Paige's Ponderings

At seventeen, Sam lived and breathed his Starfleet Academy application. His mother had intended to help with more of it, but Starfleet itself had suddenly transferred her to a different post a good thirty light-years off, something involving a project she couldn't talk about over subspace. Kirk did his best to answer Sam's questions about the application, but it had changed a lot since his cadet days, apparently, and his own research at the Starfleet labs halfway across the island kept him away for so many hours that the Dunayevskys aired out their guest rooms for Sam and Jess to use after school. One of their older cousins, Leyb—after six years in Montreal, Sam still didn't know exactly how they were related, except that his last name was Zelikov so presumably it was on Aunt Joy's side—kept taking their little turbolift up to check on Sam and offer snacks. Then he'd go pester Jess in the next room, which was mostly noticeable because the regular thud-thud-thud of her foot kicking her metal desk stopped for five blessed minutes while Leyb tried to bribe her with carrot cake. Sam didn't have the heart to make a bigger problem out of the banging, which he was pretty sure she didn't realize he could hear. The thing was, he'd been so caught up with the application that he didn't know all the details, but all the seven-year-olds at Saint Monica's had to take some kind of aptitude test that affected their placements for the next two years or something. Not the sort of thing you really prepared for, but Jess had taken the lack of direction as a cue to study everything rather than nothing and been obsessing over it for weeks. Sam would have helped more if not for his actually momentous Starfleet application, but, well. As it was, she spent all her free time going through her old homework and finding something else ridiculously beyond her grade level to read about while kicking her feet. He was pretty sure he'd had nightmares filled with distant banging.

her:

We'd be looking through the ranks of Tier 2 nobility at that point - the Hightowers would be a good first port of call. Going to that second tier is not unprecedented (Westerlings anyone?), but not ideal for a king coming to the throne in the aftermath of a rebellion. Unless Cersei was unavailable or nonexistent at the start of Robert's Rebellion, in which case I think you could well see Robert-Catelyn and an attempt at Ned-Lysa (that could still end up in Jon Arryn-Lysa).

But that's weird. In the highest families of the realm, there are a grand total of five daughters of a remotely marriageable age around the Rebellion era: Cersei, Lyanna, Catelyn, Lysa, and the already-married Elia. Contrast to the similarly-aged sons in the same set of families: Rhaegar, Brandon, Ned, Robert, Stannis, Oberyn, Jaime. In the 'not dead in infancy - not quite marriageable' age bracket we have Viserys, Benjen, Willas, Garlan, Renly and Tyrion on the male side, and on the female side there's... Arianne. Overall, that's two sons to every daughter.

And just a step down the social ladder, we run into a vast field of ???.

This is what I mean by GRRM's not a great worldbuilder in terms of feminist issues, and it starts with raw numbers. This is a work of fiction, not a historical source (or written as a fake historical source) where the existence of women is filtered out in the telling. You'd expect the sex balance to be the same approximate 50-50 as it is in the real world. And yet we hear of so many fewer women just around and about the setting. Where are the sisters? The female lines of descent, aka the indicators that men in the backstory had sisters? The female friends and cousins? The second wives? The widows, especially those who still have use-rights over their late husband's holdings? The senior septas who turn their institutions into businesses or schools or hubs of patronage? All these people tend to exist only when and where the plot requires them to exist. When the complexity of the human setting has been scaled back to make it easier for the author to handle and the reader to consume, it's those women and girls who vanished in the process.

Again, it's worth mentioning that GRRM has improved in this sphere. There are examples of women in most of those categories in the series! Usually from AFFC or ADWD. They're secondary or tertiary characters, because GRRM was not thinking about this sort of issue when he designed the bones of the series in AGoT.

Anyway, one of the things about CK2 is that every region on the map has its landed lords, and they have their families, vassals, people in their courts, etc. When you are conquering or forging alliances or arranging marriages, you can get a list of potential spouses based on what the game thinks are the smartest choices for you in terms of geography, non-aggression pacts, allies, etc, as well as the possible standout skills of the prospective bride.

One of the things about the game is that this makes for a LOT of NPCs. The mod lets you start things, at the earliest, about a hundred years before Aegon's conquest, with recommended bookmarks in periods like the Dance, the Blackfyre rebellions, Robert's rebellion, etc.

So I can actually load up the game and check to see who the most advantageous possible matches for Robert are, according to a military strategy game at least, outside of Cersei. Which out of curiosity, I did!

The game's suggestions in order of best advantages were:

One of Walder Frey's daughters (Morya Frey)

A daughter of Lord Hightower (Leyla Hightower)

A sister of Lord Bracken (Catelyn Bracken)

A Swann (Jeyne Swann)

A sister of Lord Blackwood (Alysanne Blackwood)

A sister of Lord Lefford (Leonella Lefford)

So, one of the things about the mod is that it has a feature where if a character is from the actual lore for the books, a button lights up that links to their article on the ASOIAF wiki. So you know who is from the books, and who is an NPC that's been generated by the game to flesh out the population. Since it would be difficult to populate the entire world based on who is mentioned in the books, there are plenty of game-generated NPCs precisely for things like making decent matches.

Of the ladies offered by the game, the Bracken and Blackwood do not have wiki links, so I assume the game created them or at least gave them names and such. That leaves us with Morya Frey (age 13, so even in Westeros Robert would have a wait on his hands), Leyla Hightower, Jeyne Swann, and Leonella Lefford, with the game suggesting Morya Frey due to the strategic importance of controlling the Twins, and also being related to House Blackwood through her mother. But her age means that Robert might pass her over for Leyla Hightower, the next best option thanks to the Hightowers being the second strongest house in the Reach, and the Tyrells lacking marriageable women.

Anyways one of the funny things about the game is that when you hit the bookmarks where GRRM's specified more of the family trees, and thus the gender ratios are less influenced by the game trying to populate everything reasonably, basically every lord starts having to marry down because there are simply not enough named women.

All this is probably beside the points about narrative and world building, which are excellent, I just think it's interesting that the likeliest answers (at least according to a game with decidedly military interests, but then Robert also has decidedly military interests) are indeed a Hightower or a Frey. Canonically, Morya Frey married Flement Brax and had three kids with him, and Leyla Hightower married Ser Jon Cupps (no mention of kids). House Cupps doesn't seem to be an even remotely prominent house, so they might have been a love match.

The space twins.

ROBERT DOWNEY JR and JUDE LAW as SHERLOCK HOLMES and DR. JOHN WATSON