#Doran martell

[polysucks]

What’s ur take on Elia/Lyanna

call me robert the way i hate rhaegar targaryen

let's talk about the romanticized martyrdom of these beautiful brown women and the tragedy that is the narrative they are forced to haunt.

Mourned, But Never Saved: How We Failed Elia and Lyanna

Word count: 1651 Time to read: 9 - 15 mins No major CWs except for my opinions, which are classified by the SCP Foundation as optic hazards

In literature, media, and even real-life tragedies, there is an obsession with The Perfect Victim—the young, beautiful, tragic woman whose suffering is romanticized, whose fate is mourned but never queried. She is consecrated in death, turned into an emblem of loss rather than a person with wants, needs, and a right to legacy of her own. It is easier to weep for her than to hold the men who destroyed her accountable.

It is easier to say, how sad, than to say, who did this?

Who let this happen?

Who benefited from it?

This phenomenon is not unique to Elia Martell and Lyanna Stark.

It is everywhere. We see it in the way murder victims—especially young, beautiful women—are transformed into icons of sorrow, their faces plastered across documentaries and true crime podcasts, their lives reduced to cautionary tales or poetic misfortunes for profit of more men who are so far removed from the tragedy they can justify the commodification. We see it in the way literature often treats female suffering as tragic inevitability, a necessary sacrifice to elevate the story of a male protagonist. And we see it in how Westerosi history records women like Elia and Lyanna—not as figures in their own right, but as the lost wives and lovers of great men.

There is a reason the world (and us, the fandom. myself included. I love a good Lyanna deification) linger on their beauty, their youth, their tragic ends, but not their anger.

Not their suffering.

Not their humanity.

The waif aesthetic that dominates social media—the fetishization of frailty, of doomed beauty—allows women like Elia and Lyanna to be preserved in glass (Metaphorically, but Lyanna is literally encased in stone), as if they were expected to die young the whole time, as if their stories had no other possible ending. It allows them to be stripped of their voices, reduced to passive, inevitable victims to their gender, and therefore circumstances, while the men who led them to their deaths remains shrouded in legendary calamity.

Rhaegar was a dreamer. Rhaegar was burdened by prophecy. Rhaegar was torn between love and duty. Excuses.

These justifications place his choices above their suffering, making their deaths seem like collateral damage in his grand narrative. Reduced to pitstops on the journey that is Rhaegar’s lamentable fate.

Their suffering is seen as a necessary part of his legend. Their deaths serve his myth.

Elia’s murder is not seen as an act of racialized violence against a Dornish woman and her mixed-race children, but as a tragic consequence of Rhaegar’s failure. Lyanna’s death is not treated as the cost of her own choices—whatever choices she may have made, but as the romantic conclusion to an ill-fated love story. They are not given full stories of their own. Their deaths are simply moments in his.

This is the same blindness that allows figures like Humbert Humbert in Lolita to frame themselves as misunderstood lovers rather than predators to the untrained eyes, and pseudo-critical thinker. Just as Humbert tells the story of Dolores Haze through his own selfish, delusional lens—robbing her of her voice, her autonomy, her anger, her right to be seen as more than his obsession—so too does Westerosi history rob Elia and Lyanna of their full truths. We mourn them, but only as beautiful ghosts, not as women who deserved better.

But Elia Martell was not just a forsaken wife. She was a Dornish princess with pride in her homeland, a mother, a woman who fought for the survival of her children. And Lyanna Stark was not a stolen maiden. She was a Northern girl with a wolf’s heart, with confidence, with autonomy, a woman who knew what she wanted, even if the world refused to let her have it.

To mourn them without condemning him is to continue the same cycle that destroyed them. It is to let them remain frozen in time, tragic saints of Rhaegar’s doomed love story, rather than women whose lives were stolen by a man’s choices.

We cannot allow them to become hollowed-out saints of tragedy, their stories reduced to romantic footnotes in the Targaryen legacy. They were not just victims. They were women. And they deserved more.

The Women Rhaegar Targaryen Left Behind: The Perfect Victims of a Flawed Legacy

Elia Martell: A Princess, A Mother, A Betrayed Woman

Elia Martell was a Dornish princess, born in a land where women had more agency and political power than most of Westeros. In Dorne, daughters can inherit titles, rule in their own right, and are not cast aside for the crime of being born female. Though, even in this progressive culture, Elia was still used as a political pawn. Under the weight of political pressure on her homeland, she was married off not as an equal partner, but as a tool to serve the Targaryen dynasty—her body reduced to a vessel meant to bridge two kingdoms in subservience, not unity.

