#I haven’t drawn asoiaf in ages sorry

[buildoblivionthenwewilltalk]

oh damn it’s valentines days so have my favourite doodles I’ve made of these crazy kids

[dknc3]

Hey, do you mind if I ask why you love Catelyn so much? I like her, but you really love her. What is it about her that connects to you? Also, another random question, I can see Ned/Cat is your OTP, but do you like the two with any other characters?

What ever gave you the idea that I love Catelyn? Or the Ned/Cat is my OTP? HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!

Yeah, this got kinda long. (“What a surprise!” said absolutely no one.)

Okay, why do I love Catelyn? First of all, she is extremely well written. I think GRRM has done a remarkable job on many of the characters in ASOIAF, tbh--making them fully developed, complex people that you cheer for, scream at, want to protect, want to smack, want to comfort, want to talk sense to, hope desperately that they succeed (except for when they’re doing something stupid and you hope desperately someone stops them)--often all at the same time! And you are always seeking to understand them--what makes them tick, what makes their relationships with others what they are, etc. But even among a book series full of these deliciously complex characters, Catelyn stands out as one of the best.

She’s a genuinely good person. I know a lot of people disagree with this, but she is. She isn’t a perfect person. Her attitude toward Jon is awful. She offered nothing but coldness to a motherless child who grew up in her home with her children, and I don’t excuse that. But that flawed behavior does not come from her having a cold heart, being a selfish person (any more so than EVERY person is in some ways selfish), or generally being a bitch. There are reasons she is the way she is about Jon--not excuses, mind you. And the reasons don’t change the fact that it hurt Jon, but understanding the entire situation and the part that EVERYONE (I’m looking at you, Ned!) played in it is important in order to really understand Catelyn’s attitudes and behaviors. I’ve been asked about Cat and Jon MANY times and have written a lot on the subject so I won’t belabor that here. Suffice it to say, that while I didn’t like the almost complete non-relationship between the two of them, had she accepted her husband’s bastard with open arms and no questions and no fears and selfless love for this child whose existence presented potential threats to her and hers on a number of levels, I might have admired her more as a saint, but I probably wouldn’t have appreciated her as much as a character.

But she is a good person. Like all people, she has been taught from childhood what being “good” means, and she tries to live her life to those standards. She tries to teach her children to live by those standards. Her particular standards and morals are the product of her upbringing and society influenced by her own intelligence and generally loving nature. She sees many of her own flaws--something most of the characters in ASOIAF are not as good at doing. When she meets Mya Stone, she thinks about “Ned’s bastard on the Wall” with, among other emotions, GUILT. She begins to doubt Littlefinger’s account of the knife more and more as she listens to Tyrion on the way to the Eyrie. She was ashamed of her emotional breakdown after Bran’s fall (a breakdown that is not really that difficult to understand given the emotional beating she was taking at the time), knowing she’d let down her husband, children, and House. She berates herself for not being able to be with all her children during the War of the Five Kings (an impossible task!). She knows she is a grief-stricken, hollow sort of person after Ned’s death and tries hard not to inflict that upon the people around her.

There are those who say she cares only for her own family, but this discounts the way she feels sorry for Mya Stone when she learns the girl is in love and hopes to marry a lord’s son. Rather than being appalled at a bastard dreaming such things, she is simply sad, knowing it can never be and that the girl will suffer heartache. She even thinks of how the girl is like Sansa with her innocent ideas. And she actually risks her life to take Brienne with her after Renly’s death. Is she more concerned about her own children than about strangers? Yes. But ask any mother if they are equally concerned about all people as they are their own children. You aren’t going to get many “yes, of course!” answers to that. Here overriding concern for her own children does not mean she had a lack of concern for other people.

She’s smart. Really smart. She makes mistakes, but with the exception of letting Jaime go, most of her mistakes were actually quite logical given only HER knowledge and experience rather than the reader’s. And freeing Jaime in a desperate bid to get her daughters back was something she did in the despair learning of the deaths of her two youngest sons. And fandom gives her HELL about it. Um, Robb slept with Jeyne Westerling upon hearing of Bran’s and Rickon’s death, and THAT had pretty significant consequences as well, so Catelyn is hardly the only character that let her emotions get the best of her in truly terrible circumstances.

The remarkable thing is how much she’s able to just swallow her emotions. As we spend so much time in her head, we are treated to a front row seat to the unrelenting grief, exhaustion, guilt, and despair this woman feels, BUT NONE OF THE CHARACTERS IN THE BOOKS GET THAT. She is tough and determined and pragmatic enough to do what has to be done. To do whatever needs to be done in order to protect her children. (And before his execution--to protect Ned. That’s why she arrested Tyrion. She didn’t even want to do that. She wanted to just hide. But once he’d seen her, she could hardly let this man, whom she believed had conspired to kill her son and was a member of a family that killed the former Hand of the King, just ride to King’s Landing where her husband and daughters were and casually say, “So, I met Lady Stark coming back from King’s Landing. What do you suppose she was doing here?”)

Historically speaking, she lost her mother at a young age and has essentially acted as the Lady of a Great House--first in Riverrun and then in Winterfell--since the age of 9 or 10. She started a marriage in HORRIBLE circumstances, moved to a land FAR different than her own, where even the gods were different, but made herself the Lady of Winterfell in every sense of the word--adopting northern dress and hairstyles, learning so much about the northern houses and bannermen that she could advise Robb well on military strategy, earning the respect of her husband so much that he left her to rule in his stead during the Greyjoy Rebellion and trusted her to do the same when he left to become Robert’s hand. And, of course, she and Ned together created a marriage of deep and abiding love out of that terrible beginning--something that speaks volumes about both their hearts and their steadfastness.

She’s in her early thirties when we meet her, and honestly, I am generally more interested in characters who have lived a bit--who have a sense of who they are. I love established relationships--the discovery of who these people are and how they came to be who they are individually and together. Their strengths and their weaknesses. How they weather the storms. Young love is great and all, but I really do prefer examinations of love that lasts--that has endured and changed and struggled and grown. And that may be partly my age, but I’ve kind of always been drawn to those characters and relationships--even when I was a teenager, so I don’t think it’s just that.

So, yeah. I love her. And if I had the time, I could probably write entirely too much about all the reasons why. I haven’t even scratched the surface of her relationship with her children here, or her siblings, or her amazingly on point interactions with Renly and Stannis. 

Funny thing is, I didn’t think I’d love Catelyn. When I read Bran’s first chapter and was introduced to his brother Robb and bastard brother Jon being “of an age,” I immediately thought--Oh, this is one of those tales where two people are in an arranged marriage and there’s no real love between them. Then I read Catelyn’s first chapter, and I was immediately blown away. I realized then that this woman and this marriage were not going to be so easy to put into a box, and so began my love for Catelyn Tully Stark and my tragic ASOIAF OTP.

Okay, that’s more than verbose enough. As to your other question--do I like Ned or Catelyn with anyone else. Absolutely not. Makes me break out in hives, thank you very much! I am not opposed to the two of them having had feelings for people before they ever met. And let’s be honest, they were not remotely in love when they married. But from that point forward? Nope. It’s Ned and Cat, Cat and Ned. Nobody else for either of them as far as I’m concerned. :-)