Robb Stark

Robb Stark, also known by his epithet The Young Wolf, is a fictional character in the A Song of Ice and Fire series of epic fantasy novels by American author George R. R. Martin, and its HBO television adaptation Game of Thrones, where he is portrayed by Richard Madden.

Introduced in A Game of Thrones (1996), Robb is the eldest son and heir of Lord Eddard Stark of Winterfell and Lady Catelyn Stark. He subsequently appeared in Martin's A Clash of Kings (1998) and A Storm of Swords (2000). After his father is executed on the order of King Joffrey Baratheon, Robb is crowned King in the North by his bannermen and wages a war against the Iron Throne. Robb's subsequent betrayal and murder at an event known as the Red Wedding shocked both book readers and television audiences alike.

At the beginning of A Game of Thrones, Robb is 14 years of age (increased to 17 in the TV series). As the oldest legitimate son of Eddard Stark and his wife Catelyn, Robb is raised as the heir to the ancient House Stark of Winterfell, which holds dominion over the North, one of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros. Trained by Winterfell's master-at-arms Ser Rodrik Cassel, Robb is a talented rider, swordsman, and lancer. He has five siblings: younger sisters Sansa and Arya, younger brothers Bran and Rickon, and a bastard half-brother Jon Snow. He is also a close friend to Eddard's ward Theon Greyjoy. Robb is accompanied by his direwolf, Grey Wind. Like most of his siblings, Robb favors his mother's House Tully features over that of House Stark. He is strong and fast with a stocky build, blue eyes and thick auburn hair.

James Poniewozik of Time describes Robb as less eager to seek retaliation than his father Eddard but as more pragmatic. Poniewozik's overview of the television version of Robb focuses on his role as a foil for Eddard:

Robb has risen to take his father's place, as a lord of Winterfell and as a focal character in the show. We never saw what kind of warrior Ned was in the field, but in King's Landing, he fought a straight-ahead battle, telegraphing his moves, and died for it. Robb, seeing the Lannisters' numbers, shows himself capable of feints and deceptions—albeit at the cost of 2,000 men and the guilt of having sent them on a suicide mission.

In the third novel, A Storm of Swords, Robb is assassinated in an event called the Red Wedding, which was inspired by the Black Dinner and Glencoe Massacre from Scottish history. George Martin has said that he decided to kill Robb Stark because he wished to keep the story difficult to predict: "I killed Ned because everybody thinks he's the hero ... The next predictable thing is to think his eldest son is going to rise up and avenge his father. And everybody is going to expect that. So immediately [killing Robb] became the next thing I had to do."

In their 2015 book, Game of Thrones and Business, Tim Phillips and Rebecca Claire agree:

But the Internet-crashing shock wasn't fundamentally about death. There's loads of that on TV. What really made this stand out was that it broke the rules – the story just wasn't supposed to go this way. We'd invested in the revenge story of Robb Stark and his family who, in Hollywood narrative terms, should clearly win the war against the Lannisters because that's the way things are done in fairy stories.