Inside Game Of Thrones - Season 1 - Episode 18

Episode 4 years ago

Inside Game Of Thrones - Season 1 - Episode 18

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In the last episode of INSIDE GAME OF THRONES (written by Joseph Nwogo), we were following Bran’s story, and we stopped at where Robb Stark marched South to battle the Lannisters. In this episode, we’re following a new character to continue the story.


CATELYN STARK
Catelyn Stark, born Catelyn Tully, first daughter and firstborn child of Lord Hoster Tully, Lord of Riverrun in the Riverlands. Catelyn has two siblings. She is the first, Lysa, her sister, second, while her brother and their father’s heir, Edmure is last.

Catelyn’s husband is Lord Eddard Stark of Winterfell, and she has five children of her own— never would she accept that bastard her husband had as one of hers —and has a home in Winterfell.

But that was not always how it was meant to be. Catelyn, in fact, never thought she would end up in the situation she finds herself. Hold on, let me make it clear.

Remember when I said Aegon and his two sisters conquered the seven kingdoms and began to rule all of it as one big kingdom? Well, the North wasn’t one of those kingdoms. The main reason is because, going North from King’s Landing, the Kingsroad passes through the bogs, or the Marshlands, lands under the lordship of Howland Reed— who, don’t forget, is a bannerman of House Stark —and the only way to continue the journey is a narrow crossing called The Neck at Moat Caitlin, wide enough for no more than a few knights to ride abreast.

A few good men there can hold off a thousand times their number, because only so few can pass to fight at a time.
And if you don’t want to take the The Neck, you are always welcome to try going through the swamp, where there are poisonous serpents and poisonous lizard lions. That, of course, is if the men of the bog don’t shoot you down first with poisoned arrows.

The North, by the way, is about the same size as the rest of the seven kingdomscombined,though it’s sparsely populated. So Ned Stark rules over the only free region in the seven kingdoms.

Ned Stark had an elder brother, remember? Brandon Stark. Catelyn’s father, Lord Hoster, wanted to have alliances with the greatest house in the North. The easiest way to do that was by marriage; he had daughters, the Lord of Winterfell had sons. And so Catelyn was betrothed to Brandon Stark, heir to his father’s seat in Winterfell.

Brandon Stark was loud and lively. He loved his mead, had a boisterous nature, talked a lot, and had a knack for making Catelyn laugh, the exact opposite of his good-to-a-fault, overly quiet and reserved brother Eddard.
But then Brandon went with his father Rickard Stark to answer the summons of the Mad King, and never came back home again.
After his death, the new heir to Winterfell automatically became Eddard, as you would expect. And Lord Hoster wanted an alliance with House Stark. He didn’t just intend for his daughter to marry BRANDON. He wanted her to marry the HEIR.

And that was how Catelyn found herself married to Eddard Stark.

On the same day, Catelyn’s sister, Lysa, was wedded to Lord Jon Arryn, Lord of the Eyrie in the Vale. True, the man was Ned’s foster father and closer to Lord Hoster’s age, but in one day, Lord Hoster Tully made alliances with two great Houses.

Catelyn didn’t get to spend happily ever after with her intended, but she wasn’t exactly mistreated in her husband’s house. Ned was a good husband, a good father, and apart from the stark difference— no pun intended —between his nature and that of his brother, Lady Stark saw nothing to complain about in her marriage.

When their son Robb was still a baby, Ned went off to wage war as ally with Robert Baratheon and Lord Tywin Lannister. Their marriage hadn’t been up to a month, and Ned was gone for a long time. Somehow he found himself a woman somewhere, who he had an affair with.
Ned had a child with her, and her do-gooder husband, with his untouchable sense of right and wrong and in keeping with the ways of the North, brought the child back home, a bastard, to live with the rest of his trueborn children.

That singular wrongdoing of her husband’s made Catelyn hate Jon Snow.
She knew the bastard was a motherless child who needed the care of a mother, but Catelyn could never bring herself to play that role to Jon. Everytime she looked at him, she saw this illegitimate child of another woman standing in line with the children she had dutifully born to her husband for an inheritance, and she hated her husband for it. But no matter how much she did, she still hated the child more.
And to make matters worse, Jon looked more like her husband than even the children she had borne him, both in looks and in character.