GoT S3: the court of the North
A few thoughts about episode 3x9, a LOT of thoughts about Catelyn, and a very few thoughts about Robb.
The show not only seeded hints throughout the season, but went out of its way to establish that the Red Wedding was short-sighted and destructive. Roughly transcribed:
OLENNA: The people are hungry for more than just food. They crave distractions. If we don't give them distractions, they’re likely to create their own, and their distractions are likely to end with our heads on spikes.
Deployed correctly, royal weddings are a tool, a safety valve. Things are very much not okay, everyone knows that, but there are a few very small moments of respite, and they are necessary. A population with a little bit to lose is pliant; a population with nothing to lose is nuclear. A ruling class that's short on bread can hardly afford to burn down its circuses. Not that those circuses are all sunshine and roses - I thought it was very sharp that Talisa lampshaded the creepiness of the public bedding just before it's contextualized so closely with the mass slaughter.
Moreover, the laws of hospitality are not mere ritual in a society that doesn't have much in the way of a travel infrastructure. They significantly disincentivize flat-out murdering whole villages for a place to crash anytime Ser Schmoe wants to get out of the rain. If you can depend on hospitality protections, regular mass slaughters are more trouble than they're worth; if you feel like (or rationally know) you're in mortal danger everywhere you lay your head, the risk-reward analysis changes significantly. Hospitality expectations are not only a way of keeping the people charitable, they are a way of keeping the people governable.
More and more I think the Lannister faction's strategy is rooted around Tywin being stuck on the slights of his past, trying to one-up the Mad King with a scorched-earth campaign that out-Aeryses Aerys. Burn them all.
I of course was as prepared as one can be for the Red Wedding, and tbqh even during my unspoiled read of the series it didn't surprise me in the way it seems to have surprised a lot of folks? It was tragic emotionally, but intellectually I found it perfectly in keeping with the brutal unfairness which was such a big part of the story to me from the very beginning, when Ned beheaded that poor schmuck for the shocking crime of having the good sense to run from White Walkers. The death that did shock and upset me was Frey's young wife. I wasn't surprised that Cat would try to hold her hostage in exchange for Robb, and I admired her for fighting back with everything at hand. But then, after Robb was dead and couldn't be brought back, she goes through with it, HOLY SHIT WHAT?! The very last action of Catelyn, who would've been so easy to soften up and idealize, was the pointless murder of an unarmed girl.*
So...SPEAKING OF CATELYN, lol. I am really tickled, or maybe just ticked, at fandom's insistence that Catelyn comes across worse in the show, that she's silenced, that she's just Not Right and It's Not Fair! RME. This post is going to make it look like I don't like her but she's actually a character I like quite a lot! I just think that the "defenses" of the character tend to flatten out and idealize her rather than genuinely appreciate her. ie, people wanted Catelyn to be their Strong Female Character (TM) instead of the wonderful, three-dimensional, exceptionally POV-blinkered because she is human and that is how we do character she ACTUALLY IS in the books and then on-screen.
After some initial misgivings before seeing the whole season, I don't mind the scene that pissed everyone off so much when it aired, where Cat feels guilty over her repressed dislike of Jon. I was worried it was about softening her up and making her more maternal (as if that is necessary with Catelyn, of all characters!) but in context, it struck me as a poignant moment of introspection, albeit one with some very human point-dodging. While her own personal feelings about inheritance of course couldn't have caused the War of the Five Kings, it is quite true that widespread support for a rigid inheritance-based aristocracy is what has led Westeros to this point, and one of the pillars holding up that social structure is the pointed scorning of bastard children like Jon. To the extent that she's able to acknowledge this is what's going on, the fact that she's having this conversation with Talisa is quite moving to me, that she's admitting to Talisa that she might be unfair to people based on the circumstances of their birth and accepting the girl as enough of a peer that they can have the kind of heart-to-heart conversation she hasn't had with anyone since Ned died.
But, like most people, Cat finds it much easier to overrate her own importance - yes, the gods laid waste to a whole continent because of one passing thought in your head, lol - than to make conscious acknowledgement of an error in her worldview, particularly given that said worldview is one that has worked out to her benefit for decades. Basically, what I liked about the scene was what I suspect most people really hated about it: that it's a massive demonstration of her privilege. It's the All About Me attitude that comes from someone who spent a significant portion of her formative years totally assured that it was, in fact, All About Her.
