![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
We Love the Women Fandom Hates: Catelyn Stark (Day 4: Ned Stark and Petyr Baelish)
Pip necessitated hosing out her litterbox out in the yard again, at which point a wasp promptly stung me through my shirt. Our cat's badness level is unusually high for someone her size.
This is the late-night and semi-belated rendition of Round 4 of WLtWFH, brought to you by yellowjackets, coffee, and spoilers.
Ned Stark and Petyr Baelish
Or, Wait, This Isn't 'We Love the Men Fandom Hates'
So why are we talking about Ned and Petyr, anyway? Like the subtitle says, this isn't "We Love the Men Fandom Hates." The reason we're talking about Ned and Petyr tonight is that like I mentioned before, it's an awkward truth of fandom and media consumers in general that female characters are disproportionately judged by their connections with male characters, and never more glaringly than for their romantic connections. The moment a female character appears onscreen or on-page, many consumers are consciously or unconsciously evaluating her prospects for a romantic subplot, and their reaction to her is so often colored by how they view her as a love interest for male characters.
Catelyn Stark is no different. I don't think it's a far cry to say that married female characters often hold less conventional appeal to fandom readers in the first place, due to seeing them as taken, settled-down, having reached the zenith of their most important story arc. But the way Cat interacts with the men she has romantic connections with still influences how she's perceived. Many Catelyn detractors view her as asexual, frigid, boring, or disinterested in sex and romance -- which, by the way, there shouldn't be anything wrong with in the first place, but which nevertheless can be death knells to fandom's interest in a female character. This doesn't mean she doesn't have romantic entanglements that affect the ASoIaF plot significantly. And it also doesn't mean that at the same time as dismissing her as a romantic being, readers aren't judging her for them anyway. We're going to look at the two main romantic connections in her life: her husband Ned Stark and her childhood friend Petyr Baelish.
First, I think it's worth pointing out that in general, A Song of Ice and Fire doesn't have the time or emphasis or room for romantic subplots the way that a lot of other book series do. It's a complicated, many-POV, multi-continent political-historical epic fantasy with a cast of thousands and many things going on at once: with some exceptions (Jaime Lannister and Brienne of Tarth, along with a few others), the books don't have the time or pacing to allow characters to spend a lot of time brewing about their unresolved sexual tension with other characters. Much shipping is drawn from subtext and hinted-at relationships. So anyone expecting involved romance plots for main characters in general is bound to be disappointed. But many expect and hope for them anyway, especially with female characters.
The primary man in Catelyn's life is her husband Eddard. First off, Ned and Cat were not a love marriage and are not a love marriage, per se, but they're a reasonably content and functional one and they care deeply for each other. This is a concept not often expressed in fantasy or in fiction in general. By modern-day mores, people ought to either adore their spouses or hate them, arranged marriages ought to turn out to be heteronormative bliss or oppressive hell. Since it's obvious that the Stark marriage is not oppressive hell, many write it off as one-note heteronormative bliss. The fact is, Cat and Ned were two awkward strangers when they were engaged, both all too aware that he was the replacement fiance for his dead brother Brandon. Brandon wasn't any less of a political marriage for Cat, but that didn't prevent her subsequent engagement to Ned from being haunted by the specter of Brandon's murder. All narrative cues from Cat's perspective point to having grown to care for and respect Ned as a life partner all the while feeling the divide between them caused by Ned's quiet remoteness and the many secrets she knows he keeps from her. Jon Snow is not the only section of Ned's life that he compartmentalizes away from her and the rest of his family: his relationship with Robert Baratheon also seems frustratingly out of her reach, and he's stubborn about these things in the way only a mild-mannered person can be. After some fifteen-odd years of marriage, Cat and Ned are both best friends and friendly strangers.
What does this mean for the books and how people perceive Cat's character? Well, the fact that she doesn't have a passionate relationship with her husband -- but nor does she seem to have had the chance to have a passionate relationship with anyone else -- removes a factor that, frankly, a lot of readers find "humanizing" in some way for a female character. It's not a secret in Hollywood that by trope and convention, a sympathetic female character is one who's emotionally vulnerable to men in one way or another. Cat's far from emotionally unaffected by the men in her life, least of all her husband, but she's not exactly pining wistfully away for his attention either. Actually, the narrative place Ned takes in Cat's life and character journey is arguably a little more subversive than that. Ned in fact functions in the role that's so often occupied by women in fiction: he dies to catalyze others, and Cat foremost, into diving into the plot to investigate and avenge his death. He's kind of her fridged love interest. Nothing he does in the plot is quite so important as his getting himself killed.
