Petyr and Catelyn; One big tragedy

[Tyrell_like_Squirrel]

Okay, I admit it. I am too lazy to put together a well researched theory on this, backed up by textual evidence. Mostly, I want to hear other peoples thoughts and see if I'm just crazy.

I do NOT believe that by the time we meet her, Catelyn has any romantic feelings for Petyr Baelish at all. That said, based on several different lines of thinking, I do have a few thoughts on Catelyn's relationship with Petyr.

 

We know that Martin loves the unreliable narrator, a fact he has commented on several times, not to mention you can see it plainly when reading through the books. Assuming R+L=J, Ned seems to be able to bury his true thoughts from the reader. So we know that sometimes characters have thoughts, feelings, and memories that are kept somewhat secret from the reader. At least within reason. Cersei never thinks about sleeping with Meryn Trant, but I think it's safe to assume that's not true lol.

 

We know that Catelyn is a character devoted to duty, in a way even more then Ned is devoted to honor. Again, I'm not quoting specifics here, but she does mention in ACOK and ASOS that she was always the dutiful child. Her own actions demonstrate this. She marries the man her father chooses, transfers her dedication to her husband, obeys the patriarchal system to the point where she feels like she can't correct Robb since he's a "man grown." Point being, Catelyn does what is required of her, at the very least in regards to her father.

 

We know that Catelyn has buried memories of Petyr away. We first witness it in the Vardis/Bronn fight in AGOT when she starts thinking about the duel between Petyr and Brandon. She continues to have flashbacks to this duel, to memories of Petyr, despite having only seeing him once near the beginning of AGOT. During these memories she seems strangely detached, she relates the information but doesn't always seem to give her feelings about the information. I don't ever recall her thinking in her own POV that Petyr was "like a brother." She has a memory about Petry rescuing her and Lysa in a dense fog. She doesn't relate how this memory is relevent to the situation at hand, or how she felt about it. Could be nothing, or maybe something more...

 

So my point is; Is it at all possible that Catelyn had feelings for Petyr, but her dedication to her duty won out in the end? 

I don't really believe that she slept with him or anything like that, but there's a part of me that wonders if Catelyn might have felt something for him. Obviously after years of marriage to Ned, and burying away her memories of Petyr (She mentions burning a letter he wrote her) she no longer holds these feelings.

But I believe the reason Catelyn keeps flashing back to her childhood with Petyr is because things were more complicated then she would like to remember.

Perhaps it wasn't just the forced abortion that made Lysa krazy. Maybe feelings of jealousy for Cat? Imagine, the older sister has everything that Lysa wants, husband, children, love. What if she held feelings for Petyr too, but threw them away for her duty? Would that make Lysa all the more desperate since she now had a chance? Or was it just unrequited love for Petyr, who in turn had unrequited love for Cat?

 There's no reason why the surface explanation we get in the books isn't true, but I like to speculate cause it's interesting.

Now in regards greater narrative purpose, it might come into play in Sansa's story. If Littlefinger revealed that Catelyn did care for him, but chose to follow Westeros fuedal system over their "love" (whatever that may have been) then it transforms him from a entitled douchebag who took getting friendzoned waaaaay too hard, into an entitled douchebag who feels cheated out of the one thing he wanted.

And now he works to destroy the Westeros feudal system that cheated him out of the one thing he wanted, so he can have everything. Every player in his tragedy will be punished, the Starks, the Tullys, the Arryns, etc for ruining his dreams, and Sansa will be the replacement for what he was supposed to have.

 

This also plays into Sansa's major thematic arc, that of a disillusioned romantic. Sansa believed that life was like a song, and then had all she loved torn from her. Perhaps Petyr felt the same way, but he let it turn him into a monster. Sandor Clegane also has the disillusioned romantic thing going on, with Gregor and the Knight toy. I wonder if he will come back into Sansa's story to complete this triumvirate of people who see Westeros and it's "morals" for what it truely is.

 

Hopefully Sansa will choose kindness, her defining feature, instead of Petyr's path of hate. Maybe she will redeem the sins of her mother, or to put it another way, learn from her mother's mistake. After all, she's already learned that she can't trust the system as it exists, maybe she'll try to change it? just a little? Maybe Sandor will find his "true knighthood" and subsequent redemption through her?

 

Just my thoughts and rambles.

[Buried Treasure]

Littlefinger already is the 'entitled douchebag who feels cheated out of the one thing he wanted'. To his knowledge he wasn't friendzoned, but Cat slept with him one time then completely threw him over and gave her favour to the man her father wanted her to marry. He's wrong, it was Lysa he slept with and LF got them mixed up because he was drunk, but the character does actually have the extra flavouring to his motivations that you suggest. OTOH, I don't think it was any more complex for Cat, she only ever saw Petyr as a fondly held foster brother.

