What, exactly, is wrong with Lysa?

[Malcolm of House Tucker]

What is currently wrong with Lysa is that she is splattered, in multiple unpleasant chunks, across a mountainside.

[Annara Snow]

It's talking to fucking walls around here sometimes.

Yes she could have left, just like Tyrion could have, in the dead of night, without money, nowhere to go, alone and defenceless. It's not like she could join the Watch or go offer her sword somewhere else like her uncle.

Of course there's a choice, but when you say someone accepts and thus deserves their abusebecause the alternative was death/poverty/living as a fugitive, it's victim blaming.

It's like when people blame Sansa for not "fighting her way out of King's Landing". :bang: Yes, it really works like that. Even if she managed to run away, it would be a great idea... if she wanted to get herself raped, if not also killed. Not to mention having no source of income and no skills useful to a commoner and the most likely "career choice" to become a prostitute.

Then what was the point of writing.

"She cannot leave for Oldtown like Pate, join or cross the narrow sea, a wandering singer."

Do you think these people aren't alone and defenseless, without money and nowhere to go?

No, I believe Shae ran away from her household in these conditions as well.

So, Lysa should have ran away and become a prostitute? Wonderful choices. Thanks for proving my and Winter's Knight point.

[Sansa_Stark]

Jesus Christ people.

I never said Lysa should have run away and become a prostitute. I only gave Shae as an example that women can run away as well and usually its not safe.

What WK is saying is apparently high born women have shit lives in some ways compared to peasant men because the latter can just run off and become knights and singers.

My point was, that was untrue.

WK responded that if Lysa ran away she would be alone and defenseless. My point is that its the same for peasant men. Not all of them have skills and very few of them can fight. Running away in Westeros is shitty situation for everyone.

What about that is so hard to understand?

[Ice and fire freak]

Some of these posts seem a little odd to me,of course she couldn't run away,she's has an heir to bring up to protect the Vale which is currently her position because she killed off her husband Jon Arryn.

Seriously she's been through some terrible shit that we know of and there's probably some stuff we don't know of,what's the Tansy thing that Hoster mentioned on his death bed.

Despite all this,we can call her crazy,I guess nowadays there would be some bracket to put her in,she was very calculating and the thought of being with little finger made her do some bad shit.

Turning her back on her family was a mistake but is one that is understandable as Cat was busy bringing up a family and they were so far apart so on that score neither party make time to visit each other.

In short plenty of folk have been treated badly but it doesn't make em commit murder for their own ends.

[Tywin Manderly]

Seriously she's been through some terrible shit that we know of and there's probably some stuff we don't know of,what's the Tansy thing that Hoster mentioned on his death bed.

The "Tansy thing" that Hoster mentioned on his death bed is the abortifacient he administered to Lysa and without her knowing that she was taking an abortifacient and which caused her to loose her child with Littlefinger.

[Bonifer Tasty]

It seems to me that there's something in the blood. Lysa and Catelyn both go insane after losing too many of their children.

Don't forget, their mother is a Whent - cursed somehow by Harrenhall. Generally the Whent women are not particularly fertile (even when married to Freys). How Minissa Whent Tully got around this is anyone's guess, although she did miscarry several times after Lysa was born and before bringing Edmure to term. Perhaps the ultimate instability of Catelyn and Lysa was inherited...by genes (physical) or by curse (metaphysical). Do we have future instabilities from the surviving children to look forward to? There is crazy Robert Arryn, of course, as well as murderous Arya, sociopathic Sansa, and wild untamable Rickon to consider.

[TepidHands]

Ye gods. BECAUSETHEPATRIARCHY!!!1! isn't a diagnosis; it's a polemic. Even if Lysa had convinced her father to let her keep the Littlefetus, who's to say Petyr wanted to marry HER?

We can go all 21st century on her tale of woe, or look at it this way: Lysa was married off to the Lord of the Vale, by all accounts a lovely place, who later became Hand of the King. Cat had to take the second son of Winterfell, a cold, remote outpost where they didn't even worship the gods she did.

[Sansa_Stark]

Ye gods. BECAUSETHEPATRIARCHY!!!1! isn't a diagnosis; it's a polemic. Even if Lysa had convinced her father to let her keep the Littlefetus, who's to say Petyr wanted to marry HER?