If a man's wife were killed in fiction in a similar way, it'd be trope-conventional, it'd be tragic, and no one would question whether or not this was sad and humanizing for the poor bereaved man, whether or not he appeared to actually be in any sort of passionate love with her while she was alive. In fact, this happens all the time. Due to the gender flip, though, Cat's story arc with Ned is a little less familiar and more liable to be written off as "not romantic enough" to make her an interesting woman. The fact is, whether or not you find it romantic, it's not supposed to matter. Ned isn't a perfect husband, but they love each other the way two people who stick by each other for a long time love each other, and when he dies violently and unjustly this irrevocably changes her life in almost every way. He may not have been her true love, but he was her friend, and he was the father of her children, and he was her husband. That's far from emotionless.
On the other side of the coin we have Petyr Baelish, Catelyn's childhood friend who's carried a long-time unrequited torch for her. Petyr is an at-first unassuming young lord from the Fingers who's worked his way up to the King's Master of Coin by the time she first meets him again in A Game of Thrones. He's clever, to understate, professional, dapper, plays his cards close to his chest, and seems to silently be holding some very long grudges. If Ned is the straightforward, honorable, and somewhat naive protagonist destined to change the world more with his death than his living, Petyr is the behind-the-scenes antagonist whose machinations underlie even more of the plot than the reader could ever suspect. His relationship with Cat is also a massive plot catalyst: his fall at the hands of Brandon Stark seems to have been a huge turning point in his life, that set of events is what brings him into a relationship with Lysa Tully and eventually gives him power over the Eyrie, and his continuing feelings for her and reaction to her death set into motion his actions with her daughter Sansa also. If Ned is Cat's overt motivation for many of her actions in A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords, Cat is the unspoken presence in Petyr's even after her own death as well, and given his contribution alone to the War of the Five Kings, that's not a character connection to overlook by any means.
What does this mean for Cat's relationship with him from her end, though? There's offhand speculation or assumptions made about Cat's perspective on Petyr, often depending on the speaker's opinion of Petyr himself. Cat never could've felt that way about Petyr. Cat might've given him a chance. Cat never respected him. Cat could've respected him, but not the man he became. And so on, and so forth -- I venture that line of thinking is missing the point. Again, it's framing it all in terms of the all-important question, which is "is this a positive or viable romantic prospect?" I think the answer to that question is: it doesn't matter. Cat couldn't have considered Petyr as a romantic prospect, not responsible prematurely grown-up Catelyn Tully who knew she had to marry Brandon Stark: thinking about her love life as belonging to herself would have been naive and only brought her misery. It didn't. She was a marriage pawn, like all highborn girls. Petyr may have been naive enough then to entertain some Uptown Girl fantasies, but whether bluffing or genuinely disinterested, Cat had already put that childishness out of her head by the time Petyr challenged Brandon for her hand.
This is not an essay for discussing the many adventures of Petyr Baelish and whether or not any of them are excusable. Rather, the point I'm trying to make is that whether they are or whether they aren't, Catelyn Tully's feelings towards him shouldn't have any bearing on that. She's not responsible for his actions. Not by perceivedly shooting him down, not by perceivedly leading him on, whatever you perceive. What matters to Cat about Petyr is that he's her friend, albeit her friend she hasn't been close to in a long time, and that she has to reluctantly rely on him in a world where she doesn't have a lot of friends to bank on. What matters to Petyr about Cat is an entirely different animal, and the depth of his feelings towards her don't actually mean that her connection with him is obliged to be as important in return, positively or negatively. It's not that it's important that her romantic connection with him is nonexistent: it's that her romantic connection with him is unimportant. As noted earlier, she doesn't have time for that. And she never will. Not every female character can afford to be a love interest first and everything else second.
So what's it all amount to? What it all amounts to is that judging ASoIaF by the yardstick of conventional romantic plots in general is a recipe for disaster, but particularly for its female characters and particularly for Catelyn Stark. It does her a disservice to imagine that her connections are boring, one-dimensional, or dispassionate just because they don't follow the pattern of any comfortable, acceptable romantic tropes, whether nice ones or negative ones. She's a woman trying to protect her family and house and embroiled in a lot of trouble, so her relationships reflect that foremost.
I don't think it's worth arguing that Catelyn Stark is a faithful wife, a good wife, a bad wife, a good girlfriend, a bad girlfriend, asexual, monogamous, or none of these things -- really, you could make a case for all of them. Rather, it's useless and sexist to define her primarily by them. Life experience doesn't fall neatly into those categories, least of all in a world of political marriage and girls as tradeable pawns, and holding her to those standards is part of what leads many to write her off as unrelateable.
