen dependence on dragons means that they’re also farmore reliant on diplomacy, which is the type of power that is conventionallyavailable to queens, and which the historians Yandel collects his informationfrom would be less likely to appreciate.

That, in turn, means that he can’t appreciate the decline instatus of the Targaryen queens. Rhaenyra’s failed bid for thethrone is the death of the dragons as a species, but it’salso a crisis point where the Targaryens as Valyrian dragonlords gave way tothe Targaryens as Westerosi monarchs. Whatever does linger of the old ideasabout queenship is a part of Targaryen otherness, and Yandel doesn’thave an interest in depicting, or even thinking of, that in a positive light.

So yes, there’s a lot of disturbing stuff. ButI think the suffering eclipses a lot of other dimensions to the queens’lives in ways that are congruent with some of the most interesting aspects ofhow the Targaryens interacted with Westeros.

Based on what we know about how Aerys chose his daughter-in-law, I don’t really think he was looking for a more conventional marriage with the more central great houses. He didn’t go for one of those marriages. He sent Steffon Baratheon to Volantis to find a bride for Rhaegar, and then when that ended in tragedy he went to Elia Martell. So he doesn’t seem to have been trying to build a military base of support. What he was looking at was reinforcing Targaryen specialness. A noblewoman from Volantis would presumably be from the Old Blood, demonstrating his belief that the Targaryens have no equal among their Westerosi vassals, but she would not bring to the marriage an army which would be more loyal to Rhaegar than to Aerys. The same reasoning could apply to Elia. She is not a lady but a princess, a distant cousin of the Targaryens. She comes from the smallest kingdom, so any army her family could raise would not be a threat against the other houses.

Basically, what he’s looking for is high status, apparently defined by some sort of proximity to the Targaryens, combined with relatively low military power. Assuming he doesn’t send another envoy to Volantis, the only eligible lady we know of who somewhat fits the bill is Ashara Dayne.* She’s not the blood of the dragon like Elia, but the Daynes have married into the Targaryens before. She has those one-in-a-million purple eyes. Plus the Daynes have that whole lost-in-the-mists-of-time Sword of the Morning thing working for them. But, as bannermen to the Martells, they don’t have much more than Dawn in the way of military resources. Her brother Arthur is widely known and loved, but already neutralized as a member of the kingsguard. Special, but not powerful, which is what Aerys seems to have been looking for.

*I feel like she’s the go-to answer for Rebellion-era hypotheticals. “What if the loyalists held onto Gulltown?” “Ashara Dayne.”

Well, it’s a piece of evidence. A piece of evidence does not, in and of itself, have to be a bulletproof case, it just has to help support a conclusion. The fact that none of Cersei’s children look like Robert, while all of Robert’s other children look like Robert, is unusual enough to be a clue to the truth and a big part of the case that Jon Arryn would have made to the public. He couldn’t show people all of them, but he could easily locate at least four, plus Stannis, Renly, and (I think) Shireen also have that look. But he’d present it in context of other information about the twins. Cersei’s denials of the accusations tend to be telling because she doesn’t actually want people to believe her denials, and Jaime’s reputation is enough to create a presumption of guilt on his part.

So in-universe, people wouldn’t be considering Princess Rhaenys in that context. Ned, presumably thinking more or less the same way most people would, notes to himself as he reads Jon Arryn’s book that Lannister-Baratheon pairings resulted in children with Baratheon coloring, not that Baratheon children never inherited another parent’s light hair. If you’re asking more about consistent worldbuilding, assuming that hair color more or less follows Bio 101 Mendelian genetics in ASOIAF, it’s not inconsistent. If you assume that the Baratheon coloring is dominant (B) and lighter hair colors are recessive (b), it’s possible that Rhaenys’ mother had (Bb) genes (Orys was probably Aegon I’s half-brother, so the earlier Baratheons could have been carriers of Targaryen traits, and the Velaryons had a history of marrying into the Targaryens so her husband could have been a carrier as well), so Rhaenys and her kids wouldn’t have that look, but Robert has (BB) genes so all of his children will have those traits.

But again, that’s more for the reader. Something as concrete as a paternity test wouldn’t be a part of anyone’s expectations. The queen’s fidelity isn’t something that’s going to be decided by, like, a rational finder of fact operating from a presumption of innocence. In practice, it’s almost the opposite: if she’s in a weak enough position to have to defend herself from scrutiny, she’s probably screwed. The case Cersei tries to build against Margaery in AFFC is transparently bogus to the reader because we witness her inventing it, but it does illustrate the standards here. “She’s been alone with a musician and asked a maester for moon tea” may be less convincing than the hair color of hers and Robert’s children, but it would be taken seriously. (In our world’s history, too. Anne Boleyn died for less.) And that’s not even about the parentage of a child who actually exists! If the queen’s sexual history can be impeached, then that preemptively calls the legitimacy of any children she may have into question, which is potentially catastrophic to the legitimacy of the monarchy.

