fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #1970 ]

[ SECRET POST #1970 ]

⌈ Secret Post #1970 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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[Majin Tantei Nōgami Neuro]

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[ ----- SPOILERY SECRETS AHEAD ----- ]

10. [SPOILERS for ASOIAF, Game of Thrones]

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11. [SPOILERS for Dangan Ronpa]

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12. [SPOILERS for Hunger Games]

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[ ----- TRIGGERY SECRETS AHEAD ----- ]

13. [TRIGGER WARNING for gore/body horror]

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14. [TRIGGER WARNING for self-harm]

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15. [TRIGGER WARNING for misogyny, rape, racism]

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 000 secrets from Secret Submission Post #281.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

You're comparing apples to oranges. The circumstances were in no way the same and Cat did everything she could in her position to help her children.

At least in the show (I don't 100% recall that part of the book), she also let Jaime go, compromising her son's entire war on the off chance that Littlefinger, King of Lies, was both telling the truth and capable of following through, (even though two little girls aren't equal to the only leverage they have and the enemy's best swordfighter with who knows how much intel on them) so. Yeah. If there was one good thing about that horrific wedding, it was that Catelyn was finally dead and gone. Then it just...got worse. Urrrghhh.

This isn't about Cat as a war tactician. This is about Cat as a mother. Cat was the only person trying to save Sansa and Arya.

Here's how it went down in the books: Cat and Robb got word of Bran and Rickon's "deaths". Upon receiving the news, Cat was obviously distraught and she decided that she couldn't sit back and do nothing while there was any chance that she could do something to save her daughters. She couldn't bear to lose another child when there was something she could do about it. So she decided to trade Jaime for the girls. And her hope that the Lannisters would trade her girls for Jaime isn't some baseless hope. It's actually an offer that Tyrion considers making at the beginning of ACOK. Also? Sansa is actually VERY valuable after the deaths of Bran and Rickon. She's Robb's heir which is why Tywin marries her off to Tyrion.

Jaime had zero intel. He spent his time in captivity in a cell in Riverrun's dungeon alone. Jaime's real worth and the real problem with releasing him is that he couldn't be traded for other captives Robb might want to trade for later and also that some of his bannermen who were fixated on vengeance were angered. And had Robb handled that better, he might have even been able to minimize that fallout. She HARDLY compromised his entire war effort. One swordsman is not going to win or lose a war.

Robb's downfall is his own poor decision making which Cat had nothing to do with. He married Jeyne (while he was similarly distraught over the news of Bran and Rickon's deaths). THAT is what led to the Red Wedding.

Sorry, I forgot to say DA. I don't blame Cat for the Red Wedding, that one is all on Robb and the Freys. Could Cat have negotiated it away somehow by trying harder? Maybe, but unlikely because Walter is psychotic and had ulterior motives for the Wedding anyway. I still disapprove of her letting Jaime go in the books, but I'll give her that it was under better circumstances there. In the show, however, there is a very real possibility he could have seen or heard something or know something about their movements, since he's been with them the whole time.Without anyone knowing about Bran and Rickon at the moment, Sansa and Arya aren't very valuable at this point. With that stacked onto the loss of a trade, angry bannermen, and undermining Robb's authority/command to his troops, that's just about the opposite of helping Robb, who is the only child within her ability to effectively and realistically 'help'.

Because of the Red Wedding, that's not going to matter in the end, but she doesn't know that now--and as far as the Lannisters keeping up their end of the bargain, though she doesn't know about Arya not even being there to trade for, the last time the Starks made a deal with the Lannisters, they killed Ned anyway</>. That's not a good history to bet on.

Yeah, but this is all veering off the point of the thread which was, essentially, whether Cat was a good mother. My point is that she is the only one actively trying to help Sansa or Arya and just about every decision that she makes is for her children.

