GoT S3: the court of the North

[pocochina]

A few thoughts about episode 3x9, a LOT of thoughts about Catelyn, and a very few thoughts about Robb.

Comments

[pocochina]

do you mean that in order to convey the same character in written text vs. onscreen, you have to actually change the way the character is written? Because that makes a lot of sense but is not something I've seen talked about much w/r/t adaptations.

I do very much agree with that statement. I think for me here, the big issue is that the most important qualities of Catelyn were pretty consistent to me, from page to screen? But seeing her from the outside, rather than her own POV, means that we see her from a less flattering angle and so there's less room to fill in the blanks with SFC hyper-competence and emotional forbearance and good judgment (since of course her reasoning always seems perfectly logical to her). That's not D&D DOING MEAN THINGS TO CATELYN about which we all have to be outraged BECOZ FEMINISM, it's why the adaptation can still be an exciting experience without changing the raw material.

I think people are genuinely confused about whether or not we're supposed to come away from that scene thinking that Catelyn should feel guilty about Jon.

This is a weird sticking point to me because GoT, like the book series, seems to me a lot less interested in getting readers to make judgments on right and wrong and more interested in letting us see and feel for the characters. You know? I don't think it's unclear because the scene isn't about getting us to praise or scorn Catelyn, it's about giving us a look into her head, and I (obviously) found it satisfactory on that count. I think fandom's looking for a "should" in an "is" scene, which is confusing because it's not there. And I don't know if I'm more sensitive to this particular conversation because I like Catelyn so it only seems more pronounced to me, or if it really is more of an issue because we are so much more heavily conditioned to ~judge women as Good or Bad that the dignity of an honest portrait of a female character is jarring.

I can understand why some people are annoyed, because they genuinely can't tell if that scene (and how Cat is written in general) was aimed at making her more ~sympathetic to viewers, especially the ones who read the books and then hated on her for being "a cold-hearted bitch."

See, okay. I might care more than I should about Catelyn and Jon, lol, but IMO it's a...translation issue, for lack of a better term? I don't know that general audiences would understand the stigma on bastard status, without spending way too much time hearing Jon's POV about it. (tbh I don't think people who do get all the details of Jon's POV always grasp the scapegoating and shaming he's gotten in the conservative North, but okay.) Without that context, her saying she wanted a poor motherless boy to die actually highlights some of the pettier aspects of her character much more sharply than the "make Sansa your heir instead of Jon!" conversations in the book. Because if you don't get the social context where "bastard" means "omg nasty loser," it just sounds like a mother prioritizing her own children, which we not only anticipate but applaud.

So I'm not sure I even agree with fandom that it makes her *nicer* but on top of that, I....did not find it ~beyond belief that she had a lot of cognitive dissonance and even ambivalence about her attitude toward Jon? I mean, no she didn't ask Ned to legitimize him but she didn't hurt or endanger him or even cite an instance where she was unkind to him either. Nobody is always entirely consistent in their belief system. And at that moment she's IMO working *very* hard to avoid second-guessing what she did in letting Jaime go, but those feelings of personal doubt have to go somewhere, and I think she coped with that by honing in on a thing she ~thought a long time ago and not a thing she DID recently that has very real repercussions. (In a manner much like someone else we know, come to think of it.)

tl;dr, Catelyn is fascinating and awesome.

I haven't thought so much about Lysa. Like, I am impressed with the uncomfortableness of her story, but I didn't give it too much thought. Why, do you have Lysa thoughts? Do tell!

[pocochina]

The number of times I've seen fandom question behavior from characters that is perfectly normal everyday human psychology, simple because it doesn't "make sense"...

lol, yeah, it's at the point where anything people complain about OOC gets more credibility with me.

I've actually seen a fair number of people who seem to start from the assumption that Catelyn should have treated Jon just like her own children. ...the criticism I saw was mainly of the form, "Well hell yes Catelyn wished Jon Snow dead AND SHE SHOULDN'T HAVE TO FEEL BAD ABOUT THAT!!!"

So she's a failure as a character for not being entirely accepting and unbothered even a little by Ned's cheating on her, and also because she didn't unrepentantly want the child dead! So fucking reductive of a character who's a sharp, sympathetic deconstruction of the wicked stepmother trope. Cat is a stepmother to a child with a special destiny, she isn't always very nice to him - and she has a lot of good qualities and there are solid explanations and contextualizations of her flaws.

Also, I get the frustration with how women are always supposed to be self-abnegating, I really do, but the extent to which fandom has decided only sociopaths are acceptable Feminist Characters is pretty appalling to me. Really, she shouldn't have cared at all that she had an ugly thought like that?

[pocochina]

I don't really have anything to add to this, but yeah, ITA.