samwpmarleau:

in case you weren’t sad enough about rhaella:

imagine how she must have felt after rhaegar took off with lyanna. here she is, having watched her son grow up so different from his father, imagine how much she would have been looking forward to the day rhaegar would become king and her life would no longer be miserable, when she could freely dote on her grandkids and see elia, the closest thing she had to her dear friend loreza, become the next queen mariah, and she could speak her mind and never live in fear again, all because rhaegar was her son, not aerys’s

and then.

like imagine how utterly devastated she must have been that rhaegar wasn’t the boy she thought he was, that in the end he was exactly his father’s son

and how guilty she must have felt when he died because she was still furious over what he’d done but how could a mother be mad at her dead son? her firstborn? yet at the same time how could she not? how could she not, when her daughter-in-law had been raped and murdered, when her granddaughter–the granddaughter she’d loved fiercely because aerys wouldn’t even though doing so risked his wrath–was stabbed to death and the grandson she’d barely gotten the chance to know had had his head smashed against a wall? when her world was in shambles?

rhaegar was going to be the catalyst behind her happiness, and instead he was the catalyst behind her family’s destruction.