We can put them to work reconquering the Rhoyne valley.
That might actually work. We could do this as well as something similar in Old Andalos.
In fact, seeing as Viserys still lives, we can use him to strong arm the faith not just to sign off on it, but to force a situation where the initial casus belli comes just as much from them as from us
Basically forcing them to call for a Crusade. Maybe not to recapture a holy city like in our world, but to defend our vaguely defined kinsman from before the crossing fromthe yoke of slavery.
Imagen the picture being painted here, Andals and the Rhoyan, side by side, united in faith and blood, returning from the land they once left, to free these they once had to leave behind from their bondage., but we're before they had to flee from the dragon lords of Valyria, now one of them is leading the charge.
I mean it would have a whole host of compounding benefits.
1.
We'd free people from slavery.
Slavery is wrong and evil,
fighting it is the right thing to do.
2.
This Holy War, by being both Holy (religiously sanctioned) and a War (official government policy) would make everyone who speaks about against the it, and subjects nessecary for it, both a traitor, condemned from the top down, by the king, their highest liege lord, and a heretic, feeling pressure from the bottom up by from their own smallfolk, because speaking out against it would mean opposing both a royal and divine mandate.
(This of course doesn't apply to regions that don't follow the new gods, but luckily for us, this is basically just the North and the Iron Isles, with which we both have a chill relationship with right now)
This would be really helpful, especially now after we were just knighted and started a political courtship as controversial as this one. Two-pronged Censorship during the next few years might be a game changer, because it would mean during the most critical moment necessary for discontent against all flip over to talk of rebellion, any such talk gets suppressed from both the top down (the kink) and the bottom up (the religious smallfolk), making any kind of large scale coordination for the opposing nobility basically impossible, while making sure that our reputation in the eyes of the small folk doesn't become a negative.
Both of these could still happen at a latter date, but conspiracies take a lot of time to coordinate, so any delay is vital and no matter how interested the smallfolk is in royal drama, being a doomer about the princesses Dornish husband and how he'll corrupt the Princess just doesn't feel the same 10 years after the fact.
Not to mention that in comparison to canon, the now the crown has an actual mechanism to force people to shut up, that can be used with some degrees of finesse and political acumen. Even Viserys as a generally popular King couldn't go around cutting out the tongues of notable Nobles without concrete proof and they knew it. He also couldn't really force every single one of his vassals to investigate if some village is insulting his daughter.
But if there was an actual war that involved the whole Kingdom (or at the very least the ones following the Faith, but again, that's the one we want)?
It's very easy for him to hand out unofficial punishments to certain people that expresy discontent, like, even if he doesn't have any concrete proof. He could just be like:
"Lord XYZ, whispers say that you have expressed doubts about the ongoing conflict and my daughter's role in it. To accuse you of both treason and heresy, what terrible rumours. I, of course, know that you are a loyal vassal and would never think something so horrible, but I'm starting to worry that I'm just 'a weak king with a woman's heart', so I feel like I have to be stricter with my vassals. How about you lay my worries to rest by sending another 300 soldiers and maybe one of your nephews to support the Andalos front under my father's command. I'm sure this will also put the rumors to rest, though I admit I sometimes simply 'don't know what is proper' so if this show of support doesn't cause them to quiet down, maybe another shipment will"
There is actually a certain beauty to this, when you look at it from a political perspective and compare it with a normal order of censorship.
You see, seven kingdoms are a feudal state and the very first "clause" of the feudal contract between a king and his vassals, no matter which contract specific interpretation we're talking about has to be: "I am given X amount of land and people to manage, and Y rights and privileges, so that I can raise and feed Z amount of soldiers to my Lord when he needs them"
So if they fail to respond to this punishment, it doesn't cost him any kind of reputation or political capital to further pursue the offending lord, because while getting more and more involved in the way your vassals handle their land and the people on it, might be an overreach that has to be carefully considered each time, if they do not provide you the soldiers you asked for to help you in fighting legitimate, just and national war, I would argue that in the context of a feudal contract that would give him the right to genuinely just kill them.
