Tully Madness

[Craving Peaches]

1 minute ago, Aldarion said:

Catelyn trusted Littlefinger

So did Ned, Robert, Jon Arryn... 

Starks, Baratheons and Arryns confirmed mad?

[Darth Sidious]

Sansa has the inherited predisposition to madness as well but she may not live long enough for the problem to come up. If she kills Robert Arryn and gets caught it will be a fast trip down the mountain. 

[Alester Florent]

On 7/4/2023 at 5:15 PM, Jon Snowfyre said:

This is, quite frankly, the most stupid and asinine threads I’ve ever seen on this site. The fact it hasn’t been locked or deleted by the mods is nothing short of astounding to me. There is absolutely no merit to the idea that the Tully’s have a mad gene in them. It also seems quite obvious that this threat was meant to use the 2, ONLY 2, Tully women going mad after years of abuse and severe moments of trauma, to defend Targaryens throughout their 300 years of tyranny. 
 

Stop responding to this thread, and let it die.

Most sensible people have stopped responding (except immediately following a bump), but it keeps getting bumped by the same old accounts which add nothing to the discussion but just keep the thread on the front page. 

I can't believe it's still going either. 

Edited July 7, 2023 by Alester Florent

[Aldarion]

On 7/5/2023 at 4:40 PM, Craving Peaches said:

So did Ned, Robert, Jon Arryn... 

Starks, Baratheons and Arryns confirmed mad?

Precisely.

EVERYBODY is mad. Except Wildlings... maybe.

[SaffronLady]

On 7/5/2023 at 10:30 PM, Moiraine Sedai said:

Revenge will send Arya to an early grave but not fast enough to spare her from suffering her own mental illness.  

And how is she mentally ill again?

[Moiraine Sedai]

On 7/7/2023 at 11:46 PM, SaffronLady said:

And how is she mentally ill again?

Even a casual reading of Arya’s POV chapters clearly shows her mental illness. All the murders done at Arya’s age and that List she keeps are proof.  She recites the names of people she intends to murder. That’s sick. Arya is ill.  Mentally ill.  

[SaffronLady]

Just now, Moiraine Sedai said:

Even a casual reading of Arya’s POV chapters clearly shows her mental illness. All the murders done at Arya’s age and that List she keeps are proof.  She recites the names of people she intends to murder. That’s sick. Arya is ill.  Mentally ill.  

Wanting revenge is normal. Please let the hate flow and understand it is normal.

[Moiraine Sedai]

53 minutes ago, SaffronLady said:

Wanting revenge is normal. Please let the hate flow and understand it is normal.

Arya is an extreme case. I can understand wanting Justice but Arya’s mind has broken. The Insurance man had done nothing to the Starks and Arya murdered him. It’s not hating to criticize a very flawed character like Arya. Hate? The hate come from the Arya defenders who deny that she is mentally damaged and she is committing horrible crimes.  

Edited July 9, 2023 by Moiraine Sedai

[SaffronLady]

3 minutes ago, Moiraine Sedai said:

The Insurance man had done nothing to the Starks and Arya murdered him.

She is literally learning from a guild a assassins. Nobody said only the guilty or people cadets have a blood feud with were on the training list.

You know, to be honest, if I were running a death cult/hitman guild, I'd wet the hands of cadets with the blood of people whose need to die were dubious at best, even some innocents. Then I, as cult leader/guild master, swoops in to provide much needed psychological support with "god of a thousand faces" bullshit.

It's not Arya's problem. It's that an assassin's guild would very likely intentionally damage members' mental well-being. Whether Arya chooses to embrace the damage and the power for revenge, or she goes home before she completely snaps would be her character arc in TWOW.

TLDR: Arya, as of now, is not mentally broken. She might be, but as of now, not yet.

[Moiraine Sedai]

1 minute ago, SaffronLady said:

She is literally learning from a guild a assassins. Nobody said only the guilty or people cadets have a blood feud with were on the training list.

You know, to be honest, if I were running a death cult/hitman guild, I'd wet the hands of cadets with the blood of people whose need to die were dubious at best, even some innocents. Then I, as cult leader/guild master, swoops in to provide much needed psychological support with "god of a thousand faces" bullshit.

It's not Arya's problem. It's that an assassin's guild would very likely intentionally damage members' mental well-being. Whether Arya chooses to embrace the damage and the power for revenge, or she goes home before she completely snaps would be her character arc in TWOW.

TLDR: Arya, as of now, is not mentally broken. She might be, but as of now, not yet.

Then we must continue to disagree on the main question. Arya is crazy, in my opinion based on what she is doing and what goes through her mind.  

[SaffronLady]

17 minutes ago, Moiraine Sedai said:

Then we must continue to disagree on the main question. Arya is crazy, in my opinion based on what she is doing and what goes through her mind.  

A pity as IMO she is responding very normally to trauma.

[the trees have eyes]

On 7/4/2023 at 4:19 PM, SaffronLady said:

Care to give a quote or are you content with randomly saying stuff?

He is randomly saying stuff.  There's a group of people who don't like the Starks (and an invented "inherited Tully madness gene" gives another arrow to their quiver to target all Ned and Cat's children) and enjoy bashing them almost as much as they do prompting a reaction from people who find these kind of arguments silly.  Objective analysis and sweet reason will get you nowhere here as the idea is to wear team colours (anti-Stark) and just repeat the same arguments ad nauseam to drown out anything which points out how silly those arguments are.

But engage as much as you have an appetite for! 

[James West]

It is Arya who will slowly become mentally impaired.  Sansa will fall in love with Petyr Baelish and her life will end the same way like her Aunt Lysa.  Petyr killing her after she becomes useless.  

