#but i think acknowledging context and also the dearth of concrete information or understanding of mental health in westeros

[navree]

I like your take on Daenaera but I still don't have much thoughts on the aegon and jaehaera thing. To me if she lived I just think Aegon will keep a marriage only in name with her. He respect her as Queen but won't have much emotional connection with her. Cuz based on canon: it's very doubtful that she can actually have the concept of consent when she was cognitively 4 when she was 8. Neither did she show much ability to bond with people after the dance (aegon did tho). That's even a hard thing for me to ship compared to Aegon and Daenaera's 7 year old gap

Yeah, that's also been what trips me up on Jaehaera sometimes, which is that the way she's coded is meant to hint to a pretty severe developmental delay that does signify a bigger developmental disability. I'm pretty sure that was just there on Martin's part to make sure people didn't get attached to Jaehaera or her relationships with people like Aegon before killing her off (since I think he was doing a bit of backfilling, since Daenaera and Aegon III as the couple who produced children and reigned together was set in stone before he got into the minutia of the Dance and created the twins and then had to figure out a way to end the Dance concretely), especially considering how sloppily it's handled compared to disabilities like Tyrion's dwarfism and Bran's paralysis in the main series, though that may be because those are physical disabilities rather than mental. And Jaehaera being half her age mentally is something to note, four is incredibly differently, cognitively and developmentally, from eight, especially when Aegon was already older than her by three years, and would have impeded their connection in the short amount of time they had.

But I do also want to note that, because F&B is vague by design and Jaehaera died young and pretty early in Aegon's reign, we don't actually know if her issues were going to be permanent and severe. Jaehaera went through a lot in the Dance, beyond all the deaths of her family members and living through two armed invasions of KL, which is always gonna be scary for a kid, we really can't overstate how traumatic Blood and Cheese would have been for her. She's, like, six, and men break into her home to commit various acts of violence against her grandmother, her mother, her siblings, and her. It's not just that Jaehaera saw her own twin, someone she's never lived her life without, be beheaded by intruders, which would be incredibly traumatic in and of itself, or saw her mother and grandmother both in a state of emotional collapse that would be very distressing for a child, Blood and Cheese also threaten her specifically. At six years old, grown men tell Jaehaera that they are going to rape her unless her mom picks which of her brother's is going to die. In a time and place where she has no space or tools to process all the incredible traumas of that night, or having to later deal with Helaena's breakdown and not even being able to have the comfort of her mother, and likely very little comfort from her father who is first actively participating in a wara nd then later has a long convalescence following Rook's Rest, of course Jaehaera was going to regress. Aenys went back to acting like an infant after the trauma of just learning about his mother's death at age three, it's entirely reasonable Jaehaera went through something similar. The brain is a funny thing, and how trauma affects it is also a funny thing.

I do thing that Jaehaera was neurodivergent, while the severity of her mental condition seems to have only been noted during/after the Dance, even as a kid she's noted as not having expressed emotions the way you typically see from children, and I think that's generally seen as an early indicator of autism by the medical community today. So I'd feel comfortable headcanoning Jaehaera as autistic, likely more severe on the spectrum than Helaena is coded as being in the show, and I know that a lot of people do headcanon her that same way. So in my view, I'd attribute Jaehaera's mental state as a trauma response to the horrors she had to go through at such an early age, and if she had lived longer than the age of ten, it's entirely possible she would have improved and healed.

And with respect to the Aegon/Jaehaera/Daenaera throuple AU that's at the heart of this for me, I'd follow it on those lines, and that's part of what I talked about when discussing how Jaehaera and Daenaera would forge a connection first. Jaehaera's mental issues come not just from her neurodivergency but from her trauma and her inability to deal with that, so having her socialize with someone who, while she too has known grief and strife, has not been through anywhere near the same crucible as Jaehaera, is helpful developmentally. Bonding with Daenaera, and especially Daenaera because of her known traits of being sweet and bright and easy to get along with, would go a long way to helping Jaehaera in a world where mental health counseling and therapy and psychiatry aren't a thing. And that in turn can help lead her to bond with Aegon, who clearly wanted to connect with people but also had a boat load of issues, and as they grow older it turns into something more romantic, along with the romantic feelings springing up with Aegon and Daenaera and Jaehaera and Daenaera too. I'd have Jaehaera certainly be autistic, as mentioned, likely blunt and unaware of social cues and perhaps with a tendency to put her foot in her mouth or fail to follow social norms as a result, since she's described as "sweet and simple" in the text. That's kinda one of the things at the heart of this AU, that the Dance left a lot of young children lonely and lacking in connection that they desperately need, and how those children might grow and develop and blossom if they find that connection, in spite of the sins and rivalries of their parents (the Greens v Blacks, obviously, but also the mistreatment of the Velaryons on both sides and those loyalty switches).

But I'm also glad you like my Daenaera take anon! She's pookie to me, sometimes characters just speak to you without you even knowing why, and she's definitely like that for me, and I'm glad people enjoy the vibes I'm trying to bring.