R+L=J v.108

[sj4iy]

That's a nice story. I salute you both for staying together after all that separation.

Thanks ^^

Being around some one and getting to know them is different from being separated once you've established a relationship. Couples such as your own have withstood separation, but only after the bond is forged.

Sure,there's no proof that Ashara has Arthur's qualities, but it i not a stretch to imagine.

What I'm thinking is that Rhaegar may well have been torn. He owes a duty to his wife Elia, he has this prophecy that may influence him toward Lyanna, and thirdly he hears the callings of his own heart.

We get a glimpse of this in his early years when he turns from his first love: books and scholarship, to one day "I will require a sword and armor. It seems I must be a warrior." He follows the call of duty.

Perhaps he took Lyanna because he felt called to her by his visions, but it was Ashara he wanted. He does not seem like the sort of character who would try to have both love and duty, but I've always found the location of the toj to be a puzzle. Its nearness to Starfall suggest one more explanation an affair with Ashara.

Then Ashara's death potentially gains another explanation. So far we have:

1) she didn't die - she's actually Septa Lemore.

2) she didn't die - she's hiding somewhere in Essos.

3) she threw herself down because of a combination of tragedies: her brother dying; her's & Ned's baby dying; and Ned going back to Cat.

now add

4) she threw herself down because of a combination of tragedies: her lover Rhaegar dying; her brother dying; and her's and Rhaegar's baby dying.

Eh, I don't see any textual evidence that supports the idea that Rhaegar cared at all about Ashara or vice versa. I would need to see something in the text that gives us a clue as to some sort of unilateral or mutual affection by one or both of them to believe it, and as far as I know, there is nothing. Without that, I don't see the feasibility of such a theory.

[Ellfoy]

I would also like to point out that many men thought Ashara beautiful because of her purple eyes... Rhaegar was certainly not impressed by purple eyes...

Edit: if you want to go with the shallow argument of course.

[BearQueen87]

Eh, I don't see any textual evidence that supports the idea that Rhaegar cared at all about Ashara or vice versa. I would need to see something in the text that gives us a clue as to some sort of unilateral or mutual affection by one or both of them to believe it, and as far as I know, there is nothing. Without that, I don't see the feasibility of such a theory.

Is there even any interaction in text between Rhaegar and Ashara? They obviously interacted, but no one talks about them interacting in anyway, where was obviously know Rhaegar interacted with Lyanna (and other women, like Cersei).

I would also like to point out that many men thought Ashara beautiful because of her purple eyes... Rhaegar was certainly not impressed by purple eyes...

Right. None of the ladies he married has those violet eyes, so it's not a requirement for Rhaegar in the love department.

[Ellfoy]

Is there even any interaction in text between Rhaegar and Ashara? They obviously interacted, but no one talks about them interacting in anyway, where was obviously know Rhaegar interacted with Lyanna (and other women, like Cersei).

Right. None of the ladies he married has those violet eyes, so it's not a requirement for Rhaegar in the love department.

I was saying that because you know he is a Targaryen... he is kind of used to purple eyes...

[honeyed chicken]

True to you both, there is nothing textual . . . just me lobbing darts.

I think it was mainly the Barristan chapters of ADWD that got me wondering. In one of them he's thinking, "if only I had been good enough to defeat Rhaegar and given the crown to Ashara, so much grief would have been averted." (paraphrasing from memory - always dangerous.).

It was that that got me thinking about Rhaegar wrt Lyanna/Ashara. And wondering why did he choose that wild girl from the north that he had zero ties to as opposed to the beauty in KL that he probably knew well, and was the sister of his best friend? Without that mention in ADWD I would not be thinking of it.

Of course, if there was anything between Ashara and Rhaegar, Barristan would be in good position to know and he would probably have mentioned it.

[Bael's Bastard]

I think Barristan would speak much differently about Rhaegar if he knew there was something between Rhaegar and Ashara. I don't think he knew of any such thing, and I don't think there was any such thing.

[Rhaenys_Targaryen]

Disagree.