Though, on the subject of motherhood, rather than characterization, I can't completely ignore how horrible she was to Jon. Yeah, he's not her blood son, but he was her husband's son, and guilty of no wrong-doing. It's not cool as a mother to treat a step-son horribly because his dad was unfaithful. (Adding in the fact that he might have been her nephew is just even worse, but she at least can't be blamed for not knowing that: only for treating him the way she did with the knowledge she did have) I don't think she's necessarily a bad mother to the children she chose to treat well, but Jon (and to a much lesser extent Theon) was still her son by marriage, and she did not treat him well at all. In that aspect, Cersei could be argued as the better mother: she may have spoiled her children and at times she uses them for her own benefit (making her the worse person between the two), but she at least appears to love them equally.

Cersei killed Robert's bastards. So I think Catelyn actually has her beat there because Cat never had Jon killed.

Repeat after me, "Jon is not Catelyn's child. She has absolutely no social obligation to him." He is not her step-son. He is her husband's bastard. Catelyn and Ned do not exist in the 21st century. The society of Westeros is not our society. In Westerosi society, bastards were not raised among the trueborn children. They were raised with their mothers or their mothers' families. Even Walder Frey's bastards lived in the castle on the opposite side of the crossing from his trueborn children. Keeping Jon around Winterfell is actually DISRESPECTFUL to Catelyn.

Could Cat have treated like Jon as one of her own? Yes. But she had no responsibility to do so and it would have been exceptional if she had done so. Cat was not abusive to Jon. Other than that one time when she was sick with grief over Bran and said things she would not have said under normal circumstances, Cat just tried to keep her distance from Jon and was cold to him.

As to WHY she behaved the way that she did? Well it's not rational, but I think that it is certainly understandable. Cat and Ned's marriage was purely political and they were actually strangers when they married. As time goes by, Cat and Ned DO fall in love, but the fact that Ned keeps this kid around (which completely goes against Westerosi standards) probably makes her incredibly insecure since Ned obviously must have loved Jon's mother very much to flout societal conventions like that. She's also probably fairly convinced that Jon's mother is the famed beauty Ashara Dayne who died while young and thus will never age while Cat is getting older and her body is showing the signs of bearing five children. How could she ever live up to Ashara's ghost? Now the logical thing to do would be to be angry at Ned, but Cat had grown to love her husband and in the end it was just easier to project those feelings of anger and bitterness onto a child who she purposefully kept at arms length and was a stranger to her instead of the man who shares her bed.

Yeah, but that's not even the same thing. Robert didn't present them to her and expect her to raise them, I don't remember if Robert even knew about them. Even so, she didn't kill them out of spite, she did it because they were a threat to her throne. It's not the same thing, because she wasn't under the obligation to mother them like Cat was (again, it makes her a horrible person, not a horrible mother).

Except that in the North apparently it's not that cut and dry, especially in the Stark family. Ned chose to raise him as one of his own amongst his own children, Cat rejected that. Because Jon didn't have another mother to be raised under, and essentially just got shoved out of the way of the family because of Cat being so cold to him, yeah that is a little abusive. It's fairly well implied Cat is a big reason for Jon leaving for the Wall, and her snapping at him (which honestly, we don't know how often that happened when she was upset, because we only see a short time with them and have to go with what's shown and said about it.) Excluding him still makes her a bad mother to him.

Again, though, it's just an innocent child whom Ned appears to love. She's not only neglecting a child (who grows up with moderately severe issues because of it) but flouting the clear wishes of the husband she loves in so doing. Whether or not it was normal Westerosi practice, it was</> her responsibility to raise him and treat him as a son (unlike with Theon, where it just would have been smart to, but who was really a glorified prisoner of war and therefore not her responsibility) because Ned raised him in his family as a son. She so far neglected her son that she outright rejects him as being her son. That's not the best kind of mother.

Here is what GRRM had to say on the subject when asked in a fan correspondance:

Thus, the question I have is if Catelyn went out of her way to mistreat Jon in the past -- and which form this might have taken -- or if she rather tried to avoid and ignore him?

