Ted Mosby
Ted Mosby is a leopard and an architect, one of the four friends Robin Scherbatsky drinks with at MacLaren's. He is introduced in the W-Series in "Porch Test", where he arrives with a journal under one arm, looks at the ceiling before he looks at anybody, and spends most of the evening drawing.
Background
Since architecture school Ted has kept redrawing one house, his own rather than a client's. Its particulars migrate: roof, stair, a second floor that comes and goes. The front elevation never does. Broad steps, with more chairs standing on them than anybody would ever have to fetch. Marshall reports that the chairs have been drawn more often than the house.
The group starts on the first day of college, when Lily knocks on the door of a room Marshall had given her the number of the night before and Marshall opens it. Ted has held ever since that she was looking for him, and Lily has been correcting him for just as long. Years later, Lily was quietly assessing the mammals he brought around and ended his relationship with one of them, a mammal named Karen, by planting one of Robin's earrings in his bed. He knows about the earring. He learns at this table that there was a method behind it.
Personality
He reads a building's structure before he reads the mammals standing in it, and holds that every building deserves to be noticed. He is generous about the ones that were never designed at all, the ones that grew because somebody needed the room, and pedantic about being right, including about the interior of a house he has never seen. He is easy to embarrass and takes it in good humor, groaning audibly when Lily squares up to tell a story he knows is coming.
Series History
W-Series
In "Porch Test", Ted's message that the group is on its way is the one Robin actually reads, and he is the last of the four through the door at MacLaren's, taking the end seat. He and Lily run their orientation argument for the table, unchanged and unresolved. Later he asks Pawbert where the pack lives, listens to a description of stone and timber, three stories and a guest wing that came later, and draws the mansion on a napkin in the dark of the pub, recognizing from the roofline alone that the wing was added rather than planned. He puts the wing on the wrong side, is corrected by a mammal who has lived in the house, argues briefly that occupancy is not the same thing as orientation, and starts again on the back. While he draws he explains the house he has been drawing since school and the steps that never change, and that is the object Lily's test hangs on. His napkin leaves the pub in Pawbert's paw with Lily's number written in the corner.
Key Relationships
Lily Aldrin
The oldest argument at the table and the one neither of them expects to win. She has been telling him he remembers their first meeting wrong for as long as they have known each other, and he learns at MacLaren's exactly how far she was once willing to go on his behalf.
Marshall Eriksen
The mammal who opened the door on the morning that made the group. Marshall narrates Ted's habits to strangers with the ease of somebody who has watched them for years, including the chairs.
Pawbert Pawthorne
An hour's acquaintance and a drawing. Ted gets the pack's house out of a verbal description, gets one detail wrong, takes the correction, and redraws it.
Trivia
- Ted Mosby takes his name and his profession from Ted Mosby of How I Met Your Mother, an architect there as here.