It is not the trauma, that makes you stronger, it is the healing. I do think it is possible to have a strong character with part of the story of how they became strong is trauma and do it responsibly. But in order for this you need to show the healing process and how it relates to the particular strength of that person.
The only way for a rape story to have worked would have been to have it be right at the beginning of her story... Like John being a bastard, only obviously it would be much worse.
@@GoldenRose116 yeah I'm not saying it would have been a happy story, but at least it would have been relevant to the plot and be a social commentary. I was thinking that she would be punished by society for not being pure and how that would affect her life would at least be an interesting story that could focus more on her fight for justice than the actual event.
@@charliedelfino2102There's a scene in that same sansa rape episode where sansa is in the bath and she tells ramsey's girlfriend that she's a stark of Winterfell, that this is her home and that she's not afraid of her. If they had simply put that AFTER the rape scene instead of just using sansa as a punching bag, it would've shown how resilient she was. It would've shown her determination and strength and at least hinted at all that that makes one strong. One's mental state is so important to healing. Those determined to survive have much better chances of actually healing
YES! Exactly! That whole message of "it's good that I was abused and assaulted by all these horrible people - it was all just a boot-camp for becoming the badass I am today!" BLEEUURRGHH. As an actual SA survivor, I can say *that's not how it works.* I might've moved past the trauma (with the help of therapy) and made a good life for myself now, but I've NEVER thought of my past traumas as 'valuable life lessons that made me a stronger person,' because THERE ARE BETTER AND WAY LESS AWFUL WAYS OF ACHIEVING THAT. The destructive, life-scarring way should NEVER be held up as the most 'interesting' or 'morally character-building' way to do it.
thank you for this! i hate that saying 'what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.' it could have been coined by DB and DW. such a nonsense. by the time she gets to castle black and changes her clothes, suddenly she's slick and clever, strong and opinionated....... nah mate. ,y own SA made me so screwed up in a myriad of ways.. and definitely didnt give me death defying belief in myself and opinions. love to you.. keep doing good xxx
@@piaauman9020 you INTERPRET her as SUDDENLY cunning. She might have been way before. As a survivor I guarantee you I have been thought to be dumb, spoiled, untouched by the harshness of the real world princess Barbie who never notices her surroundings, is too airheaded to even realize when she gets insulted or preyed upon. Because I just smile along whatever happened and am friendly with everyone nomatter how they treat me. I was raped from birth onwards. I am a still depenend disabled women of quite underwhelming proportions. I cannot fight people off, I cannot outrun them. But I sure know I can disarm them with freezing and kindle them with fawning. I have literally survived men who have raped, beaten, mamed and killed others. I never even got a scratch. I now live. I quietly left with nobody suspecting. I am still getting stalked. I smile and make my fluffy dog do wavy wavy paw for the neighbour's kids, while the police helicopter surches for the guy who yanked a blond haired girl off a horse and stabbed her, because she looked like me. My cutesy dog cannot be petted by strangers for me beeing weird with strangers touching him - he is there to protect me, appears cute on the outside, but I make sure they stay away from him, because he wouldn't really react friendly. Appearing unsuspecting, plain or unaware are not the same as beeing it. Just like those people appearing friendly, harmless or helpfull - might be absolutely not. "His Neighbors told cnn he was a friendly and charming member of the community..." They never learn.
As someone who has experienced trauma throughout my life, especially as a young person, and as someone who tries to have a positive outlook that can often take the form of "everything is a learning experience blah blah blah", I can say with the utmost certainty and confidence that I wish I never had experienced the terrible shit I did as a child, teen, and young adult. I am not my traumatic experiences. I have been going through therapy to heal from said experiences(albeit for a short time so far). The long lasting effects of my childhood have included addiction, anxiety, depression, an extreme difficulty communicating and forming meaningful connections with others, disassociating at the drop of a hat, and the list goes on. I wish I hasn't experienced what I have. I'm not better for it. I'm deeply hurt by it. It's going to take a lot of work to come back from it. I won't be stronger or better than anyone when I do finally heal, I'll just finally be on the same level as any other normal well-adjusted adult. The notion that trauma makes a person better or stronger is asinine. All that said, I hope for the two of you to find the peace and healing you need and deserve to live a full and meaningful life. Love and light to you all
Naivety does not last long in face of the harsh realities of the mortal world. You do no grow stronger... but you do grow less innocent. You no longer walk down the dark streets, you look twice before entering a room, and you learn caution that serves to keep you safe when the strong are no longer there to protect and coddle you as if a child. There is value in that in such a world... even if it does come at some slight price.
Sansa is the oldest female child in a rich, highly religious family isolated in a rural-ish setting. She's raised with clear-cut gender roles, and expectations which leads her to become a people pleaser. She has a rich inner life and imagination, and dreams of something"better". If she was American she would be that perfect suburban golden girl who only dates boys from her church, but dreams of moving to New York because she thinks it will be like any of the early to mid-2000s Anne Hathway movies.
Arya was raised the same way, so the actual parts of them that are Stark (family) are stubbornness/ determination, loyalty, competence, and longing for those family bonds. All the Stark kids share those traits (except Bran, but he has more of them than Blood Raven does, so they still shine through)
I was a big Sansa fan, both in the show and books. I was constantly waiting for Sansa's moment of glory where she would finally gather all the learning she had accumulated from the likes of Ned, Little Finger, Cersei, Olenna, Tyrion and so on to become a major player. It never came. She never got the chance to do anything seriously cool or to push the plot in an interesting fashion. Watching her get crowned should have been amazing, but it was just watching the conclusion to a storyline we simply never got. It's horrible to think that she'll probably be remembered as that character who got sexually assaulted by Ramsay in one of the most controversial plots, than anything she managed to do in her own right. They utterly fucked up.
It's a shame show Sansa didn't earn a crown it was give to her. They really needed to show that Sansa was a capable ruler in her own right rather than just have her act bitchy and have other characters tell the audience how smart she supposedly was.
I absolutely agree. they cut short all of the promising arcs, and made the show into a joke. i would have love to have seen sansa use her intelligence and excellent leadership qualities to put both jon and dany on the throne, take the north for herself and ... well you know what should have happened.
You got it right. Sansa deserved much better than she got. But she did get her revenge. When she gave Ramsey's to the starving dogs, and when she put Arya to kill Baelish. She never got her happily ever after, but at least she got her revenge.
For me, Sansa was ruined when it became clear the show was playing her as a young Cersei 2.0: cold and calculating and controlling, a player of the game, disabused (literally) of love but having struggled and attained the crown and sceptre This ruined Sansa for me because i think the books are laying the foundation for Sansa to be TEMPTED to become a Cersei 2.0 who rules through her children, with the bonus for Petyr that he rules through her, but that Sansa's love will become the actual foundation for her happiness The showrunners seem to have put together the plot to the point that she eliminates Petyr, clumsy as it was, but didnt grasp that Sansa truly dreams of love, not of a crown... much like Daenerys, whose motivations were likewise flipped
Damn, you expressed this perfectly here! It's the point I kinda failed to make clear enough in the video. It makes realistic sense that that could be Sansa's development BUT I think it entirely destroys her purpose in the story
So well said!! I just think that D&D simply do not understand women and just like most mainstream film makers nowadays cannot create believable strong female characters. As a matter of fact, they don’t understand human nature, beyond what they think is cool and “badass”.
@@Kanikanihia Just like many male writers D&D don't know how to write for women. They do a ok job with tomboy girls. Like Breanne, Aria, Ygritte , Gilly,Yara. And hoes. And maybe lady Catelyn, Cersei,& Kaleesee Daenerys . But not so much for a more feminine naive girl like Sansa. ,A pawn in the game.
Not sure if a simple "Love will save the day" is a lesson AWOIAF is trying to convey for Sansa. Or for any character . A main theme so far in the series is that classic troopes in fantasy literature are more often than not a bad combination with the real world. Characters that represent honor, chivalry and honesty (Ned and Rob) die as a result of this. Sansa story is one of disenchantment , each step just showing her that the songs she heard as a kid where just that, songs. This applies to both book Sansa and show Sansa. Was the line "Whithout LF, Ramsay and the rest, I would have stayed a little bird all my life" a little bit over the top ? yeah. But this is where giving Sansa Jeyne's storyline for the sake of having a POV in Winterfell clashes a little bit with the overall message. If we are to follow the books, Samsa tribulations are not related to SA (thankfully), but she is still being used as a pawn and a throphy bride to Arryn's inheritor. And she is learning from it, gaining strength from it, growing from it. Her little sister is training to be an assasin, her little brother is slowly turning into a "druid", her older brother is becoming a full fledged warrior. All cool RPG characters, but none of those can lead a kingdom or survive rulinghood (See King Viserys as an example) . Sansa, on the other hand, is learning about politics. In an almost too perfect analogy to chess, the pawn is on her path to become a queen. I also disagree in the fact that learning to play the game automatically makes her Cersei 2.0. On the contrary, Sansa moral compass still aligns mainly with that of Ned, she is just not as naive as he was. Sansa became a player to survive and to protect the north (the same one she once considered "too barbaric" and wished to leave behind), while Cersai became a player out of ambition, hate and jealousy. Even when faced with war and zombies, she doesn't forget about the north inhabitants, the common folk, which in the end is what she is supposed to do as a leader. Jon is too focused on the Others to actually rule and Dany is at this point blinded by her claim to the throne to care about the people she has behind. In the end, Sansa has the north crown not because she "wants" a crown, but because having it is the only way she can actually help her people in a system ruled by corruption. And that is the highest act of love she can have with the people that loved her the most, her family.
The Little Bird was smart. The Little Bird knew how to read a room. The Little Bird was resourceful. The Little Bird survived even though flying around among struggling giants. The now grown bird should be proud. Instead she lost it all to the people that harmed her by looking at herself with their eyes and agreeing with them that "she was only a stupid little girl".
The whole unearned "She's the smartest person I've ever met" line was a perfect example of characters "telling" us information as opposed to the writers "showing" us through a characters actions. It's as if D and D thought they were writing Cersei as a smart character (hint, she's not) and that by them making Sansa Cersei 2.0, the audience would immediately think, "O, she must be smart then". It's was all just so incredibly disappointing and frustrating.
TOTALLY.. it felt so forced. i'd have loved to have seen the reason she became so determined and cunning, rather than being told in a really pithy and pointless way.
@@piaauman9020 not to mention she makes some of the stupidest political moves in the entire show. She decides, for no logical reason, not to tell Jon and Davos about the army of the Vale, even though they both tell Sansa they absolutely need more men. Her decision not to tell them before the battle caused tens of thousands of northmen and free folk their lives for ZERO tangible benefit. Also, Sansa just challenging Jon's logical and correct decision to petition Dany for help, in front of the Lords, did absolutely nothing to help Jon but instead (I would argue purposefully) undermined his ability to rule. She was at worst a terrible political actor and at best a naive political actor who unwittingly undermined the authority of others with far more practical political experience than her (ie Jon as Lord Commander and Dany as ruler of Meereen and Slavers Bay)
@@Jon.A.Scholt I lost the little affection I had for show's Sansa in season 8 after seeing how she treated Daenerys so badly. The logical reaction is to stand your ground as Lady of Winterfell and celebrate they are there to stop a horde of zombies from killing you and all your people. Her reaction is so illogical! I think D&D thought something like "bitches hate each other, CAT FIGHT!" and that's all. She is hiding while Daenerys and her army are defending her and she can't stop bitching about her! I guess D&D thought that Sansa would be justified when Daenerys out of the blue burns KL but Sansa doesn't see the future... like Bran, who could stop her... OMG I hated the ending hahaha
Having Sansa call CERSEI the smartest person she's ever met was just such an insult to her character. That wasn't Sansa. The character D&D were writing hadn't been Sansa for years.
I hated that trauma made me strong line too. No, trauma fucks you up. Healing from trauma can help make you strong, but imagine how strong you would be if you hadn't experienced trauma and had a strong sense of self early on. My trauma did not make me strong, before I started healing it just led me into more traumatic situations. Sometimes it still does, because I'm not fully healed.
Your analysis is spot on! And how could she say that to Sandor, who wishes someone had saved him from his own abuse that scarred him for life, in every way.
Sansa’s entire ‘arc’ in the show is torture p0rn. The show revels in hurting her in ever conceivable fashion, as if punishing her earlier ‘stupidity’ (read: the entirely expected worldview of a sheltered little 11 year old from a remote part of the world who’s never been given reason to mistrust anyone). It’s honestly creepy, the amount of pleasure the show takes in breaking her heart over and over again, as if it resents her for having come from a well adjusted family that loved her.
the scenes are supposed to be disrubing. There are stories like this in real life. Game of thrones is depicting the harshness of life. If it didn't have appalling scenes it would not be as realistic as the real world we live in.
@@mysticstarseed444not a single male character gets r*ped… but that happens all the time in the real world. yet i never saw it in game of thrones? but women are getting assault practically every episode. it’s pure spectacle and meant for shock factor
Reality is harsh, and it does not coddle for the sake of coddling. The only justice in the world is the justice that the strong make by their own strength, and the only sin this world sees fit to punish is weakness. You may not LIKE what it is, but this is simply the way things really are. We are seeing that more and more even in the modern world. Naivety only lasts so long as it is protected, and not a moment longer.
@@mysticstarseed444 What a pathetic excuse. There are many, many ways to illustrate how harsh Westeros and the real world are without recreating, in detail and at length, the sexualized humiliation and r*pe of an adolescent girl.