Unlike most Westerosi noblewomen, Elia likely grew up learning court intrigue, family honor, and the weight of responsibility alongside her brother Oberyn. She was not a sheltered damsel but a woman of sharp mind and fierce spirit—something we see reflected in Oberyn’s devotion to her memory. He does not recall her as fragile or passive but as someone who deserved better, someone whose suffering should not be forgotten.

When Oberyn confronted Gregor Clegane in King’s Landing, he demanded that Gregor say her name. Not Rhaegar’s. Not Aerys’. Elia’s. He refused to let her become just another nameless casualty of the Targaryen downfall. He forced her murderer to acknowledge that she was more than Rhaegar’s discarded wife—that she was a woman, a mother, a sister. That she mattered.

Yet history continues to erase her. The common narrative reduces Elia to a tragic mistake in Rhaegar’s story, the wrong wife he had to cast aside to fulfill his grand destiny. But Elia was not the wrong wife. She was the right wife—for herself, for her children, and for her people. It was Rhaegar who failed her, not the other way around.

Lyanna Stark: A Wolf, Not a Maiden

Lyanna Stark exists in the public consciousness as a ghost of two extremes: either a helpless girl stolen away against her will or a reckless romantic who doomed herself and thousands of others for love. But neither of these simplifications capture the full truth of who she was.

Ned remembers Lyanna as fierce and willful, a girl with a warrior’s spirit, more like Arya than Sansa. He openly wonders if she would have carried a sword if their father had allowed it. She was not passive, not delicate—she was a Stark through and through, wild-hearted and strong.

She was also perceptive. She saw through Robert Baratheon’s romanticized view of her and understood that he would never be faithful. She knew what kind of life awaited her as Robert’s queen, and she wanted no part of it.

At Harrenhal, she was not just Rhaegar’s great love—she was a girl who made an impact on those around her. She was remembered for her boldness, for her defiance of traditional expectations. If she was, as many believe, the Knight of the Laughing Tree, then she was not some lovestruck maiden swept away by fate—she was a protector, a rebel, someone who took action in the face of injustice. And that act had nothing to do with Rhaegar.

Even in death, her final words to Ned—Promise me, Ned—were not about Rhaegar. She was not mourning her lost love. She was not asking Ned to preserve Rhaegar’s dream. She was thinking of her son, of the next generation, of ensuring his survival. Her last act was not about romance—it was about family, about duty, about love in the way only a Stark would understand it.

And just as her own agency is stripped from her, so too is her son’s identity. Jon Snow is often defined entirely by his Targaryen heritage, despite the fact that Lyanna fought to ensure he would not be a pawn of House Targaryen. She did not die for Rhaegar’s prophecy—she died whilst ensuring her child lived outside of it.

The stories of Elia Martell and Lyanna Stark are not just footnotes in the legend of Rhaegar Targaryen. They are not sacrifices for prophecy, not symbols of doomed romance, not mere casualties of a tragic war. They were women with agency, with convictions, with love for their families that transcended the narrative they are forced to haunt. To remember them only as victims is to betray them all over again—to strip them of the depth and defiance that made them who they were. If their suffering is to mean anything, it must be seen for what it truly was: not a poetic tragedy, but an injustice. Not a love story, but a loss. And not a justification for Rhaegar’s actions, but an indictment of them. We do not honor them by mourning their deaths—we honor them by remembering their lives.

But history, both fictional and real, loves to turn women like them into saints of sorrow—The Perfect Victims. The world mourns them but does not seek justice for them. It remembers their beauty, their tragedy, but not their anger. It allows their suffering to be poeticized, aestheticized, while the men who doomed them remain enigmatic, misunderstood figures.

But Elia Martell was not misunderstood. She was betrayed.

Lyanna Stark was not a tragic mystery. She was a woman who acted.

And that is how they deserve to be remembered.

[helaenarts]

Nymeria of Ny Sar, future princess of Dorne leading her ten thousand ships 🌊

Loveeee her and I have to draw more Martell omgggg

[melrosing]

☀️ pre rebellion house martell ☀️

[bladeofdreadfort]

MARTELL WEEK II day 1; family — oberyn, elia, doran

[martellspear]

have you ever stopped to think how the cities with prettiest names are in Dorne? I mean: sunspear, starfall (!!!), godsgrace, kingsgrave and skyreach ??

they serve nonstop

[ginny-anime]

I find it hilarious when people hate on House Martell and dorne.

