u/FlorentApologist

Any houses that you are misunderstood in fandom Discourse™️?

Personally I think the discourse pendulum impacts how a lot of houses are discussed. Either the Starks are and have always been the pinnacle of honor, or they're brutal human-sacrificing conquerors and Ned was an outlier because of his time in the Vale. If we're meant to believe the Starks really ruled the North for 8000 years and counting, I think it's most likely that they averaged somewhere in the middle, while (probably?) leaning towards overall positive.

A lot of the loyalty that we see isn't just specific to Ned himself, although that's certainly a major aspect: Wylla Manderly and the Liddle man that Bran meets in ASOS both represent a viewpoint of loyalty to House Stark itself, as an ideal of justice and fairness in the North. Lyanna believes as a matter of principle that defending her "father's man" is her duty as a Stark, and Roose went out of his way to make sure that the circumstances of Ramsay's birth weren't discovered by Rickard, so we know that Ned wasn't the only principled (or at least law-enforcing) Stark of his time.

That being said, one look at the canonical Stark family tree in the world book also makes it clear that the idea of Stark isolationism (which the show heavily leaned into in later seasons) is a total fabrication. That's an awful lot of Riverlands and Vale marriages, even pre-Southron Ambitions, for a house that supposedly doesn't mix with the south. (Although you could probably make an argument that the Starks seem to have favored southern houses with strong First Men or old gods ties.)