…Rhaegar Targaryen, the former crown prince of Westeros.
Rhaegar fights Robert Baratheon on the Trident. Artist’s depiction. Obviously.
Of all the characters that are talked about but never shown, Rhaegar Targaryen gets paid the most attention. His story is developed so fully that sometimes it’s easy to forget that he never actually appears, not on the page or the screen. We just know so much about him—his melancholy childhood, his reluctant interest in fighting, his mysterious choices, and his death at the hand of King Robert Baratheon. It’s not surprising that he won the poll, although Howland Reed came in a very close second.
Perhaps the reason Howland and Rhaegar were such popular choices is because they’re both tied up in a historical mystery that has yet to be unraveled. Why exactly did Rhaegar kidnap Lyanna Stark, as we’ve been told? Rhaegar could tell us the answer. What precisely went down at the Tower of Joy right before Lyanna died? Howland could tell us. You’ll notice that Lyanna Stark and Arthur Dayne, two other characters who could shed light on this mystery, are also popular choices. George R.R. Martin has done a great job maintaining our interest in these events, and we want to meet anyone who can give us new info. If they happen to be dead, so be it.
But Rhaegar stands above these other figures, probably because there are so many intriguing opinions about him floating around out there, and not all of them are consistent. As WiC writer Katie Majka put it:
"We hear about Rhaegar from two ends of the feud—Robert Baratheon thought he was no good, and Ser Barristan had nothing but praise for him. While I’m more inclined to take Papa Bear’s word for it (rest his soul), Game of Thrones doesn’t play with the black-and-white notions of purely good versus purely bad, so I wonder what kind of man, exactly, Rhaegar was."
This discrepancy gets to the heart of why Rhaegar is so fascinating. He couldn’t be a kidnapping rapist AND a gentle-hearted romantic who gave the money he made singing in the streets to orphans, could he? There’s even more information to sort through in the books, where characters like Jon Connington fill in details of Rhaegar’s life, and where Daenerys has visions of him. Fans have also ascribed some political savvy to him, as detailed in the Southron Ambitions theory.
Really, it’s kinda remarkable how Martin has managed to construct a complete character entirely through the remembrances of other people. And yet there are still pieces of Rhaegar missing, and it’s those missing pieces that give him his enduring mystique. Hopefully, we’ll learn more about him in Season 6 and The Winds of Winter.