IN DEFENSE OF CATELYN STARK

Ayama and the Thorn Wood, The Language of Thorns, Leigh Bardugo// Venetian Ladies Listening to the Serenade, 1909 by Frank Cadogan Cowper // A Game of Thrones, Chapter 31, Tyrion IV.

lyanna stark || elia martell || sansa stark || arya stark || alicent hightower || jaehaera targaryen || cersei lannister || myrcella baratheon || joanna lannister || aemma arryn || catelyn stark || sansa stark (2) || margaery tyrell || rhaena targaryen, daughter of aenys i

for @tell-them-the-north-remembers, for this post (analysing ned loves my hair. gosh it took some time to find but i rembered that i had it in my drafts. for when i'd do catelyn. hope you like it)

important modern westeros headcanons concerning the extended stark clan for my own modern au 

important details to know 

married couples: brandon and barbrey, ned and cat (duh), rickard and lyarra, hoster and minisa, brynden and unspecified beautiful man, and edmure and roslin

the starks, as we know them, are not The Starks Of Winterfell, they’re like their sixth cousins who live in winterfell the town (not the castle). they still have some runoff money from being related to them but they’re not the absurdly old money that The Starks Of Winterfell TM are. rickard and lyarra and then brandon and barbrey are at the cusp of between upper and upper middle class and then ned, lya, and benjen who didn’t go into the family business are towards the bottom of upper middle. 

rickard stark is a shrewd and calculating businessman. he doesn’t ever coast through deals on the stark name, but he doesn’t like. avoid using it either. out of all his children, legal or good, he gets along the best with barbrey, brandon’s wife. rickard sent all of his children to a upper crust southron boarding school over the school years and then the “summer” (i don’t know how westerosi school years would work yet okay but imagine an equivalent of an american summer vacation) he sends brandon to stay with some friends in barrowtown, where he ended up falling in love with barbrey ryswell. he dies around the same time that bran is born of cancer. 

lyarra stark, nee flint, is dedicated. she’s the one who kept up her husband’s squeaky clean public face, and she was always doing double time for brandon. when lyanna ran off with rhaegar and then came back with a baby to live with ned and cat for a few years, she was doing triple time. lyarra has a sharp wit and is very ambitious. she thinks that all of her children but brandon made a mistake when they chose not to go into the family business and she doesn’t let any of them forget it. she loves her grandchildren, even though she dislikes the circumstances of jon’s birth and thinks that ned might not have gone into police work if he didn’t marry a woman who went into law. 

brandon and barbrey stark are the “someone will die.” “of fun!” couple. brandon is big, boisterous, and friendly and barbrey is hilarious, if you have a cruel and biting sense of humor. barbrey is devoted and loving, if you’re her family, and she’s disapproving of anyone who hasn’t earned her love. she and brandon don’t have children because brandon travels so much for work and barbrey doesn’t want them, but they love on ned and lyanna’s enough you’d think they were their own. brandon takes over the company when rickard dies and babrey is a higher up in her own father’s. she and roose bolton are frequent business partners. 

in less fun news, barbrey’s sister, bethany, was married to roose bolton. barbrey and roose remain good friends until she attends the funeral of the man’s other son after he was killed resisting arrest for serial killing, torture, lots of not great ramsayish things because barbrey’s like “well roose is kinda a dick but it’s not like he wanted the kid to be like that. gotta go support the guy so he feels less bad” and gets a really bad vibe about the whole deal. she cuts off contact after that. 

when lyanna stark was young, her mother and father were always talking about different businessmen she could marry and how she could come north and take over her portion of the family business, and lyanna felt suffocated. instead of coming back up to winterfell after her high school graduation, she runs off with her married poetry teacher, rhaegar viserion. it’s about a two year crazy ride of a romance, and lyanna ends up with a baby and the realization that rhaegar is terrible for her. she moves back up north to winterfell with ned, who was in the midst of a falling out with his parents over his choice to forego college and go into police work and his choice to marry so young, catelyn, and their young son robb. lyanna lived with ned for about four years (seeing sansa’s birth) before she died of cancer. this results in a few year long custody battle with jon’s father to keep him in winterfell. the custody arrangement ends up with jon spending major holidays of the seven and summer vacations with rhaegar and his siblings but all the rest of the year with ned and cat. 

benjen made his way north to work for an expedition company north of the remains of the wall. he has not married and does not plan to. he dated a few women back in college, but it wasn’t really his thing. he tried dating a few men later on, but it wasn’t his thing either. benjen’s just kind of a lone wolf. he’ll spend holidays down in winterfell, and sometimes ned and cat spend the children up for a week or so at a time for a little break and because benjen loves his niblings

the tullys! depending on the way that i’m feeling on a given day they might be named tully and just be so distantly related to the tullys of riverrun that they can’t even prove a connection, “blackfish” as the children of a riverlands knight who admired brynden tully, or just “fish” because that’s a real last name and the idea of it makes me giggle. the family grew up in maidenpool.

hoster is a former physician well respected in the communtiy. he and his wife, a surgeon, made quite a nice living for themselves, and now hoster is in hospital administration, running the one at the university of maidenpool, one of the most respected institutions in the country. 

minisa whent met hoster at the beginning of med school and the two have been together ever since. becoming a surgeon was difficult for minisa because of all of the obstacles that were against her, but she never let any of it stop her. she was said to have the “steadiest hands in the riverlands” and her children remember her for competent as a professional as well as for being kind and compassionate as a mother. minisa died in a car accident when catelyn was fifteen, and hoster was never the same since. 

brynden was a college athlete, a pro athlete, and then a sports announcer. when catelyn was seventeen, he and his boyfriend were outed to the world and he became one of the most prominent gay celebrities, paving the way for more openly gay men in sports. he was always exceptionally close to his niblings, and once they had children, he doted on them just the same.

lysa was always a little bit unstable. she spent much of her life pining after petyr baelish, their neighbor across the street who was always in love with cat but never looked her way once. when she tried to talk to him about her affections, he laughed in her face the same way that cat had to him. when petyr moved away to king’s landing for college, he never came back and never spoke to her again, though catelyn apparently heard from him lots. 

she flitted from interest to interest, always trying to find something that she was better at than catelyn. she took up a job at an after school program for primarily underprivileged kids, and while she wasn’t good at working with groups, she found that she was very good at making individual members feel loved and confident in ways that she never had as a child. she decided to start up her own home day care with high rates that only let in a small amount of kids, so that they could have more personalized attention. 

she never had any luck with romantic relationships, but after deciding that she wanted a child of her own, she went through the insemination process and had robin. unlike canon robin, this robin almost never lacked peers to interact with between his mom’s daycare kids, his winterfell cousins and his maidenpool cousins, he never lacked for friends. and between his grandparents, his cousins, and his aunts and uncles, robin ever lacked for family or love. 

edmure and roslin met at college. while hoster had been trying to pressure edmure into medical school, he met roslin in his intro to psychology classes and fell in love with the subject as he fell in love with her. roslin is the daughter of, of course, walder frey, by one of his later wives. walder is like a donald trump figure in all the grossesness that entails. roslin became interested in discovering why people act the way that they do (and why that way is so often Bad) and how to try to help people like, not do that. discovering a man who was so earnest, true, and kind was a breath of fresh air. edmure only completed his bachelors and ended up going into public relations at a company in maidenpool but roslin went all the way to get her doctorate and start practicing psychiatry and helping people that way. they had three daughters, minisa who’s rickon’s age, bethany who’s three years younger, and celia who’s two years younger than that.