Alyssa Targaryen and Rhaena Targaryen's mother-daughter relationship

Alyssa Targaryen and Rhaena Targaryen’s mother-daughter relationship joined family affection to the demands of royal succession, and ultimately became a casualty of the rivalries surrounding the Iron Throne. Their estrangement was not caused by one disagreement alone: Rhaena’s secret marriage wounded Alyssa, while Rhaena’s growing resentment over her place in the succession led her to feel that even her mother had turned against her.

Family and Dynastic Context

Alyssa married Prince Aenys Targaryen in 22 AC, when both were fifteen. The match joined the royal family to House Velaryon, whose members were descended from Valyrian stock; Alyssa herself shared Aenys’s silver hair and purple eyes. Their first child, Rhaena, was born the following year. She was named in memory of Aenys’s mother, Queen Rhaenys, and, despite being small at birth like her father, grew into a happy and healthy child. King Aegon doted on his granddaughter, whose appearance reminded him of the queen he had lost.

Rhaena grew up within a family whose marriages and children carried consequences for the dynasty. Alyssa and Aenys had further children, including sons Viserys and Jaehaerys and a daughter, Alysanne. Rhaena was the eldest daughter, and her position as a royal child would later matter not only as a family bond but as a possible claim to rule. Her sense of being passed over would become one of the lasting sources of distance between mother and daughter.

Shared Political History and Divergent Claims

After Aenys’s death and the conflict with Maegor, Alyssa became a political actor in the struggle over the crown. In the period before Jaehaerys declared for his claim, Queen Tyanna warned Maegor that Storm’s End, the Eyrie, Winterfell, and Casterly Rock had been communicating secretly with Alyssa. They were waiting to see whether her son could prevail. The account presents Alyssa as a consequential figure in the effort to gather support for Jaehaerys, but Rhaena’s later account of the family’s history shows how such political choices could look different from the perspective of the eldest daughter.

Rhaena confided to her friends that she did not share her mother’s affection for Rogar Baratheon. She credited him, grudgingly, with supporting Jaehaerys against Maegor, but could not forgive his inaction when her husband, Prince Aegon, faced Maegor at the Battle Beneath the Gods Eye. Rhaena also increasingly resented the preference given to her younger brother over her and her daughters. She considered herself the firstborn and recalled that she had become a dragonrider before her siblings. In her view, her family—including Alyssa—had passed over her claim to the Iron Throne. The account records these as Rhaena’s grievances, not as proof that Alyssa alone determined the succession; it nevertheless shows how the daughter understood her mother’s political loyalties.

The Fair Isle Marriage and Its Aftermath

In 49 AC, Rhaena married Androw Farman on Fair Isle. It was her third marriage and his first. The ceremony was small, conducted by the groom’s father and a septon, and attended by only two great lords. Alyssa was neither advised of nor invited to the wedding. The court learned of it only after the ceremony and feast, when a raven brought the news from Casterly Rock.

Chroniclers in King’s Landing report that Alyssa was deeply offended by her exclusion, and that mother and daughter were never as warm with one another afterward. The marriage also angered Rogar, then Hand of the King, because Rhaena had remarried without the Crown’s leave. In practice, he claimed authority over that permission. Androw was the second son of a minor lord, and some considered him an unsuitable match for a woman who had twice been queen and was the mother of the king’s heir. The account suggests that the possibility of other politically advantageous husbands helps explain both Rogar’s anger and Rhaena’s secrecy, without establishing that Alyssa would have approved the marriage had she been consulted.

The exclusion cut in both directions: Rhaena married without her mother’s knowledge, while Alyssa experienced the omission as a personal slight. Their disagreement therefore reflected more than the suitability of Androw as a husband. It made visible a weakening bond in which Rhaena acted independently of the family’s royal authorities, and Alyssa was left outside a major event in her daughter’s life. Jaehaerys and Alysanne, by contrast, welcomed the news and sent gifts and congratulations to Fair Isle.

Estrangement During the Regency

The wedding formed part of a wider fracture among the three queens—Alyssa, Rhaena, and Jaehaerys’s sister Alysanne—whose earlier unity against Maegor had begun to give way to resentment. The immediate political crisis arose from Jaehaerys’s secret marriage to Alysanne, which took Alyssa and Rogar by surprise. Yet Rhaena’s marriage had already left its own hurt: Jaehaerys felt he should have been consulted, though less strongly than his mother, while Alyssa was wounded that she had not been told or invited.

Alyssa’s objections to Jaehaerys and Alysanne’s marriage were described as arising from genuine concern for her children, the dynasty, and the realm. When she finally accepted that the marriage could not be undone, she urged her councillors to use their power to protect the couple from what might follow. She had lost two sons to Maegor and already felt a coldness between herself and her eldest daughter; she could not bear the prospect of permanent estrangement from the children who remained to her. Her response shows a mother trying to preserve ties with her surviving children even as her political responsibilities and family loyalties pulled in different directions.

That protective stance did not erase Rhaena’s sense of exclusion. She believed that her mother’s affection for Rogar and support for Jaehaerys belonged to a pattern in which her own position and her daughters’ claims were set aside. Alyssa’s hurt over the Fair Isle wedding and Rhaena’s grievance over succession thus mirrored one another: each felt that the other had failed to recognize her place in the family.

Significance and Limits of the Record

The relationship is preserved chiefly through reports of specific actions and attributed grievances: Alyssa’s marriage to Aenys, Rhaena’s birth, the secret Fair Isle wedding, and the later accounts of their political resentments. The sources do not present a continuous record of private conversations or reconcile the two women’s competing views. They do, however, make clear that the estrangement lasted beyond the wedding and developed amid a larger contest over royal authority, marriage, and inheritance.

Their story shows how the same family bonds could carry different meanings for mother and daughter. Alyssa’s political support for Jaehaerys and her attachment to Rogar were part of her own place in the struggle for stability; Rhaena experienced the preference for her brother as the displacement of her own birthright. The wedding on Fair Isle turned that underlying divide into a personal rupture. The account leaves their relationship unresolved, with the reported loss of warmth standing as the clearest consequence.