Lil sketchy

Hi again~ I've got three questions if that's alright? =>How do you feel of Catelyn's dislike of & treatment of Jon?What is your opinion on Renly and his decision to crown himself rather than stand with Stannis?What do you think of Edmure Tully and hoe Robb & Blackfish blamed him for their plan (that they never bother informing him of) failing and how they convinced him to marry to fix Robb's on mistake? I fee like Edmure was treated unfairly.

1) How do you feel of Catelyn’s dislike of & treatment of Jon? I like Catelyn, but I am critical of her behavior in this respect. 

On the one hand I have sympathy for her—society makes her dependent on her husband and places most of her worth as a human being on her capacity to birth trueborn children, so to an extent I get why she cannot bring herself to openly confront ned about it, and why she has so much anxiety over jon “stealing” her children’s birthright (also, as a woman, as someone who’s not a mother and feels occasionally the pressure to become one, I rage against the idea that a woman “must” feel a motherly instinct by default regardless of circumstances, and if she doesn’t then she is a bad person). On the other hand, Catelyn’s treatment of Jon is objectively inexcusable. It’s not limited to not being able to feel affection for the kid, it’s downright dehumanizing (she refuses to call him by his name, makes sure he knows he’s unwanted there, makes him literally scared of her, she basically inflicts all the damage she can get away with under Ned’s nose). Catelyn had every right to be pissed at Ned for forcing his bastard on her without an explanation, but she should have never put the blame on JON. Jon was a child, had no responsibility in the choices any of the adults made, and deserved to be raised in a healthy, loving environment just as much as his siblings did, end of the story. 

2) What is your opinion on Renly and his decision to crown himself rather than stand with Stannis? Extremely poor. Renly had zero legitimate reasons to proclaim himself as king. What he did was an arrogant, selfish move based on an “I’m the stronger and cooler one with the bigger army” logic that, if successful, could have set a TERRIBLE precedent for the realm.

3) What do you think of Edmure Tully and how Robb & Blackfish blamed him for their plan? Edmure was given specific orders by his king (who didn’t owe him an explanation), and decided to override them to prove himself as a bold leader. But this is war, coordination is crucial, and Martin immediately frames Edmure’s decision as shortsighted and doomed to fail from every perspective (a sympathetic but bad motivation; a poor judgment of people; a disregard for Catelyn’s attempts to make him reason; a bad track record on the battlefield). I like Edmure, and I think his desire to prove himself was genuine and not motivated by malice or selfishness, but he made a mistake. (more details on this post)

Also! Do you think it ever occurred to Tywin that having Cersei marry Loris could backfire? Like if she had done so and given birth to a child from him with dark hair, wouldn’t that just prove that her children weren’t Robert’s with how dark hair is such a strong trait in the family?You’d think he’d try marrying her to a blond haired man just in case.

Cersei x Loras is show canon only, in the books Loras joins the Kingsguard and Tywin considers various candidates:

“So long as you remain unwed, you allow Stannis to spread his disgusting slander,” Lord Tywin told his daughter. “You must have a new husband in your bed, to father children on you. […] You will marry and you will breed. Every child you birth makes Stannis more a liar. […]  I have considered the Redwyne twins, Theon Greyjoy, Quentyn Martell, and a number of others. But our alliance with Highgarden was the sword that broke Stannis. It should be tempered and made stronger. Ser Loras has taken the white and Ser Garlan is wed to one of the Fossoways, but there remains the eldest son, the boy they scheme to wed to Sansa Stark.“

the *chosen one* is Willas, but Olenna nixes it so there’s never an actual betrothal, though Tywin remains determined until the end to find another husband for his daughter. But, book and show canon alike, he is clearly not concerned about Cersei possibly having babies with different hair color this time around, because in his mind the twincest simply doesn’t exist. He’s in deep denial—his children? His golden twins? No fucking way, it’s too humiliating, Stannis is a liar and a fraud, it must be. (whether he intimately, or on some subconscious level, knew it to be true, we will never know because we don’t have his pov.) He’s not thinking rationally, as proven by his belief that if he gets to make Cersei behave and she pops out more children, the rumors will magically go away. At any rate, history is made by winners, and Tywin is determined to win this game. Once they’ve won, if he says that the incest is false, then the incest is false.

keep also in mind that the hair color thing is how Jon Arryn first and Ned later came to solve the puzzle, not actual evidence of the incest (which can’t be proven for sure, unless one of the parts involved confesses it). Neither it was the source of the rumor or the reason it spread like wildfire—prior to Jon & Ned’s investigation nobody seemed to find the kids’ hair color suspicious at all, and it took Ned an examination of the entire Baratheon/Lannister genealogy AND an offhand but enlightening remark by Sansa to finally see the truth. Yes, Stannis planned to use Edric Storm as “proof” that Robert’s true children look a lot like Robert himself, but this is an age when there are no pictures, photographs, or accurate visual media to spread information with, and MOST people have no idea how the royal family looks like, at all. Even Stannis admitted that showing Edric Storm to each and every person in the realm was not feasible.

Cersei having a dark haired child from a man who isn’t Robert (or even a Baratheon) would be little proof in the eyes of people who have no concept of genetics and (especially the nobleborn) understand that claiming illegitimacy on the only basis of physical resemblance or lack thereof is a slippery slope. In two years, everybody could claim that (x) lord’s son and heir isn’t trueborn because he looks nothing like his father! In other words, hair color can’t be used consistently as factual evidence of adultery.