Robin Arryn
The little Lord of the Vale, a sickly, coddled boy still at his mother's breast, fond of watching bad men fly out the Moon Door.
The fuller tale
The Lord of the Eyrie is six years old, breastfed, and enthusiastic about executions — that is the realm’s introduction to Robin Arryn, and it is not an unfair one. Born late to an old father and a smothering mother, sickly from the start and given to shaking fits, Robin grows up as the most protected child in Westeros in every sense: a mountain fortress no army has ever taken, a mother who never lets him out of arm’s reach, and a hole in the floor of his hall through which bad men are made to fly for his entertainment. He is what happens when a child’s every want is granted and every strength is postponed.
Power, for Robin, is a thing other people exercise in his name while being careful of his moods. His mother rules the Vale around him; after her death, Littlefinger rules it through him, palming the boy’s trust with gifts and endearments while the Vale lords grind their teeth. The show then does something almost optimistic with him: Yohn Royce takes him to Runestone to be fostered — to learn, at last, to hold a sword and sit a horse badly rather than not at all — and it is Robin, flattered and steered by Littlefinger, who nods the Knights of the Vale north to the battle that saves Winterfell. The boy who could not leave his mother’s lap tips the largest battle in the North without ever leaving the Vale.
By the tale’s end he appears at the great council in the Dragonpit, grown, composed, and startlingly presentable — a lord among lords, given a vote in choosing a king. The books, further back in time, keep him smaller and in far more danger: sickly little Robert Arryn, called Sweetrobin by the cousin he doesn’t know is a Stark, dosed with sweetsleep to still his shaking fits by a maester who knows every dose shortens the road, while Littlefinger cultivates the boy’s heir with visible patience. In both tellings his meaning is the same: the Vale’s neutrality, its armies and its impregnability all hang on the health of one fragile child — and everyone at his court has done that arithmetic.
The page and the screen
The show gives Robin an arc — coddled wreck to fostered lordling to poised young council-voter — while the books hold him at the edge of a knife. There his fits are managed with sweetsleep, a drug that kills by accumulation; his named heir, Harrold Hardyng, is being groomed and married forward by Littlefinger with unmistakable intent; and his one protector of consequence is a girl called Alayne Stone whose real name he never learns. The book reader is invited to doubt the boy will see manhood; the show viewer watches him outlive the man who was measuring his coffin.
Where they stand, season by season
Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.
The chronicle records no death for this soul — they are living when the tale leaves them, or their ending is a page the maesters have yet to turn.