@@DiogenesDworkinson The world is indeed full of cruelty, and like ours, Westeros is an often ugly place. I don’t understand, however, why the sexualized abuse and r*pe of a little girl is the kind of cruelty you want to see on screen. Why is it the “harsh reality” that you want recreated in detail? Yes, the world can be a nasty place-especially for vulnerable children. As someone who works with female survivors of genocide, I am always conscious of this fact. There are ways to tell such stories without reveling in the degradation and violence itself. It’s interesting that you and other men find it so hard to imagine them. Nicole’s point stand. This is torture p*rn, and some of you like it.
I've always been frustrated with book fans who despised Sansa. Yes, her naivete can be irritating, but she's *just a kid!* Unfortunately, Benioff and Weis also seem to have a very surface-level understanding of the character and ruined her in the show. In fact, I'd say that they had a very superficial understanding of most of the characters. That could be masked in the early seasons when they had the strong foundation of the books to build from. As they moved into uncharted waters, this became quite clear.
@@Ashbrash1998 Right. She was being raised as a sheltered princess in the distant North, completely unprepared for the wild world of Westerosi politics.
I mean she might be a kid but Joffrey was swinging his sword at her little sister and she shouted at Arya for ruining everything and attacking her prince Joffrey. Arya wasn’t like Viserys, she didn’t abuse her sister. She was a little trouble maker that was much younger than Sansa. To not defend your sister against a rabid boy swinging a sword at her just screams sociopath. That being said I don’t “hate” any character, they’re what makes the story fun. As long as the character makes sense and uses some sort of logic I’ll probably like them. Sansa hasn’t really grown much in regards to her capability to love. She’s colder and more careful than before, I don’t want to see her do a 180 and become compassionate and caring about others as she never has done before. I think she’s meant to be a disliked character.
@@Ashbrash1998lets not pretend Ned hasn't just as much to do with it as Catelyn. He is the one that actively led her keep her head in the clouds by not talking to her
@@joshuaadams6565 she’s an eleven year old child with a crush, describing children fighting to what she thinks are kindly adults. It’s those not-kindly adults who escalate things. Cersei insists a Dire Wolf die, Sandor Clegane kills the Butcher-boy. The scene isn’t there to pass judgment on Sansa; it’s there to show: “They’ve left their home, and everything is suddenly scary and high-stakes, the adults are unhinged, senseless violence has entered their lives.” From the nursery into the fire.
There is a great line in the books that goes something like this: Tyrion ask Sansa to trust him or something similar and she replies " Even a little Lion has claws".
This a tribute to Sansa's singing and playing abilities too. She can play the harp and the bells, and it's a safe bet she knows "The Rains of Castamere": "And mine are long, and sharp, my lord, as long and sharp as yours".
the thing about jeyne poole is that her story shows the reader not only how girls are mistreated in this world, but how being of lower birth also affects you. the way she was discussed by the council was like they were talking about selling off a cow. i think she's very necessary to sansa's story to show the reader that even though sansa's going through so many horrible things, she's still sort of privileged. also, every time sansa experience's something terrible, it kind of makes her more empathetic and compassionate, which i find interesting and wish was shown in the show instead of giving us cersei 2.0.
Sansa was not of a lower birth. The whores in Baelish whorehouse were of a lower birth. Sansa's story shows the hypocrisy of royal/upper birth thinking. Even when you're born "right" they still fk you up.
Sansa's story in the show was so missplaced. It literally made no sense. Like, why would she marry Ramsey? She wouldnt. If the plan was to marry him and wait for Stannis, then why not join Stannis in the first place and take the Vale knights with her. So dumb
The books have a fake Arya go to marry Ramsey. It makes better sense as it is a deal made by the Lannister's to buy the Boltons. They don't have Arya, so they make one, in another tale of child sexual abuse.
In the books the first chapter of Sansa being in the Vale she builds a snow castle (winterfell) and to me shows she is still a child. Longing for home and her family. I felt happy she could finaly do something that made her feel happy (though it resulted in something a bit more dramatic, couse ofc.) but that moment was quite heartfelt.
That was the moment I started crying for Sansa and her loss , although she annoyed me in the first few chapters. When she was staring at the snowballs she made thinking that she has no Arya , Robb or Jeyne to throw them at , that her prayers weren't hard , it hit me so hard .
I watched the show before reading the books, and going back to the show after reading the books, I was shocked at how off Sansa's characterization seems from her very first appearance in the show. The book depicts her as soft-spoken, demure, almost obsessively courteous in her interactions with others. In the show, she's depicted as snarky and shrill? It's pretty clear that D&D really didn't get her book characterization and so wrote her to just be a Generic TeenTM. I feel like GRRM told them she was meant to become a queen or ruler at the end, and the only way they could envision her doing that was through the "suffering turned me into a badass" arc you bemoaned here. It's such a shame because I really feel that Sansa's character and arc give many of the answers to the series's central questions: the power of mercy in the face of violence, that kindness can win out over cruelty, that being loved makes you more powerful than being feared, that the ability to rule is not equivalent to the ability to commit violence, and more. The show really did not understand those messages, though, and Sansa's characterization suffered for it. Loved your video and analysis! You've earned a subscriber here, and I can't wait for the Sansa psychological analysis video.
She (as all Starks including Cat) is quiet sarcastic and snarky, but only in certain situations and most of what they had in the earlier seasons that features this were straight up from the books, it only got unnecessary over the top in later seasons. I think they missed out a lot more on how she tries to be a perfect Lady, which she is not but that is fine. She is much closer to it than Arya in contrast, but she still does unladylike things, she has a fistfight with Arya, sneaks out to meet Dontos in the goodswoods to try to escape, lies (and gets away with it!) to Tyrion, she tries to push Joffrey and kill him, she tries to lure him into the Vanguard, she slaps Sweet Robin and runs around with Myranda none of these are things a Lady is supposed to do, but she does them anyways. She is trying to be soft-spoken, demore and courteous because she wants to be a perfect Lady, the way she envisions her mother, but she isn't and that makes her great, because her mother isn't either, nor is Arya. But she unlike others isn't being courteous because it's expected too, she is generally very kind and wants well for others, what she has been raised to. She saves Dontos by speaking out loud, something a proper Lady isn't supposed to do, she feels with the starving people of Kings Landing, despite being too young to fully understand them, she tries her best with Sweet Robin even though he annoys her because she knows he needs her. And this balance was pretty decent for an adaptation when they still had book material and went off the rails after that for just being snarky for no reason, being non courteous for no reason, being unkind for no reason. Book Sansa wouldn't leave Jon in the dark over the Vale knights, book Sansa wouln't be openly distrusting to Danys face after she managed to be courtous to the Lannisters for so many years, book Sansa wouldn't mistrust Arya over LF.
It’s one thing to let the horrors of the world change you. It’s another to experience them and still believe there’s good in the world. Sansa very much embodies the later; the Battle of the Blackwater really highlights why I think she’s important. She’s a calming and hopeful presence when a drunken Cersei wishes violence upon them all. Sandor threatens to kill her if she didn’t sing, but instead of a song of heroes and glory, she sings a hymn of mercy leaving Sandor in tears and sparing her.
I like how you mention that Sansa's scenes are framed by the men around her. Sansa's 'role' across the show entirely seems to be her own objectification. This holds true in two senses: she acts as a character foil for the benefit of the story (this is a good thing), and she's a political pawn for several powerful families (this gives her objectification in-universe plausibility; it's not good, but things are often bad at the start of a story but are expected to change). Sansa is a character foil to her sister (illustrating various degrees of expressiveness), to her father and later Sandor (revealing different ways and times in which a person can be gentle), to Littlefinger (depicting varying degrees of honesty), etc. I think the reason people don't like Sansa is because she starts off very low on expressiveness. We don't know her subjective self, because she needs to hide it as a prisoner of war (and likely doesn't know herself anyway given that she's a child). This seems to indicate the obvious end point for Sansa's character; we should learn who she is while she discovers who she is herself, but the show never does this. The show instead has Sansa integrate the traits of her abusers, which I'm very happy to hear you call out. To dig a little deeper into the framing idea: In terms of cinematography, the camera seems to look voyeuristically toward Sansa when she's with a man, but shows her perspective more often when around women such as Cersei (about whom Sansa is deeply curious). It's also no coincidence that all of these men, including the most villainous ones, had their roles in the show changed or expanded as a result of being fan favourites. People really liked Tyrion, Littlefinger, Sandor, etc. These men are shown through their own perspectives expressing themselves almost every time they appear, and successfully accomplishing their goals. All of these men are only able to do this because of their scenes with Sansa. For Sansa though, the same character development is not given. The writers saw her correctly as the vehicle for the advancement of other characters that any good character rightfully is, but forgot that she is a character herself and that relationships should build both characters, not just one. As an example of what might have changed this: imagine if we had a two minute scene in the second season depicting Sansa's loneliness while she does something she knows how to do well, like knit a little cloth sigil of Winterfell. Even if most people would find a superficial reading of the scene boring, it would have been a good way to depict Sansa's desire to express herself while cloistered in imprisonment, as well as how few options for expression she has. Also, I like the attention to the Dreadfort/Winterfell error. It made me realize the symbolic significance in Sansa being imprisoned in her own home instead of Ramsay's. Ironically, I actually think this is good writing.
I feel strongly that it was a mistake aging the characters up so much in the show, and Sansa's character suffers the most from this. The showrunner prioritized filming torture porn and actual porn over telling a good story with characters that make sense.
For real. They even did this with minor characters to serve their horny purposes. Poderick Payne is a boy of about eleven or twelve and the show only ages him into a young adult for no other reason than having some sex jokes about how the prostitutes love him? And Missandai was ten when Daenerys took her in. Again, the show ages her up just so we can see her topless later?
I stopped liking Sansa at some point after she reunited with Jon, it’s like her character did a complete 180 and became someone she wasn’t. That smug smile and constantly thinking she’s smarter than everyone, literally giving me Cersei vibes was so irritating. This isn’t the character I was following for years, and it didn’t feel like a good direction to go for her. Sansa not telling Jon about the Knights Of The Vale seemed so uncharacteristic of her to me, it’s like D&D just needed an excuse to make the Battle Of The Bastards happen the way it did and so they had Sansa just not tell Jon. It didn’t feel like something the real Sansa would do, she put one of her only remaining family members in mortal danger just so she can have a girl boss moment…it’s like what?
For me it was when she didn’t tell Jon about the knights of the Vale. She knew they didn’t have enough men and instead of telling anyone about her contacts she just kept quiet and sent a letter in secret. Why?? The whole battle plan should have been around the knights, setting a trap for Ramsey, taking advantage of his overconfidence. Keep it a secret for the audience if you want to drama of watching the Stark fighting an apparently loosing battle
The Knights of the Vale thing was so weird it's like they wanted to show that Sansa was a player in the GoT so just had her do some random scheming for no reason. It's a classic case of trying to write a "smart" character when you yourself aren't smart.
Plus her grilling Jon for wanting battle with not enough men, Jon then logically answering "well this is all the men we can get,what do you want to wait for?" and her still saying nothing about the Vale.
My reading when season 6 was airing was that she wasn't telling Jon about the Vale because she didn't want Littlefinger anywhere near Jon and accepting his help was an absolute last resort. But, given how the rest of the show went, and how clunky the Battle of the Bastards was written, I was giving the writers too much credit and no amount of headcanoning could make Sansa's actions work.
@@mirandatilley2486 The main reason this doesnt work is that troops dont move over night. The battle of the bastards didnt happen over night. Sansa mustve let Littlefinger know weeks in advance to the battle for the knights of the Vale to be there on time. Even if we are very charitable with travel times and communication it wouldve been at least a day or night before the battle and she says nothing. I thought Sansas writing in the last seasons of the show were infuriating because the show keeps telling us how smart she is but we arent shown her doing anything smart. Her interactions with Jon, Danny and the council in winterfell are painful to listen to. Ive heard an interpretation where shes doing it to overthrow Jon (even not telling him about the Vale being a play to hopefully get him killed) so she can take control of winterfell and the north. But even that only somewhat works if we accept we magicked away the inherent traditions and sexism of westeros and the north.
Oh definitely same on the trauma part. As someone that was traumatized and assaulted as a child, it made me feel better when, in therapy, i could accept at no point was i BETTER for going through it. I was significantly fucked up actually in a fair amount of ways, especially in how i tried to use it as an identity. It wasnt. I am my identiy, what i love, who i love, who i acceot love from. The trauma didnt make me stronger, the love of the people around me brought me BACK to where i could have been naturally if i hadnt been abused like that.
D&D never understood that SA victims wouldn't ever think that " it was good that I got SAd , it made me strong! I would never change it" . The dialogue between Hound and Sansa horrified me . Yikes .
That scene COULD have worked if it was done in a way that made it clear this was a bad rationalization of her abuse, like hearing "I was beat as a child and I turned out fine" from someone who is DECIDEDLY NOT FINE, but the show's ability to do things like that was long gone by season 8.
I completely agree, it should have been done this way. Similar like in the books Arya thinks "I am brave" "I am strong" "I do not need any one"... but you know she does that simply to give courage to herself and to be able to rationalize what had happened to her, like kids do.
