Some among you may recall on the wotmania message board I posted a comprehensive manifesto in a 35 part series listing all the complaints against Egwene I could possibly think of. With the difficulty mustering the interest in re-reading Brandon Sanderson's prose so as to extend that list, plus her perfidy becoming glaringly obvious to all and sundry with her arc in ToM, I have decided to redirect that mental train to an equally pernicious character, Catelyn Stark nee Tully, of A Song of Ice and Fire. Plainly, this will eventually contain spoilers for the first four books of aSoI&F, and just as obviously, none for aDwD. You may disagree with my assessments. Go right ahead. If you are wrong, I will do my level best to set you straight. If Catelyn is your favorite character and in your eyes, an exemplar of motherhood and womanly virtue, please give your children up for adoption.

This first post will mostly cover her sins at Winterfell in and before GoT. Enjoy (or not):

- She raised Sansa. Sansa is nearly universally despised most of all the Stark children. She is spoiled, petulant and in some ways the least mature of any of them despite being the second oldest, and the first one to be betrothed. Her simpering catalog of misery in the second and third books is still not even to win her much empathy, because those troubles are mostly her own doing and her own inability to cope. And most of these traits cannot be believed to come from her northern upbringing or northern blood. Compare the Manderly granddaughters or Lady Dustin or the Mormont women or Arya to the simpering, helpless Sansa. Is this the niece of Lyanna, who rode in a tournament and unhorsed three knights? Is this the daughter of a Stark, a sister of a man who won every battle he fought before his seventeenth birthday and stood on his feet with three crossbow bolts in him? The childish intuition of her younger siblings is a better judge of character than Sansa’s older and theoretically better educated mind, whose personal assessments in the first book or so depend entirely on the physical appearance of the person in question. Sansa’s weakness and her bad choices all stem from her taste for the luxuries and pageantry of the southern nobility. And where did she get these tastes and preferences? She certainly didn’t learn them at Winterfell or inherit them from Ned Stark’s blood. Even if she inherited them from Catelyn, growing up in the harsher north, among a family whose motto is "Winter is Coming" should at least have disciplined her into prioritizing those tastes. But she was raised by her mother and Septa Mordane, to fit their image of a proper SOUTHERN lady. Even placing the lion’s share of the blame on the septa, when you consider Catelyn’s greater stock of grit, it still comes out to be Cat’s fault. How else would a septa have come into the service of Winterfell? The sept in the castle was built for her. The septon is a young man (and of northern origins anyway) whose duties center mainly on maintaining the library. The clergy of the south came to Winterfell with Catelyn. Had it not been for her, Sansa’s primary female example would have been Old Nan, whose response to childhood hardships is to tell them horror stories of how things could be worse! And who has the least recollection of Old Nan’s stories and sayings? Sansa of course. Bran and Arya seem to fall back on her tales the way other people recall their educations. Even Catelyn and Ned are reminded of her stories by various things they encounter. Almost never Sansa, whose number is called by the Hound from day one – she’s been trained to recite courtesies by rote and depend on others to keep her safe and fed. And this training stems almost entirely from Catelyn’s doing. Arya might be her daughter as well but being younger, has had less time under the pernicious influence of her southron caretakers, and is generally more willful and unreceptive to their corruption anyway.

While Sansa’s nature might naturally incline her toward the weaknesses she displays, it is up to her mother and her teachers to weed that out of her and overlay those weaknesses of the flesh with training and discipline. No less and unfit a mother than Cersei Lannister herself comments on the poor preparation for puberty her mother has given Sansa. Does anyone really believe that a scion of the First Men, raised through a northern winter or two, would teach her daughter to expect a first menstruation that is “less messy and more magical”?

- Upon receipt of Lysa’s letter, Catelyn immediately begins urging Ned to accept the office of Hand. Setting aside the issue of their family’s troubles all stemming from this acceptance, the problem illustrated here is Catelyn’s blind faith in her birth family. The Tully words are “Family, duty, honor” and from Catelyn’s behavior, it is no accident that family is placed before duty or honor in that list. And more specifically, it is her blood family that she places before her husband. She urges Ned to accept the appointment against his own distaste, misgivings and generally known unsuitability, because of the warning letter from her sister.