Availability is often a key to romance. As the sister of his best friend he would have been around her a good deal. And she was not just a pretty face - she had those Targaryen purple eyes and while I'm sure there were other lovely women at court, she was the one Barristan singled out as most beautiful. Likely Rhaegar saw that too.

As for the L+R attraction question, I look forward to Martin's explanation - should he chose to give us one.The blood of the First Men idea is very shaky to me. The Targs have been in Westeros for over 200 years with Starks there the whole time and just now the blood of the First Men becomes important enough to a Targ prince that he kidnaps heir girl? There's got to be a better reason than that if that he did, in fact, take her.

Beauty is objective :)

And who says that Rhaegar was interested in Valyrian looking women? There's no hint for that.

And as to "important enough to a Targ prince that he kidnaps their girl"... If R+L=J is true, L was not kidnapped.. He simply disappeared with her.

Pretty sure that doesn't match the timeline given when Jon was born. Rhaenys...you want to help me out there?

I'm not certain that I've followed the entire conversation here correctly.. The theory discussed is that R+A, but that R+L=J ? So then, Rhaegar loved Ashara, but said "I'm sorry sweetheart, I just have to go have a child with this other girl who I first have to kidnap"

Or did I misunderstood the theory in question?

As to when Jon was born.. We have multiple hints that Catelyn and Ned were married in 283AC, which means that Robb, who was conceived on the wedding night, was born in the 10th, 11th or 12th month of 283AC. The general timeline events of the main series would suggest that Robb would have been born more around the 10th month, as multiple events, for example, and more than 1 month, occur between Robb turning 16 (Jaime's escape from Riverrun) and the Purple Wedding.

My thread on "who's older: Robb or Jon?" did not reach the conclusion I had hoped for yet, and most likely won't until we get more timeline info. All that I've been able to proof in that thread, is that Robb and Jon were born extremely close after oneanother. So within a timeframe of weeks.. Meaning that, if Robb was born in the 10th month, Jon would have been born either a few weeks before, or a few weeks after, somewhere in that small timeframe.

Which means that his conception was very early in the year 283AC, perhaps in the last few days of 282AC, at a point where the war had been going on for months already. Should R+L have travelled to ToJ immediately, they would have been there already by then.. Even if they had spend some time elsewhere first, there would be plenty of time to have reached ToJ already by then (depending on the length of their stay at the intermediate location).

So yeah, Jon was most likely conceived at ToJ.

[BearQueen87]

True to you both, there is nothing textual . . . just me lobbing darts.

I think it was mainly the Barristan chapters of ADWD that got me wondering. In one of them he's thinking, "if only I had been good enough to defeat Rhaegar and given the crown to Ashara, so much grief would have been averted." (paraphrasing from memory - always dangerous.).

It was that that got me thinking about Rhaegar wrt Lyanna/Ashara. And wondering why did he choose that wild girl from the north that he had zero ties to as opposed to the beauty in KL that he probably knew well, and was the sister of his best friend? Without that mention in ADWD I would not be thinking of it.

Of course, if there was anything between Ashara and Rhaegar, Barristan would be in good position to know and he would probably have mentioned it.

Lyanna was described as being of surpassing loveliness, so it's not like she's unattrative. And Rhaegar has ties to her, they are formed at HH

[Alia of the knife]

And Cersei is supposed to be drop dead gorgeous, and Rhaegar fled from her crazy-self and ended up marrying a pretty but not "remarkable" woman. Just because Selmy thought Ashara was gorgeous doesn't mean Rhaegar did. And even if Rhaegar did, it doesn't mean he was in love with or had any feelings for Ashara. He did end up running away with a woman who doesn't resemble Targaryen-anything. And this is coming down to looks, nothing textual. There is nothing textual for R+A

Prophecy. If Rhaegar believes he (blood of the dragon) and this woman (blood of the First men) are going to make TPTPW, then that's a reason that no other Targ, so far as we know, came up with.

I would add that all these women were probably on par with one another, because two Lannister men acknowledged Lyannas beauty.

I think what it comes down to is that these women had a singularity that each man responded to differently.

For Rhaegar and Robert, it was Lyanna.

For Jaime, it was Cersei.

