On Catelyn and Jon
Disclamer: This was written by a Dany stan, lover, simp, worshipper, apologist, whatever you want to call us! If you’re a Dany anti stay off this post and go fawn over your lesser faves, thanks!
After the … I think 700th round of Jon vs. Catelyn discourse on twitter, I wanted to compile my thoughts about this on one post.
1) This discourse reveals GRRM’s genius in writing morally gray characters and a morally gray narrative. These characters make us squirm and they make us angry or frustrated or uncomfortable because that’s what they’re meant to do. They’re not meant to be morally straightforward. It amuses me that people claim to want to read a narrative about morally gray characters but then choose when to appreciate moral grayness and when to disavow it. So the emotional responses people have on either side of this discourse reveal that GRRM has truly managed to write a morally gray narrative. Kudos to him for that.
2) It is undeniable that what Catelyn did to Jon was horrible. She mistreated him. She neglected him. She ostracized him. She took her insecurities out unfairly on a child that had nothing to do with it. Whether you think it was purely neglect, or does count as emotional abuse, whether you’re a Catelyn stan or not, you have to acknowledge and accept that Catelyn’s biggest flaw and predominant flaw is how she treated Jon throughout his life because of her insecurity and a pervasive anti-bastard stigma that plagues Westeros. We cannot proceed forward if we cannot acknowledge that these characters act realistically in the situations they’re in (even if this is a fantasy work!). We cannot be scared to acknowledge their flaws even if we know misogynistic double standards lie on the other side. Also, it is not misogynistic to acknowledge that an adult used her power to harm a child. Women can be neglectful too, period. It’s not feminist to deny that women can be in the wrong. What is misogynistic, though, I will get to later in this post.
3) One of the reasons it may be hard for female readers to identify what Catelyn did to Jon as abusive is because the issues of power and control between them do not mirror typical abusive dynamics. In ASOIAF, we’re acquainted with pretty straightforward examples of abusive relationships: Viserys Targaryen and Daenerys Targaryen, Khal Drogo and Daenerys Targaryen, Joffrey Baratheon and Sansa Stark, Cersei Lannister and Sansa Stark, Gregor Clegane and Sandor Clegane, Robert Baratheon and Cersei Lannister, Tywin Lannister and his children, Ramsay Bolton and Theon Grejoy, and Cersei Lannister and Tyrion Lannister, to name a few. So, unlike these examples, Catelyn doesn’t beat, starve, mutilate, torture, kidnap, burn, sexually assault, or chain Jon. A lot of female readers, especially Catelyn stans, are inclined to presume that because Catelyn’s emotional abuse of Jon is not outright or overt physical violence, sexual violence, or overt class violence, that it doesn’t qualify as abuse. Yet if you look at the Catelyn/Jon dynamic through Jon’s eyes, you’ll clearly see that it is abuse. As someone who studied psychology and who has worked with communities of female abuse survivors, I know that what Jon went through at Cat’s hands doesn’t compare to what female readers themselves may have experienced at the hands of their abusers. This does not lessen what Jon went through, though. Cat actively blamed Jon for something he was not responsible for; the very fact of his birth causes her to loathe him, and it is not a loathing that she ever rid herself of in life. Tywin and Cersei despise Tyrion for the very fact of his birth as well, and while Cat never did what Tywin and Cersei do to Tyrion, she’s projected her own insecurities on to Jon nonetheless.
Part of this is that GRRM (whether he wants to admit it or not) is depicting a different range of abusive or toxic relationships. Not all abusive relationships are going to look like Viserys/Dany or Joffrey/Sansa. Obviously those are the two of the most harrowing examples of abuse in ASOIAF. But emotional abuse, verbal abuse, and neglect are all actual forms of abuse. Any organization dedicated to rehabilitating abuse survivors could tell you that. Catelyn verbally and emotionally abuses Jon, she neglects him, and isolates him. Unlike abusers such as Viserys or Drogo or Joffrey, though, she doesn’t seek to isolate and gaslight Jon so that she and only she can have access to him, but rather she isolates Jon because she wants him far away from her and her family. She believes he is a blight upon her otherwise perfect family life, and thus seeks to alienate him as much as she can to ignore the constant reminder of her husband’s “infidelity”. It is because of how Cat has treated Jon throughout the years that he decides that his only path forward is to take the black and join the Night’s Watch. He reluctantly chooses to isolate himself because he knows that there will never be a place for him at Winterfell as long as Catelyn Stark has something to say about it. So no, Cat does not isolate Jon to torture and gaslight him as her plaything the way Joffrey does with Sansa or Viserys does with Dany, but she isolates him specifically because she wants to get rid of any visible reminder that at one point, her beloved husband “cheated” on her and brought back another woman’s child.