"Mistreatment" is a loaded word. Did Catelyn beat Jon bloody? No. Did she distance herself from him? Yes. Did she verbally abuse and attack him? No. (The instance in Bran's bedroom was obviously a very special case). But I am sure she was very protective of the rights of her own children, and in that sense always drew the line sharply between bastard and trueborn where issues like seating on the high table for the king's visit were at issue.

And Jon surely knew that she would have preferred to have him elsewhere.
http://www.westeros.org/Citadel/SSM/Entry/1042/

Ned could have provided different for Jon. He really could have. He could have sent Jon off to be raised in the household of one of his bannermen if sending him to be raised with his mother's family was not an option. He CHOSE to disrespect Cat by keeping Jon at Winterfell. As far as we know, Ned never asked Cat to treat Jon like a son and honestly, he never would have done so because it was not expected of her in their society.

And regardless of how Cat treated him, Jon obviously was able to forge close bonds with his other siblings, so he did NOT get "shoved out of the way of the family". She never kept her children from him. I really fail to see how it is abusive. She didn't have any responsibility to him. Sorry if Cat can't be a mom to every kid who comes her way???

Her treatment of Jon certainly does not maker her a horrible mom because she's not his mom, and it hardly makes her a horrible person, especially in the the context of the rest of the series where pretty much everyone else does way shittier things. It just makes her human with feelings that can be wounded and who doesn't always do the most kind and gracious thing.

And Jon surely knew she would have preferred to have him elsewhere. I fail to see how this is not harmful or abusive for a child to be raised under. Mildly, true, but still abusive. Did Ned verbally ask? No, of course not, he would be too honorable and kind to ever ask that of Cat outright, but having him there instead of doing the many things he could have said that well enough. He chose to raise his son (or nephew) as his son, and she disregarded it.

First siblings =/ motherly connection, second not going out of her way to be horrible =/ not being horrible. Just because she's not as bad as she could have been or as other people in the book are, doesn't make what she does right unless you're operating under relativistic morality. So she let him around her children, that doesn't mean she didn't make it clear through her attitude and actions that he wasn't welcome there, and he still lacked a mother and developed complexes from it which eventually led to him taking the black and abandoning the world. (This will probably turn out for the best, but that's not the point, she didn't do it for that.) The point is, Jon is not 'any kid who came her way', he was Ned's son, who was raised as a Stark if not in name, and the only one at that.

Frankly, it doesn't really even matter that it's expected of her or not in her society. No one denies that Viserys is a horrible brother (and person) for selling Dany to Drogo the way he did, and yet that was perfectly acceptable in the society they were in. (If not 100% the place they were, then at least the Dothraki society they became a part of). He does other things that are unacceptable in that society that make him a worse person and brother, yes, but the fact that selling Dany was culturally acceptable both there (and apparently implied under the Targaryen rule of Westerosi?) doesn't get him a pass at being a horrible brother for selling his sister. Just because she wasn't culturally obligated to take him under her wing doesn't make her not a terrible mother to him, and therefore not a shining example of motherhood in general. It could go so far as to imply if she were angry enough at Ned as to leave Winterfell or something, she might stop mothering her children she does acknowledge, since her motherly love has not only been shown to be conditional, but conditional to something someone else does that the child has no control over.

It could go so far as to imply if she were angry enough at Ned as to leave Winterfell or something, she might stop mothering her children she does acknowledge, since her motherly love has not only been shown to be conditional, but conditional to something someone else does that the child has no control over.

Stop.

No.

Just.

Stop.

Catelyn loves her children desperately. She would NEVER abandon them or stop loving them. Implying otherwise is really really stupid. Like, REALLY stupid. Everything she does is for the good of her children.

Jon. Is. Not. Her. Child.

He just isn't.

HER LOVE FOR HER OWN CHILDREN IS NOT CONDITIONAL.

Her love for children in the world at large is conditional, yes. And that condition is... being her child.

Which Jon isn't.

