Here’s the thing tho: in the case of Arrec, there weren’t a lot of Riverlanders who were eager to have him back – maybe the Blackwoods, given their blood ties, although they would have been licking their wounds from their massacre at Blackwood Hall, and maybe the Tullys (although they were far too practical to throw good money after bad) – and a lot of Riverlanders who had participated in overthrowing him (the Brackens, the Charltons, and twenty other houses) who would have been facing treason trials if he ever retook the Riverlands.
As for Arlan V, it’s probably a case of better the devil you know – Harwyn was a hard man when it came to tribute and homage, but if you kept out of his line of march, he generally let you alone (”their ironborn overlords had largely ignored such conflicts amongst their vassals”) – than the devil you don’t. After all, the memories of Durrandon tyranny were still fresh, and the worst of Ironborn tyranny had yet to come…
Simply put, in the Riverlands, Durrandon was not a name a name to conjur with.
Someone correct me if I’m out of line here… but based on the history outlined in WOIAF, I can’t help but think of the Riverlander nobility as shockingly ungrateful towards the Durrandons?
It’s like… Arlan didn’t have to come save their asses from the Teagues, who they all hated. And when he was done with that, he could have simply gone home rather than deal with his responsibilities towards the failed state he created. He even offered the Riverlanders one of their own to rule them, and they turned him down flat because she had lady-parts and they couldn’t be having that. So he just went “fuck it, all y’all are sworn to Storm’s End now.”
And there’s no evidence that either him or his heirs were particular repressive, tyrannical, or incompetent rulers. They merely demanded that the Riverlanders see to the common defense of their shared realm, which is literally your bare minimum of obligation to your ruler in a feudal system. And this demand was seen as so onerous by the Riverlanders that they rose in rebellion time and time again rather than fulfill it!
It isn’t even that the Riverlanders were strongly committed to not being ruled by an outsider; plenty of them were more than willing to declare for Harwyn Hoare and then a century and a half later for Aegon Targaryen and then three hundred years after that for Robb Stark. But they seemed uniquely pissed off at the Durrandons for no better reason than that they were Durrandons. Why? What the hell was going on there?
Uh, the Teagues weren’t universally hated…that was the issue. Arlan III Durrandon didn’t come to “save their asses from the Teagues,” he intervened in a civil war in which there were partisans on both sides: the Blackwoods, the Tullys, and the Vances on one side, and the Brackens, Darrys, and Teagues on the other. As I said in my essay, the Riverlands were likely split on religious, regional, and partisan affinities.
So the Teague loyalists who fought at the Battle of Six Kings were unlikely to forgive or forget. Thus Shiera Blackwood wasn’t just rejected because she was a woman, it also didn’t help that she was married to Arlan III’s son, or that (in the minds of these lords) her father had been a rebel and a traitor who had invited foreign invaders into the kingdom. And then Arlan III just decides to “add the riverlands to his own domains” – he didn’t get his loyalists to acclaim him King, he didn’t even claim the crown by force of arms, he just outright abolished the Riverlands as a kingdom and announced it had been annexed by a foreign kingdom, which offended the pride of all Riverlords.
Thus, the Durrandons lacked legitimacy in the eyes of the majority of the Riverlands’ political class – as we can see from the fact that “a dozen pretenders from as many houses” rose up against them, often pointedly taking on monikers of Riverlander nationalism that harkened back to the Justmans, the Mudds, the Fishers, etc.
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