Quote (AnomanderRake @ Aug 17 2013 10:27am)
I don't see Viserys as a villain at all. I see him as an extremely tragic figure. He saw his entire family brutally murdered as a little child, and he barely managed to escape himself. Then he spent most of his childhood in the streets with his baby sister trying to scrape for food and survival, struggling even harder to protect her and keep her alive, having been told that he has to go back to Westeros to become a king. Later he's taken in by Illyrio, but that's only because Illyrio needs to use him and Dany to fulfil a plot he has running with Varys. Viserys is an asshole, sure, but that's only because he never learned how to behave, all he knows from his childhood is that he has to go back and become a king, yet doesn't even understand why. He's just playing out this role that's been instilled in him since his miserable childhood. By the time GoT starts, he has already gone mad, doing whatever he can to become a king, mostly by shitty means. Still, if you know how he got to his position, your heart really goes out to him.
Catelyn is also tragic in her own sense, but I think she's at least stronger than Viserys (madness doesn't truly claim her until the last seconds of her life, when she starts clawing her eyes out and going bonkers). She basically had her husband and most of her kids ripped away from her in a short amount of time. I'm not a mother, so I can't presume to know how that feels, but I really can't blame her for that politically stupid move of freeing Jamie for her girls. She has her flaws (a la the way she treats Jon), but they're really nothing compared to her strengths. She's also very much Ned's wife, because when Renly tells her the offer he made Ned, she basically tells him the exact same thing Ned did before he could even tell her what Ned said. She gives Robb solid advice, she gave Renly solid advice, all in all, she really held things together really well considering what she went through (unlike Cersei who is already crazy because of something a fortune teller told her when she was 8). So I think Catelyn is a great character, and whenever I read her chapters I really strongly feel and sympathize with her.
I absolutely blame her for freeing Jaime.
Thousands of Northern men were asked to leave their families for an undetermined amount of time, fight in a war and possibly die. Mothers were asked to send their young sons off and possibly die as well. Being unwilling to do what herself that which was asked of her people makes her a bad leader.
It undermined the war effort so severely that even if she had gotten her daughters back from it, they were that much more likely to end up being conquered by the Lannisters eventually anyway. Let's say, hypothetically, Catelyn was offered the choice of getting her daughters back and spending a year or two with them before eventually losing the war to the Lannisters and having the girls spend the rest of their lives as "highborn married prisoners". I think she probably would have taken that deal. She prioritizes her own desire to spend time with her children over providing a good world for them to live in after she is gone. That makes her a bad mother.
Despite all those, if it had been an sure chance to swap Jaime for the girls, I still might not have blamed her. But instead, she freed him which was a guaranteed major betrayal of the kingdom she was supposed to protect in exchange for a pipe dream that had no chance of ever happening.
It's the madness of grief. At least Aerys had legitimate reasons (Targ genetics/schizophrenia) to justify his madness.