Hi, different anon. About Rhaegar and Lyanna, don’t you think that Barristan’s account that “Prince Rhaegar loved his lady Lyanna”, is reliable?

This is a tricky subject, because I think it’s an area where modern fandom and medieval literature have almost perpendicular perspectives. Let’s take the case of Lyanna and Rhaegar at the Tourney of Harrenhal, as seen below: 

Oh no, wait. That’s actually a painting of Lancelot and Guinevere from 1890, a classic love story that involves adultery, murder, toxic relationship dynamics, and everyone dying horribly. And a lot of chivalric romance is like that – Tristan and Isolde, Gawain and the Green Knight, Percival and the Loathly Lady – they’re not about healthy relationships, they’re about DRAMA and TRAGEDY. 

Now that doesn’t mean we can’t find something interesting/redeeming in them; a lot of feminist scholars have pointed out that the mechanics of courtly love at the heart of these chivalric romances (which often found their dramatic tension in the conflict between masculine-coded chivalry and feminine-coded courtly love) kind of results in this weird dom-sub thing where the lady is in charge of the relationship and spends a lot of time punishing the knight for not being impossibly faithful to her or thinking about anyone but her at any point. 

(I mean, I can’t be the only one who sees something in all these paintings of men kneeling in front of women, right?)

But wrt to Rhaegar specifically, the knock on him is that he abandoned his wife and kids to run off with another woman in an unequal power dynamic. But if you shift the marriages around in any of these chivalric romances – so Lancelot is abandoning his wife to run off with Guinevere, or Tristan from his wife to run off with Isolde – you’d wind up with the same dynamic. Including the necessity of both of the adulterers to die in the end to restore the stability of patriarchial marriage. 

And I think that’s what GRRM did, he took these stories that he’d grown up on and switched it around so that it was the prince running away from his wife instead of the queen from her king. 

So does that pass muster with modern fandom’s conceptions of a healthy relationship? No. It’s not meant to (if only because unhealthy relationships are easier to mine for drama and tragedy). 

A Romantic story is not the same thing as a romantic story.