~
Other: Say Yes to Gay YA, in which agents demonstrate a level of cynicism and heterosexism that should be shocking but sadly isn't and in which writers stand up for the queer characters and elements in their books. Go represent.
This is the late-night and semi-belated rendition of Round 4 of WLtWFH, brought to you by yellowjackets, coffee, and spoilers.
Ned Stark and Petyr Baelish
Or, Wait, This Isn't 'We Love the Men Fandom Hates'
So why are we talking about Ned and Petyr, anyway? Like the subtitle says, this isn't "We Love the Men Fandom Hates." The reason we're talking about Ned and Petyr tonight is that like I mentioned before, it's an awkward truth of fandom and media consumers in general that female characters are disproportionately judged by their connections with male characters, and never more glaringly than for their romantic connections. The moment a female character appears onscreen or on-page, many consumers are consciously or unconsciously evaluating her prospects for a romantic subplot, and their reaction to her is so often colored by how they view her as a love interest for male characters.
Catelyn Stark is no different. I don't think it's a far cry to say that married female characters often hold less conventional appeal to fandom readers in the first place, due to seeing them as taken, settled-down, having reached the zenith of their most important story arc. But the way Cat interacts with the men she has romantic connections with still influences how she's perceived. Many Catelyn detractors view her as asexual, frigid, boring, or disinterested in sex and romance -- which, by the way, there shouldn't be anything wrong with in the first place, but which nevertheless can be death knells to fandom's interest in a female character. This doesn't mean she doesn't have romantic entanglements that affect the ASoIaF plot significantly. And it also doesn't mean that at the same time as dismissing her as a romantic being, readers aren't judging her for them anyway. We're going to look at the two main romantic connections in her life: her husband Ned Stark and her childhood friend Petyr Baelish.
First, I think it's worth pointing out that in general, A Song of Ice and Fire doesn't have the time or emphasis or room for romantic subplots the way that a lot of other book series do. It's a complicated, many-POV, multi-continent political-historical epic fantasy with a cast of thousands and many things going on at once: with some exceptions (Jaime Lannister and Brienne of Tarth, along with a few others), the books don't have the time or pacing to allow characters to spend a lot of time brewing about their unresolved sexual tension with other characters. Much shipping is drawn from subtext and hinted-at relationships. So anyone expecting involved romance plots for main characters in general is bound to be disappointed. But many expect and hope for them anyway, especially with female characters.
The primary man in Catelyn's life is her husband Eddard. First off, Ned and Cat were not a love marriage and are not a love marriage, per se, but they're a reasonably content and functional one and they care deeply for each other. This is a concept not often expressed in fantasy or in fiction in general. By modern-day mores, people ought to either adore their spouses or hate them, arranged marriages ought to turn out to be heteronormative bliss or oppressive hell. Since it's obvious that the Stark marriage is not oppressive hell, many write it off as one-note heteronormative bliss. The fact is, Cat and Ned were two awkward strangers when they were engaged, both all too aware that he was the replacement fiance for his dead brother Brandon. Brandon wasn't any less of a political marriage for Cat, but that didn't prevent her subsequent engagement to Ned from being haunted by the specter of Brandon's murder. All narrative cues from Cat's perspective point to having grown to care for and respect Ned as a life partner all the while feeling the divide between them caused by Ned's quiet remoteness and the many secrets she knows he keeps from her. Jon Snow is not the only section of Ned's life that he compartmentalizes away from her and the rest of his family: his relationship with Robert Baratheon also seems frustratingly out of her reach, and he's stubborn about these things in the way only a mild-mannered person can be. After some fifteen-odd years of marriage, Cat and Ned are both best friends and friendly strangers.
What does this mean for the books and how people perceive Cat's character? Well, the fact that she doesn't have a passionate relationship with her husband -- but nor does she seem to have had the chance to have a passionate relationship with anyone else -- removes a factor that, frankly, a lot of readers find "humanizing" in some way for a female character. It's not a secret in Hollywood that by trope and convention, a sympathetic female character is one who's emotionally vulnerable to men in one way or another. Cat's far from emotionally unaffected by the men in her life, least of all her husband, but she's not exactly pining wistfully away for his attention either. Actually, the narrative place Ned takes in Cat's life and character journey is arguably a little more subversive than that. Ned in fact functions in the role that's so often occupied by women in fiction: he dies to catalyze others, and Cat foremost, into diving into the plot to investigate and avenge his death. He's kind of her fridged love interest. Nothing he does in the plot is quite so important as his getting himself killed.