On a broad systemic privilege level, Cat is as well-off as a woman in Westeros can be. This goes beyond the fact of her aristocratic status. Catelyn grew up in the idyllic Riverlands, not so far North as to bear regional stigma but not quite in the toxic sphere of the royal court. She's a pretty, feminine woman who takes easily to the role of wife and mother. She's the apple of her father's and uncle's eyes, and she made good in the crapshoot that is marriage in their world. This produces some very interesting pattens in Catelyn's interactions with men: she gets along famously with older, high-status men, while she is extremely uncomfortable with lower-status men.
Cat is basically the prom queen all grown up. She's a mature and gracious Lady of the North, but once her world flips upside-down and she has to start making contacts with her family again, she gets the worst case of revertigo ever.
Probably this is most obvious with Edmure, as explored at Tower of the Hand. While I didn't work through any defense of Edmure's strategy on the merits, I did feel vindicated in my read on the psychological dynamics of the Tully family. Part of the issue is Catelyn's insistence on crowbarring everyone into the roles they played when she was last at Riverrun: Edmure was a hapless boy years and years ago, so he must still be a hapless boy now. But he's also the focal point of her pain and denial about her father's decline. It's brutal watching someone you love slip away; I don't blame Catelyn for some private immaturity. But her POV chapters throughout Books 2&3 drip with unfair irritability at Edmure for presuming to take their father's place - as if he were Lord Tully, sniff sniff! But actually, Edmure was acting in the spirit of family, duty, and honor when he started taking the reins from a sickly, senile old man. Someone had to run the Riverlands, and Catelyn is (as most people do in her shoes) rejecting the idea that her father can't do it anymore; her POV assessment of Edmure is a lot more about her being pissed at him for accepting and acting on the reality of their father's infirmiry than it is about anything Edmure did or didn't do. And so by the Battle of the Fords, she (like her uncle, who is similarly in denial) is just itching for a reason to justify this.
Presumptuousness! Borderline disloyalty! Basically, Cat's projecting any misgivings she might have about her "power behind the throne" status with Robb onto her brother. Partisan defenders of Catelyn's right to be a two-dimensional madonna martyr will sometimes go on about how Robb doesn't appreciate her. But like, Robb is the King in the North, not the Spa Manager out in the Riverlands who has to humor the wacky rich lady and cater to her whims. If he didn't value her, he would have been well within his rights to pack her off; it's the least he should have done after she proved to be so unreliable as to give up their one bargaining chip by letting Jaime Lannister out of his cage, which is a big fucking deal. Cat gets a lot of credit for her strategic thinking because we're in her POV and so don't necessarily see that being the person who tells a teenage boy "don't do the thing!" is about the lowest-hanging fruit there is on the tree of wisdom. But when she does actually make a decision and act, she comes to the totally bizarre conclusion that making the Kingslayer pinkie-swear something gives him sufficient personal motivation and political capital to have two other valuable hostages released for nothing. Robb should have thrown her in the cage herself, if not executed her for treason; instead, he not only indulges her but continues to heed her counsel for the most part. Robb is so eager to make an example of Edmure and, later, Karstark because he has to compensate for letting Cat get away with what she did about Jaime. I don't mean lol Freudian compensation, I mean she seriously undermined his credibility with his men with that stunt. I wonder if his own resentment at his inability to stand up to her when he clearly should have wasn't a factor at play in his spectacular irrationality about his marriage.
It's not just Edmure, although he was the character in focus in S3; it's a pattern with Catelyn and the other Tullys. Cat's internal monologue when the northman want to cross the Vale is all about how Lysa is just so STUPID and COWARDLY, doesn't she GET that Robb the special snowflake King in the North NEEDS to get across with his rag-tag army and drag the wrath of the Lannisters in his wake? From an outside POV, we know that Lysa is doing exactly what Cat is doing - using what few bargaining chips she has to maximize her son's interests. And actually, Catelyn has such good instincts that I'd hazard a guess that her frustration with her sister is coming from a place of knowing that something doesn't add up. But because Cat is so eager to dismiss Lysa as spineless and silly that she literally does not spare a thought to her sister's cost-benefit analysis, she misses those intuitive alarm bells and therefore any chance she had of figuring out what was going on.
Granted, that's not just about Lysa, it's also about her patronizing attitude toward Littlefinger. Much like Robb mistakes familiarity and affection for trustworthiness in Theon, Catelyn thinks that darling Petyr's childhood crush on her means he is actually going to ally with her and support her best interests. IMO Cat, even more than fandom, idealizes the beginning of Petyr's obsession with her as having been about actual love at one point, rather than (as I think is most likely) overwhelmingly about Petyr's narcissistic craving for the shiniest status symbol in sight. Catelyn's dismissal of both Littlefinger and Lysa reflects the fact that, like her son, she may have some brilliant outsider's insights into the game of thrones, but she just does not understand the day-to-day grind of it all. She doesn't get how talented and how ruthless one has to be to rise as far as Littlefinger - how could she, sealed off in the static North for all these years, develop even a spectator's appreciation for the climb? She doesn't see how warped Lysa has become in order to survive some fucked-up circumstances - she intellectually gets that she and Ned were lucky to love each other, but I don't know that she truly grasps that there are far more ways to be unlucky in an arranged marriage than a relatively neutral absence of love.