[SaffronLady]

On 7/11/2023 at 7:09 PM, the trees have eyes said:

Objective analysis and sweet reason will get you nowhere here as the idea is to wear team colours

So it's election time, except there's nothing to elect.

[James West]

On 1/15/2023 at 8:47 PM, Sydney Mae said:

The Tully sisters went mad.  Catelyn Tully-Stark and Lysa Tully-Arryn were showing signs of madness and emotional fragility.  Lysa had it from her youth to her death.  Catelyn lost it at the wedding.  She cut Aegon Frey's throat and killed him.  Catelyn went mad that minute.  There is insanity in the Tully blood.  Robb, Sansa, Arya, Bran, and Rickon are half Tully.  Cat's brood inherited the gene predisposing them to insanity.  I know stress can trigger the disease.   

Arya, Sansa, Bran, and Rickon are part Tully.  Arya has already began to lose her fragile grip on sanity. 

Bran will become more dangerous if he should follow and lose his sanity.  A greenseer falling victim to the Tully curse of insanity will be great for the story though.  

[Craving Peaches]

Just now, James West said:

A greenseer falling victim to the Tully curse of insanity will be great for the story though.  

No it wouldn't, because there is no Tully curse of insanity, so the author making one up now would be bad writing.

[Lord of Oldstones]

Tully funeral ritual is like half way Targaryen and half way Greyjoy/Ironborn. So, therefore symbolically they are predisposed to combined strong madness that is seen in those two set of family. 

Edited July 20, 2023 by Lord of Oldstones

[BlackLightning]

I don't know; I think that this is a legitimate topic

The Tullys, as a whole, are not genetically predisposed to madness. But the Lords of Harrenhal are.

Seriously.

Look at the list of people who have either ruled Harrenhal, lived in Harrenhal or have directly managed the affairs of Harrenhal as resident shotcaller. Almost all of them have had some serious issues.

I personally think that the combination of Balerion's dragonfire and the nature of the stone that Harrenhal is built with (which is said to incorporate human blood and magic) created something almost radioactive that really fucks up people's minds and bodies. 

But that's another subject. The generation of Tullys that we are most familiar with -- Catelyn, Lysa and Edmure -- are descended from the Whents, the Lords of Harrenhal, by way of their mother, Minisa Whent.

(The Whents have a history of infertility and post-partum mortality for both mothers and infants...tansy tea or not, this is something that Hoster Tully's wife, Minisa of House Whent, struggled with and it's no coincidence that her daughter Lysa Tully also struggled with it)

The Whents came to be Lords of Harrenhal because they were next of kin to the Lothstons who were Lords of Harrenhal before them. The last Lothston of Harrenhal, Lady Danelle, was definitely insane/mad. In most circumstances, I would not believe the stories told about but, in this case, I fully believe the stories about Danelle Lothston to be true. Lady Danelle appears to have been a skinchanger and the psychic gene she carried certainly made it's way to the current generation of Starks by way of their mother, Catelyn Tully

The fact that all five children of Eddard Stark and Catelyn Tully are confirmed skinchangers (despite their varying phenotypes) with one of them being a greenseer (which is a huge deal statistically) means that they had to have gotten the psychic gene from both their mother and their father. Not only that but the combination of those Stark and Tully genes had to make for quite the cocktail in order to produce a greenseer...and a powerful one at that.

So, given Catelyn's depression and the instability of both Lysa and Robert, it is not unfair or inaccurate to say that the Stark children may be carrying genes that predispose them to mental illness.

For all the threads about Arya, it's also a fair enough thing to say that Arya is having some serious mental health issues. She's not crazy or evil...but your girl is CLEARLY struggling. Sansa has had a couple of very questionable dissociative moments. Bran frequently experiences bouts of depression. And Rickon was - in fact - showing signs of being very unmanageable, even dangerous, at a young age; not entirely unlike his Arryn cousin

(In the case of the Starks, it could be a case of being psychically bonded with direwolves and having said bond either disrupted or overly-magnified at too young of an age.)

Whatever it may be, I know handful of people in the fandom (the usual suspects...we all know who they are) will use this as a way to paint the Starks as evil or unworthy or broken**

But it would be very dishonest to say that nothing is wrong with these kids.

The Starks have endured things that adults three times their age had never experienced. Most people on this forum don't even come close to experiencing the sheer trauma and horror they've experienced. And adverse childhood experiences can and do alter brain chemistry and bring on mood disorders (i.e. bipolar disorder, depression) and personality disorders (i.e. borderline, dissociative, antisocial)

 

**And let me say this. People who suffer from or struggle with mental illness are not evil or worthless. Something is wrong with their brain, just like how someone diabetic has something wrong with their pancreas. We have to change this narrative immediately. It's not funny, it's not cool and it's not productive. Please stop.

Edited July 21, 2023 by BlackLightning

[LongRider]

36 minutes ago, BlackLightning said:

**And let me say this. People who suffer from or struggle with mental illness are not evil or worthless. Something is wrong with their brain, just like how someone diabetic has something wrong with their pancreas. We have to change this narrative immediately. It's not funny, it's not cool and it's not productive. Please stop.

THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU!   I appreciate you saying this.    

[Darth Sidious]

Of Cat’s children, yes, it is Arya who seems to have succumbed to the mental illness. The inherited tendency and the shock of seeing Ned’s execution pushed Arya over the edge. Sansa and the others are in stressful conditions but as long as they are not pushed beyond their coping abilities they may escape the illness.  Arya was pushed beyond her ability to cope and lost it.