Probably give them a second chance and then a trial beforehand, but if it comes down to it, giving them a single follow up notice that only the reason further fail in their duty as vassals is because they are planning an rebellion against the crown and then just sending a dragon rider to burn them if they do not respond is, under the agreement these two parties operate under, a acceptable thing to do.
That is treason to such an unquestionable degree that nobody could speak out against it, not just because it's his right as their king to act this way, but because in speaking out against his action would mean speaking out against the system of feudalism itself and this would erode their own powerbase disproportionately more than Viserys, maybe it would hurt a few less than others, the Lannisters would loose more power than the Sea Snake would, but all would lose more than they'd gain.
3.
We'd free people from slavery.
Slavery is fundamentally wrong and unquestionably evil,
fighting it is the right thing to do.
4.
Westeros is a martial culture. So not only would such a war be fought by people who you want to keep busy, it will also be made up of the seven kingdoms future lords, allowing a really once in a lifetime opportunity to network with the people Rhaenyra will have to convince to swear fealty to her if she want to actually rule, during a time where their minds are still changeable and in a environment that would allow drastic changes in attitude. While we probably will never convince someone like Unwin Peake to support us, I do think that someone like Borys Baratheon could change his mind if we fought side by side with him and made him respect us as a genuine warrior.
That isn't only true on an individual level, but also on a general level, the soldiers who fought with the Dragonknight, learned to fear and respect her, as well as the sons their raised, will be a lot less eager to join their lord in rebellion.
The same is probably also true with the Dornish. If we play our cards right and are successful in both matters of trade and military cooperation, this might actually start a similar cultural shift on the relationship between the Kingdoms under the Iron Throne (specifically the Stormlands) and Dorne as the World Wars helped bring about between Britain and France. Maybe they will still dislike each other, but this dislike wouldn't be a burning hatred, but a intense rivalry framed by mutual respect. They'd still think the other side as Brutes/Snakes, but maybe they could sometimes see them as their Brutes/Snakes.
5.
We'd free people from slavery.
Slavery is at it's very core wrong and with out a doubt evil,
fighting it is the right thing to do.
6.
Ok so for this next point I do have to give the smallest glimpse into my thought process. I genuinely think that the singular act of Rhaenyra becoming a knight would be enough to win her the throne if the debate around her status as Heir was genuinely about law and tradition.
By becoming a Knight we (well our father, but still) have forced the High Septon into doing one of two things.
Either he:
(A) Abolished one of the unseparably interwoven attributes of one of the four cornerstone identities of the institution that is the faith of the seven (Septons, Knights, Septas and Silent Sisters), an attribute (being one and not the other of a two gender binary), that with following the High Septon and following the will of the New Gods, makes up the only three completely shared attributes that these roles have
Or (B) he took the by this point already well established 'Doctrine of Exceptionalism' that already allows the House of the Dragon to break certain important cultural norms, like the taboo on incest, with the justification that they, as Dragon Riders, essentially play by different rules (in this case do not suffer the biological consequences of incest) and expanded it to also say, essentially, the default gender of a Targeryean isn't [Male] or [Female], but [Dragon-Rider].
I'm quite certain that he took option (B), because taking option (A) would be suicide. I don't mean political suicide, I mean that the type of decision that gets even a literal miracle worker hacked to pieces in some dark alley.
So he probably went with option (B), right? It's the better play, both in the short term, because you don't have to start immediately reforming a pillar of your legitimacy in a way that spreads doubts on all of your traditions, and in the long-term, because you'd only have to wait until Viserys falls over, say that he forced you into knighting her, through force of arms, against the will of the gods and not only can you take back a concession you made, you can probably get some type of benefit as a quid-pro-quo to whoever you just helped.
So taking option (B) makes perfect sense from his perspective.
Good.
For us to become the King of the Seven Kingdoms, as in the person that actually rules, we should want option (B), an extension of the 'Doctrine of Exceptionalism', more than anything.