[Danelle]

I don't think that LF plans to destroy the system. If he really wanted to accomplish that, he would try to undermine not just the Lannisters and Starks but also their positions in society. He doesn't seem to oppose the position of the Hand of the King, he merely tries to exterminate a Hand, who is a threat to him. He had a grudge against Ned and Tyrion, he despised them for who they were, not for their status.

 

I don't think that in Cat's POV, were are given hints that she had feelings for LF.

She always regarded him as a brother, it is likely that since she was the eldest Tully child and she was close to her father, she was able to comprehend from an early age that LF had a low status in westerosi society.

Something similar occurs during the Hand's tourney. Jeyne Poole expresses her wish to marry Lord Beric Dondarrion, but Sansa ponders that while Jeyne is merely a steward's daughter, Lord Beric is a member of a very prestigious House.

I believe that Cat does mention kissing LF, but she never considered it to be nothing more than a game.

[RedShirt47]

Just because his noble status wasn't high enough for him to arrange the marriage he wanted is not a tragedy. Baelish could have gotten a good marriage with a lower noble house or a rich merchant house.  The one girl he wanted was beyond his reach and "oh, woe is me...". He blames the system, but Cat didn't want to marry Littlefinger. He blames the system for not forcing an arranged marriage for him (when it did for Ned).

Ned didn't really get the marriage he wanted either, if the rumours of him and Ashara are true but he made the best of it (it helped that Catelyn and he were a good match).

Most people suffer an unrequited love encounter in their lives, not everyone you desire will desire you in return. These are almost never a tragedy, just how live is.

[finger]

I think LF and Cat shared a past, but when the story starts, they were over that. There might be memories of unfulfilled love, resent, whatever, but it was not what moved their acts any  more.

LF acts for more earthly reasons: fear, greed, ambition,...

As for Cat, my take is that she acts out of haughtiness. She's Lord Stark's wife, Lord Tully's daughter, she claims homage, she doesn't bear a slight. She's dutiful but, at the same time, she makes stupid mistakes, as the Tyrion affair, that was the most blattant cause of the war.

[FuzzyJAM]

Nothing remotely suggests Cat ever had any romantic feelings for Littlefinger at all.  And it would be kind of odd if, after a reveal that Littlefinger was mistaken in his idea that he slept with Cat (it was actually Lysa) we then had another reveal that, yes, he was mistaken that time, but he was right about other times, and Cat and Lysa both got it wrong and Littlefinger got it wrong in one way but not totally.  I guess it's not utterly impossible, but it'd be a rather odd reveal.

Even if they ever did have romantic feelings for each other, it wouldn't be a tragedy.  A couple teenagers fooling around and then falling apart is not a tragedy.  Petyr was 14 when he last saw Cat, and never had any interaction with her until Game.  Cat seems to have been very happy in her married life from the off, doesn't seem like she was upset so no tragedy there.  Petyr seemingly was upset, yes, but if a 30 year old man can't move on from his teenage crush that's really him just being an idiot, not a tragedy.  He has far more cause to be upset about the aborted child, though whether he was or not we don't know - it wouldn't exactly be characteristic if he cared.

[Winter's Knight]

I think LF and Cat shared a past, but when the story starts, they were over that. There might be memories of unfulfilled love, resent, whatever, but it was not what moved their acts any  more.

LF acts for more earthly reasons: fear, greed, ambition,...

As for Cat, my take is that she acts out of haughtiness. She's Lord Stark's wife, Lord Tully's daughter, she claims homage, she doesn't bear a slight. She's dutiful but, at the same time, she makes stupid mistakes, as the Tyrion affair, that was the most blattant cause of the war.

*sigh*

. Did Cat start the WotFK?

No. Stannis and Jon’s discovery of the incest meant that war would be inevitable. Further, both LF and Varys were looking to create friction between Houses to destabilize the realm for each of their divergent ends. The rapid escalation of tension to the outbreak of war is largely LF’s doing. He had Lysa poison Jon and write to Cat saying it was Cersei in order to keep the truth of the incest closeted for a while longer, as well as to pit the Starks against the Lannisters.

 

The major causes for the war are the incest and the discovery of incest, LF and Varys’ meddling. The defenestration of Bran, and Cersei’s subsequent attempts to keep the incest hidden (knowing she would have to get rid of Robert and saying as much to her father, who also has interest in disposing Robert to become Hand once more) were the next layer of causes. These factors primed the situation such that any spark would ignite increasingly open hostilities, that is, conflict would be nearly unavoidable.