And for Selmy, it was Ashara.

Just as Lyanna and Cersei didn't do it for Selmy, neither did Ashara or Cersei do it for Rhaegar.

[Rhaegal Targaryen]

If Jon somehow sits on the It,who will be his wife?I just want to hear your opinions.......

Also about the Ashara-Rhaegar relationship,there is nothing to indicate that they even had a relationship or that they personally knew it's other.

[BearQueen87]

If Jon somehow sits on the It,who will be his wife?I just want to hear your opinions.......

No idea. I think he'd make a good political alliance, not necessarily a love match. I could see him joining with Val to bring the Wildlings into the fold, and that might be political and love. There aren't a whole lot of options, are there? I've seen some people say Shireen, but I fear for her. I think Mel might get her hands on that poor kid.

[UnmaskedLurker]

There aren't a whole lot of options, are there?

Don't forget about Aunt Dany. :P (j/k).

Actually, I am not sure if by some chance Jon ends up on IT that he will end up married at all. The Battle for the Dawn might not leave much room for romance and the series likely would end before we would see what happens down the road too far after the end of the war. Or maybe it would be a character that has not even been introduced in the series yet. This question is way too hard to predict.

[Rhaegal Targaryen]

No idea. I think he'd make a good political alliance, not necessarily a love match. I could see him joining with Val to bring the Wildlings into the fold, and that might be political and love. There aren't a whole lot of options, are there? I've seen some people say Shireen, but I fear for her. I think Mel might get her hands on that poor kid.

I consider Val to be a red herring but she could work as well and as for Shireen=dreaming about a dragon eating her,Jon gets stabbed,Melisandre likes burning people,she is the only possible scource for King's blood and it parells perfectly the Agamemnon-Iphigenia situation,i don't want by any means anything bad to happen to Shireen but when your mother is a relligious zealot and a very obsessive person is near you,thing don't look good.I believe that Jon might marry someone from Dorne so the relationships between Dorne-Targaryens can be repaired.

Don't forget about Aunt Dany. :P (j/k). :shocked:

Actually, I am not sure if by some chance Jon ends up on IT that he will end up married at all. The Battle for the Dawn might not leave much room for romance and the series likely would end before we would see what happens down the road too far after the end of the war. Or maybe it would be a character that has not even been introduced in the series yet. This question is way too hard to predict.Agreed.

[BearQueen87]

Don't forget about Aunt Dany. :P (j/k).

Actually, I am not sure if by some chance Jon ends up on IT that he will end up married at all. The Battle for the Dawn might not leave much room for romance and the series likely would end before we would see what happens down the road too far after the end of the war. Or maybe it would be a character that has not even been introduced in the series yet. This question is way too hard to predict.

:-P

I can see GRRM flashforwarding like 5 years at the end. Jon gets chosen to rule from Harrenhal (KL's is toast, yo) and we learn in a FF who he marries.

I consider Val to be a red herring but she could work as well and as for Shireen=dreaming about a dragon eating her,Jon gets stabbed,Melisandre likes burning people,she is the only possible scource for King's blood and it parells perfectly the Agamemnon-Iphigenia situation,i don't want by any means anything bad to happen to Shireen but when your mother is a relligious zealot and a very obsessive person is near you,thing don't look good.I believe that Jon might marry someone from Dorne so the relationships between Dorne-Targaryens can be repaired.

Yeaaaaah. I think Shireen is doomed. :(

Dorne...well if Arianne is still alive, maybe?

[Rhaegal Targaryen]

:-P

I can see GRRM flashforwarding like 5 years at the end. Jon gets chosen to rule from Harrenhal (KL's is toast, yo) and we learn in a FF who he marries.

Yeaaaaah. I think Shireen is doomed. :(

Dorne...well if Arianne is still alive, maybe?

Could be Arianne or a Yronwood.I liked tze's essay about Jon/Arianne very much.Although she ovvereaches a little bit,some of the things she said were actually very intresting.