Why because they didn’t bow down to the conquerors?

They killed Rhaenys the conqueror and her dragon?

They didn’t fight in the dance of the dragons when it wasn’t their war to fight?

Because they were the only kingdom that defied the Targaryens and remained an independent kingdom until the reign of Daeron ii?

What is there to even hate about House Martell and Dorne

[scorpiusartistry]

Part One of the characters of The Great Noble House Nymeros-Martell!

Here is Doran with his (ex?) wife Mellario of Norvos and their three children, Arianne (the heir apparent), Quentyn and Trystane

[asongoficeandfiresource]

“Cool breezes, sparkling water, and the laughter of children. The Water Gardens are my favorite place in this world, ser. One of my ancestors had them built to please his Targaryen bride and free her from the dust and heat of Sunspear. Daenerys was her name. She was sister to King Daeron the Good, and it was her marriage that made Dorne part of the Seven Kingdoms. The whole realm knew that the girl loved Daeron’s bastard brother Daemon Blackfyre, and was loved by him in turn, but the king was wise enough to see that the good of thousands must come before the desires of two, even if those two were dear to him. It was Daenerys who filled the gardens with laughing children. Her own children at the start, but later the sons and daughters of lords and landed knights were brought in to be companions to the boys and girls of princely blood. And one summer’s day when it was scorching hot, she took pity on the children of her grooms and cooks and serving men and invited them to use the pools and fountains too, a tradition that has endured till this day.”  - The Watcher, ADWD

A Song of Ice and Fire Calendar 2025 || The Water Gardens by Eddie Mendoza

[amber-laughs]

honestly the rebellion did nothing but tear siblings apart. lyanna and ned on opposite sides of the war leading to a rift between ned and benjen, ashara and arthur losing each other, lysa slipping deeper into her resentment of catelyn, the final nail in the coffin for stannis and robert, hoster and the blackfish parting, cersei and jaime delving deeper into their sick ways, oberyn fleeing westeros forcing him and doran to grieve their sister on their own never healing

[haunted-mindset]

One thing I would love to have seen in ASOIAF is all of the big players in the Game of Thrones finding out that Jon is actually a Targaryen and they got duped by NED FUCKING STARK OF ALL PEOPLE!? Can you imagine Tywin Lannister finding out and realising he got played and there was a Targaryen right in front of him. Or Olenna trying to marry Margrey to him. I know some of these characters are dead by this point but still, just imagine the chaos....

[thatscruelsummer]

Princess Elia Martell🧡

[rosenroot]

Sand Snakes persuading Doran to go to war (failing tho)

[helaenarts]

‘Arianne: Are you certain you are not off to some other bed, some other woman? Tell me who she is. I will fight her for you, bare-breasted, knife to knife. Unless she is a Sand Snake. If so, we can share you. I love my cousins well.

Arys: You know I have no other woman. Only... duty.

Arianne: That poxy bitch? I know her. Dry as dust between the legs, and her kisses leave you bleeding.’

The Soiled Knight I

A Feast for Crows

Arianne sketch commission for jacaerys on X

[sometimes-petty]

imagine you're Doran Martell. The last sibling you had left just died a gruesome death that was also perfectly legal so you can't raise any objection over it. Your eldest niece wants to avenge him and proposes to burn down a city that is on the opposite side of the continent than the one he was murdered in. You have her locked up. Your second eldest niece also wants to avenge him and proposes to murder the dowager queen, her brother, and their father. You have her locked up too. Your third eldest niece also wants to avenge him and proposes to crown the princess in open rebellion. You have her locked up too. You're done for the day. The next, your daughter stages the open rebellion in question. The princess is injured irrevocably. Everyone is screaming. Six people get arrested. It's been two days

[ladystardustsangsongs]

“Rhaenys, Daughter of Elia„

What could’ve been😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

first post chat :D I’m actually so scared of posting this, so pleasee be nice 🙏

this is heavily inspired by a fic I read a few years ago where everyone survived and Rhaenys has vitiligo but everyone thinks shes like cursed or smth?? (the writing is amazing but I think the author deleted it 😔 or maybe its just my dream i cant tell the difference these days)

[melrosing]

carmartelldansen…. caramelldornesen…. etc…

more here