I like how they rushed the final seasons of the show because Dave and Dan wanted to work on their Star Wars project and then after how bad the final season turned out Disney fired them anyways 💀
For me the points that showed me that they didn’t understand Sansa’s story (or the point of ASOIAF- it’s an anti-war story) were: the omission of the “not kiss” between Sandor and Sansa. Sandor goes to Sansa broken, ready to flee because ‘fuck the king’, and willing to SA Sansa. He asks her for a song since he’s always called her “little bird” and sees her as a pretty bird in a cage (which is GRRM playing with the ‘spoiled privileged teen girl’ trope). He grabs Sansa and Sansa begins to sing a song for The Mother. The Mother’s song is a song for peace. A song for mercy. A song sung as a prayer for the avoidance/ending of a war. This pretty song expected of an innocent high-born girl is enough to stop Sandor in his tracks and reconsider hurting Sansa. It’s the starting of Sandor’s arc to process his trauma and heal. He does rail against it a bit but the change has started until finally after he’s wounded and Arya abandons him he accepts a quiet life of peace as a monk on the Quiet Isle. Sandor’s arc is a story of a broken and traumatized man who is thought of as a savage and mad dog. But this song of peace and innocence starts him off not on a redemption arc but an path for healing. It’s important for Sansa that Sansa uses the tools expected of her station to protect herself. She’s not girlbossing her way out of something. She says over and over “that a lady’s courtesy is her armor”, and it’s an important contrast to Arya (who is girlbossing her way through planetos with a weapon named for a tool expected of a nobelwoman). Sansa never desired to be a warrior like Arya, she finds pleasure in being a high born lady…and theres nothing wrong with either path. GRRM is showing that characters like Sansa aren’t damsels in distress because they like the “trappings” of their station, rather Sansa’s story shows that she can use those tools to protect herself while becoming politically astute to maneuver. The other thing is that at her wedding to Tyrion, Sansa never kneels to allow him to place the cloak on her. Instead Tyrion has to stand on a jester’s back to do so. Sansa refusal to kneel is her act of rebellion disguised by her courtesies because in this scenario she’s not expected to. At no point in the scene do Tyrion, The Septon, Jeoffry, Cersei demand she kneel for her husband. Sansa uses societal expectations to fight back a bit, turning the situation to mock solely Tyrion. Had she knelt she would have been lumped in with the way kingdom sees Tyrion. Instead she makes a statement at the wedding that she’s a child being forced into a political marriage without people notice her openly defy the system and the Lannisters. It grows the alienation between them and keeps Tyrion in people’s crosshairs while she fades to the background as the poor girl who was forced to marry The Imp. Which also allows her some cover to keep sneaking out to see Dontos. As Tyrion, still smarting from the humiliation at the wedding, allows her space because he’s trying to Nice Guy his way into Sansa’s heart.
I might be alone on this one, but I lost all respect for the show and the show runners specifically in that moment. Season 8 might have been bad, but bad writing can happen to any writer. But writing something like this? Pretty disgusting on just a human level.
I relate a lot to Sansa character wise and in my personal life and I would like to say this: I was dissatisfied with Sansa's arc, and specifically this answer to the hound, not because it was acknowledged that all of those horrible experiences also made her grow up as a character, but because it was the perfect moment for her to break crying for her lost childhood, imagining what would have been if she had taken other choices, and maybe reflect that it was all of this traumatic situations that ended giving her the key to the knights of the vale, so in a way, yes, it is a good moment to thank the gods they put her on the position to save what remained of her home and family but not the way that she did. The show felt flat, as you very well point out, because they reduced her to her trauma, a complex answer from a complex character would have better suited Sansa and the feel of the show: not happily agreeing that Trauma empowered her, but crying realising that she was where she needed to be when it came to it. I also wish they showed her more as the daughter of Catelyn (loving, caring, still true in some ways to her most idealistic self, but strong and full with political intelligence) in defiance to what the world had tried to break her into: a resentful Cersei or a cunning Little Finger. At the end in the show she just felt a template of what others made out of her. All the subplots of her undermining Jon and having doubts about Arya didn't feel quite right to me either.
I think the biggest flaw is that they hide away all her true feelings and intentions just to surprise the audience, when it would have been more compelling to watch her take these actions on screen.
Great choice for the worst moment of characterization/message in Sansa's story. I particularly see how it would resonate with you as a therapist. From my perspective as a woman, I found the worst moment to be Sansa walking away after feeding Ramsay to his dogs with a little satisfied look on her face. It so perfectly summed up the message of her arc: to be a strong female character, you have to lose your stereotypically female attributes of kindness, love, forgiveness. You can only be strong if you act like a man, and a brutal one at that. (You can see this play out in Sansa's costuming, too; it became all armor-like dresses and metal.) What a terrible disservice to kindness, and to women. What a terrible disservice to young Sansa, whose dog Lady was the sweetest and gentlest, reflecting who she was as a person.
I found that deeply concerning too. Whatever Ramsi was, killing him the same way he did so many of his victims is a kind of validation. He should have been given a fast, clean death and probably after a sentence.
Seeing as for every 11,000 murders committed by men in the US, there are 1,000 committed by women, I think we can largely say it's not a terrible gender bias to suggest?🤷♀️
The thing that was horrible about GOT was that being a straight up sociopath was considered a good thing where as in the books Sansa’s biggest feature later on was her compassion. Same with dany. In the show aryas brutality is portrayed as a good thing when in the books it’s portrayed as troubling
I was also very bothered by this scene. It's this glorification of trauma as if horrible situations are something to be desired and proud of because they make us stronger. Sure, it's great if someone can heal from their trauma and it's amazing if they grow from it but it should never be glorified in that way or depicted as the only way for someone to grow. What happened to her way horrible and should never have happened, but to frame it as something she needed to grow is sending a horrible message.
The other thing I didn't like about what the writers did with Sansa was her hostility towards Dany. In the beginning it was completely understandable but after Dany proved her word, that she did come to Winterfell to defend it, the North and Westeros as a whole Sansa still mistrusted her. The writers turned her (and Varys) into a mouthpiece to justify the "Mad Queen" arc rather than have a legitimate reason for Sansa to not want Dany as queen other than Dany being too eager. The only reason I can think of for Sansa knowing Dany would go evil for no reason is that Littlefinger leaked the Season 8 scripts and Sansa got the chance to read them.
Lindsay Ellis said it best in my opinion. "Sansa's only purpose this season is to have this weird unfounded suspicion of Daenerys which only proves to be founded when Daenerys does something completely nonsensical. Sansa's mistrust of Daenerys only makes sense if you are writing from the end forward. Telling us she's smart when her intelligence is really just writer clairvoyance. Giving her suspicions without giving her a reason to have them other than the writers knowing how the show will end and they want Sansa to look smart."
Sansa never thought Daenarys would become the mad queen. She wanted an independent north and saw a queen with dragons who convinced her king to give up his crown to her as a problem. Her safety and power in the north to a large extent depended on the love of her people, especially her brother/cousin Jon. She never questioned Daenarys's sanity. She questioned why she needed to have the north included in her kingdom. Sansa was very clear and specific about her concerns in their one on one conversation. It was Daenarys who was hostile.
my problem with the hostility with dany is that it shouldn't matter. jon Snow is the leader of the north why would Danny care what dim sansa has to say. really any concerns abouth thenorth should be going through jon not sansa, pointless scene really, it should have been sansa and jon having the "wut abou de norf" spat with eachother.
@@ajae... it's Daenerys - and if you look at it, Sansa questioning why North has to remain as a part of the Seven Kingdoms is actually dumb - she cares not for North safety - they're alone. Poor, without people and food, fleet (minus fleet from House Manderly - but it's not enough) vulnerable and easy to attack, even with all the advantages - Moat Cailin, not heavily populated, vast space, strong and harsh winter, so not easy to conquer - something that book Stannis is aware of, even with the help from Jon. Sansa wanting them to remain independent would only weaken them. Also - North remaining in the Seven Kingdoms is important because of the fact that they always were a part of it, it's a symbol. They peacefully bent the knee, to save their kingdom and people. Most importantly - if she was so smart, then she should have used their position to negotiate with Daenerys - they're giving up their crown, so they could negotiate different terms of remaining in the Seven Kingdoms (they could have the very same privileges as Dorne), got better positions and representation at court. They came to Daenerys because they needed her help, not only because she summoned them - and without it they would be dead. North wouldn't get that help if they didn't bend the knee - why would anyone be willing to help them and put their army in danger? With the majority of the Vale army being in the North, Vale would be easy to conquer - especially with dragons, just like during the conquest, same goes for riverlands - with lands and its people still too weakened from last war. They don't have many allies.
The term I've heard for Ramsey's treatment of Theon is, "Torture porn", and I believe it applies to Sansa especially. She doesn't suffer in order to learn or overcome. She suffers in order to indulge the viewer in a very dark place, enjoying the spectacle of pain. .
Sansa has always been my favorite. She brings a very interesting point of view of a tragic place to be amongst war. All the abuse, the beatings, the manipulation and all while having her father killed and, consecutively, hermother, and all male siblings (it's believed Theon killed Bran and Rickon), Arya is missing and could well be dead in Sansa's mind. There's only Jon, north of the wall, so far away from Kings Landing. And yet what people see is "stupid girl you killed ned how could you believe one of the most experienced person in the whole game of thrones from decades while you were 11 coming from a far country-ish northern frozen land!! its your fault!" It's pretty sad how shallow the show portraited her and all the "cerseification" of Sansa in the later seasons. I'm excited to see how the develops in the next books! Great video, I looove Sansa content!
Making Sansa also go through Jeyne pools storyline was ridiculous especially since Jeyne exists in the show. D & D really shouldn’t have been given control of the story they bamboozled George and did everything to his story he was worried about.
THANK YOU. I have so many issues with how the show wrote (but not portrayed persay, the actors were phenomenal) most of these characters for TV, and Sansa is at the top of my most wronged characters list. Especially as a victim of CSA myself, and with intimate knowledge of these books (it's one of my biggest hyperfixations) I KNOW the gratuitous amount of sexual violence was unnecessary, bordered on voyeurism, and weren't even in the books at all in the first place. It bothers me every time I see the show or hear people talk about the story while only having knowledge of the show. I think that at the end of the day, it really shows how, in my opinion, George is remarkably talented at writing characters of all genders and D&D simply do not know what to do with a young girl like Sansa.
I knew as soon as they removed Jeyne Poole they were going to have major issues later on. I didn't anticipate that they would put Sansa in Jeyne's place, but I sensed trouble coming. Sansa is meant to be a deconstruction of the Disney fairy-tale princess. She is not a perfect person by any stretch of the imagination when we meet her. She is a selfish, petty 11-year old who - at first - has no interest in growing past her narrow frame of reference. But so what? This is the mindset of a privileged child. It's not damning. I wouldn't have wanted her as a playmate at 11, but that doesn't mean much. It doesn't mean the whole character should be written off. I hesitate to comment on Sansa's character arc after KL from the perspective of a reader . It's too undercooked in the books at this point. I can't be sure what will happen in the Vale. She's in a bad spot of another kind, but at least at this stage she isn't as trusting as she was. There is growth, but it is slow. But I have hope for her, because Martin has shown that he has a deft hand in developing his characters. The show messed so many things up. It started out well...but it just *fell apart*. It's not just Sansa, but she is one of the characters it is clearest with. (I'm looking at you, ShowTyrion. WTF were they thinking, making him this quasi-white knight character?)
*spoken word snaps in agreement* i think the showrunners and their writers were very generous to fans not interested in reading the books. book-fans were exasperated by the white-washing of some characters while even the white-washing felt brutal to those who knew nothing about the books or how cruel book westeros is. i followed George's lead and treat them as separate entities entirely. they did everyone a huge disservice castrating the series. *everyone* would've gotten a return on their 8 seasons of emotional, financial and psychological investment if they'd have just given promoted or hired new showrunners, sob.
tyrion is a white knight in the books as well, it goes right back to his first love. he is a genuinely kind and decent person who learns the game of thrones and the game of thrones requires you to be not be kind and honest. look at what happens to every completely honest person in the books.
I stopped watching the show immediately after the Sansa rape scene. It was complete male gratification, not at all from her point of view. It made me feel genuinely sick how they wrote a scene that wasn't even in the books about a child and didn't even focus on her pain but the camera panned to who was abusing her. Disgusting. I was on the edge of quitting it for a while because of how they'd portrayed women and just vulnerable people in general in the past, but that was genuinely the last straw. I can't stand people who say it got worse in the last season, that the writing "spoiled" the show. No. The writing was rotten to the core and spreading starting season 2. The writers unfortunately have a certain view of the world, and that bled into their writing/directing/show running.
After reading the books and watching the show I found Sansa to be one of the most relatable and heart breaking. The rigidity of the gender roles she was brought up in promised her a life with a prince that was beautiful and full of honour, but the reality of her situation was the opposite. It’s heartbreaking to watch her try to cling to some sense of normalcy or to return to the rigidity of her imposes gender roles because MAYBE if she did the world would go back to normal and she would get her happily ever after. It feels like her story mirrors that of so many young women who are promised a beautiful happy life with a husband and kids if they just follow orders and do what they’ve be told only to be smacked in the face with the cold reality of that promise way to late in life to do anything to change it.
I didn't make it to that scene of Sansa talking to Sandor, as i quit the show after her wedding to Ramsay. I can't imagine book Sansa saying those words at all. It's crazy to look back and think of how initially I was excited for Sansa to go to Winterfell, as I thought, "wow this is going to be so different. the northern lords are going to react very differently to actual Sansa Stark being there than fake Arya in Jeyne Poole. Sansa will have a much higher leg up. She doesn't need to marry Ramsay at all." All throughout the eps leading up to the wedding and the wedding ep itself I kept expecting the northmen to turn on the Boltons and put their weight behind Sansa, even thought at the wedding they were going to be killed there in a similar payback to the red wedding that the boltons helped orchestrate, but of course none of that happened. They gave us Sansa's earlier storyline as you said, dialed up to 10, and had her act like Jeyne does in the books throughout the whole thing, and not how Sansa, a highborn lady would have reacted. I cant tell you how disappointed I was.