Parts of this have been posted elsewhere, but I'll stick them in here as well:

The sigil of House Martell includes a spear and a red sun. Jon's first love, Ygritte, was a spearwife. (Spearwives have been heavily associated with Starks and Winterfell---Osha, a spearwife, rescues Bran and Rickon, and Mance brings a group of spearwives into Winterfell to rescue "Arya"). When Jon finds Ghost in ASOS, right before the LC election, he says Ghost's "eyes caught the last light and shone like two great red suns."

In ADWD, when Jon is thinking about Val, he thinks of her as "A warrior princess . . . not some willowy creature who sits up in a tower, brushing her hair and waiting for some knight to rescue her." In AFFC, we have an Arianne chapter literally called "The Princess in the Tower". Arianne spends most of that chapter trying desperately to rescue herself from imprisonment in the Spear Tower. Arianne actually makes greater efforts to escape her tower imprisonment than Val does hers, thus fulfilling the spirit of Jon's declaration by, in a twisted way, adhering to the word of it (she's waiting for a knight to rescue her, yet she's doing her damnest to force the knights to come in the first place).

If R+L=J, then Jon was born in Dorne. Both he and Arianne would have had two siblings that they were not close to (for Arianne, Quentyn and Trystane, for Jon, Rhaenys and Aegon). Both would have been portrayed as being much closer to their cousins than to those siblings, to the point where those cousins essentially were their siblings---for Arianne, the Sand Snakes, for Jon, the Stark children. Moreover, when Arianne is imprisoned in the Spear Tower, she goes over her options and decides to seek help from Lord Fowler, the Warden of the Prince's Pass. The Tower of Joy, where Jon was almost certainly born, is located in the Prince's Pass.

In AFFC, Arianne has an affair with the "white knight" Ser Arys Oakheart. The Kingsguard's vows heavily parallel portions of the Night's Watch vows. House Oakheart is associated with trees, just like the Starks, and Arys and Arianne have this little convo in "The Soiled Knight" chapter

Arianne goes on to tell Arys about a way for him to be released from those vows. If Jon gets released from his vows, such that he would be in a position to marry, then the entire Arys Oakheart/Arianne affair would serve to foreshadow a relationship between Jon and Arianne.

Jon's favorite sister is Arya (and say "Arya" and "Arianne" aloud---the two names are extremely similar). Ghost's sister (Arya's direwolf) is Nymeria, who was named after Arianne Nymeros Martell's ancestor, the warrior queen Nymeria. Nymeria's star is white, the color of snow and one of the two Stark colors (and the same color as Ghost). When Jon was young, he idolized the Young Dragon, the guy who conquered Dorne---yet the whole point of the Young Dragon/Dareon II story seems to be that you cannot conquer Dorne . . . you marry it.

Ghost is known as the silent direwolf. In the Spear Tower, Arianne repeats, over and over, the fact that she is surrounded by silence.

Arianne is, frankly, heavily associated with bastards. She's closer to her bastard cousins than she is to her trueborn siblings. She apparently lost her virginity to Ser Daemon Sand, the Bastard of Godsgrace, who went so far as to ask her father for her hand in marriage.

Arianne told her father she wanted "a consort with teeth". When thinking about a former betrothal (to old Ben Beesbury), she thinks, kind of redundantly, about how "she could not be forced to marry him if he was dead". There seem to be heavy Jon-centric foreshadowings (given his direwolf and his stabbing in ADWD) in both statements.

[UnmaskedLurker]

:-P

I can see GRRM flashforwarding like 5 years at the end. Jon gets chosen to rule from Harrenhal (KL's is toast, yo) and we learn in a FF who he marries.

Flash forwards are tricky. They tend to get a bit cheesy. Now I personally liked the flash forward at the end of Harry Potter (I love cheese and am a sucker for happy endings), but I believe I am in the minority with respect to that epilogue. It is difficult to do a flash forward without is seeming to just be schmaltzy--and they lived happily ever after--which we know GRRM is not going to do. So I have trouble seeing how a flash forward would work with GRRM's style.

