#idk there’s something here about rhaenyra’s son aegon carrying his mother’s grief into his own reing

[iheartbookbran]

There’s something about Rhaenyra’s epithet being the Black Queen and how the color black is often associated with mourning and grief. Because Rhaenyra’s story really starts with the death of her mother, and that’s a grief that she carries onto her adulthood. But it goes deeper than that, we’re told how many children Aemma lost during her marriage to Viserys, and Rhaenyra, though just a child herself at the time, had to experience the loss of her siblings alongside her mother, never being enough for her father because she wasn’t a son. Then she finally becomes the heir, but not in time to save her mother, and the grief never really leaves her. She loses Harwin (and at least in the book, Laena). She learns about the usurpation of her throne at the same time that she learns about the death of her father. She loses her only daughter.

She watches her sons leave her one by one until only one is left.

How could she ever be anything other than the Black Queen?