Cersei’s putting the cart before the horse there, though. Accusations that the queen’s children aren’t the king’s children aren’t exactly a source of power. What they can do is support or justify the overthrow of a ruler by force. Varys isn’t planning to install Aegon just by going public about Cersei’s kids, it’s one of a few things that he’s planing on doing to weaken the regime enough that the Golden Company can take Kings Landing. The more instructive contrast in the histories is the “Daeron Falseborn” story from the Blackfyre Rebellion, for which the evidence was ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. The Blacks thought they had the muscle to take the IT, but they couldn’t keep it if they didn’t preserve the idea that the Targaryens have the right to rule. Delegitimizing Daeron II personally was a way for the Blacks to take up arms against the king without delegitimizing the Targaryen dynasty.

That’s all built in to the “being queen” deal. (And the deal for noblewomen generally, but for a queen consort the stakes are life and death because infidelity is treason.) Margaery’s entourage serves a few purposes, but the most important one is that she always needs at least one credible witness to her chastity. That is to say, the queen lives under a presumption of guilt. Every minute of every day, she has to be creating this really intimate defense from charges that don’t even need to add up.

While I do think that it works as worldbuilding and is reasonable for characters in-universe to buy into, I also think you’re right to feel like something doesn’t make sense about it, because there’s a broader issue here. A system of government which is predicated on state ownership of women’s bodies is fundamentally absurd. It is going to have implications and outcomes that don’t make sense. If it feels off, that’s because, you know, it should.

(It sounds like you mean Jaehaerys II, not Jacaerys? Apologies if I’m misunderstanding you.)

Yeah, he struck me as a dirtbag. It’s not just the ick factor of the marriages, but that he went to so much active effort to cling to this particular relic of Targaryen exceptionalism. Even if the prophecy does end up checking out - though this PTWP-breeding doesn’t exactly have a track record of stellar results - Rhaella’s life was as miserable as it was because Jaehaerys allowed his son and heir to become such an abhorrent person.

Even aside from the terrible results with Aerys, there’s also a pattern of missing things which have become destabilizing problems down the line. The destruction of the Reynes happened on his watch, in 261. While kings and lords accept some degree of violent and sometimes brutal status reinforcement, Tywin Lannister learning that he can literally get away with murder of civilians and even children is going to have terrible repercussions for Jaehaerys’ descendants. It looks like a show of strength inherent to the system, but it turns out to be an empowering experience for the people beneath him. If, as is far more likely than not, the Southron Ambitions theory is accurate, then the War of the Ninepenny Kings had a similar thing going on. Take the fight to them, unite behind a common purpose, sounds great, right? Except it actually taught the great lords just how much leverage they had over the monarch’s house. Checks on the monarchy were long overdue, to be sure, but this didn’t happen on well-considered terms, and the plot came to fruition under the heir that Jaehaerys had done such a spectacularly bad job of molding. Maybe if Jaehaerys himself had lived longer he’d have done better, but his long-term failure with his son suggests not.

I like that you mentioned Jon’s voice, because that’s something I’ve thought about as well. Sansa’s little anecdote in AFFC about how they’d only ever had the one bard come to Winterfell and Ned didn’t want him sticking around made me wonder if the kids hadn’t learned his songs and started singing along? Not that Jon could sound a whole lot like Rhaegar to someone who wasn’t listening for it, because Rhaegar by all accounts worked long and hard on his music and would’ve had great technique on top of his natural ability, and in any event he’d have been too young to have the same voice as a grown man - but Ned would have been listening for it. I think Jon has a good ear and a strong set of pipes but he’s such a gloomy Gus that he doesn’t exercise it.

(If only he were the kind of person who absent-mindedly hummed while going about his day! Maester Aemon would’ve cracked this case wide open.)

Personality is a more nebulous one generally, especially due to the nature/nurture kind of questions with Jon. I think Jon takes after Lyanna more than he does either of his fathers, in both ways that are admirable (compare his protectiveness of Sam to the Knight of the Laughing Tree story) and unfortunate (disastrous impulsiveness and insistence on growing up too fast). But I think that’s a very fair point that his willingness to change things isn’t something he learned from Ned, or even from studying and trying to live up to Stark history*; it’s definitely a Targaryen hallmark, and a behavioral pattern he shares with Rhaegar.

*For the most part. That said, there are arguably parallels between Jon’s resettlement of the wildling refugees and the King in the North’s acceptance of the fugitive Manderlys, who as an Andal house also represent an ancient enmity with the northerners.

That would be a really interesting parallel for Daenerys and her fight to dismantle the despicable system which her dragonlord ancestors created. Depending on how much of the story is true/missing, there’s also the outside possibility that they’re distant relatives though the Night’s King. (Old Nan says he was a Stark, so. That’s good enough for me.)