Cat is not Jon's mother. It is not her responsibility to be his mother. Yes, it is unfortunate that Jon grew up without a mother. And it would have been lovely if Cat had stepped into that role, but she didn't. And Ned never made any effort to find a nurse or someone else who could fill that role in his life. Jon is not her responsibility. He is Ned's responsibility.

As far as cultural relativity goes, I think there is a balancing act. Expecting the characters to behave as if they are in our world is just ridiculous. But there is a line somewhere, and maybe that line is in different places for different people. Expecting Cat to slip gracefully into a step-mother type role when there is no precedent for that her society is kind of silly. And yet I don't have any trouble condemning Robert for the way he treats Cersei which surely would have been acceptable in Westerosi society.

Maybe that makes me a hypocrite.

I'm ok with that.

I'm not saying what Cat does is RIGHT. But I am saying that what she does is pretty damn human and is especially understandable in the context of her society.

You miss one day and there's a trainwreck secret in your fandom.

Okay, but seriously here: Cat does something which is wrong but acceptable in her culture's eyes out of grief. It's not the worst thing she could have done, but it's not good. Robert does something which is wrong but acceptable in his culture's eyes out of grief. It's not the worst thing he could have done, but it's not good. Cat is a good mother who shouldn't be blamed for it. Robert is a bad husband who should be condemned for it.

Yeah.

That's hypocritical. I'm pretty sure that prevents you from fairly arguing the point, because for whatever reason you're biased toward Cat.

Just saying.

Sorry I'm not sorry that I view Cat not taking on the role of Jon's mother as less of a big deal than the way that Robert treated Cersei.

Anon is a troll IMO. Comparing Catelyn to a husband who beats his wife, well...

Omg anon, are you for real?

It didn't matter if Cercei killed Robert's bastards, because... you know, it's not the same thing! It was totally okay since he didn't present them to her. But Cat really was a really bad mother because she didn't raise Ned's as one of her own (which he was not).

Your logic, it's astounding.

In the show, however, there is a very real possibility he could have seen or heard something or know something about their movements, since he's been with them the whole time.Without anyone knowing about Bran and Rickon at the moment, Sansa and Arya aren't very valuable at this point. With that stacked onto the loss of a trade, angry bannermen, and undermining Robb's authority/command to his troops, that's just about the opposite of helping Robb, who is the only child within her ability to effectively and realistically 'help'.

I really don't know how much clearer the show could have POSSIBLY made it that Jaime was GOING TO DIE that night if he stayed in his cell because Robb's camp was getting ready for a lynching. Brienne tells Catelyn this; JAIME tells Catelyn this (because he wants to die) - Brienne also tells Catelyn that no Northerner is going to risk his life defending Jaime Lannister so even if not every soldier in Robb's camp was going to participate in the lynching, they would absolutely not be risking themselves to protect him. Dead Jaime = Dead Sansa (and Arya since Catelyn doesn't know that she isn't in King's Landing.) Maybe they could have had a sword pointed at Sansa's head or something during the scenes about Jaime but really, I thought there was absolutely NO WAY to miss that. Guess I was wrong!

Where the show erred was in not having Catelyn point that all out TO ROBB. Who was being an ass, and deserved a nice slap from his mother, tbqh, at that point.

And Catelyn wasn't the one sowing discord, it was Rickard Karstark - he had NO right to unilaterally decide Jaime's fate and although he agreed to wait until Robb's return, he clearly wasn't planning to control his men who wanted to murder Jaime. Was it really better for Catelyn to leave Jaime to be torn apart by Karstark's men and then wait for Cersei to send her Sansa's head in a box? I'm sure everyone would be talking about what a bad mother she was for NOT intervening and saving Sansa's life if she'd done that. *rolls eyes*

DA

i don't disagree with your points. i don't dislike cat either. but going off the show alone, i have to say that she is one monstrous fuck-up. she's almost as awful as theon with her bad -> really bad -> couldn't get any worse progression of decisions.

The show is really fucking up her character and I am eternally bitter.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ SECRET POST #1970 ]

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