#there's a reason why rhaelya is my beloved ship and nedcat is smth i find genuinely boring

[aerltarg]

(i'm so sorry, anon! i just started to answer and then tumblr ate it all up 😭 luckily, saved the screenshot)

tbhq, it feels like you've come to the wrong person bc i'm very picky w the arranged marriage aus, especially if this concept is a thing and even a norm in the canon setting. i just don't see the appeal of forcing two ppl on each other bc it's far more serious than the classic “oh there's only one bed in the room!!” or smth like that lmao, it's traumatic and still does affect women in the most negative way irl. my personal stance on this, of course, comes from the fact that it is smth that influences the culture and lives of real women of my own country nowadays.

when it comes to rhaelya, i love how they canonically defied the status quo, which harms everyone in one way or another, by trying to escape the shitty trap ppl call an (arranged) marriage in their world. rhaelya are many things but for me personally it's abt a choice. i'm deeply uninterested in pairings that lack this freedom of choice and thus don't like aus even for my otps that deny them this freedom. of course, i've come across enough of arranged marriage rhaelya aus in the past. however, i liked only a few of them, the ones that described in detail or even focused on them falling in love before the marriage and that clearly showed that there was indeed a choice and that both characters entered their relationship willingly. and i genuinely didn't like the stories that didn't serve this aspect however much my co-shippers might praise those.

if rhaegar and lyanna were an arranged match, their whole dynamic would be very different. and “friends in arranged marriage” would make them just another couple of two highborns who were forced to marry bc of politics in their pseudo medieval world. imo, better than the majority bc it's rlly a russian roulette when you just throw one person at the other without considering anything regarding their personalities and expecting them to have an amiable relationship, let's alone building a decent family (and especially not in the sense we as modern ppl understand this), is just foolish but still. so going from “friends in arranged marriage” to “actually we fell in love after being married” must be rlly complicated.

sorry if it came out as criticism and discouragement! i never meant this, only shared my personal opinion on this. in the end of the day all of us are entitled to our own preferences and ofc all of us are free to play w whatever aus we want! they're meant to be fun after all and if you genuinely enjoy this that's all that matters!