If a man's wife were killed in fiction in a similar way, it'd be trope-conventional, it'd be tragic, and no one would question whether or not this was sad and humanizing for the poor bereaved man, whether or not he appeared to actually be in any sort of passionate love with her while she was alive. In fact, this happens all the time. Due to the gender flip, though, Cat's story arc with Ned is a little less familiar and more liable to be written off as "not romantic enough" to make her an interesting woman. The fact is, whether or not you find it romantic, it's not supposed to matter. Ned isn't a perfect husband, but they love each other the way two people who stick by each other for a long time love each other, and when he dies violently and unjustly this irrevocably changes her life in almost every way. He may not have been her true love, but he was her friend, and he was the father of her children, and he was her husband. That's far from emotionless.
On the other side of the coin we have Petyr Baelish, Catelyn's childhood friend who's carried a long-time unrequited torch for her. Petyr is an at-first unassuming young lord from the Fingers who's worked his way up to the King's Master of Coin by the time she first meets him again in A Game of Thrones. He's clever, to understate, professional, dapper, plays his cards close to his chest, and seems to silently be holding some very long grudges. If Ned is the straightforward, honorable, and somewhat naive protagonist destined to change the world more with his death than his living, Petyr is the behind-the-scenes antagonist whose machinations underlie even more of the plot than the reader could ever suspect. His relationship with Cat is also a massive plot catalyst: his fall at the hands of Brandon Stark seems to have been a huge turning point in his life, that set of events is what brings him into a relationship with Lysa Tully and eventually gives him power over the Eyrie, and his continuing feelings for her and reaction to her death set into motion his actions with her daughter Sansa also. If Ned is Cat's overt motivation for many of her actions in A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords, Cat is the unspoken presence in Petyr's even after her own death as well, and given his contribution alone to the War of the Five Kings, that's not a character connection to overlook by any means.
What does this mean for Cat's relationship with him from her end, though? There's offhand speculation or assumptions made about Cat's perspective on Petyr, often depending on the speaker's opinion of Petyr himself. Cat never could've felt that way about Petyr. Cat might've given him a chance. Cat never respected him. Cat could've respected him, but not the man he became. And so on, and so forth -- I venture that line of thinking is missing the point. Again, it's framing it all in terms of the all-important question, which is "is this a positive or viable romantic prospect?" I think the answer to that question is: it doesn't matter. Cat couldn't have considered Petyr as a romantic prospect, not responsible prematurely grown-up Catelyn Tully who knew she had to marry Brandon Stark: thinking about her love life as belonging to herself would have been naive and only brought her misery. It didn't. She was a marriage pawn, like all highborn girls. Petyr may have been naive enough then to entertain some Uptown Girl fantasies, but whether bluffing or genuinely disinterested, Cat had already put that childishness out of her head by the time Petyr challenged Brandon for her hand.
This is not an essay for discussing the many adventures of Petyr Baelish and whether or not any of them are excusable. Rather, the point I'm trying to make is that whether they are or whether they aren't, Catelyn Tully's feelings towards him shouldn't have any bearing on that. She's not responsible for his actions. Not by perceivedly shooting him down, not by perceivedly leading him on, whatever you perceive. What matters to Cat about Petyr is that he's her friend, albeit her friend she hasn't been close to in a long time, and that she has to reluctantly rely on him in a world where she doesn't have a lot of friends to bank on. What matters to Petyr about Cat is an entirely different animal, and the depth of his feelings towards her don't actually mean that her connection with him is obliged to be as important in return, positively or negatively. It's not that it's important that her romantic connection with him is nonexistent: it's that her romantic connection with him is unimportant. As noted earlier, she doesn't have time for that. And she never will. Not every female character can afford to be a love interest first and everything else second.
So what's it all amount to? What it all amounts to is that judging ASoIaF by the yardstick of conventional romantic plots in general is a recipe for disaster, but particularly for its female characters and particularly for Catelyn Stark. It does her a disservice to imagine that her connections are boring, one-dimensional, or dispassionate just because they don't follow the pattern of any comfortable, acceptable romantic tropes, whether nice ones or negative ones. She's a woman trying to protect her family and house and embroiled in a lot of trouble, so her relationships reflect that foremost.
I don't think it's worth arguing that Catelyn Stark is a faithful wife, a good wife, a bad wife, a good girlfriend, a bad girlfriend, asexual, monogamous, or none of these things -- really, you could make a case for all of them. Rather, it's useless and sexist to define her primarily by them. Life experience doesn't fall neatly into those categories, least of all in a world of political marriage and girls as tradeable pawns, and holding her to those standards is part of what leads many to write her off as unrelateable.
Other: Say Yes to Gay YA, in which agents demonstrate a level of cynicism and heterosexism that should be shocking but sadly isn't and in which writers stand up for the queer characters and elements in their books. Go represent.
no subject