Yeah, I brought her out of retirement because I have never seen her so rapt by the show except when she's been agitated by all the screaming and snarling. She really loved those horses. (And Oberyn Martell.)
Watching TV with a dog is edifying. I can't tell the difference between a real animal noise and Frank Welker making an animal noise, but she can.
zaratustra wrote:w
A defense of Sansa StarkThe writer assumes people dislike Sansa Stark because she's a female in a more traditional role. I don't think that's true, as there are a few other women in GoT that haven't grabbed a sword and yet are perfectly amenable characters.
The problem is that she's an extremely passive character that has had
no remarkable character moments and basically no agency, and is just led around like a somewhat-mobile trading chit.
She's terribly unlikable in the first book because not only is she the most naive Stark (and they're ALL pretty naive), she's the one who fucks everything up. She fucks up her own escape by running to Cersei. If she hadn't done that...well, we'll come back to that in a minute.
She becomes a lot more likable, albeit very much a pitiable character, in the later books as her illusions are stripped away and she becomes a prisoner. She still doesn't quite outgrow her childish beliefs -- in the books the Ser Dontos plot plays out over a much longer period of time, and her head is filled with her usual romantic foolishness about how noble he's being -- but she learns some hard damn lessons.
I've said before that there are interesting parallels between Sansa and Joffrey -- each in their own way, they're children who are acting out what they think real life is supposed to be like because of the stories they were told as children. But they were told very different stories by very different families.
There's also a parallel between Sansa and Theon -- she doesn't suffer the same direct physical abuse that he does, and she isn't so traumatized that she completely submerges her own persona -- but she IS beaten and psychologically tortured, and she DOES learn in pretty short order that she has to lie about what she's thinking.
It's not an accident that in the fourth and fifth books Sansa's and Theon's chapters are headed "Alayne" and "Reek". They've both had to assume new identities. But there's a pretty significant difference: Sansa is acting, Theon isn't. Sansa is pretending to be Alayne, but Theon has actually BECOME Reek.
I also think that the "If only she hadn't gone to Cersei..." backlash from the first book starts to subside as the story progresses, because it's entirely possible that things would have been equally fucked up, or worse, no matter what she'd done. Would she and Arya really have gotten back to Winterfell safely? Maybe. But what then? Would Catelyn have returned to join them? If so, I can't imagine things ending well for any of them following Theon's invasion and Ramsay's subsequent takeover.
Ned and Robb would still be dead. Ned just would have died in a cell instead of in a public execution. I see no reason why the Red Wedding would have gone any differently (though the timing is tricky here -- if she had turned around to go back to Winterfell before Robb made it to the Twins, she wouldn't have been able to arrange the marriage in the first place -- and Robb would have been stymied). Lord Karstark would likely have killed Jaime Lannister in his cell, which would have further destabilized both the Kingsguard and the Lannister family.
Basically, Sansa fucked up, but over time it becomes pretty clear that a bunch of terrible things were going to happen to her and to her family (and to everybody else) no matter what she did.
I'd say I came to like Sansa in the books in pretty short order. I'm sure that informed my read on her in the show, but I also think the show's done a generally good job of fleshing out the less likable/relatable characters (Cersei is the best example).
