i just realised now that the red wedding is over i can finally rant about talisa versus jeyne and what truly massive, fundamental changes hbo made when they introduced talisa. i’m sure someone else has already done this and done it better than i, but here’s my attempt at it:
so anyway, in the books, for those of you who haven’t read them, robb marries a young lady named jeyne westerling, of a minor-ish house. they meet, he’s injured, she nurses him back to health, they bang, and due to a mix of love and honour/duty to do what’s right they get married. yeah, he loves her, but also you can’t just go around banging young ladies of good houses, so much to catelyn’s concern but resigned understanding, out goes the frey girl and in comes (heh) jeyne. note how different that is from talisa. talisa was a foreign-born nurse with no name whatsoever, and robb marries her purely out of love.
this may seem minor but actually what it does is it strips robb of any and all lordliness and honourable behaviour that you damn well know ned drilled into him. ned, whose purity of lordliness is so renown that jon snow is only known as “that guy’s infamous mistake”. in what universe would his oldest son, born and raised to run winterfell, throw away his ironclad promise to the freys simply because he fell in love? with the character of jeyne, robb walks a line between love and honour. in the hbo iteration, robb basically tells his mother and the freys to suck it and marries talisa for love. it doesn’t make any fucking sense and more than that, it fundamentally changes the character of robb stark.
so now, the red wedding. here’s where hbo got really gross. jeyne was never fucking pregnant, nor does jeyne die in the red wedding (because robb isn’t fucking stupid enough to bring her in front of walder frey! i mean come on). so when they decided that talisa was pregnant, they already knew what road the show was heading down (hint: towards the twins), and it means that they literally made her pregnant just so they could fucking stab her in the uterus.
ladies, am i rite? totally interchangeable murderable characters! who needs a living breathing character when you can have joffrey sex-murder her? who needs a richer story when you can have uterus-stabbing?