At one point she argues against Ned trusting his best friend because it has been so long since they have seen one another that his own office might have changed him in ways Ned is not familiar with ( "You knew the man, the king is a stranger to you" ). Would that she applied that advice to herself! It has been even longer since Catelyn has seen Lysa, who has been under just as much life-changing stress as Robert, but she never stops to consider that she knew the girl but the wife/mother/Lady of the Eyrie is a stranger to her. As it turns out, Catelyn’s insipid, short-sighted and selfish daughter makes a better Lady of the Eyrie and mother to Robert Arryn than Lysa did. But all that matters to Catelyn is that Lysa is a daughter of Riverrun, which counts WAY more to her than fifteen years of marriage and five children with some northern savage. What is worse, her recollections of Lysa hardly paint a portrait of a woman who is trustworthy, anyway. Everything we see of Lysa as a young girl shows her to be weak and cowardly and childish at best. There is hardly a single memory of ANY virtue displayed by the young Lysa to recommend her judgment to Catelyn in any circumstance, let alone in the acceptance of an unspecified conspiracy theory. Catelyn's faith in her judgement and trust in her support on her flight to the Vale with the captive Tyrion plainly stem from her presumption of family loyalties first.

- We also see Catelyn through Jon's eyes in the early books, and quite a different picture emerges. While Jon, at this stage in life, is something of an emo whiner and poser, to the extent that the wardrobe was the deciding factor in choosing to join the Night's Watch, even the most charitable filtering of his perceptions cannot paint a good picture of Catelyn. She herself admits that bastards are a common occurrence among the noble houses, and we see as the books develop, a long history of noteworthy bastards being associated with their noble families. Sure, there are treacherous and fratricidal bastards, but there are plenty of examples of true-born brothers who are perfectly willing to kill one another or betray each other to advance. Catelyn has no problem with her husband's moral deficiency that produced Jon in the first place, rather her absurd complaint has to do with his responsible handling of the situation. Ned is governed strictly by his honor and duty, and she has no reason to think he will fail his true-born sons in anyway. By all the laws of the Seven Kingdoms, Jon has no claim against his brothers' inheritance. There is no rational threat here, except for Catelyn's oft-repeated placing of her blood kin above all else. Even if Ned did entertain the notion of Jon one day inheriting Winterfell or some other high status, it could only be because of the incapacity of his other sons to properly handle the burden. That sort of thing does not matter to Cat, though! Better the North suffer under the rule of an unfit lord, so long as that lord is her son, rather than only Ned's son! For a woman who claims to love her husband, her hypocrisy is exposed in her denial of his own flesh and blood. Her love for Ned extends only so far as her own interests will accommodate him. Beyond that, he's not a Tully, so the hell with him and the hell with a kid whose only wrong done her is to possibly make up for the shortcomings in affection she seems to withhold from Arya.

Even her own son, Robb, who holds her counsel in far too great esteem in later books, is aware of the iniquity of her treatment of Jon, as we see implied in his farewell to Jon. Though a dutiful son who refrains from overtly disrespecting his mother by asking if she behaved properly, he nonetheless is concerned about her treatment of Jon when the latter paid his farewell visit to Bran's sickbed. Jon's own behavior on this morning might very well rank as his most mature moment in the entire book, with his handling of Catelyn's vicious rejection and his averting any problems his brother's affection for him might create in the Stark household. It is typical of Catelyn that in the nadir of Jon's character development, he shows best when compared to her.

- Her behavior following Bran’s fall is absolutely reprehensible. For her 14 year old son to have to rebuke her neglect of her three-year old is generally the sort of behavior one expects to see in trailer trash or ghetto families or the typically narcissistic single mother encountered in real life. Robb’s stepping up to take over the running of the household matters is more than simply being “man of the house’ while Dad is away; rather it is something akin to taking over the management of a Fortune 500 company or the administration of a large state while the governor is indisposed. Sure, you can say he has been raised to do this, and more was expected of children that age in that time and place…. but the same goes for women. They were expected to fill in for their husbands and whatnot. The mid-20th century stereotype of a wife who only concerned herself with the household and children comes from a time when women were not physically capable of anything else, but society had evolved to cover the bases. In medieval levels of technology and society, if the farmer is gone, his wife takes over plowing. If the merchant is gone, his wife takes over trading. If the lord is gone, the lady must rule in his stead, unless he has appointed a stand-in (Ned didn’t, expecting Cat to suck it up). And the worst part, is this is all over the child she herself admits to favoring. Bran is her special boy whom she pleads with Ned not to take south with him. The girls, fine. Despite the wildly differing temperaments, qualities and virtues of the two girls, her reaction to both their departures is to shrug it off and think it will be good for them. But not her precious favorite! Once again, it is a case of Catelyn’s desires taking precedence over the actual good of her children. Remember too, this is the one she tried repeatedly to stop from climbing out of unreasoning fear of danger to a kid growing up in a household where playing with giant wolves and training with weapons and insane equestrian practices are not atypical.

This pattern of attempted coddling, or Catelyn's emotional whims coming ahead of the best interests of her offspring, will recur and to her detriment. Unfortunately, once she becomes the predominant PoV character for any part of the story involving her, we no longer get a balanced or external view of Catelyn, and following GoT, careless readers are all too likely to accept her self-serving complaints as the counsel of wisdom.