We can go all 21st century on her tale of woe, or look at it this way: Lysa was married off to the Lord of the Vale, by all accounts a lovely place, who later became Hand of the King. Cat had to take the second son of Winterfell, a cold, remote outpost where they didn't even worship the gods she did.

Actually, whenever Cat married it was to be the lord, so Brandon was heir and she was to marry him, and then Eddard took his place and he was the lord at the time and therefore him being a 2nd son didn't matter

Now, you can argue that Eddard wasn't as handsome, tall or strong as Brandon, but compared to a possible infertile old man, that's really nothing.

[Mom Like Stoneheart]

Cersei was perfectly happy to marry Robert, till he started raping her.

Perfectly happy as long as she could keep her brother/lover at her side. Cersei was a sociopath from the word go.

Maybe Hoster Tully aborted that child because he finally an inkling to what kind of person LF was going to be. Maybe he saw the manipulative beast forming and did not want his daughter near LF. Remember Cat said he was sneaky and cunning from a youth. Maybe Tully didn't want his daughter near the ungrateful pig that tried to destroy the match between Cat with Brandon Stark .A match that seemed like a genuine love match. Maybe Tully did not want LF with Lysa because after all that Tully had done in fostering LF he goes and knocks up his baby girl.

[Sansa_Stark]

Cersei was perfectly happy to marry Robert, till he started raping her.

Perfectly happy as ling as she could keep her brother/lover at her side. Cersei was a sociopath from the word go.

Truedat. People like to blame Robert for her failings. But you must consider these points.

1. She killed Melara as a child. A ten year murderer possibly out of spite(Melara wanted Jaime) and to prevent a prophecy.

2. She used to pinch Tyrion. Once she did it because she heard that Baelor imprisoned his sisters. The other she twisted his penis because he "killed her mother."

3. According to Oberyn Martell she said "And you're just a milk cow, you can't tell me what to do. Be quiet or I'll have my father cut your tongue out." She said this to Tyrion's wet nurse.

4. In her dream, when she visited Maggy, the woman was sleeping. So Cersei just kicks her bed, wakes her up and when Maggy doesn't want to talk, Cersei threatens to have her whipped.

Cersei was evil from the start.

[DaarioKnowsBest]

She got LittleFingered, by all accounts Lysa used to be beautiful and normal like Cat.

[LordStoneheart]

She got LittleFingered, by all accounts Lysa used to be beautiful and normal like Cat.

oh my seven gods, if this wasn't kind of pushing it I would want this to become the most used buzzword on this forum.

[MotherMerciless]

littlefingered made me laugh.

I honestly think that was wrong with Lysa was her whole life. Simple as that.

[ARYa_Nym]

No.

This is even before Lysa had stress from her horrible marriage and betrayal from her father.

"Last night I dreamed of that time Lysa and I got lost while riding back from Seagard. Do you remember? That strange fog came up and we fell behind the rest of the party. Everything was grey, and I could not see a foot past the nose of my horse. We lost the road. The branches of the trees were like long skinny arms reaching out to grab us as we passed. Lysa started to cry and when I shouted the fog seemed to swallow the snow. But Petyr knew where we were, and he rode back and found us."

Cat has been made of tougher stuff than Lysa since youth apparently.

Lack of courage isn't a symptom of anything though to my knowledge so it has no bearing on mental instability.

You are correct. But the larger point still stands. Had there been peace, Ned and Cat would've chosen his bride-to-be.

I don't get this whole "Cat went insane" argument. Cat was never insane.

Anyway, Lysa was a great match up until she ruined herself. Hoster made the beat out of a bad situation.

It's foreshadowed when Cat says that she would go mad if anything happened to Rob. Then during her last moments the Freys mention her instability.

[Mom Like Stoneheart]

What is wrong with Lysa is, she wants what she wants . NOW.

She is spoiled and selfish.

It's all about her, her, her.

She whines, remember when this happened it me, it's fault.

[GinesthoiOfIce]

Life's done that her. At the beginning, she was just a teenage girl with a big crush on Petyr, slightly obsessed with him (Like IIRC, when she counted the number of times he danced with Catelyn). She was over-sensitive and was jealous of Catelyn but nothing out of the norm or anything.