The show really hammered home the Cat:Cersei::Robb:Joff parallels, which I appreciated in the book but do so even more now. Catelyn tells Robb not to kill the Karstark man for treason and he goes ahead in his arrogance and does it anyway. Catelyn and Cersei as mirrors for each other is so well done. Because I think that both women are examples of how The Patriarchy can take any type of strength and turn it against you. Cersei is extraordinarily strong-willed, but lacks internal judgment - indeed, she may be as secure in herself as she is BECAUSE she is clueless or unresponsive to many femininity expectations, including passivity and self-effacement. Catelyn, on the other hand, is quite gifted with the instincts Cersei lacks, leading her to become a highly adaptable person who is able to read an environment and figure out what the expected behavior is, and so she's learned to get herself to be as feminine - that is to say, submissive - as possible.
Maybe because the parallels with Joff brought the critique of the character to the surface so well, or maybe just because he's a little more mature and gets a lot more screen time, I found myself doing much better with Robb in the show than in the books. I still think it's silly to say that he broke his Frey engagement for ~love and ~honor - I think he mostly wanted to prove to himself and everyone that he could do ONE DAMN THING because he wanted to and not because he had to - but I did understand how he got to be so dizzy and scared, with no home base, that he'd want to cling to the idea of some untouched private sphere, even if it's just his own tent. That isn't how the game is played, but nobody ever expected the heir to Winterfell to need to know the rules.
*BOOK SPOILERS: I'm hoping so hard that this signifies that the show is not only going to go there and use the Lady Stoneheart storyline, but that it's going to pick up on the ways that Catelyn was already going down this road well before she died. I am pretty into Lady Stoneheart, unsurprisingly; I think it's a wonderful metaphor for what happens to people when they've nothing left to lose. She has no voice, no true purpose, no loyalty to the living or ability to move forward.
This entry was originally posted at http://pocochina.dreamwidth.org/306805.html. Leave a comment here, or there using OpenID.
The show not only seeded hints throughout the season, but went out of its way to establish that the Red Wedding was short-sighted and destructive. Roughly transcribed:
OLENNA: The people are hungry for more than just food. They crave distractions. If we don't give them distractions, they’re likely to create their own, and their distractions are likely to end with our heads on spikes.
Deployed correctly, royal weddings are a tool, a safety valve. Things are very much not okay, everyone knows that, but there are a few very small moments of respite, and they are necessary. A population with a little bit to lose is pliant; a population with nothing to lose is nuclear. A ruling class that's short on bread can hardly afford to burn down its circuses. Not that those circuses are all sunshine and roses - I thought it was very sharp that Talisa lampshaded the creepiness of the public bedding just before it's contextualized so closely with the mass slaughter.
Moreover, the laws of hospitality are not mere ritual in a society that doesn't have much in the way of a travel infrastructure. They significantly disincentivize flat-out murdering whole villages for a place to crash anytime Ser Schmoe wants to get out of the rain. If you can depend on hospitality protections, regular mass slaughters are more trouble than they're worth; if you feel like (or rationally know) you're in mortal danger everywhere you lay your head, the risk-reward analysis changes significantly. Hospitality expectations are not only a way of keeping the people charitable, they are a way of keeping the people governable.
More and more I think the Lannister faction's strategy is rooted around Tywin being stuck on the slights of his past, trying to one-up the Mad King with a scorched-earth campaign that out-Aeryses Aerys. Burn them all.
I of course was as prepared as one can be for the Red Wedding, and tbqh even during my unspoiled read of the series it didn't surprise me in the way it seems to have surprised a lot of folks? It was tragic emotionally, but intellectually I found it perfectly in keeping with the brutal unfairness which was such a big part of the story to me from the very beginning, when Ned beheaded that poor schmuck for the shocking crime of having the good sense to run from White Walkers. The death that did shock and upset me was Frey's young wife. I wasn't surprised that Cat would try to hold her hostage in exchange for Robb, and I admired her for fighting back with everything at hand. But then, after Robb was dead and couldn't be brought back, she goes through with it, HOLY SHIT WHAT?! The very last action of Catelyn, who would've been so easy to soften up and idealize, was the pointless murder of an unarmed girl.*
So...SPEAKING OF CATELYN, lol. I am really tickled, or maybe just ticked, at fandom's insistence that Catelyn comes across worse in the show, that she's silenced, that she's just Not Right and It's Not Fair! RME. This post is going to make it look like I don't like her but she's actually a character I like quite a lot! I just think that the "defenses" of the character tend to flatten out and idealize her rather than genuinely appreciate her. ie, people wanted Catelyn to be their Strong Female Character (TM) instead of the wonderful, three-dimensional, exceptionally POV-blinkered because she is human and that is how we do character she ACTUALLY IS in the books and then on-screen.