4) Catelyn is a realistic and interesting maternal character in this series because she is morally gray, and an “imperfect” mother. I wrote previously that Catelyn disrupts the two extremes of maternal characters typically featured in fantasy (including in asoiaf, btw): the “good wife” mother and the “paranoid, evil mother”. So if we conceptualize the maternal trope in fantasy, the two poles on this spectrum are “good wife” on the “righteous” end, and “evil queen” on the villainous end. Cersei and Lysa (and Rhaenyra) are all demonized as evil queens and “bad” mothers (I do NOT think Rhaenyra was a mad queen, by the way, but a lot of Rhaenyra antis/Green supporters think she was, lmao, and I don’t think F&B does such a great job of humanizing Rhaenyra’s tragedy). Naturally, you’d expect Catelyn to be the “good wife” archetype. In some ways she is, especially when you hear Cat stans talk about her: the avatar of motherly and domestic femininity who devotes herself selflessly to her children and would die for them a thousand times over, who silently allowed her husband to cheat and come back with a child of his own and never said a word against him. On the other hand, according to Jon stans, she is the wicked witch of the west, the bitchy and evil step-mom who ruins his life (and within Jon’s narrative that … actually is how she functions). However, as I articulated in my other post, I love Catelyn precisely because she’s not actually the perfect, submissive, domestic housewife that people would expect her to be. She’s a fierce mother willing to kill for her children, she’s passionate, she’s hot-tempered and assertive, she can be very impulsive, she was one of the few female presences in Robb’s war campaign with an actual sway in the political proceedings (crucify her for all the mistakes she made during the campaign if you’d like, but it’s nevertheless amazing that we get to see Robb and Renly as kings from Catelyn’s POV). And honestly, her relationship with Jon makes her a more multidimensional character. Frankly I would’ve hated Cat if she was that perfect, good, submissive little housewife. I’m tired of maternal characters in fantasy who are angelic and perfect and only exist to be canon fodder to develop husbands or sons, I really am. Catelyn is the opposite of that, and I wouldn’t want her to be anything else. It’s disappointing to see that both Cat stans and Cat antis can’t appreciate her for the morally gray character she is.
Think about it: if you were a young wife in a stringently patriarchal, isolationist region you did not grow up in, separated from your husband for a long time, and he came back with another woman’s child and constantly refused to explain himself, to the point that he shut you down when you asked about the child’s mother, how would you react? Would you be happy-go-lucky and completely empathetic and understanding? It’s easy to proclaim yourself as morally superior in the situation because, for the most part, none of us are going to experience this situation, especially because the conventions of Westeros don’t exist in our world (for the most part). Cat was expected to be a perfect wife to Ned, and because of her position, could not keep questioning her husband (especially in the early stages of their marriage). I’m not justifying Cat’s behavior, because it’s also based in Westerosi classist hatred of bastards, and anyway nothing can justify emotional abuse, but rather I’m saying that it’s realistic.
Ned isn’t to blame of course, but he could’ve mitigated the situation at any point. He could’ve explained the truth, or parts of the truth, to Cat. He could’ve stepped in and defended Jon. Except he let the situation play out as it was because of his own guilt and moral obligation (one of the best examples of how his tireless commitment to “honor” is actually one of his flaws as well). He could’ve eased Cat’s insecurities and made Jon’s experience at WF far less alienating if he’d just told Cat the truth or told her to stop treating Jon like trash. But he didn’t, and this is what we have to accept.