Thank you! This is the line I was hoping you were going to criticize! It absolutely burns me up when abuse is portrayed as having been needed, or on some level, a good thing. The attempt to justify it in this way sends very unhealthy messages to victims and perpetrators alike!
THANK YOU!!! That "I would have stayed a little bird" was so upsetting and disturbing. And that's without taking into consideration the way Sandor speak to her, the words he uses. THE ICKS!!! 😖
They also made Littlefinger appear incompetent because he wouldn't just give her to the Boltons unless it served him in some way it didn't. So it made more sense to send her to the only place she would be most protected, which is... House Mormont. Even though they have a very small army. They are honorable and knowing the best means to protect Sansa is to keep her identity a secret, it is very likely no one would transmit her wherabouts to the Boltons so long as Littlefinger cleverly disquises her and only reveals her identity to the Mormonts who again are an honorably people and had proudly served the Starks. And to have her grow into her own character, you could have it be an issue for Mormont to house her because their forces are so small in number. If work came out, they wouldn't be able to protect her for long and they would be putting themselves in danger especially since she isn't the next in line to the throne at Winterfell. This gives Sansa the opportunity to stand up for herself and show she has agency by being the commanding personality necessary for the Mormonts to maintain their pledge of honor towards the Starks. They are not just honoring their pledge to the Starks, they are honoring her as the rightful Stark.
There's also the fact book! Sansa actively wants to marry Willas Tyrell (Margaery's eldest brother, who had a bad leg and a passion for falconry) because it would give her a way out of King's Landing and she doesn't care if he's a cripple. Show! Sansa also wants to escape but it looks like she's still swooning over Loras' pretty face and is oblivious to what is going on. I understand they had to cut Willas and Garlan because it would have made the show too intricate (still a shame, I liked Garlan the Gallant), but it led to a huge mischaracterisation of Sansa.
In essence, the argument the show is making is that Lady Catelyn was a little bird for the entirety of her life until maybe the last few chapters of it because for all that time, until maybe the last few chapters of it, she didn't go through anything half so traumatic as Sansa. I believe D&D wrote that line, whether consciously or subconsciously, to excuses what they ended up putting her through unnecessarily, as if to say, _"Look, everyone, what we did was actually great, because we made her into a Queen! Can we get a, 'Hell yeah'"?_
How the show treated Sansa made me stop watching it and took a long time to begin again. Your video is 10/10 cause that's exactly how I thought about what happened to her character.
Girlboss Salsa was such a disappointment. Each Stark child is supposed to find a different sort of strength, and Salsa's arc in the books is about her learning to be subtle, to fight from a position of weakness and make a difference by taking advantage of people seeing her as weak and stupid. But I guess that's just too hard to write. So instead we just get smug, emotionless Salsa. She becomes so boring. Her chapters are so great in the books, and Sophie Turner did such a great job showing the subtlety of her character. I wish she would've gotten the opportunity to play a better end-game Salsa, I think she would've done a great job of it.
I think it is very, very obvious why Little Finger made the deal with Roose to marry her to Ramsey in the show. It is the same reason he seems to want her to marry Harry the Heir in the books. Petyr Baelish has one goal, power; he is climbing a ladder. He is not conquering with armies. He it doing it with diplomacy and influence. He married Lysa, (though he killed her when she became a liability). This made him stepfather to the next High Lord of the Aerie. He sent Sansa to the Boltons to marry Ramsay who is a psychopath (which he definitely knows about). She is reestablished and accepted as lady of the North. Little Finger then goes to the Aerie and convinced her cousin to send the army to rescue her from the Boltons. He expected to show up and have Sansa be a totally traumatized basket case who would welcome his rescue and come to be totally dependent on him. Instead she has become stronger and mistrusts him. He is lord of Harrenhall in the Riverland and I imagine has somehow managed to make ties with the Fryes and maybe get influence over the baby of Edmure Tully conceived during the Red Wedding. And I think in the show Harrenhall was made top house in Riverlands when the Tullys in revolt. Not sure who is officially the High Lord anymore. Little Finger in the books is loaning out tons to money to people and everyone owes him favors. He stockpiled a lot of grain before The War of the Five Kings, which he started, and is making a ton of money selling that grain. He is slowly behind the scenes building power to get himself into position to claim the throne. More like have people ask him to be king, and he will humbly accept. I think this is where the books are going. There are so many more conspiracies (Great Northern Conspiracy, Dornish Master Plan, whatever Varys is plotting with Aegon), and they are so better plotted out in the books.
Yes, thank you! A video that was much-needed! Yeah, Sansa is a great underrated character, and I can't wait to know what happens next to her in the books. While yeah, she starts perhaps a little annoying in the books, later, as her story progresses, and we see and understand where her story and character arc is going, you realize she has and will have an amazing story and that yeah, she's a fantastic character and well developed. And yeah, I especially love that Martin didn't make her into a bad-ass fighting boyish girl, but made her a smart feminine character that knows how to make people follow her due to her kindness, unlike Cersei who just uses and manipulates men, so Sansa and her type of character, is something we don't get much in these type of series, and which sadly isn't liked very much by a lot of the male audience.
She's learning to manipulate Harry the heir and Littlefinger. I hope she gets just what she needs from each. I agree she's becoming a smart feminine character, but she'll do it with manipulation as well as kindness. The right mix.
4. Little bird. I think D&D wanted to say something like she would not be the same person today without the trauma, the wizened skin, the cynicism etc. This is undoubtedly true, and for believers in standpoint theory she could now relate to the hound and other abused commoners now she had her own experiences. I do think D&D fluffed it with poor writing, which maybe cheapened the line, and minimized the abuse, maybe it was Sophie's delivery, but even so someone relating their own story down in the pub, without the expectation of a team of pro writers would also definitely fluff these sorts of stories, minimize bits, need longer to explain others and it would depend on the patience and skill of the listener as much as the storyteller (and when I disclosed that I was studying psych undergrad, I heard all the abuse tales and every one was surprisingly honest and blunt if not 100% articulate and fully formed). From this perspective, if we imagine Sansa had not prepared any speech for the hound, we could likely imagine she would give an unthoughtful brush-off or face-saving BS answer. He is not the therapist after all, and she may not have worked through her trauma with a therapist guiding her into the correct lingo to use or framing to see the world.
That's something along the lines of what I was thinking. There's every reason she could have reached an imperfect conclusion about it all and also every reason she wouldn't have a profound response in that situation. I suppose that goes in hand with there being no exploration of her inner life in a way. And on the topic of her repeated traumatic experiences, not having read the books it just struck me as awful but entirely plausible she could end up in multiple situations as such, hell, plenty of women in this day and age can experience multiple abusive encounters and relationships. And actually, I think it's pretty common for people to armour up and see their tragic experiences as battle scars so that doesn't ring as untrue to me. I'm not overly keen on her arc but those little bits just don't strike me as big problems
I remember hearing or reading Martin comment on why he created the character of Sansa. The other Stark children were all decent likable kids and Martin felt they needed to have at least one child who was less likable, so he created Sansa. She was also not supposed to survive the story.
You read WAAAY more into the "little bird" conversation. What I took away from it was that Sansa recognizes, at this point, that she was a VERY sheltered and protected child who would likely STILL be as sheltered, naïve and foolish at that point if she hadn't been forced to learn the harsh lessons of misplaced trust. She was telling the hound that WITHOUT experiencing those traumas, she might have never understood the dark side of human nature and would likely still be a "foolish little girl" in a young woman's body. THAT is the "little bird" she referenced. I, like you, suspect that this impression was left accidentally by these two showrunners because I don't believe they are clever enough to have formed such a complex thought. At least by the poor writing they showed as soon as the show past the point that the author had written to.
I have not payed attention to that conversation, but when you pointed it out, I completely agree. It seems that the implication is that all the horrible things she endured made her the strong woman she is and then in retrospect "may be they were not so bad" - a concept that I totally disagree. What a good catch, I guess this is the "therapist eye". You are right, Sansa in the books is much more interesting. Recently I was rereading them and one thing jumped at me - how much she equates physical beauty with everything that is good in a person. She is offered at one point a marriage with the heir of Higarden, which at that point is the only way out for her, but the only thing that she can think about is "how much better would be to marry Loras, sincere is so pretty and his brother has only on leg", Same with Tyrion - her biggest concern is his looks, not that he is a Lanister and/or possibly a horrible person. Of course in that society the value of a woman is put in her beauty, so it is understandable, but still shallow. Her mother Catlyn is the same way - when she talks with Brianne, in her head she thinks "there is nothing worse for a woman than being ugly" - and this is after all the bad things in her life, really woman - how about your husband being abusive, how about your kid dying, how about not being able to have kids, ... I was thinking also that the way Aria grew up such a rebel and wanting to do things no woman usually does may be due to her understanding that she is not pretty. I mean the fact that she knows from her mother (not that Catlyn would ever do that intentionally, but for a smart kid there are ways to get things that are never said) the importance of it, shaped her to become this person.
Her first thoughts are of physical beauty, then the next are of other things pretty quickly, like how kind Willas sounds, and how she looks so pretty in her new gown she'll make him want her for herself, not her claim! She's a teen. She'd like someone a little good looking, while aware that looks are deceiving. Of course she thinks Tyrion is ugly - he IS, and all she wants is to get AWAY from court, she has realized that Joffrey can and will abuse her any time, just as he says. As for Catelyn, I read that thought as one of sympathy for Brienne - " gee that's a rough start in life for her" sentiment - and she tells Arya she'd be pretty if she brushed her hair. She was trying to get the kid to clean up some and brush her hair - using the wrong incentive! Arya is not gorgeous, but she's not ugly either.
I think that your problems with Tyrion in the show is colored by the relationship that they have in the books. I didn’t see any romantic feelings that show Tyrion had for Sansa.
I actually really like Sansa. She was just a naive girl that dreamt of what she had been told she must dream. She slowly started go see the real world and how she was more capable of doing things and using power. By the end of the war, after many deaths, assaults etc, she just wants peace for HER people, the north. She is queen and wants to rule peacefully. As I see it, the series just starts her story. Now she must rule and go through all the trauma she endured, let love inside her again, as we all know she desires and grow.
I like what you said in the end of this video. How Sansa could have been the beating heart of the show if David and Dan bothered to understand Sansa as a character and what the overall point is of the book series, because chances are that is what GRRM is setting her up to be. Sansa is introduced as someone who loves stories and songs and has a very black-white view of the world. She is supposed to be like the reader who reads A Game of Thrones for the first time and expects things to go in a specific way. Sansa, just like the reader, is suprised by the Ned's death and now has to relearn how the world works - JUST LIKE THE READER. While Sansa has many storylines to her name: a political arc, an autonomy arc, and a romance, but the number storyline is what lesson Sansa will learn by the end of this book series when it pertains to songs, truth and lies. In the beginning Sansa said, "All she wanted was for things to be nice and pretty, the way they were in the songs." We all know how this isn't true but what many in this fandom fail to realize is that Littlefinger's line: "Life is not a song, sweetling. You may learn that one day to your sorrow." Is as equally inaccurate. Thinking everything in the worlds is pretty, rainbows and amazing is wrong, but by the same extent thinking there is no hope, only monsters win, and if you wish to succeed you need to lose your moral compass is just as wrong. What Sansa will learn in the end will be something more in the middle of these two extreme takes. It will be a bittersweet lesson. And that will be no doubt one of the core message of the Song of Ice and Fire book series. Very few characters have a storyline that pertains to the title of the book series, but Sansa being one of them, shows just how important she is to the book series. In my opinion GRRM is setting Sansa up as the heart of the story.
Going to be honest, I never saw her statement of without the trauma she wouldn't have grown up as a wholesome ending. I saw it as relatable, real, sad, but true to those who have been through trauma. It's a real mindset that most of us go through when we're really starting to face what we've been through and question "who would I have been if I didn't go through this? What would have changed?" As someone who grew up in a cult, as someone who almost killed someone in self defence and justified rage at 15, as someone who was sexualized starting at age 11 and wasn't pulled out, saved, shown what normal was til the age of 20/21, I related to this. This spoke to me not because it was wholesome. But because it was real. It was something that showed where she was in healing, and it pushed me to answer the questions I'd already been asking myself a long the exact same lines. I agree that the show ruined Sansa. It ruined all of the characters. But while we didn't get to see the emotional internal story, we got to see what she was outwardly put through. Those of us that her part of the story is supposed to resonate with didn't need much more, we could easily infur the rest because on various levels, we were there. It was triggering, it wasn't an okay place to be, but being able to watch her come out the other side, helped some of us come out the other side. Book is still better, but this sticks with me.
Think you missed that in part a fictional SA or abuse of women is there for the white knight to contrast with. In this story the two most scarred people, Tyrion and the Hound, have not given in to their trauma, retain their humanity for it's own sake, and are subtly (or not) guiding her to safety, which Sansa is not quite ready to accept. Sansa wedding night was in the books, it wasn't a creation of D&D, it was Jayne Poole, so having made the choice to put Sansa in there she is simply following the Jayne storyline. In the books, she is manipulating littlefinger to get her to safety, and he is happy she is creating this obligation that he can later call on, ie the death of Aunt Lysa.