After some initial misgivings before seeing the whole season, I don't mind the scene that pissed everyone off so much when it aired, where Cat feels guilty over her repressed dislike of Jon. I was worried it was about softening her up and making her more maternal (as if that is necessary with Catelyn, of all characters!) but in context, it struck me as a poignant moment of introspection, albeit one with some very human point-dodging. While her own personal feelings about inheritance of course couldn't have caused the War of the Five Kings, it is quite true that widespread support for a rigid inheritance-based aristocracy is what has led Westeros to this point, and one of the pillars holding up that social structure is the pointed scorning of bastard children like Jon. To the extent that she's able to acknowledge this is what's going on, the fact that she's having this conversation with Talisa is quite moving to me, that she's admitting to Talisa that she might be unfair to people based on the circumstances of their birth and accepting the girl as enough of a peer that they can have the kind of heart-to-heart conversation she hasn't had with anyone since Ned died.
But, like most people, Cat finds it much easier to overrate her own importance - yes, the gods laid waste to a whole continent because of one passing thought in your head, lol - than to make conscious acknowledgement of an error in her worldview, particularly given that said worldview is one that has worked out to her benefit for decades. Basically, what I liked about the scene was what I suspect most people really hated about it: that it's a massive demonstration of her privilege. It's the All About Me attitude that comes from someone who spent a significant portion of her formative years totally assured that it was, in fact, All About Her.
On a broad systemic privilege level, Cat is as well-off as a woman in Westeros can be. This goes beyond the fact of her aristocratic status. Catelyn grew up in the idyllic Riverlands, not so far North as to bear regional stigma but not quite in the toxic sphere of the royal court. She's a pretty, feminine woman who takes easily to the role of wife and mother. She's the apple of her father's and uncle's eyes, and she made good in the crapshoot that is marriage in their world. This produces some very interesting pattens in Catelyn's interactions with men: she gets along famously with older, high-status men, while she is extremely uncomfortable with lower-status men.
Cat is basically the prom queen all grown up. She's a mature and gracious Lady of the North, but once her world flips upside-down and she has to start making contacts with her family again, she gets the worst case of revertigo ever.
Probably this is most obvious with Edmure, as explored at Tower of the Hand. While I didn't work through any defense of Edmure's strategy on the merits, I did feel vindicated in my read on the psychological dynamics of the Tully family. Part of the issue is Catelyn's insistence on crowbarring everyone into the roles they played when she was last at Riverrun: Edmure was a hapless boy years and years ago, so he must still be a hapless boy now. But he's also the focal point of her pain and denial about her father's decline. It's brutal watching someone you love slip away; I don't blame Catelyn for some private immaturity. But her POV chapters throughout Books 2&3 drip with unfair irritability at Edmure for presuming to take their father's place - as if he were Lord Tully, sniff sniff! But actually, Edmure was acting in the spirit of family, duty, and honor when he started taking the reins from a sickly, senile old man. Someone had to run the Riverlands, and Catelyn is (as most people do in her shoes) rejecting the idea that her father can't do it anymore; her POV assessment of Edmure is a lot more about her being pissed at him for accepting and acting on the reality of their father's infirmiry than it is about anything Edmure did or didn't do. And so by the Battle of the Fords, she (like her uncle, who is similarly in denial) is just itching for a reason to justify this.