What she became in her latter year is just the result of her over-sensitiveness taking over her and making her paranoid.

Hoster, I think, was concious as shown by his remorses, of the part he had in making his daughter unhappy.

In this case, the Blackfish's words in AGOT (p.366) are the best : " The Lysa who came back from King's Landing is not the same girl who went South when her husband was named Hand. Those years were hard for her. [...] Your sister is afraid,child"

[EstEst]

I forgot to comment on this before. This kind of argument is absolute bullshit. "Oh, so who cares if you have no sexual agency and no freedom at all to decide how you're going to live or who you will marry and what happens to your own body, and who cares if you are getting raped every night by someone who's been legally given the right over your body, or if your baby gets aborted against your will - at least you aren't starving!" :bang: Seriously?!

You could use the same kind of logic to keep anyone in line and argue that nobody has any right to rebel against any kind of injustice or want any kind of a right. Hey, so what if the armies are burning and pillaging and raping and killing your families, at least you aren't starving! Hey, so what if you are starving, at least there's no war within the walls of the city! Hey, so what if you are almost starving and the armies are raping and killing your families, at least you have the freedom to marry who you like, unlike those highborn people, so don't complain! etc.

"It's a custom of their world" is one of the most absurd and most annoying and offensive arguments out there. It's like when people say it's OK when women are getting abused by their husbands and families and stoned for 'adultery', but it's OK because "it's their custom/culture". Or when 8-year old girls are being forced to marry adult me - one such girl recently died of internal bleeding as a result of 'first wedding night' - but it's OK because "it's their custom"?!

There are also customs of female circumcision, of sewing together vaginal lips without proper hygiene and re-sewing them if there is infection and inflammation. It is a custom in Westeros to kill a baby like Tyrion and it is a custom in Slaver Bay (just like say in ancient Rome) to use children for sex.

Dear girls, (or women, sorry I don't know), what you use in your posts are called "logical fallacies". Mostly you use two kinds of them: misplaced generalization, and appeal to emotions. That means that you take one of my (or someone else's) statement about some particular event or idea, extend it to a wider cause, and argue against that generalized cause instead of the original one. Most often, using emotionally charged generalizations. Your phrase "You could use the same kind of logic to defend <this and that>" ("this and that" being a generalization or misrepresentation of the original idea) is very definitive of this kind of fallacy.

Example: you imply that my statement "It's okay that half of nobility have to marry out by their parents' orders, since it's their custom" is equal to the statement "It's okay that the women get abused and/or stoned for adultery, since it's their custom". That's not what I was saying.

Another example: you imply that my statement "Lysa's being forced to marry Jon Arryn was caused by her having got pregnant" is equal to "8-year old girls being forced to marry old men is okay". That's also not what I wrote.

More example: you imply that my overall opinion may be extended to the "who cares if your baby gets aborted against your will - at least you are not starving". That's plain wrong, since in the very post you quoted I stated that I don't regard an inflicted abortion a normal thing; but you omitted this part of quotation which is too one of logical fallacies.

In the part of your post that I made bolded in color you're arguing against the question that was not touched in my posts at all. I guess from this text that you argue against the idea of smallfolk generally living better than the nobles. I also guess that your phrases are inspired by the quote from TheFrostedKing ending with "become a peasant". Well, in respect to his (ironical) suggestion your paragraph is a vast generalization too, I think you see that yourself.

A list of things I never wrote about, in particular or in general, includes female circumcision, killing dwarf babies, being pillaged and raped, and children being used for sex.

Please, in future argue fairly and don't place your own words in my mouth.

[WeddinGuest]

Ah, the old "21st century morals vs Westeros morals" debate. While I certainly am not in the "harshly judge the Westerosi with no regard at all for culural differences" camp, I think the idea some posters seem to embrace, that per "Westerosi morals", Lysa should have just accepted the status quo and resigned herself to being a piece of chattel and a brood mare with no sexual agency, is going too far, especially if the conclusion is that Lysa's ultimate sin was not (1) murdering her husband or (2) abandoning the Tullys/Starks, but her rejecting the status quo in ANY way.