Because the fact of the matter is, that this one act makes a older Dragon-Rider (daughter) inheriting before a younger Dragon-Rider (son), theologically speaking, perfectly reasonable and in the medieval legal world, those don't as much go hand in hand, as their the same person holding their own hand in an effort to fake having a girlfriend.
Ok, sure, it's not quite that easy, we'd probably need something else as well, some type of precedent that would directly concern the relationship between not just a younger dragon riding brother and an older dragon riding sister, but, because this is all happening in the context of a marriage with the Prince of Dorne, a president that would simultaneously be relevant for a marriage between two equal rulers and ideally would even be connected to Targeryean Incest, seeing as this is the origin of this argument.
Now if only there were a Dragon-Riding, Martially-inclined, in Westeros relevant, Targaryen who married her younger brother and rules not as his lesser but as his equal …
Idk, I'll probably have to reread the first chapter of this quest.
But DeleteWolf, you absolutely handsome devil that you are, you forgot to respond to the very frequently in the quest mentioned and even in your own argument touched upon possibility of the High Septon just saying "Nuh, uh?". While I really respect and 100% agree with every point you have made in regards to the theoretically possible theological and legal underpinnings of Rhaenyra's ascension, wouldn't you agree that the power political self-interest of the Faith of the Seven override any interest in consistency with previous rulings that would now be disadvantageous to hold onto out of principle?
Also, while I'm sure that you have plenty of logical reasons to have done so, I am still left wondering how the nuances of Rhaenyra's Knighthood are relevant to starting a Holy War in Essos.
Ok, fair, let me condense my thought process down a bit.
There are two things that keep us from becoming the Queen of the Seven Kingdoms, people who don't want us, a women, sitting on the Iron Throne and people who want someone else sitting on the Iron Throne. While it's valid to see these as just expressions of the same problem, I think it's better to divide them in two here.
While I think that one on one, the first (systemic misogyny), is the lesser of the two, if you divide the second part into its various claimants (Johanna's future Son, Daemon, the Sea Snakes future Grandson, various independence movements), them the problem of systemic misogyny actually has the plurality here.
And if I'm correct, then the Faith of the Seven might have just already given us the golden bullet to actually kill that beast.
Even then, so what right? Words are like wind, we'll probably just lose our knighthood the moment dear old dad dies, right?
Well, yes. That is indeed what would happen if he died in the next chapter.
But what if we did something with this knighthood before that? What if we didn't simply rest on our laurels and go even further that a few more tourneys? What if we fought a war and became an actual Knight in comparison to the often joked about summer Knights?
If we were to form the political and martial vanguard of the literal Westerosi ideal of a 'Just War' and distinguished us by doing the things we swore we would do, right after our ascension to knighthood that might just be story book worthy, seeing as we were the quasi-squire of knight of the Kingsguard, entered and won a major tournament as a Mysterious Knight and we're then Knighted by the High Septon and the King, … we'll that would certainly make it a lot more controversial to nullify this anointment more than a decade after the fact.
Not to mention that this would bind the Holy Faith's interest directly to our continuous legitimacy, because we'd make our identity as a Paragon of Knightly Values, as well as our Marriage of Equals with Dorne, the inciting incident behind this Holy War, meaning that any gain in social capital aka soft power, any type of material donations, any type of inheritance from a heirless lord and any type of new convert, especially amongst the new territories, would be contingent on status as a Knight of the Seven and therefore on also on our status as the legitimate heir to the iron throne.
We would probably still have to fight against a rebellion, but that would be exactly this and while ideally the Faith would support our claim and use it's already considerable, and now even further strengthened, soft power to help us in this scenario, weakening our enemies by having them deal with internal dissent at every level, even if the High Septon and the general leadership of the faith would speak out against us and our claim, this would then only mean that there would be a religious civil war happening in tangent to the regular one and this alone would open up lots of new venues through which we could first wage war and then afterwards reform whatever is left standing afterwards (assuming we manage to get this far)
7.