I thought Sansa's character in the show was very important. Cersei called her "little dove" and although the dove doesn't fly as high or strong as fast as the Eagle or Hawk, the dove is the mirror that shows us how horrible we all really are.
Wait a minute, if Sansa started the series as 11, and is currently 14 at the Eyrie, does that mean all the ASOIAF books only cover a period of less than 5 years????!!!
I find it so creepy the way all these older men think they have the right to creep on this child, just because they were each a little bit nice or in the case of the Hound or Dontos, honest with her about her predicament. Her rank and her lady's armor is not really protecting her.
I'd love to sit down with you and discuss Sansa because, whilst i agree with most of what you say, i actually love her story, she's my favourite character. I interpret that 'i would still be the little bird' line differently to you. What would be her impetus to change if she'd just continued to rely on the kindness of others? Maybe something else would have happened but there's a chance it wouldn't either. Is the 'going through hell made me who i am ' so unrealistic? I think she had to go through two hells because, in the first, she thought she might be rescued, she then was only to end up in hell again. It was at this point that she realised the only way out of hell was to drag herself out. I'm also ok with the depiction of violence, in so much media violence is portrayed as something heroic (Logan and Deadpool are major examples of this), to have a site portray how horrific violence really is isn't a bad thing. Was Sansa singled out for violence? She was paired with Theon who was just as much a victim as she was but, whilst Theon found some kind of peace, he never escaped being a victim, Sansa did. Ultimately I love Sansa's character because she (and maybe Arya) are the only charecters in the entire show that learn anything, i don't think that Sansa learning due to get treatment diminishes hey achievement.
I took what Sansa said to the hound more and something she said is a coping mechanism for herself, in her own head. I'm just speaking as someone who's gone through similar traumas and have told myself that I'm okay with it because it's made me who I am today. I've told myself that obviously to make myself feel better about it. I can look back and understand that's what I was doing now but that's how I saw the character doing it in the show, not a glorifying of what she had been through. I also kind of took it as her saying it to the hound to make him feel less guilty for possibly "abandoning her" to such a fate.
Basically they rushed to finish the series. They should've aimed for at least 15 seasons. And it annoyed me how the North was given independence but the Iron islands weren't in the show, yes piss off the guys who are known for rebellion and ruthless tactics.
I watched this scene as it aired and cringed at it immediatly, exactly for the reason you described. Watching her character state something so twisted and cruel about herself saddened me so much.
I dont agree with the part of 'little bird'. She started a naive joung girl that tried to please people (lanisters) to adapt. And was mistreated and exploited for that. If she never left kingslanding, she would have never rebelt/learned to stand her ground/ self-worth/or build an army. And would have stayed a little bird. Although she could have had many roads to season 8, this was her path. In stead of acting like a victim, she used trauma as her weapon to make her stronger. Every person that hurt her in the past, she learned from and used it next to protect herself. I think of all tv characters, sansa is 1 of the best portrayed. Her character is immense complex, but mayby not for everyone to be understood. Her character feels natural, shes a survivor from the start and as she gets older and more traumatized, she adapts en empowers herself.
I've always really liked Sansa since the show, but came to like her even more after reading the books. I got so, so sick of the show audience seeming to dismiss Sansa for her femineity and perceived softness. She's just as much a young wolf as Arya.
Sansa was ruined the moment they wanted to make her a 'girlboss' who was unfeeling and jaded. Because apparently D&D believed that a woman must go through r*pe and let go of idealism and kindness to be strong. It's so infuriating because Sansa's story was one of a victim of abuse who struggles to remain kind and caring and loving while also toughing up in a world that wants to eat her up. Turning her into an icelady girlboss only pushes the narrative that 'pain' makes people stronger, that in the end you will become your abusers, and it's a bleak and depressing story to give to people who have gone through similar things to what Sansa did.
I think for the little bird scene, it isnt attempting to say that one cannot grow up without experiencing trauma. I think it's trying to express that in Sansa's eyes, the world is full of horrors beyond the imagining of most. And she believes being unaware of these horrors is itself a type of childish naivety. Her point I think is that in her opinion she needed to experience these horrors to be fully aware of their existence and their true nature. She sees this knowledge and awareness as being a strength that she has come to value. As for why she might think these things, it could be that shes right considering the particular world in which the story takes place. Or it could be as simple as a coping mechanism. Refusing to see herself as a victim because doing so would only invite more predation from the evil and the Ill intentioned. The latter of those actually has real world study back it up. Victims are more likely to become repeat victims because they present as easy targets for predators. And a good way to avoid that is to consciously try to give the opposite impression.
The perspective that Sansa gives where she talks about Ramsey and Little Finger and how she wouldn't be who she is without them is something that people often do who experience trauma. It's sort of a way to cope. I don't think we're supposed to view it as the writers glorifying trauma (at least that's not how I take it), but more of a glimpse into Sansa's mind and how she deals with the horrible things that have happened to her. When people have been through terrible things, they often ask "Why me?". This is just to show one way that those feelings are handled and how Sansa views them.
That's what I would hope because, as I said, it does make realistic sense but there is also zero exploration of it, just the statement as part of an empowering conclusion to her character whilst at the same time kinda turning her into Cersei. If they're gonna that, it needs exploring and they just don't
A lot of survivors have written in to this COMMENTS section to say no, that is not it, it was the healing that made them the strong people they are now. So NO.
Sansa's chapter in the book always woke in me the desire to smack catelyn and the Septa, because those stupid ideas of knightly knights, pretty equals good came from somewhere! But the moments where i liked the character was when she was kind to others despite her own pain. I think in the books her lesson will not be as in the show: might is right, kill or be killed (or as others said here cersei 2.0) but: it's what people DO that matters, not their speeches or their looks or titles!
Sansa is a child, and I feel that modern George has placed her in what is supposed to be an adult setting, but through Sansa (but not Arya) shows the self-absorption and not knowing how to act and relate to others as independent adults, and this is why she cannot reciprocate kindness when offered and maybe the men are portrayed as pining but really they are looking for simple acknowledgment, respect or an adult understanding that we are bound together and need to make this work, much the way you don't often choose your workmates, but still the company needs you to fulfill your goals together.
There is a feeling that Sansa may become more important in proceeding books, for example she maybe lined up to marry the not dead afterall Prince Aegon Targaryen. Personally Im still hoping for Ned Stark and his ancestors to come back as white walkers....
I think for the people who do positively grow from their trauma, it is common to view the trauma as a sort of catalyst for positive change in their life. It is common to say, “though what has happened to me was awful, I am thankful that I have become who I am. I could not be who I am now without these traumatic experiences.” It is not to say that the trauma is good. It is affirmation that the traumatized person is good, and has grown from to be better. I feel that we can invalidate the experiences of people who grow through trauma if we insist on saying that their trauma shouldn’t have happened and saying that they should also wish that it never happened. No matter how awful the trauma was, if they have embraced who the trauma has made them then to wish the trauma never happened is also to wish who they are now never existed. I like your analysis overall though. I just got a bit triggered by your final point.
The problem is that's not what's being said. Sansa is saying that without it, she'd have forever been a pathetic little bird. The difference is subtle but massively important, plus the framing of all of it is as a good thing without any exploration of actual healing taking place, so it just becomes that the trauma, in and of itself, transformed her from someone we should see as pathetic, into someone we should admire
I think what also ruined her for me was unfortunately her portrayal. I don't think Sophie Turner is a particularly good actress (I also didn't like her as Jean Grey) and she comes across as having no feelings at all and robotic instead of childlike und full of dreams (earlier seasons) and traumatized (later seasons). So her whole arch is more like "gatekeep gaslight girlboss" instead of a girl/woman who's coming into herself. I don't wanna blame Sophie Turner alone, the character in the show was also badly written with horrendous dialogue, but taking everything into account, her arch of becoming queen of the North didn't feel justified or right at all.
While I did enjoy earlier seasons Sansa, my two main complaints are 1: she's rude "Oh, I just remembered, I don't care." Book Sansa would NEVER. And 2: that Shae got protective of her. The whole point of her arc is that Sansa has NO ONE who genuinely is on her side. Giving her any ally, especially one willing to kill for her is fundamentally misunderstanding her arc.
I can understand being upset by Sansa saying without her trauma she would not have grown, but as a therapist you must know this is a narrative trauma survivors create for themselves often as a way to see themselves as stronger and not have to face just how damaging their trauma was. Sansa is still not far removed from her trauma and has not had much time to process that. She is still very young and coping the best she can with shouldering a lot of power while trying to move past her pain. It makes perfect t sense to me that she would say this, especially in a public setting where she has to maintain her aura of strength in front of people who look to her for their own strength. Perhaps in time she will be able to process her trauma more and realize, at least in private, that she could have grown into a powerful woman without that trauma. As a survivor of trauma myself, that sentiment made perfect sense to me given the context in which she said it, her age, and the freshness of her trauma. I said very similar things before processing my own trauma more deeply than congratulating myself for surviving it.
Absolutely! The development does make rational sense. My concern is more the context and the way it is framed as a positive conclusion to her character, rather than something worth deeper exploration. It makes perfect sense...but then explore that, not paint it all as empowerment
Unfortunately trauma often does make you stronger and this world was cruel. As a trauma survivor, I unfortunately had to grow up quickly but in a few ways it had benefited me by erasing most of my naivety and protected me from certain situations. It has genetically changed me and would never want that used just for a hollow plot point but it is reality.
My view tends to be that if you come out of it stronger, then that's your victory and your power and something to be proud of. Unfortunately there are a lot of people it definitely does not make stronger, not initially anyway, and if they are able to grow gradually from the experience then I see that more as humanity's power to learn from even bad things. Either way, the point the show says isn't "as awful and damaging as trauma can be, it is possible to come out of it a stronger person" the point is "Sansa would've forever been a naive little bird without it" it might make her stronger but to say it was needed? To say a 14 year old girl would've never grown up unless she was abused? There is almost a point in what they're saying, they just get a bit lost in their own message
Рік тому+2
Amazing analysis. You really get the Sansa of the books.
I have not read the books (but I will) so my thoughts on Sansa in the HBO adaptation (upon seeing this title) were that it would have been nice if she had a ladies’ maid/companion so that there would have been a vehicle for us to learn more about her. I had completely forgotten about Jeyn! The show got so bad towards the last seasons, that I have not rewatched it. I wish I had ditched it after Season 3 in favor of the books. Thank-you for your analysis.
I see so few examples in tv or film of strong feminine characters, who have a happy ending. We love Arya, but she isn’t a feminine character. Shay dies after betraying Tyrion, Margery is killed in an explosion. They let Sansa live but only after she becomes a bitch.
I hated Sansa in the show, but once I started the books she became one of my favourite characters. The thing is, in the show she is 13, but even though she is said to still be a child in the beginning, she looks 15-16 to me (which is the actress's age, I think). And when you see a 15-year old in the world of game of thrones as naive as Sansa, they just seem childish and spoiled and offputting. But in the books I actually picture her as a child, and get to read her thoughts, and she is just a sweet naive little girl who was raised in a loving home, her worldview shaped by fairitales.
Actually... Sophie was 13 when she started to film GoT. She literally grew up along with Sansa. Maisie was 12 when she first started to film GoT. When S1 premiered on TV that's when Sophie was 15 and they were filming S2.
From the beginning, and I hadn’t read any of the books when the show first came out, Sansa was the person who fascinated me the most, as hers was the epitome of the life a young, noble girl in a feudal kingdom faced, often traded to her enemies to keep some veneer of peace, forced to walk on eggshells in front of everyone, until ultimately either surrendering to that fate, or taking control of it, as many feudal women did, though they’re scorned now by history with names like “She-wolf,” etc. I disagree that that scene glorifies abuse. That’s a scene created in the very-rushed last season to try and get across to the audience that always waiting to be rescued is not a good life-plan. Most of history’s she-wolves didn’t become who they were because they dreamed of it, they were usually forced to it out of some necessity - often violent. But the show had gotten into such a big hurry in the last season that the proper time couldn’t be devoted to allowing the audience to subtly come to that understanding. That’s why it feels so cringy, I think.
What an excellent analysis. I too absolutely hated that conversation in Season 8 between Sansa and Sandor. I look forward to exploring some of your other ASOIAF videos that explore the various characters. I am one of those self described annoying people who absolutely adore the book series, and as such have some very specific complaints about the television show. At the same time I also recognize that I still love the television show in spite of what I see as where it failed to grasp and thus portray some of the primary themes of the book series. For instance, one example is that I feel that the book series is doing an excellent job of exploring the downside of revenge, where the television show glorified it. A good example of this was the portrayal of Ellaria Sand. In the books she is calling out the Sand Snakes for wanting to perpetuate a cycle of revenge. While on the television show they had her wanting to cut Myrcella Baratheon up into little pieces for revenge over Oberyn’s death. Or the badass way they showed Arya taking out her revenge on the Freys, while it feels like her training as a Faceless Man in the books will take her into some dark places that she will be confronted with by the end. In general I loved the show and even felt that there were times that they made some improvements over the books in specific scenes. But I do think that spectacle and shock won over the deeper meanings of many aspects of what the books are trying to do.
Sansa is my favorite character less so for her characterization in the books or tv show but by the possibilities that lie in her character. If done right she has so much narrative potential. I feel like so many characters in Game of Thrones are very stereo typical archetypes of hero vs villain but her character is so different and therefore more interesting.