In fairness, though, the Others are a threat to all human life regardless of their origin. The skinchanger origin theory reminds me a lot of the Mountain/Robert Strong. He technically was human at some point, but that has no bearing on the fact that he’s gotta go.

The Deep Ones have so far struck me as a piece of worldbuilding to remind us that there’s never just one singular fight that people have to face, even in the metaphysical realm. The Others are the problem now, something else was the problem while the Others were dormant, some of our characters will see to it that humanity lives to fight another day. And it will have to fight - whether it’s the Deep Ones, or a human somewhere figures out gunpowder, the story isn’t heading for either annihilation or utopia, and the only other option is a world that still has problems.

Not to say that the Old Ones rising wouldn’t be awesome, because it totally would.

(I really do enjoy them, and this one was fun, so thanks!)

If things shake out the same up until the point of the Trident, I think Jon is the least of Rhaegar’s problems. He still has to answer for Rickard’s and Brandon’s deaths, and Lyanna’s abduction. If he’s going to climb out of the mess he’s made, he has to produce Lyanna to say that she wanted to be in a relationship with him (assuming that is what happened, because there’s not going to be any pacifying Ned Stark if it isn’t). Kings and princes having noble mistresses is common enough to be accepted, if not exactly applauded. Keeping Jon (or whatever his name is in this scenario, hold that thought) a secret is going to be far less of a viable option under those circumstances. Ned having kept Jon a secret only worked because just about everyone who would link Jon to the Targaryen dynasty was dead. You know? A Secret Prince off in a Secret Prince tower with Secret Prince-appropriate security detail is actually going to draw more opportunistic attention than a nobody who can be raised in plain sight. At best, raising him in isolation is going to avoid another Daemon Blackfyre by creating another Bittersteel, which if anything is an even bigger mistake.

What to do with him from there is another set of questions, because he is a really potent symbol for former rebels - if he is discarded then it increases the perception that Rhaegar’s actions were an insult to one of the great houses, but if he’s kept around, then this is the rare situation where worries about another Daemon Blackfyre are pretty reasonable. Rhaegar’s best bet is to do the thing he was worst at doing, which is to take some kind of decisive action to make it clear that Jon has a place somewhere but it isn’t as his heir. (Assuming he hasn’t already done so, that is.) It’d still be risky, but:

Again, risky. But I don’t know if there’s a less bad way for him to deal with his actions. And of course, this isn’t a cure-all, so much as a long shot that might let Rhaegar get back on his feet. Whether this would happen is not just if something could work in a long-term theoretical way, it’s if a critical mass of people believe at the moment that this will head off problems in the long run. And unfortunately, Rhaegar wasn’t a great politician even when he was holding a relatively strong hand. But maybe he’s smart enough to pardon and use Jon Arryn, who has made much harder sells in his day. And of course, it’s not going to matter in the long term, because winter is most assuredly coming - either one or both of the kids is going to be a savior, or he’s not.

As for the prophetic angle of it, I’m not actually sure how certain Rhaegar was about Visenya. It’s definitely possible that he was expecting a girl, but at the same time, Rhaegar didn’t have a fixed interpretation of TPTWP prophecy, so I don’t know how confident we can be about what he predicted about his other children’s futures. I think he was doing a lot of winging it (which all parents do, of course, though usually in less esoteric ways than prophecy). And after reading AWOIAF, I tend to think Rhaenys was named less for the sake of prophecy and more because Queen Rhaenys was someone Rhaegar would really identify with and admire. But! If he were trying to cultivate someone to fill Visenya’s shoes, he probably would have just stepped back and allowed Lyanna to raise her son as she saw fit (if she had survived). And possibly assigned Arthur Dayne or Gerold Hightower to be his master-at-arms and general role model, which actually answers both the question of Jon’s role in the regime and his legendary destiny.

Well, the simple explanation is, why wouldn’t he? He went to an awful lot of trouble to make that kid. Providing for it would have been the easy part.

Granted, what seems obvious to me isn’t necessarily what would’ve made sense to Rhaegar. I can think of a few other explanations, though, none of which are mutually exclusive:

Any or all of those things sounds to me like a good enough reason to have one of his friends snag the royal seal for five minutes. Even if they’re long shots in terms of future enforcement, it’s better than no shot.

I think your comparison of Aegon IV to Tywin Lannister is an especially apt one - narcissists  who only care about their children insofar as those children reflect the way they want to see themselves.

It’s certainly possible he had major gratitude/love for Daeron and that’s what he’s talking about. I’m not sure there’s anything which suggests Daeron was responsible for Brynden’s status, though? Aegon did legitimize him, after all, not Daeron, and he wouldn’t have done so based on Daeron’s influence (if anything, he would have left Daeron’s favorite out, just to spite him). And acto the worldbook, Melissa Blackwood was popular enough that he also had some friends at court who were still loyal to his mother after she left.