I wished I'd showed her she could fly

We must stop forgetting that Catelyn is a Tully

thegoodlannister:

ivanolix:

I like that Game of Thrones has addressed Joanna Lannister and how her loss affected the surviving members of her family. Especially, I appreciate that we see Cersei’s bitterness, with the implication that living as a woman in a man’s world is doubly hard when you’re without that solid rock of womanliness that is a mother.

I do appreciate all that, but it makes me more upset that Riverrun and the Tullys have so far been unaddressed. Catelyn and Cersei are, by virtue of their roles and the fact that they are POVs, compared and contrasted to each other. Their war is the war of mothers fighting for children, not just kings fighting for thrones. We’ve seen this onscreen, but the differences and similarities don’t ring as true as they do in the text. For the comparison to work, you need to understand where both women came from.

Many fans look at Catelyn and dismiss her as a stereotype. The Good Wife and the Good Mother all in one, what Sansa wants to become someday. And modern fans don’t tend to care for such stories, so they dismiss her. Without the inclusion of the Tullys and Catelyn’s backstory, the complexity of her character takes effort to find. It’s not impossible but let’s be honest, fandom can be pretty lazy at times, especially casual viewers.

And this complexity is important. Catelyn is the Good Wife and the Good Mother, not as meta tropes that we as the audience apply to her, but in-universe itself. Before Catelyn turned ten years old House Tully lost its matriarch and Catelyn (ever following the words Family Duty Honor) stepped into her place. She’s not a grown-up Sansa—she did not have times for dreams of Jonquil and Florian. That is not her trope, for she’s not unaware of how she became who she is. Unlike Tywin, Hoster didn’t shun all femaleness because his wife was lost, but neither did he marry again. Catelyn had to take her mother’s place for father, siblings, and the great house itself. While Sansa has simply dreamed of the role society has ascribed to her, Catelyn lived it.

And to everyone in Westeros, that’s who she’ll always be. Wife or Mother. Lysa responds to Catelyn, not just as a younger sister envious of her elder, but in a manner rather similar to a teenage girl rebelling against her mother as she tries to find her own way. Edmure is not just an adoring younger brother, he’s a son looking up to his mother. Hoster relies on Catelyn as a platonic wife, as lady of his household, placing burdens on his daughter that he doesn’t even understand.

And Catelyn takes these burdens into her heart and swallows the bitterness and does her duty. Willingly, but not blindly.

Were feminism to exist in Westeros, would Catelyn suddenly step up and go “Hey, women can rule and fight? BRB off to be a warrior queen”. No. Cersei, maybe, but that’s because Cersei grew up stripped of any notion of motherhood at all. She reclaimed the lost femininity of her childhood through Jaime and her children, while simultaneously fighting for something more. She wants what her father had, what her brothers had, what she didn’t have—because without a mother she had nothing and she needs something.

Catelyn is not Cersei. She could have stayed a girl and played kissing games with Petyr, and House Tully would have withered and the world would be different. She could have been someone unlike Catelyn Tully. But she was. She is Catelyn Tully. Firstborn and first to understand duty, she took on mantles that were not supposed to be hers (and she knows it, she feels it, under all the poise and grace and competence, never doubt it). Not because she knew nothing else, but because it was the only option she could live with. Riverrun needed a Lady. Catelyn became that Lady, and again for Winterfell, and again for Robb’s camp, and again for the Brotherhood Without Banners when they robbed her of her other duties.

Without the Tullys, without the realization that Catelyn stood up and became Wife and Mother at the age of nine, the strength and complexity of her character wavers and is easily lost. Without the Tullys, Catelyn is easily and wrongly simplified down to lazy writing of a stereotypical woman. Without the Tullys, viewers don’t realize that Catelyn’s life of duty is her agency, and her mind is not weak or fearful because of it.

Catelyn is she-wolf, yes, but let us not forget that she is a trout as well.

YES. Catelyn is equal parts Tully and Stark. She wasn’t just assimilated into the north - and I know this might sound silly, but sometimes I worry that her HBO wardrobe kind of implicates otherwise. She adapted to the North, surely; she took her husband’s land and family and carved a place for herself in it. But she never never lost herself. Cersei may always be Cersei Lannister, but at once, Cat is both Catelyn Stark and Catelyn Tully, an identity entirely her own - and not purely dicatated to her through societal roles. She is both of the North and of the Riverlands. She embraces both the Stark and the Tully words - and more than that, she exemplifies them.

(via sherlockt)