Lily Aldrin
Lily Aldrin is a lion, a kindergarten teacher and a painter, and one of the four friends Robin Scherbatsky drinks with at MacLaren's. She is married to Marshall Eriksen. She is introduced in the W-Series in "Porch Test", where the test she once ran privately on the mammals Ted brought around becomes the episode's title and its closing question.
Background
Lily has cropped golden fur and wears a cardigan over a paint-marked shirt, with paint worked in at the base of her claws past the reach of a scrub brush. She teaches kindergarten, and holds that a meltdown is never really about the crayon. It is trouble at home, or something a kit cannot yet name, and the crayon is simply the nearest object.
The group starts with her, on the first day of college. Marshall gave her his room number at orientation on the eve of it; she knocked the following morning and he answered. Ted has maintained ever since that she was looking for him, and she has been telling him he remembers it wrong for just as long.
Barely out of school and afraid that they would all drift into being mammals who used to know each other, she built herself a way to check. She pictures the whole table old, a house with chairs out front and everybody still sitting in them, and each time Ted produced somebody new she placed her in that image and assessed it honestly. A mammal who remained there once everything else had ended was approved; one who had to be repeatedly forced back into the frame was not. She used it to end Ted's relationship with a mammal named Karen, in part by planting one of Robin's earrings in his bed. She does not pretend any of that was kind, and says she would do it again.
Personality
Warm on the surface and sharp directly underneath. She reads a room the way she reads a five-year-old, and she reads mammals she has known for an hour as accurately as ones she has known for years, down to naming the exact face somebody is making and what it means. She takes ownership of the unkind things she has done rather than softening them, and lands a new word for her own friends provisionally before deciding, out loud, to keep it.
Series History
W-Series
In "Porch Test", Lily arrives at MacLaren's with the others and slides in beside Marshall. When Nick refers to his own four as a pack, she looks down her table at two snow leopards, a leopard and a lion, gropes for the equivalent, takes "pride" from Marshall and keeps it. She asks Pawbert what he does, and reentry services and kindergarten turn out to be the same job: her kits do not have the words yet, and his clients have answered the same questionnaire at every agency in the city and use the vocabulary to avoid being read, which she calls the worse problem. When Ted starts drawing the house he has been drawing since architecture school, she squares herself toward Pawbert and explains what she used to do with those front steps. Ted learns for the first time that there was a method; Robin learns where her earring went. Lily refuses to have the method called kind and says she would run it again, and Marshall's verdict that it worked draws the observation that it worked on him. She then tells Pawbert his expression is the one her class wears when they have the answer and have not settled whether to put a paw up. He leaves his where it is. At the goodbye she adds her number to a corner of Ted's napkin and folds it into his paw.
Key Relationships
Marshall Eriksen
Her husband, and the door she knocked on. They keep a standing argument about whether practicing law is harder than handling five-year-olds, which she closes by reminding him that he cried during career day. When he says the test worked, she tells him it worked on him; he calls himself an easy case and she agrees.
Pawbert Pawthorne
An evening's acquaintance who gets her test and her phone number. She recognizes his profession as her own from a different angle, reads his face before he has decided anything, and hands him a question he carries home.
Ted Mosby
The friend she vetted without telling him, and the one she has been correcting about their first morning for as long as they have known each other.
Trivia
- Lily Aldrin takes her name from Lily Aldrin of How I Met Your Mother, a kindergarten teacher and painter there as here.