 

 

[Maxxine]

I've actually had this thought too. I'm not sure if Cat had romantic feelings for Petyr, but to me there seems to be something more complicated going on there than just he was just like a little brother to her. Just by the way she thinks about him and how often she thinks about him when he is completely irrelevant to what's going on around her. However, I think if this relationship affects the plot in any way moving forward it will be because if/when Petyr finds out that he never slept with Cat. This issue is really interesting to me because Petyr is technically not lying when he tells people he took Cat's virginity. He's just mistaken. I feel like the fact that he truly believes that he could've had Cat if not for how low-born he was has had an effect on the type of person he is. So how would finding out that he never slept with her and she was never interested affect him? The only problem with this is everyone who knows the actual truth is dead so it's unclear if how he would find out.

[kimim]

LF is like Iago. Yeah, he has a motive, but not enough of one to explain all that he does. He's basically a plot device, the trickster who can't fail until GRRM needs him to fail.

I doubt that Cat was in love with him. I think she had a crush on Brandon Stark and her sense of duty comes in when she agrees to marry Ned soon after losing Brandon. I think Petyr was just a trusted friend.

[Cas Stark]

I don't see anything in the text to show that Cat ever had any romantic feelings for LF.  I agree it seems like she may have had something of a crush on Brandon.

[JonCon's Red Beard]

Most people suffer an unrequited love encounter in their lives, not everyone you desire will desire you in return. These are almost never a tragedy, just how live is.

It's not just the case of an unrequited love. It's that, in their society, no one (or very very few) marry for love. Marriages are for alliances. LF wanted something that wasn't going to happen for him like never.

[Nerevanin]

I don't ever recall her thinking in her own POV that Petyr was "like a brother."

Catelyn IV, AGOT:

He was my father’s ward. We grew up together in Riverrun. I thought of him as a brother, but his feelings for me were... more than brotherly.

Of course, Catelyn can say one thing and think otherwise but I think that this is not the case. One thing I'd like to mention is that Catelyn is four or five years older than Petyr. That means that when she was 18, he was only 13. Imo, this is quite a big gap when it comes to children or teenagers. Lysa on the other hand was practically the same age as LF. To me it seems natural that LF fell in love with Catelyn who was older and whom he looked up to, while Catelyn treated him as her little brother.

[Jaak]

However, I think if this relationship affects the plot in any way moving forward it will be because if/when Petyr finds out that he never slept with Cat. This issue is really interesting to me because Petyr is technically not lying when he tells people he took Cat's virginity. He's just mistaken. I feel like the fact that he truly believes that he could've had Cat if not for how low-born he was has had an effect on the type of person he is. So how would finding out that he never slept with her and she was never interested affect him? The only problem with this is everyone who knows the actual truth is dead so it's unclear if how he would find out.

Sansa heard Lysa´s confession. Petyr did not (he entered later).

[Maxxine]

Sansa heard Lysa´s confession. Petyr did not (he entered later).

I don't understand your point. I know Petyr doesn't know. That's why I said it would be interesting to see how this would affect him if/when he found out. I guess Sansa could tell him but would he believe it.

[kimim]

 

I don't understand your point. I know Petyr doesn't know. That's why I said it would be interesting to see how this would affect him if/when he found out. I guess Sansa could tell him but he would he believe it.

I think a part of him would. LF has had the best luck of any character so far, but he's going to go down eventually. His finding out that his dearest memory is false, that he was used, tricked, outplayed by Lysa could be the beginning of that.

[bemused]

I don't understand your point. I know Petyr doesn't know. That's why I said it would be interesting to see how this would affect him if/when he found out. I guess Sansa could tell him but would he believe it.

I'm not at all sure Petyr doesn't know. Look at the way Lysa prattles on to Sansa about it.. I know she snapped, but still... She and Petyr have been carrying on for years, and she was supremely jealous of Cat. For me, it's a stretch to think that she wouldn't have revealed the fact that she was the one who came to Petyr.. not Cat .

Even if the revelation was inadvertent, implied in her declarations of how she cared, not Cat .. she did this or that for him, not Cat .. and so on. She's so needy, I can't believe she wouldn't have said something that would allow LF to put two and two together.

When he realised it , that would be one more black mark against Cat .. one more reason to cause her pain.

[Jaak]

I don't understand your point. I know Petyr doesn't know. That's why I said it would be interesting to see how this would affect him if/when he found out. I guess Sansa could tell him but would he believe it.

Sansa is privy to a few details that only Petyr and "Cat" knew. Sansa was not in position to make up a lie with these details. She could have heard it from Lysa... or possibly Cat. But in truth, real Cat had no idea of these details.

But seriously: would the Cat that Petyr knew have blabbed the details of how she lost her virginity to her 11 year old daughter of another man?

[Good Guy Garlan]

The only tragedy is that a grown ass man can't get over his childhood crush