Jeyne is important in her own right because GRRM uses her to scold the audience for not caring about what happens to non-POV/"important" to the plot characters.Theon's redemption comes from him deciding that Jeyne deserves to be safe and that no one deserves to be tortured BECAUSE she's a human being. THAT is the theme. And Jeyne needing to lie and say she's Arya in order for non-Theon people to decide she's worth saving is a major CRITIQUE of Westerosi society and the audience. Replacing her with Sansa just enforces the bullshit behavior that GRRM was critiquing against.
Interesting because none of the stuff with the direwolves, culminating in Lady’s death would have happened. I suppose we’re swapping Sansa and Arya, and Sansa is very by the books, who would have stayed with the Queen at that time. But then, what would Joff and Arya gotten up to.
Good analysis I do think ppl miss that due to Ned seeing how his father, Rickard’s, Southern Ambitions ultimately led to devastation to the Starks + his PTSD from Robert’s Rebellion and falling out with Robert over Elia Martell’s and her childrens’ murders + his promise to hide/protect Jon, lead to Ned overcorrecting and hiding his family from the world. Unlike how he was sent to the Eyrie for fostering, Ned did not do that with any of his children- Bran and Jon should have been sent (or in the process of arranging fostering) to at least other Northern Houses by the time GOT starts (yes, even noble bastards would be fostered). This contributes to all the Stark children being woefully unprepared to deal with political maneuvering compared to their peers like Margery, Joeffrey (yes he’s a little shit and ineffective, but J’s at least suspicious), and Danny. Danny often raised points to Viserys that the people who took them in did so because they wanted something not because they believed V was the true king of Westeros. And throughout her journey in the books she does display caution and shrewdness born from a child who has been on the run for all of her life. But the Stark kids? Ned did not prepare them to be on their toes, did not instill reasons to distrust others and stick close to their family. This is why Sansa is so naive in the beginning due to her seeing KL as the fantasies sung in songs. And why it takes her some time to shake off the rose color glasses to become more astute in self-preservation and maneuvering. And it’s why Cersei and LF are big influences for her because she starts to learn how to play the game, with hints that she’ll move from pawn to a piece that absolutely will dominate/remove C and LF from the board. It’s why Arya, despite being more distrusting, still blunders by not reporting to Ned what she overheard in the dragon crypt in KL because she lacked the information gathering/connections she’d eventually learn in Bravvos. It’s why Robb has extreme anxiety over leading the North in his father’s stead, not because he’s 15 but because he is stressed about managing all of the nuances between the Northmen (Ubers won’t march behind Glovers, etc.) in a way that will make them respect him. It’s why he decides to send Theon away from him despite protests and it’s why he failed to see the growing plot of the Red Wedding. I’m over simplifying a lot but Ned did his kids dirty by not prepping them to be politically motivated and keeping them removed from anything outside of the Winterfell bubble. We were robbed of much in GoT, but I mourn for Sansa’s arc in the Vale. We could have had Sansa learning to run circles around LF and ultimately gain power over the Vale through her manipulating Sweet Robin and getting rid of LF . Because then if everything played our the same, minus the Ramsey storyline, Sansa’s ending would have felt more earned
It is not the trauma, that makes you stronger, it is the healing. I do think it is possible to have a strong character with part of the story of how they became strong is trauma and do it responsibly. But in order for this you need to show the healing process and how it relates to the particular strength of that person.
I really like how you put it. It's true healing makes you stronger not trauma ❤
The only way for a rape story to have worked would have been to have it be right at the beginning of her story... Like John being a bastard, only obviously it would be much worse.
@@charliedelfino2102she would have been 13 tho.. rape stories never work as character development
@@GoldenRose116 yeah I'm not saying it would have been a happy story, but at least it would have been relevant to the plot and be a social commentary. I was thinking that she would be punished by society for not being pure and how that would affect her life would at least be an interesting story that could focus more on her fight for justice than the actual event.
@@charliedelfino2102There's a scene in that same sansa rape episode where sansa is in the bath and she tells ramsey's girlfriend that she's a stark of Winterfell, that this is her home and that she's not afraid of her.
If they had simply put that AFTER the rape scene instead of just using sansa as a punching bag, it would've shown how resilient she was. It would've shown her determination and strength and at least hinted at all that that makes one strong. One's mental state is so important to healing. Those determined to survive have much better chances of actually healing
YES! Exactly! That whole message of "it's good that I was abused and assaulted by all these horrible people - it was all just a boot-camp for becoming the badass I am today!" BLEEUURRGHH. As an actual SA survivor, I can say *that's not how it works.* I might've moved past the trauma (with the help of therapy) and made a good life for myself now, but I've NEVER thought of my past traumas as 'valuable life lessons that made me a stronger person,' because THERE ARE BETTER AND WAY LESS AWFUL WAYS OF ACHIEVING THAT. The destructive, life-scarring way should NEVER be held up as the most 'interesting' or 'morally character-building' way to do it.
thank you for this! i hate that saying 'what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.' it could have been coined by DB and DW. such a nonsense. by the time she gets to castle black and changes her clothes, suddenly she's slick and clever, strong and opinionated....... nah mate. ,y own SA made me so screwed up in a myriad of ways.. and definitely didnt give me death defying belief in myself and opinions.
love to you.. keep doing good xxx
@@piaauman9020 you INTERPRET her as SUDDENLY cunning. She might have been way before.
As a survivor I guarantee you I have been thought to be dumb, spoiled, untouched by the harshness of the real world princess Barbie who never notices her surroundings, is too airheaded to even realize when she gets insulted or preyed upon.
Because I just smile along whatever happened and am friendly with everyone nomatter how they treat me.
I was raped from birth onwards. I am a still depenend disabled women of quite underwhelming proportions. I cannot fight people off, I cannot outrun them. But I sure know I can disarm them with freezing and kindle them with fawning. I have literally survived men who have raped, beaten, mamed and killed others. I never even got a scratch. I now live. I quietly left with nobody suspecting. I am still getting stalked. I smile and make my fluffy dog do wavy wavy paw for the neighbour's kids, while the police helicopter surches for the guy who yanked a blond haired girl off a horse and stabbed her, because she looked like me. My cutesy dog cannot be petted by strangers for me beeing weird with strangers touching him - he is there to protect me, appears cute on the outside, but I make sure they stay away from him, because he wouldn't really react friendly.
Appearing unsuspecting, plain or unaware are not the same as beeing it. Just like those people appearing friendly, harmless or helpfull - might be absolutely not.
"His Neighbors told cnn he was a friendly and charming member of the community..."
They never learn.
As someone who has experienced trauma throughout my life, especially as a young person, and as someone who tries to have a positive outlook that can often take the form of "everything is a learning experience blah blah blah", I can say with the utmost certainty and confidence that I wish I never had experienced the terrible shit I did as a child, teen, and young adult. I am not my traumatic experiences. I have been going through therapy to heal from said experiences(albeit for a short time so far). The long lasting effects of my childhood have included addiction, anxiety, depression, an extreme difficulty communicating and forming meaningful connections with others, disassociating at the drop of a hat, and the list goes on. I wish I hasn't experienced what I have. I'm not better for it. I'm deeply hurt by it. It's going to take a lot of work to come back from it. I won't be stronger or better than anyone when I do finally heal, I'll just finally be on the same level as any other normal well-adjusted adult. The notion that trauma makes a person better or stronger is asinine. All that said, I hope for the two of you to find the peace and healing you need and deserve to live a full and meaningful life. Love and light to you all
I'm *STILL* mad at that scene. The Hound wouldn't freaking say that and Sansa would react that way to it being said. Complete tripe.
Naivety does not last long in face of the harsh realities of the mortal world. You do no grow stronger... but you do grow less innocent. You no longer walk down the dark streets, you look twice before entering a room, and you learn caution that serves to keep you safe when the strong are no longer there to protect and coddle you as if a child. There is value in that in such a world... even if it does come at some slight price.
Sansa is the oldest female child in a rich, highly religious family isolated in a rural-ish setting. She's raised with clear-cut gender roles, and expectations which leads her to become a people pleaser. She has a rich inner life and imagination, and dreams of something"better". If she was American she would be that perfect suburban golden girl who only dates boys from her church, but dreams of moving to New York because she thinks it will be like any of the early to mid-2000s Anne Hathway movies.
I was thinking Passport to Paris or New York Minute, but yeah Anne Hathaway movies fit too.
Dam this was a really good and true visual of Sansa!
She dreams of love, not NYC.
Well said
Arya was raised the same way, so the actual parts of them that are Stark (family) are stubbornness/ determination, loyalty, competence, and longing for those family bonds.
All the Stark kids share those traits (except Bran, but he has more of them than Blood Raven does, so they still shine through)
I was a big Sansa fan, both in the show and books. I was constantly waiting for Sansa's moment of glory where she would finally gather all the learning she had accumulated from the likes of Ned, Little Finger, Cersei, Olenna, Tyrion and so on to become a major player. It never came. She never got the chance to do anything seriously cool or to push the plot in an interesting fashion.
Watching her get crowned should have been amazing, but it was just watching the conclusion to a storyline we simply never got. It's horrible to think that she'll probably be remembered as that character who got sexually assaulted by Ramsay in one of the most controversial plots, than anything she managed to do in her own right. They utterly fucked up.
I suppose she _did_ push Jon in the direction of killing Daenerys, but that shit was gonna happen with or without her
It's a shame show Sansa didn't earn a crown it was give to her. They really needed to show that Sansa was a capable ruler in her own right rather than just have her act bitchy and have other characters tell the audience how smart she supposedly was.
I absolutely agree. they cut short all of the promising arcs, and made the show into a joke. i would have love to have seen sansa use her intelligence and excellent leadership qualities to put both jon and dany on the throne, take the north for herself and ... well you know what should have happened.
The showrunners were too incompetent to write a smart character, so they tried to make Sansa smart just by having Arya say that Sansa is smart.
You got it right. Sansa deserved much better than she got. But she did get her revenge. When she gave Ramsey's to the starving dogs, and when she put Arya to kill Baelish. She never got her happily ever after, but at least she got her revenge.
For me, Sansa was ruined when it became clear the show was playing her as a young Cersei 2.0: cold and calculating and controlling, a player of the game, disabused (literally) of love but having struggled and attained the crown and sceptre
This ruined Sansa for me because i think the books are laying the foundation for Sansa to be TEMPTED to become a Cersei 2.0 who rules through her children, with the bonus for Petyr that he rules through her, but that Sansa's love will become the actual foundation for her happiness
The showrunners seem to have put together the plot to the point that she eliminates Petyr, clumsy as it was, but didnt grasp that Sansa truly dreams of love, not of a crown... much like Daenerys, whose motivations were likewise flipped
Damn, you expressed this perfectly here! It's the point I kinda failed to make clear enough in the video. It makes realistic sense that that could be Sansa's development BUT I think it entirely destroys her purpose in the story
She was suppose to in a way be the opposite of Cersei. Anti Cersei!
So well said!! I just think that D&D simply do not understand women and just like most mainstream film makers nowadays cannot create believable strong female characters.
As a matter of fact, they don’t understand human nature, beyond what they think is cool and “badass”.
@@Kanikanihia
Just like many male writers D&D don't know how to write for women. They do a ok job with tomboy girls. Like Breanne, Aria, Ygritte , Gilly,Yara. And hoes. And maybe lady Catelyn, Cersei,& Kaleesee Daenerys .
But not so much for a more feminine naive girl like Sansa. ,A pawn in the game.
Not sure if a simple "Love will save the day" is a lesson AWOIAF is trying to convey for Sansa. Or for any character . A main theme so far in the series is that classic troopes in fantasy literature are more often than not a bad combination with the real world. Characters that represent honor, chivalry and honesty (Ned and Rob) die as a result of this.
Sansa story is one of disenchantment , each step just showing her that the songs she heard as a kid where just that, songs. This applies to both book Sansa and show Sansa. Was the line "Whithout LF, Ramsay and the rest, I would have stayed a little bird all my life" a little bit over the top ? yeah. But this is where giving Sansa Jeyne's storyline for the sake of having a POV in Winterfell clashes a little bit with the overall message.
If we are to follow the books, Samsa tribulations are not related to SA (thankfully), but she is still being used as a pawn and a throphy bride to Arryn's inheritor. And she is learning from it, gaining strength from it, growing from it. Her little sister is training to be an assasin, her little brother is slowly turning into a "druid", her older brother is becoming a full fledged warrior. All cool RPG characters, but none of those can lead a kingdom or survive rulinghood (See King Viserys as an example) . Sansa, on the other hand, is learning about politics. In an almost too perfect analogy to chess, the pawn is on her path to become a queen.
I also disagree in the fact that learning to play the game automatically makes her Cersei 2.0. On the contrary, Sansa moral compass still aligns mainly with that of Ned, she is just not as naive as he was. Sansa became a player to survive and to protect the north (the same one she once considered "too barbaric" and wished to leave behind), while Cersai became a player out of ambition, hate and jealousy.
Even when faced with war and zombies, she doesn't forget about the north inhabitants, the common folk, which in the end is what she is supposed to do as a leader. Jon is too focused on the Others to actually rule and Dany is at this point blinded by her claim to the throne to care about the people she has behind.
In the end, Sansa has the north crown not because she "wants" a crown, but because having it is the only way she can actually help her people in a system ruled by corruption. And that is the highest act of love she can have with the people that loved her the most, her family.
The Little Bird was smart. The Little Bird knew how to read a room. The Little Bird was resourceful. The Little Bird survived even though flying around among struggling giants. The now grown bird should be proud. Instead she lost it all to the people that harmed her by looking at herself with their eyes and agreeing with them that "she was only a stupid little girl".
