To an extent. I’ve spoken before about how my reading of Rhaegar’s motivation was that he was not acting out of a sense of entitlement or belief that his rank allowed him to do whatever he wanted with no consequences, but of a deep-rooted belief in magic and an approach of “the end justifies the means”. But that does not negate how selfish and borderline tyrannical his decision to take up arms against the rebels was, or how he displayed a disturbing sense of self-importance in clinging to the throne and refusing any risk of losing it even if securing it meant the lives of thousands. I know the popular defense of his choice to fight for his father is typically about him needing to be on the throne to prepare the realm for the Others, but not only do I find this a flimsy excuse since Rhaegar actually weakened the realm by his actions, but this is where his motivation surpasses his belief in the prophecy and magic and his children’s destiny to be about Rhaegar himself and his unwillingness to pay any price for what he’d done and what he’d allowed to happen. It’s easy to ascribe his clinginess to the throne solely to his desire to prepare for the Others, and I would not say that it did not play a part in Rhaegar’s decision-making but if anything this speaks of how Rhaegar thought himself so important to the coming war that his presence on the throne was worth all the people who would fall on the Trident. That’s self-important no matter how we swing it.

It can be argued that this sense of self-importance drove Rhaegar from the beginning in his interpretation of the prophecy and even after he changed his mind about the identity of the savior. He went from thinking that he was the prince who was promised to thinking that he had to father the three heads of the dragon to thinking he had to be on the throne for sake of the war against the Others. Maester’s Aemon’s recollection of his correspondence with Rhaegar suggests that he only agreed with him on the first but the second and third conclusions were Rhaegar’s own initiative. That strong belief that he just has to be significant to the coming war in some way can be indicative of arrogance and self-centeredness, but 1) we can’t ignore how the circumstances of Rhaegar’s birth and Aegon’s conception could have been easily misinterpreted as part of the prophecy and how that affected Rhaegar’s thought process, and 2) this is where the missing context makes it hard to determine if his initial belief in his place as the prince who was promised was born of his belief of his own importance or something else entirely. 

We simply don’t know where from Rhaegar’s early belief in the prophecy sprang, so strong it was that he altered the course of his life by becoming a warrior and started corresponding with Maester Aemon. It might be a heightened sense of his own importance but it might also be a sense of dutifulness that echoed Rhaella’s own mindfulness of her duty as Barristan Selmy describes her (and Rhaegar himself). It might be an attempt on Rhaegar’s part to rationalize his parents’ abusive marriage, if he’d known the reason they were married in the first place and especially so young, which resulted in significant health complications for Rhaella (and I think that the circumstances of Aerys and Rhaella’s marriage might be where Rhaegar internalized the idea of necessary evil and the willingness to sacrifice others for the greater good). It might be a simple matter of looking at the description of the signs heralding the birth of the savior and his own birth and putting two and two together. Those are just as plausible as the idea of a privileged prince thinking that he has to be the savior figure from a prophecy, and they can easily get distorted into a conviction of Rhaegar’s own singular importance to resisting the Others as the years passed and his belief in the prophecy became a part of his character. The vagueness of the information about this period makes it hard to say so I’m reluctant to commit to any of them, but I will say that being described as melancholy and possessing of a sense of doom does not speak of someone who particularly enjoyed being a prophetic figure, even if that does not necessarily preclude a self-important view of his place in the war for the dawn. Moreover, I can see where the extent of information available to Rhaegar could lead him to the conclusion that he was the prophetic figure in the prophecy and later to believe that Aegon was instead. Wrong as he might have been, those were still logical conclusions to make within the bounds of his knowledge that do not necessarily denote a self-centered view. It’s his actions before and during the rebellion that are unambiguously self-important and unjustifiable, even if propped on a strong belief in magic ensuring his triumph and history exonerating him.