We'd free people from slavery.
Slavery is such an absolute opposite of what is good that you quickly realise that all that is good opposes slavery and all that opposes slavery is good, because in truth these are both the same thing and it is in such a way evil at a certain point you come to realise that all questions of this fact stem from a insufficient understanding of slavery,
fighting it is the right thing to do.
Actually, thinking about it, I don't know if it's been discussed before in this thread, but I do think we'll have to do at the very least something to get the faith on our side, because by insisting that we become a knight we've kind of forced their hand in a way that it is now no longer possible for them to remain a neutral third party, either we a can be a knight and therefore are a knight, so we can be King and will be King as well, or we won't be King , because we can't be King and therefore are also not a knight and we never could have actually been a knight
Not that I necessarily think this is bad, what this threat has grasped, either after some argument or instinctively, I really can't remember, is that we do not have the luxury of compromise. I think Viserys never quite got that, but it's not so much that we aren't interesting in following convention, we genuinely can't do it, because our mere existence breaks all previous conventions, funnily enough, after the last vote twice over, actually.
Every convention that we break now, every bit of controversy that we stirrup today, means that there will be just a bit less outrage when "it" happens
Rhaenyra has to say: "I am who I am, deal with it" with every breath she takes, not because she is some rebellious child, but because she has to start setting expectations as soon as possible, because even as the picture perfect Lady, her very existence would still be controversial, as a Women, as someone above houses like the Lannisters, as some married to the Prince of Dorne and as a Targaryen, so she'd rather deal with it one convention at a time, instead of all at once, after "it" happens.
I do want to note, is can be to things and both would be essentially mean nothing less than either her social or physical death, one is the obvious, her father dying, but the other possible thing is her relationship with Alicent becoming public knowledge.
So yeah. We forced the Faith into a binary choice here, but that's fine, this is the thread that looked at the world and Situation Rhaenyra Targaryen lives in and decided they wanted to play a Queer Female Knight.
We were always going to play on nightmare difficulty, so we simply have to keep on escalating and hope that we manage to ascent fast enough, that when Dragons start to Dance, we'll have build enough of a legend that thinks like sex, gender and sexuality seem to small to matter in comparison.
If you count the arguments that I've made in this way to long of a comment, you'll probably have noticed how the amount of words used is unequally divided, but that's not really my fault. I do think that the argument "it's the right thing to do" deserves to be given more weight than all the intricate justifications I could come up with, no matter it's length, because I believe that there things in this world that are simple right and some that are not and these often get ignored because they are quite simple ideas.
And while I think "Slavery is wrong" is one that I've tried to express here, I also want to take this chance to express the other one I've touched on here, that I feel like is intrinsically connected to the first (but I'm not getting into this, I've started this comment 5 hours ago) "It's never wrong to be yourself".
So even if the world she lives in will probably never fully accept who Rhaenyra "the Dragonknight" Targaryen is, I don't think that means that she is wrong in being who she is, her dignity and right to self-determination should need justification beyond her existence as a living and breathing being, but if it has to, if the only way for our Dragonknight to be her authentic self and find actual happiness is for us to pull all the stops, throw everything but the kitchen sink to see what sticks, escalate to such a degree that Taylor Herbert would blush and then go back and throw the kitchen sink as well, …
If a chance at happiness means she has to become the first ever female Knight, the first female member of the Small Council, the Hand of the King, if she have to marry the Prince of Dorne, become best friends with Otto Hightower, expand the Kings Road to cover the whole realm,throw the biggest tourney in the History of Westeros and win it personally, lead a successful Crusade in Essos, personally get rid of all bandits and pirates in all the Seven Kingdoms, lead an expedition beyond the Wall and kill the Night King with her bare hands, travel to the ruins of Old Valyria and personally wrestle the Drowned God underwater or even get on speaking terms Daemon Targaryen …
… then fuck it. Let's get ready to rumble, my friends.
I mean,
it's the right thing to do, isn't it?
When all is said and done, what other reason is truly necessary?