5) This fandom will never accept the moral grayness of the female characters, and will always praise the moral grayness of the male characters. Morally gray men like Jaime Lannister, Sandor Clegane, Rhaegar Targaryen, Robert Baratheon, and yes, Ned Stark, will always get a pass for actions that are just as bad or worse than what the female characters to do in this series. Sandor Clegane and Daenerys Targaryen are both victims of sibling abuse, but Sandor’s trauma and coping mechanisms are romanticized while Daenerys is called a bitch whose madness was foreshadowed because she silently watched her abusive brother get killed. Rhaegar fans claim that we can’t “apply modern standards” to criticize him going after a 14 year old, but they do love applying our modern standards (we don’t have an anti-bastard stigma and we would have expected a woman in Cat’s position to unequivocally accept Jon) to Cat’s treatment of Jon. So Cat’s moral grayness is completely erased. Does she function as the bitchy step-mom in Jon’s story? Yes, but GRRM has never once written her as a purely bitchy step-mom or purely submissive housewife. As I said, she functions in the middle. Cat stans like to portray her as the perfect little housewife and think that any critique of her is “anti-femininity” or “misogynistic”, while Cat antis think she’s a demon from the seventh layer of hell. Meanwhile people are writing soliloquies on Jaime Lannister and how awe-inspiring he is. Did he not push an 8 year old out of a window, hoping for his death? Doesn’t matter because the narrative is building up his redemption. But “Daenerys is evil because she murdered a rape survivor (aka the woman who killed her unborn child…)”, “Catelyn is a cunt because she emotionally abused Jon”, “Arya is a psychopathic murder with no feelings” (that take is truly hilarious), “Cersei is an unrepentant abuser with no dimension to her beyond villainy”, etc. All of the women in this series have lied, hurt people, deceived, or killed at least one person at this point, whereas most of the male characters in this series have done leagues worse. Not only do those male characters get a pass; they are actively glorified and romanticized. We coo and fawn over how sad and tragic Sandor and Theon are while hating on Cersei and Lady Stoneheart, who in my view are just as if, it not more tragic.
6) To that end: this is a morally gray narrative. Every single POV character in this series is morally gray. They live in a feudalist, medieval era during a warring period. It is becoming increasingly irritating to participate in a fanbase that does not fundamentally understand the moral grayness of the narrative itself. What exactly is the point of reading a series if you’re going to boil every character down to “completely good” or “completely evil” just based on if you like them or not or whatever your ship or “house” loyalty is? If you’re a stan of that character you’ll hypocritically defend every one of their actions, cherry-pick when to listen to GRRM and when to embrace death of the author, write essays and dissertations on material violence and oppression, but when you hate that character then all neutrality and proper analysis is lost and you all end up embracing extremely vile rhetoric. There are a few characters in this series who are GENUINELY evil and irredeemable, characters like Tywin Lannister, Roose and Ramsay Bolton, Gregor Clegane, and of course the Others, and fewer characters still who are completely pure and good (I’m thinking the children characters mostly, like Rickon Stark and Missandei of Naath). For the most part, though, the characters are morally gray, with varying degrees of goodness. Some are clearly antagonists (like Cersei), but nevertheless have their softer or more vulnerable sides. With Catelyn specifically, yes she did abuse Jon. Period. But she is not Drogo, she is not Tywin, she is not Gregor Clegane, she is not Viserys, she is not Joffrey, she is not Randyll Tarly, she is not Roose or Ramsay, she is not Euron. Moreover, in an effort to keep justifying hatred of Catelyn, Cat antis will go hogwild and make false claims about how she “caused” the War of the Five Kings or that she “abused” her actual children. No, she did not cause the Wo5K; Petyr Baelish and the Lannisters precipitated the war with the murder of Jon Arryn, and AGOT is like embarrassingly clear about that. I don’t know how you could’ve genuinely read AGOT and think “yeah, Cat caused the war when she kidnapped Tyrion Lannister”. Who fanned the flames and framed Tyrion? It wasn’t Catelyn. And I cannot believe any of you think Catelyn “I would die for my children 500 times over and mutilate and torture myself and offer myself to the dogs” Stark abused any of her children just because she wasn’t a perfect little housewife.
And this is what I mean … with the female characters and their moral grayness especially, their antis will go to extreme ends and make boldly incorrect, non-canon, out of character claims about them. “I don’t like Cat because she abused Jon” is a very valid reason for hating Cat, but this turns into “She’s an unrepentant child abuser who caused the war of the five kings, and I laughed when her corpse was stripped nude and thrown into the river”. “I don’t like Daenerys because I perceive her actions in Essos to be overly idealistic and at times ruthless” becomes “Daenerys is a Nazi, blood purist fascist, a narcissistic tyrant, and I can’t wait for her to die violently”. “I think Arya can be cruel at times so I don’t like her” becomes “Arya is a cold-blooded, psychopathic murder who is steadily losing her humanity”. “Cersei is paranoid and violent and trods on the corpses of women and innocents to achieve power” becomes “Cersei deserved to be abused and raped by Robert and she deserves to be murdered by her intimate partner”. On and on it goes.
Shame on all of you, truly. You have lost the big picture of ASOIAF and have wasted your time reading thousand page novels because you’re more focused on petty ship and character wars.