The whole unearned "She's the smartest person I've ever met" line was a perfect example of characters "telling" us information as opposed to the writers "showing" us through a characters actions. It's as if D and D thought they were writing Cersei as a smart character (hint, she's not) and that by them making Sansa Cersei 2.0, the audience would immediately think, "O, she must be smart then". It's was all just so incredibly disappointing and frustrating.
TOTALLY.. it felt so forced. i'd have loved to have seen the reason she became so determined and cunning, rather than being told in a really pithy and pointless way.
@@piaauman9020 not to mention she makes some of the stupidest political moves in the entire show. She decides, for no logical reason, not to tell Jon and Davos about the army of the Vale, even though they both tell Sansa they absolutely need more men. Her decision not to tell them before the battle caused tens of thousands of northmen and free folk their lives for ZERO tangible benefit.
Also, Sansa just challenging Jon's logical and correct decision to petition Dany for help, in front of the Lords, did absolutely nothing to help Jon but instead (I would argue purposefully) undermined his ability to rule.
She was at worst a terrible political actor and at best a naive political actor who unwittingly undermined the authority of others with far more practical political experience than her (ie Jon as Lord Commander and Dany as ruler of Meereen and Slavers Bay)
@@Jon.A.Scholt absolutely! i was thinking the same about the not telling jon about the knights of the vale. there was no sense in most of that crap
@@Jon.A.Scholt I lost the little affection I had for show's Sansa in season 8 after seeing how she treated Daenerys so badly. The logical reaction is to stand your ground as Lady of Winterfell and celebrate they are there to stop a horde of zombies from killing you and all your people. Her reaction is so illogical! I think D&D thought something like "bitches hate each other, CAT FIGHT!" and that's all. She is hiding while Daenerys and her army are defending her and she can't stop bitching about her! I guess D&D thought that Sansa would be justified when Daenerys out of the blue burns KL but Sansa doesn't see the future... like Bran, who could stop her... OMG I hated the ending hahaha
Having Sansa call CERSEI the smartest person she's ever met was just such an insult to her character. That wasn't Sansa. The character D&D were writing hadn't been Sansa for years.
I hated that trauma made me strong line too. No, trauma fucks you up. Healing from trauma can help make you strong, but imagine how strong you would be if you hadn't experienced trauma and had a strong sense of self early on. My trauma did not make me strong, before I started healing it just led me into more traumatic situations. Sometimes it still does, because I'm not fully healed.
The erasune of Jeyne Poole impacts negatively in both Sansa´s and Arya´s storylines
Your analysis is spot on! And how could she say that to Sandor, who wishes someone had saved him from his own abuse that scarred him for life, in every way.
Exactly
How could he joke about raping her, who was almost raped by multiple cretins?
Sansa’s entire ‘arc’ in the show is torture p0rn. The show revels in hurting her in ever conceivable fashion, as if punishing her earlier ‘stupidity’ (read: the entirely expected worldview of a sheltered little 11 year old from a remote part of the world who’s never been given reason to mistrust anyone). It’s honestly creepy, the amount of pleasure the show takes in breaking her heart over and over again, as if it resents her for having come from a well adjusted family that loved her.
the scenes are supposed to be disrubing. There are stories like this in real life. Game of thrones is depicting the harshness of life. If it didn't have appalling scenes it would not be as realistic as the real world we live in.
@@mysticstarseed444not a single male character gets r*ped… but that happens all the time in the real world. yet i never saw it in game of thrones? but women are getting assault practically every episode. it’s pure spectacle and meant for shock factor
Reality is harsh, and it does not coddle for the sake of coddling. The only justice in the world is the justice that the strong make by their own strength, and the only sin this world sees fit to punish is weakness. You may not LIKE what it is, but this is simply the way things really are. We are seeing that more and more even in the modern world. Naivety only lasts so long as it is protected, and not a moment longer.
@@mysticstarseed444 What a pathetic excuse. There are many, many ways to illustrate how harsh Westeros and the real world are without recreating, in detail and at length, the sexualized humiliation and r*pe of an adolescent girl.
@@DiogenesDworkinson The world is indeed full of cruelty, and like ours, Westeros is an often ugly place.
I don’t understand, however, why the sexualized abuse and r*pe of a little girl is the kind of cruelty you want to see on screen. Why is it the “harsh reality” that you want recreated in detail?
Yes, the world can be a nasty place-especially for vulnerable children. As someone who works with female survivors of genocide, I am always conscious of this fact.
There are ways to tell such stories without reveling in the degradation and violence itself. It’s interesting that you and other men find it so hard to imagine them.
Nicole’s point stand. This is torture p*rn, and some of you like it.
I've always been frustrated with book fans who despised Sansa. Yes, her naivete can be irritating, but she's *just a kid!* Unfortunately, Benioff and Weis also seem to have a very surface-level understanding of the character and ruined her in the show. In fact, I'd say that they had a very superficial understanding of most of the characters. That could be masked in the early seasons when they had the strong foundation of the books to build from. As they moved into uncharted waters, this became quite clear.
A lot of people overlook that Sansa is a product of Catelyn's and a little of Ned's parenting.
@@Ashbrash1998 Right. She was being raised as a sheltered princess in the distant North, completely unprepared for the wild world of Westerosi politics.
I mean she might be a kid but Joffrey was swinging his sword at her little sister and she shouted at Arya for ruining everything and attacking her prince Joffrey. Arya wasn’t like Viserys, she didn’t abuse her sister. She was a little trouble maker that was much younger than Sansa. To not defend your sister against a rabid boy swinging a sword at her just screams sociopath.
That being said I don’t “hate” any character, they’re what makes the story fun. As long as the character makes sense and uses some sort of logic I’ll probably like them. Sansa hasn’t really grown much in regards to her capability to love. She’s colder and more careful than before, I don’t want to see her do a 180 and become compassionate and caring about others as she never has done before. I think she’s meant to be a disliked character.
@@Ashbrash1998lets not pretend Ned hasn't just as much to do with it as Catelyn. He is the one that actively led her keep her head in the clouds by not talking to her
@@joshuaadams6565 she’s an eleven year old child with a crush, describing children fighting to what she thinks are kindly adults. It’s those not-kindly adults who escalate things. Cersei insists a Dire Wolf die, Sandor Clegane kills the Butcher-boy. The scene isn’t there to pass judgment on Sansa; it’s there to show: “They’ve left their home, and everything is suddenly scary and high-stakes, the adults are unhinged, senseless violence has entered their lives.” From the nursery into the fire.
There is a great line in the books that goes something like this: Tyrion ask Sansa to trust him or something similar and she replies " Even a little Lion has claws".
This a tribute to Sansa's singing and playing abilities too. She can play the harp and the bells, and it's a safe bet she knows "The Rains of Castamere": "And mine are long, and sharp, my lord, as long and sharp as yours".
Oh wow....
the thing about jeyne poole is that her story shows the reader not only how girls are mistreated in this world, but how being of lower birth also affects you. the way she was discussed by the council was like they were talking about selling off a cow. i think she's very necessary to sansa's story to show the reader that even though sansa's going through so many horrible things, she's still sort of privileged. also, every time sansa experience's something terrible, it kind of makes her more empathetic and compassionate, which i find interesting and wish was shown in the show instead of giving us cersei 2.0.
Sansa was not of a lower birth. The whores in Baelish whorehouse were of a lower birth. Sansa's story shows the hypocrisy of royal/upper birth thinking. Even when you're born "right" they still fk you up.
Completely agree.
Sansa's story in the show was so missplaced. It literally made no sense. Like, why would she marry Ramsey? She wouldnt. If the plan was to marry him and wait for Stannis, then why not join Stannis in the first place and take the Vale knights with her. So dumb
The books have a fake Arya go to marry Ramsey. It makes better sense as it is a deal made by the Lannister's to buy the Boltons. They don't have Arya, so they make one, in another tale of child sexual abuse.
@@eric2500I know, mate. I've read the books
Imo her character started going downhill there, like it doesn't make any sense. Maybe the writers just hated her.
In the books the first chapter of Sansa being in the Vale she builds a snow castle (winterfell) and to me shows she is still a child. Longing for home and her family. I felt happy she could finaly do something that made her feel happy (though it resulted in something a bit more dramatic, couse ofc.) but that moment was quite heartfelt.
I love that moment too
She is only 12 at that point, after all
That was the moment I started crying for Sansa and her loss , although she annoyed me in the first few chapters. When she was staring at the snowballs she made thinking that she has no Arya , Robb or Jeyne to throw them at , that her prayers weren't hard , it hit me so hard .
I watched the show before reading the books, and going back to the show after reading the books, I was shocked at how off Sansa's characterization seems from her very first appearance in the show. The book depicts her as soft-spoken, demure, almost obsessively courteous in her interactions with others. In the show, she's depicted as snarky and shrill? It's pretty clear that D&D really didn't get her book characterization and so wrote her to just be a Generic TeenTM.
I feel like GRRM told them she was meant to become a queen or ruler at the end, and the only way they could envision her doing that was through the "suffering turned me into a badass" arc you bemoaned here. It's such a shame because I really feel that Sansa's character and arc give many of the answers to the series's central questions: the power of mercy in the face of violence, that kindness can win out over cruelty, that being loved makes you more powerful than being feared, that the ability to rule is not equivalent to the ability to commit violence, and more. The show really did not understand those messages, though, and Sansa's characterization suffered for it.
Loved your video and analysis! You've earned a subscriber here, and I can't wait for the Sansa psychological analysis video.
She (as all Starks including Cat) is quiet sarcastic and snarky, but only in certain situations and most of what they had in the earlier seasons that features this were straight up from the books, it only got unnecessary over the top in later seasons.
I think they missed out a lot more on how she tries to be a perfect Lady, which she is not but that is fine.
She is much closer to it than Arya in contrast, but she still does unladylike things, she has a fistfight with Arya, sneaks out to meet Dontos in the goodswoods to try to escape, lies (and gets away with it!) to Tyrion, she tries to push Joffrey and kill him, she tries to lure him into the Vanguard, she slaps Sweet Robin and runs around with Myranda none of these are things a Lady is supposed to do, but she does them anyways.
She is trying to be soft-spoken, demore and courteous because she wants to be a perfect Lady, the way she envisions her mother, but she isn't and that makes her great, because her mother isn't either, nor is Arya. But she unlike others isn't being courteous because it's expected too, she is generally very kind and wants well for others, what she has been raised to. She saves Dontos by speaking out loud, something a proper Lady isn't supposed to do, she feels with the starving people of Kings Landing, despite being too young to fully understand them, she tries her best with Sweet Robin even though he annoys her because she knows he needs her.
And this balance was pretty decent for an adaptation when they still had book material and went off the rails after that for just being snarky for no reason, being non courteous for no reason, being unkind for no reason. Book Sansa wouldn't leave Jon in the dark over the Vale knights, book Sansa wouln't be openly distrusting to Danys face after she managed to be courtous to the Lannisters for so many years, book Sansa wouldn't mistrust Arya over LF.
PinkGrapefruit - Well said! 👏
It’s one thing to let the horrors of the world change you. It’s another to experience them and still believe there’s good in the world.
Sansa very much embodies the later; the Battle of the Blackwater really highlights why I think she’s important. She’s a calming and hopeful presence when a drunken Cersei wishes violence upon them all. Sandor threatens to kill her if she didn’t sing, but instead of a song of heroes and glory, she sings a hymn of mercy leaving Sandor in tears and sparing her.
I like how you mention that Sansa's scenes are framed by the men around her. Sansa's 'role' across the show entirely seems to be her own objectification. This holds true in two senses: she acts as a character foil for the benefit of the story (this is a good thing), and she's a political pawn for several powerful families (this gives her objectification in-universe plausibility; it's not good, but things are often bad at the start of a story but are expected to change). Sansa is a character foil to her sister (illustrating various degrees of expressiveness), to her father and later Sandor (revealing different ways and times in which a person can be gentle), to Littlefinger (depicting varying degrees of honesty), etc. I think the reason people don't like Sansa is because she starts off very low on expressiveness. We don't know her subjective self, because she needs to hide it as a prisoner of war (and likely doesn't know herself anyway given that she's a child). This seems to indicate the obvious end point for Sansa's character; we should learn who she is while she discovers who she is herself, but the show never does this. The show instead has Sansa integrate the traits of her abusers, which I'm very happy to hear you call out.
To dig a little deeper into the framing idea: In terms of cinematography, the camera seems to look voyeuristically toward Sansa when she's with a man, but shows her perspective more often when around women such as Cersei (about whom Sansa is deeply curious). It's also no coincidence that all of these men, including the most villainous ones, had their roles in the show changed or expanded as a result of being fan favourites. People really liked Tyrion, Littlefinger, Sandor, etc. These men are shown through their own perspectives expressing themselves almost every time they appear, and successfully accomplishing their goals. All of these men are only able to do this because of their scenes with Sansa. For Sansa though, the same character development is not given. The writers saw her correctly as the vehicle for the advancement of other characters that any good character rightfully is, but forgot that she is a character herself and that relationships should build both characters, not just one. As an example of what might have changed this: imagine if we had a two minute scene in the second season depicting Sansa's loneliness while she does something she knows how to do well, like knit a little cloth sigil of Winterfell. Even if most people would find a superficial reading of the scene boring, it would have been a good way to depict Sansa's desire to express herself while cloistered in imprisonment, as well as how few options for expression she has.
