#deserved better than the bs the fandom gives her fr
Honestly noah fence or disrespect or anything but why do people care about Elia so much on this site?? Her main purpose in the book is to be a sad character and that’s literally it. I don’t even get why people are upset about the annulment cause we all know D&D don’t understand or care about the source material and this would never happen in asoiaf. But honestly theres a strange amount of stans for this specific character with almost no real purpose in plot.
I’m not sure that’s all she is.
admittedly, the reason I get so defensive about her has a lot to do with the fact that the way she’s treated is undeniably racialized, both within and without the narrative.
as a woman of color, it does get grating.
at king’s landing, she was disrespected and isolated from all sides, by her husband and by the court. in fandom spaces, she’s too often reduced to a stereotype, the accepting dornish scorned wife who was totes okay with her husband cheating!! of course she was!! I mean, he humiliated her, left her all alone in a court in which she wasn’t safe, she ended up defiled, raped and murdered but she was just peachy!! after all, she could have been a better wife!! if only she had been more like lyanna!!
it’s a very common sort of nonsense people sprout about her (even in the text, just look at barristan’s povs) and for those of us who care deeply for the martells, there’s bound to be a huge divide between that false perception and what we know for certain about her, which then cause people to defend her.
still, there’s so much more to her than just being a sad character who deserved better, even though that fact may warrant love on its own imo.
elia may not seem overtly relevant but she’s still a disabled woman of color, whose memory is fiercely guarded by her kins, someone who’s constantly referred to as kind, dignified and compassionate. the love oberyn and doran feel for her, their grief is what is driving their actions in the books, which is definitely moving.
there’s also the way her death is framed, which is something I’m more than willing to critize but the effect can’t be denied. her death was violent and needlessly barbaric. it caused a rift between robert and ned, it’s always talked about with disapproval and regret and it marked the moment when tywin’s gratuitous ruthlessness finally antagonized ned to all lannisters, an antagonism at the root of the events in agot. she’s at the heart of the tragedy that started it all, a tragedy that still drives our story forward years and years after the fact.
moreover, her plight, the fact that she was forgotten, brushed aside in life while her loved ones rage in her name is very much thematically coherent with asoiaf as a whole, as a series that champion the value of life, of legacies and the importance of striving for justice, even if it feels hopeless.
when oberyn is shouting at the mountain to say elia’s name, he’s challenging the lannisters and their willingness to destroy and erase all that oppose them, that will liken them to the others so strikingly. he’s standing for life, for a woman that should have lived but never did and for that waste to be acknowledged and respected.
if the point isn’t to root for that, to stand for that and defend her name too, then I don’t know what it is.
These last couple of paragraphs deserve a standing o, honestly.
There is a tendency to minimize Oberyn’s fight with the Mountain to be solely about Oberyn’s death as if that was the point of the scene, which was not at all aided by the show’s “he got sloppy and that’s why he died”. But death is never the point of any story in ASOIAF. Everyone is going to die eventually, every character is going to end up dead at one point or another. But it’s not their death that defines them. It’s what they died for that is important. It’s what they lived for. “Men’s lives have meaning, not their deaths”; the choices they made, how they lived their lives, what they stood for, is what matters and what defines them. That has always been the point from the very first book when Ned’s execution did not define him. Ned Stark’s significance does not boil down to the moment he was flung down on the executioner’s block, but to the legacy he left behind; how he sacrificed himself to spare his daughter’s life and how the memory of this kind and decent man whose first priority was to defend the young and the innocent reverberated so much through the entire North that the Northmen are willing to die in his name. Gosh, this has been the point starting from the AGoT prologue when Waymar Royce bravely stood against a foe out of a legend and chose to fight even when he knew fully well that he had no chance in winning. That choice is what defines Waymar Royce, not that he met his end on the sword of an Other but that he stood against an Other. The abyss stared him in the face and he defiantly told it: “dance with me then”.
So it really rubs me the wrong way when the significance of that scene between Oberyn and the Mountain gets minimized to be about Oberyn’s death. NO. Good god, no. That scene was Oberyn putting the Lannisters and Gregor on trial in the only way that was afforded to him. He was holding them accountable for a crime they have evaded justice for. This was not just vengeance, it was not just about killing Gregor for killing Elia and Aegon. It was about justice, about publicly announcing that he was fighting in Elia Martell’s name, about demonstrating that he was trying to serve justice by making that trial of combat a trial for Gregor, and by extension the Lannisters who named him champion. Oberyn could have killed Gregor right away, but that did not serve his purpose. Oberyn put Gregor on trial and waited for his confession so that his death would be publicly recognized as justice for Elia.
That was the point of that scene, not that Oberyn died in it but that he ultimately extracted a confession from Gregor and a public condemnation of the Lannister\Baratheon regime even as he died. But more importantly, that trial was Oberyn forcing the characters and the readership alike to acknowledge Elia Martell, not as the mother of Rhaenys and Aegon, not as Rhaegar’s wife, not even as Oberyn’s and Doran’s sister but as a person whose suffering and death and very existence was brushed aside as if if didn’t matter, as if she did not matter. Oberyn was challenging the tendency to treat Elia as an afterthought whether in-universe or IRL. He was challenging the narrative itself for treating her as a plot device. Say her name. Acknowledge her personhood and importance as a human being. Don’t be the Lannisters.
