Did Brandon Stark rape Ashara Dayne?

[SFDanny]

57 minutes ago, Ralphis Baratheon said:

Not sure Robert was "severely" wounded as he was able to wait while his maester treated Barristan first.

It was severe enough that it kept him from going to King's Landing with Ned. The point being it was not superficial and this combat was not just a one-sided affair. It was close enough that Rhaegar could have won, both the personal combat and the battle.

1 hour ago, Ralphis Baratheon said:

Rhaegar should have taken Robert's "fury" into account. He seem to fight that entire war just to get to Rhaegar. That's why after Bob killed Rhaegar he sent his maester to treat Barristan's wounds instead of his own then told Ned to take King's Landing. You think he would have done that if he won the Trident but Rhaegar wasn't there and instead was in King's Landing with Aerys? I doubt it. I think he'd tell the Maester to forget Barristan, patch him up, then he'd lead Ned and the rest to the capital. He's main goal was to kill Rhaegar from the start till he did it. Some might even say after he killed Rhaegar he cared little about anything else for the rest of life. Rhaegar not realizing what Robert being scorned would lead to was a huge oversight. IMO

Robert's "fury" may well have been taken into account. As well as Brandon's. One way to deal with such an anticipated reaction would be to be absent from where the Starks or the Baratheons could find them. What Rhaegar obviously didn't anticipate was Brandon's reaction including riding into the Red Keep and challenging him to come out and die. Which would be bad by itself, but it is only with Brandon's action combined with Aerys's huge overreaction that you get what quickly becomes a situation that no one could have anticipated.

I'd also remind you that this step - running away with Lyanna into hiding - may not have been only Rhaegar's plan. Lyanna may have wanted it as well. This looks to me to be a rescue from an unwanted marriage rather than a kidnapping or an elopement.

 

[Wasp-19]

It would't make any sense for her to have been raped by Brandon, or Aerys for that matter. Martin probably won't ever address her story directly, so to alude to some possible violence that would alter the whole fandom's perspective of a tragic character (Brandon) and never explore it is useless. Same with Aerys: most of the time, the simple answer is the right one, so why would he complicate things further by adding subtext of Aerys raping Ashara when the two of them were never linked in the narrative whatsoever?

A possible Brandon and Ashara relationship serves the plot by alluding to themes very present in Ned's arc: honour (very nice in theory, but in real life men like Brandon, not shy to take what they want, succeed over good boys like Ned), love (an ilict affair between young, attractive, carefree people contrasting Ned's stark, mature commitment and later love for Catelyn), memory (the honorable Ned passing as a man who fathered a bastard in war times while Brandon is remembered as a tragic figure who died trying to rescue his sister). I can't make a similar thematic argument for her to have anything to do with Aerys or raped by the oldest Stark. 


My take on the Ashara mystery is this:

- Brandon is the one she had an affair with. It suits his character, whereas having casual sex in a foreign tournament is nothing like Ned.

- There's a good chance Allyria is Ashara's bastard daughter, raised as her much younger sister to try and salvage her marriage prospects. Being relatively young would explain her long betrothal to Beric and the sketchy story she told Edric about Ned and Wylla. Also, with R+L=J in mind, i would be ironic for a legitimate, part-Stark child to have been raised as a bastard while a true Stark bastard was claimed as legitimate down south.

- If Ashara did commit suicide, it probably wasn't mainly love-related. By then she would have lost Brandon in a terrible fashion (if Aerys had assembled the court to witness Rickard's trial, maybe she was even present), her friend Elia (brutally raped and murdered along with her small children) and her brother Arthur. I can see how she could have been severely depressed enough to kill herself.