Okay, to those who think it's cheating to bring in RL examples of women being abused and being denied agency. All right, how about using in-world examples, then? I think that if you're going to judge Lysa by "Westerosi morals", and accept that women in Westeros have no agency, and that any woman who claims any control over her life is an evil "witch", then you must judge EVERY woman by "Westerosi morals" in order to remain consistent. If that's the case, then you have to agree with Sybell Spicer (who, much like Hoster, tricked her child into drinking moon tea) that Jeyne Westerling was being a disobedient "willful child" when she refused to give up her crown and dared to proclaim her love for Robb in public. You have to say Sansa should have just had sex with Tyrion, had his babies, and dutifully gone to the executioner's block instead of daring to escape her forced marriage. That Dany should have dutifully gone to Vaes Dothrak and faded into obscurity as one of the dosh khaleen,

You even have to say that Jeyne Poole should have just submitted to Ramsay as his dutiful wife and tolerated his abuse, that she should have thanked her lucky stars that a mere steward's daughter got to marry the heir to a Lord Paramount instead of being stuck in a whorehouse all her life, and that she was an evil bitch for running away from him. That she'd have deserved the death penalty if she'd actually killed Ramsay. IF you're being consistent. Because per "Westerosi morals", there really isn't much difference between her situation and Lysa's. Indeed, numerous noblemen AND women close their eyes to what's happening to Jeyne. If you're really going to use "Westerosi morals" to judge women, then Jeyne is the villian, not the victim. And if you say "but Jeyne was an innocent girl, while Lysa was a scheming bitch", well, just because a woman is a "bitch" doesn't mean she can't be a victim, too. (Same with Cersei).

The other point I'd like to make is that, of all the principal female characters, none of them actually "accept the status quo and accept that they have no agency". Brienne doesn't, she actually beats up and drives away the man her father chose to be her husband. Arya certainly doesn't. Sansa doesn't. Cersei doesn't. Alys Karstark doesn't. The Queen of Thorns doesn't (not only does she help engineer the PW, she escaped betrothal to a Targ earlier in life). And while Margaery, on the surface, seems to be just a piece of chattel for the Tyrells, she seems to actually want to be Queen of her own accord, not just because her family told her to be. The one who might come closest is Catelyn, and even she arrests Tyrion of her own accord, and of course releases Jaime, and the undead version of her actually winds up leading men. Now, you can certainly disagree with the MEANS Lysa uses to assert her own agency, but to say she had no right to assert her agency AT ALL, is to hold her to a standard you're not holding even other women in the story to. Just because she's a "crazy bitch"? Do I have to point out how biased this is?

Also, Hoster Tully himself comes to regret his actions. I think Lysa's story (as well as LF) echoes a motif of powerful people assuming they can get away with doing anything to the relatively powerless, only to find their past actions coming back to haunt them when the formerly powerless assume power. (Ironically, Lysa herself falls, literally, partially due to her own hubris in trying to kill Sansa, and LF too may very well fall from grace at Sansa's hands.) It seems from Jaime's recollections that Lysa was a fairly typical highborn girl before LFGate happened. It seems Hoster's drastic actions actually played right into LF's hands, priming Lysa for his "I'm you're only friend, I'm the only one who cares about you, everyone else just wants to use you, so please help me" approach that he's also trying to use on Sansa -- yet, I suspect LF will ultimately fail, BECAUSE Sansa still has connections and loyalty to her birth family intact. Now, you can argue that Lysa should still have been loyal to the other Tullys even if she was angry at her father, but again, Hoster himself seems to disagree with you. I think he regrets what he did partly because it led to Lysa personally hating him, but also because it led her to abandon House Tully in general, with obviously bad consequences for Edmure, Cat, Robb, etc.

[Jasta11]

I'm pretty sure the point made against Lysa is that she murdered her husband and let her family die on the orders of a sociopath she was obsessed with. Yes, she had a hard life, that much is certain, but it doesn't excuse her behavior. Almost every character in these books endure incredible hardships, yet almost none become bonkers as a result.

[Sansa_Stark]

Please, in future argue fairly and don't place your own words in my mouth.

I would say the same for me.

That's two people saying this btw.