In order to have a bittersweet ending as GRRM has promised, you almost cannot do a flash forward because it tends to resolve things too neatly. Rather, I would expect to see the aftermath of the war in which the losses are heavy (the bitter) but the "good guys" that survive the war will have prevailed and there will be hope for a better future (the sweet). But a flash forward more or less has to end up confirming the better future, which undermines the "bittersweet" character that GRRM seems to be going for. So as much as I would love to have everything wrapped in a neat bow in the form of a flash forward to show us how all of our favorite survivors of the series lived their lives, I don't expect it from a writer like GRRM.

[BearQueen87]

Flash forwards are tricky. They tend to get a bit cheesy. Now I personally liked the flash forward at the end of Harry Potter (I love cheese and am a sucker for happy endings), but I believe I am in the minority with respect to that epilogue.

I liked it too!

In order to have a bittersweet ending as GRRM has promised, you almost cannot do a flash forward because it tends to resolve things too neatly. Rather, I would expect to see the aftermath of the war in which the losses are heavy (the bitter) but the "good guys" that survive the war will have prevailed and there will be hope for a better future (the sweet). But a flash forward more or less has to end up confirming the better future, which undermines the "bittersweet" character that GRRM seems to be going for. So as much as I would love to have everything wrapped in a neat bow in the form of a flash forward to show us how all of our favorite survivors of the series lived their lives, I don't expect it from a writer like GRRM.

That's a good point. I hope we get a tiny idea about it, though. Or else we'll all argue for years if it was Val, Dany, Arianne, Lady #4515 from the Riverlands...

[UnmaskedLurker]

we'll all argue for years if it was Val, Dany, Arianne, Lady #4515 from the Riverlands...

Well, knowing this group, we will find a whole host of things to argue about for years after the final book is printed--why not add that issue to the list? There is no way that every question will be answered unambiguously in the text. Maybe GRRM will set up an answer site after the last book is published in which people can post questions and he will answer all of the questions that were not answered or were left somewhat ambiguous in the text. Now that would be a great resource--but I doubt GRRM would give us that kind of closure.

[BearQueen87]

Well, knowing this group, we will find a whole host of things to argue about for years after the final book is printed--why not add that issue to the list? There is no way that every question will be answered unambiguously in the text. Maybe GRRM will set up an answer site after the last book is published in which people can post questions and he will answer all of the questions that were not answered or were left somewhat ambiguous in the text. Now that would be a great resource--but I doubt GRRM would give us that kind of closure.

*sigh* True. I guess when it comes down to it, it's not a question that I'm overly invested in like I am invested in other bigger questions.

[Alia of the knife]

Perhaps you're right.

But to bring this back to what HoneyedChicken and I were saying, for whatever reason I do think Rhaegar rejected Cersei, and this was when she was still young and seemingly beautiful. In other words, Rhaegar isn't shallow and doesn't fall over woman simply cause "pretty" or because they are simply there. So the idea that Rhaegar loved Ashara simply because another man (Selmy) believed she was lovely and therefore Rhaegar must believe the same is a bit illogical.

But it's not just Rhaegar dying with Lyanna's name on his lips-it's dying with the name of the woman he loves on his lips. They loved each other.

Yup, and GRRM confirmed it was Lyannas name.

And Jeeze, what a helluva day at the Tourney if Rhaegar was involved with both Ashara and Elia, but crowned Lyanna.

Also, if Lyanna would have gotten wind of that, (and she seems to have her sources, i.e., Robert and his kid), I could easily see her getting up, throwing the crown at him, screaming "this is bullshit!"

If Rhaegar was a part of that, we've officially entered the realm of Westeros 90210, and I'm slamming Rhaegars harp in the door.

There's nothing saying that Rhaegar and Lyanna fell in love 'instantly'. We simply have not seen the extent of their relationship yet. There's also no reason to assume that Ashara is just a female version of her brother.

Also, my boyfriend and I were over 6,000 miles apart for a year while I studied in Japan. We then were 500 miles apart for 6 months after he graduated and I had to stay to finish my degree. That didn't stop us from staying together, nor did it mean that we just went with 'whoever was in the vicinity' at the time.

/we got married after that

//we've been married for 10 years now

Congratulations! :wub:

My husband and I have been together for twenty years, largely because we're goofballs. :D