Presumptuousness! Borderline disloyalty! Basically, Cat's projecting any misgivings she might have about her "power behind the throne" status with Robb onto her brother. Partisan defenders of Catelyn's right to be a two-dimensional madonna martyr will sometimes go on about how Robb doesn't appreciate her. But like, Robb is the King in the North, not the Spa Manager out in the Riverlands who has to humor the wacky rich lady and cater to her whims. If he didn't value her, he would have been well within his rights to pack her off; it's the least he should have done after she proved to be so unreliable as to give up their one bargaining chip by letting Jaime Lannister out of his cage, which is a big fucking deal. Cat gets a lot of credit for her strategic thinking because we're in her POV and so don't necessarily see that being the person who tells a teenage boy "don't do the thing!" is about the lowest-hanging fruit there is on the tree of wisdom. But when she does actually make a decision and act, she comes to the totally bizarre conclusion that making the Kingslayer pinkie-swear something gives him sufficient personal motivation and political capital to have two other valuable hostages released for nothing. Robb should have thrown her in the cage herself, if not executed her for treason; instead, he not only indulges her but continues to heed her counsel for the most part. Robb is so eager to make an example of Edmure and, later, Karstark because he has to compensate for letting Cat get away with what she did about Jaime. I don't mean lol Freudian compensation, I mean she seriously undermined his credibility with his men with that stunt. I wonder if his own resentment at his inability to stand up to her when he clearly should have wasn't a factor at play in his spectacular irrationality about his marriage.
It's not just Edmure, although he was the character in focus in S3; it's a pattern with Catelyn and the other Tullys. Cat's internal monologue when the northman want to cross the Vale is all about how Lysa is just so STUPID and COWARDLY, doesn't she GET that Robb the special snowflake King in the North NEEDS to get across with his rag-tag army and drag the wrath of the Lannisters in his wake? From an outside POV, we know that Lysa is doing exactly what Cat is doing - using what few bargaining chips she has to maximize her son's interests. And actually, Catelyn has such good instincts that I'd hazard a guess that her frustration with her sister is coming from a place of knowing that something doesn't add up. But because Cat is so eager to dismiss Lysa as spineless and silly that she literally does not spare a thought to her sister's cost-benefit analysis, she misses those intuitive alarm bells and therefore any chance she had of figuring out what was going on.
Granted, that's not just about Lysa, it's also about her patronizing attitude toward Littlefinger. Much like Robb mistakes familiarity and affection for trustworthiness in Theon, Catelyn thinks that darling Petyr's childhood crush on her means he is actually going to ally with her and support her best interests. IMO Cat, even more than fandom, idealizes the beginning of Petyr's obsession with her as having been about actual love at one point, rather than (as I think is most likely) overwhelmingly about Petyr's narcissistic craving for the shiniest status symbol in sight. Catelyn's dismissal of both Littlefinger and Lysa reflects the fact that, like her son, she may have some brilliant outsider's insights into the game of thrones, but she just does not understand the day-to-day grind of it all. She doesn't get how talented and how ruthless one has to be to rise as far as Littlefinger - how could she, sealed off in the static North for all these years, develop even a spectator's appreciation for the climb? She doesn't see how warped Lysa has become in order to survive some fucked-up circumstances - she intellectually gets that she and Ned were lucky to love each other, but I don't know that she truly grasps that there are far more ways to be unlucky in an arranged marriage than a relatively neutral absence of love.
The show really hammered home the Cat:Cersei::Robb:Joff parallels, which I appreciated in the book but do so even more now. Catelyn tells Robb not to kill the Karstark man for treason and he goes ahead in his arrogance and does it anyway. Catelyn and Cersei as mirrors for each other is so well done. Because I think that both women are examples of how The Patriarchy can take any type of strength and turn it against you. Cersei is extraordinarily strong-willed, but lacks internal judgment - indeed, she may be as secure in herself as she is BECAUSE she is clueless or unresponsive to many femininity expectations, including passivity and self-effacement. Catelyn, on the other hand, is quite gifted with the instincts Cersei lacks, leading her to become a highly adaptable person who is able to read an environment and figure out what the expected behavior is, and so she's learned to get herself to be as feminine - that is to say, submissive - as possible.
Maybe because the parallels with Joff brought the critique of the character to the surface so well, or maybe just because he's a little more mature and gets a lot more screen time, I found myself doing much better with Robb in the show than in the books. I still think it's silly to say that he broke his Frey engagement for ~love and ~honor - I think he mostly wanted to prove to himself and everyone that he could do ONE DAMN THING because he wanted to and not because he had to - but I did understand how he got to be so dizzy and scared, with no home base, that he'd want to cling to the idea of some untouched private sphere, even if it's just his own tent. That isn't how the game is played, but nobody ever expected the heir to Winterfell to need to know the rules.
*BOOK SPOILERS: I'm hoping so hard that this signifies that the show is not only going to go there and use the Lady Stoneheart storyline, but that it's going to pick up on the ways that Catelyn was already going down this road well before she died. I am pretty into Lady Stoneheart, unsurprisingly; I think it's a wonderful metaphor for what happens to people when they've nothing left to lose. She has no voice, no true purpose, no loyalty to the living or ability to move forward.
This entry was originally posted at http://pocochina.dreamwidth.org/306805.html. Leave a comment here, or there using OpenID.