Also, I like the attention to the Dreadfort/Winterfell error. It made me realize the symbolic significance in Sansa being imprisoned in her own home instead of Ramsay's. Ironically, I actually think this is good writing.
I feel strongly that it was a mistake aging the characters up so much in the show, and Sansa's character suffers the most from this. The showrunner prioritized filming torture porn and actual porn over telling a good story with characters that make sense.
D&D are sadists
For real. They even did this with minor characters to serve their horny purposes. Poderick Payne is a boy of about eleven or twelve and the show only ages him into a young adult for no other reason than having some sex jokes about how the prostitutes love him? And Missandai was ten when Daenerys took her in. Again, the show ages her up just so we can see her topless later?
I stopped liking Sansa at some point after she reunited with Jon, it’s like her character did a complete 180 and became someone she wasn’t. That smug smile and constantly thinking she’s smarter than everyone, literally giving me Cersei vibes was so irritating.
This isn’t the character I was following for years, and it didn’t feel like a good direction to go for her. Sansa not telling Jon about the Knights Of The Vale seemed so uncharacteristic of her to me, it’s like D&D just needed an excuse to make the Battle Of The Bastards happen the way it did and so they had Sansa just not tell Jon. It didn’t feel like something the real Sansa would do, she put one of her only remaining family members in mortal danger just so she can have a girl boss moment…it’s like what?
For me it was when she didn’t tell Jon about the knights of the Vale. She knew they didn’t have enough men and instead of telling anyone about her contacts she just kept quiet and sent a letter in secret. Why?? The whole battle plan should have been around the knights, setting a trap for Ramsey, taking advantage of his overconfidence. Keep it a secret for the audience if you want to drama of watching the Stark fighting an apparently loosing battle
The Knights of the Vale thing was so weird it's like they wanted to show that Sansa was a player in the GoT so just had her do some random scheming for no reason. It's a classic case of trying to write a "smart" character when you yourself aren't smart.
Plus her grilling Jon for wanting battle with not enough men, Jon then logically answering "well this is all the men we can get,what do you want to wait for?" and her still saying nothing about the Vale.
My reading when season 6 was airing was that she wasn't telling Jon about the Vale because she didn't want Littlefinger anywhere near Jon and accepting his help was an absolute last resort. But, given how the rest of the show went, and how clunky the Battle of the Bastards was written, I was giving the writers too much credit and no amount of headcanoning could make Sansa's actions work.
@@mirandatilley2486 The main reason this doesnt work is that troops dont move over night. The battle of the bastards didnt happen over night. Sansa mustve let Littlefinger know weeks in advance to the battle for the knights of the Vale to be there on time. Even if we are very charitable with travel times and communication it wouldve been at least a day or night before the battle and she says nothing.
I thought Sansas writing in the last seasons of the show were infuriating because the show keeps telling us how smart she is but we arent shown her doing anything smart. Her interactions with Jon, Danny and the council in winterfell are painful to listen to.
Ive heard an interpretation where shes doing it to overthrow Jon (even not telling him about the Vale being a play to hopefully get him killed) so she can take control of winterfell and the north. But even that only somewhat works if we accept we magicked away the inherent traditions and sexism of westeros and the north.
Oh definitely same on the trauma part. As someone that was traumatized and assaulted as a child, it made me feel better when, in therapy, i could accept at no point was i BETTER for going through it. I was significantly fucked up actually in a fair amount of ways, especially in how i tried to use it as an identity. It wasnt. I am my identiy, what i love, who i love, who i acceot love from. The trauma didnt make me stronger, the love of the people around me brought me BACK to where i could have been naturally if i hadnt been abused like that.
Thank you for correcting the narrative with the truth of what that is really like.
You are a brave and thoughtful person for doing so.
D&D never understood that SA victims wouldn't ever think that " it was good that I got SAd , it made me strong! I would never change it" . The dialogue between Hound and Sansa horrified me . Yikes .
That scene COULD have worked if it was done in a way that made it clear this was a bad rationalization of her abuse, like hearing "I was beat as a child and I turned out fine" from someone who is DECIDEDLY NOT FINE, but the show's ability to do things like that was long gone by season 8.
I completely agree, it should have been done this way. Similar like in the books Arya thinks "I am brave" "I am strong" "I do not need any one"... but you know she does that simply to give courage to herself and to be able to rationalize what had happened to her, like kids do.
I like how they rushed the final seasons of the show because Dave and Dan wanted to work on their Star Wars project and then after how bad the final season turned out Disney fired them anyways 💀
For me the points that showed me that they didn’t understand Sansa’s story (or the point of ASOIAF- it’s an anti-war story) were:
the omission of the “not kiss” between Sandor and Sansa. Sandor goes to Sansa broken, ready to flee because ‘fuck the king’, and willing to SA Sansa. He asks her for a song since he’s always called her “little bird” and sees her as a pretty bird in a cage (which is GRRM playing with the ‘spoiled privileged teen girl’ trope).
He grabs Sansa and Sansa begins to sing a song for The Mother. The Mother’s song is a song for peace. A song for mercy. A song sung as a prayer for the avoidance/ending of a war.
This pretty song expected of an innocent high-born girl is enough to stop Sandor in his tracks and reconsider hurting Sansa. It’s the starting of Sandor’s arc to process his trauma and heal. He does rail against it a bit but the change has started until finally after he’s wounded and Arya abandons him he accepts a quiet life of peace as a monk on the Quiet Isle. Sandor’s arc is a story of a broken and traumatized man who is thought of as a savage and mad dog. But this song of peace and innocence starts him off not on a redemption arc but an path for healing.
It’s important for Sansa that Sansa uses the tools expected of her station to protect herself. She’s not girlbossing her way out of something. She says over and over “that a lady’s courtesy is her armor”, and it’s an important contrast to Arya (who is girlbossing her way through planetos with a weapon named for a tool expected of a nobelwoman). Sansa never desired to be a warrior like Arya, she finds pleasure in being a high born lady…and theres nothing wrong with either path. GRRM is showing that characters like Sansa aren’t damsels in distress because they like the “trappings” of their station, rather Sansa’s story shows that she can use those tools to protect herself while becoming politically astute to maneuver.
The other thing is that at her wedding to Tyrion, Sansa never kneels to allow him to place the cloak on her. Instead Tyrion has to stand on a jester’s back to do so.
Sansa refusal to kneel is her act of rebellion disguised by her courtesies because in this scenario she’s not expected to. At no point in the scene do Tyrion, The Septon, Jeoffry, Cersei demand she kneel for her husband.
Sansa uses societal expectations to fight back a bit, turning the situation to mock solely Tyrion. Had she knelt she would have been lumped in with the way kingdom sees Tyrion.
Instead she makes a statement at the wedding that she’s a child being forced into a political marriage without people notice her openly defy the system and the Lannisters.
It grows the alienation between them and keeps Tyrion in people’s crosshairs while she fades to the background as the poor girl who was forced to marry The Imp. Which also allows her some cover to keep sneaking out to see Dontos. As Tyrion, still smarting from the humiliation at the wedding, allows her space because he’s trying to Nice Guy his way into Sansa’s heart.
I might be alone on this one, but I lost all respect for the show and the show runners specifically in that moment. Season 8 might have been bad, but bad writing can happen to any writer. But writing something like this? Pretty disgusting on just a human level.
I agree. By the time, it made me irk and say "What, did they just make her say that abuse made her better?".
I relate a lot to Sansa character wise and in my personal life and I would like to say this:
I was dissatisfied with Sansa's arc, and specifically this answer to the hound, not because it was acknowledged that all of those horrible experiences also made her grow up as a character, but because it was the perfect moment for her to break crying for her lost childhood, imagining what would have been if she had taken other choices, and maybe reflect that it was all of this traumatic situations that ended giving her the key to the knights of the vale, so in a way, yes, it is a good moment to thank the gods they put her on the position to save what remained of her home and family but not the way that she did.
The show felt flat, as you very well point out, because they reduced her to her trauma, a complex answer from a complex character would have better suited Sansa and the feel of the show: not happily agreeing that Trauma empowered her, but crying realising that she was where she needed to be when it came to it. I also wish they showed her more as the daughter of Catelyn (loving, caring, still true in some ways to her most idealistic self, but strong and full with political intelligence) in defiance to what the world had tried to break her into: a resentful Cersei or a cunning Little Finger. At the end in the show she just felt a template of what others made out of her. All the subplots of her undermining Jon and having doubts about Arya didn't feel quite right to me either.
“My audio is messy because I have a lot of bunnies-“
FORGIVEN
I think the biggest flaw is that they hide away all her true feelings and intentions just to surprise the audience, when it would have been more compelling to watch her take these actions on screen.
Great choice for the worst moment of characterization/message in Sansa's story. I particularly see how it would resonate with you as a therapist. From my perspective as a woman, I found the worst moment to be Sansa walking away after feeding Ramsay to his dogs with a little satisfied look on her face.
It so perfectly summed up the message of her arc: to be a strong female character, you have to lose your stereotypically female attributes of kindness, love, forgiveness. You can only be strong if you act like a man, and a brutal one at that. (You can see this play out in Sansa's costuming, too; it became all armor-like dresses and metal.)
What a terrible disservice to kindness, and to women. What a terrible disservice to young Sansa, whose dog Lady was the sweetest and gentlest, reflecting who she was as a person.
I found that deeply concerning too. Whatever Ramsi was, killing him the same way he did so many of his victims is a kind of validation. He should have been given a fast, clean death and probably after a sentence.
Ah, yes, killing people is a man thing.
Seeing as for every 11,000 murders committed by men in the US, there are 1,000 committed by women, I think we can largely say it's not a terrible gender bias to suggest?🤷♀️
@@SnailHatan We're talking about fictional archetypes and depictions in media here, not real people.
I generally agree, except for Ramsey, he's not a show or book character that deserves forgiveness.
The thing that was horrible about GOT was that being a straight up sociopath was considered a good thing where as in the books Sansa’s biggest feature later on was her compassion. Same with dany. In the show aryas brutality is portrayed as a good thing when in the books it’s portrayed as troubling
I was also very bothered by this scene. It's this glorification of trauma as if horrible situations are something to be desired and proud of because they make us stronger. Sure, it's great if someone can heal from their trauma and it's amazing if they grow from it but it should never be glorified in that way or depicted as the only way for someone to grow. What happened to her way horrible and should never have happened, but to frame it as something she needed to grow is sending a horrible message.
The other thing I didn't like about what the writers did with Sansa was her hostility towards Dany. In the beginning it was completely understandable but after Dany proved her word, that she did come to Winterfell to defend it, the North and Westeros as a whole Sansa still mistrusted her.
The writers turned her (and Varys) into a mouthpiece to justify the "Mad Queen" arc rather than have a legitimate reason for Sansa to not want Dany as queen other than Dany being too eager. The only reason I can think of for Sansa knowing Dany would go evil for no reason is that Littlefinger leaked the Season 8 scripts and Sansa got the chance to read them.
Lindsay Ellis said it best in my opinion. "Sansa's only purpose this season is to have this weird unfounded suspicion of Daenerys which only proves to be founded when Daenerys does something completely nonsensical. Sansa's mistrust of Daenerys only makes sense if you are writing from the end forward. Telling us she's smart when her intelligence is really just writer clairvoyance. Giving her suspicions without giving her a reason to have them other than the writers knowing how the show will end and they want Sansa to look smart."
Sansa never thought Daenarys would become the mad queen. She wanted an independent north and saw a queen with dragons who convinced her king to give up his crown to her as a problem. Her safety and power in the north to a large extent depended on the love of her people, especially her brother/cousin Jon. She never questioned Daenarys's sanity. She questioned why she needed to have the north included in her kingdom. Sansa was very clear and specific about her concerns in their one on one conversation. It was Daenarys who was hostile.
@@mellemadswoestenburg1296 Exactly, they keep calling her "smart" but only because the writers are writing the nonsensical ending first
my problem with the hostility with dany is that it shouldn't matter. jon Snow is the leader of the north why would Danny care what dim sansa has to say. really any concerns abouth thenorth should be going through jon not sansa, pointless scene really, it should have been sansa and jon having the "wut abou de norf" spat with eachother.
@@ajae... it's Daenerys - and if you look at it, Sansa questioning why North has to remain as a part of the Seven Kingdoms is actually dumb - she cares not for North safety - they're alone. Poor, without people and food, fleet (minus fleet from House Manderly - but it's not enough) vulnerable and easy to attack, even with all the advantages - Moat Cailin, not heavily populated, vast space, strong and harsh winter, so not easy to conquer - something that book Stannis is aware of, even with the help from Jon. Sansa wanting them to remain independent would only weaken them.
Also - North remaining in the Seven Kingdoms is important because of the fact that they always were a part of it, it's a symbol. They peacefully bent the knee, to save their kingdom and people.
Most importantly - if she was so smart, then she should have used their position to negotiate with Daenerys - they're giving up their crown, so they could negotiate different terms of remaining in the Seven Kingdoms (they could have the very same privileges as Dorne), got better positions and representation at court. They came to Daenerys because they needed her help, not only because she summoned them - and without it they would be dead. North wouldn't get that help if they didn't bend the knee - why would anyone be willing to help them and put their army in danger? With the majority of the Vale army being in the North, Vale would be easy to conquer - especially with dragons, just like during the conquest, same goes for riverlands - with lands and its people still too weakened from last war. They don't have many allies.
The term I've heard for Ramsey's treatment of Theon is, "Torture porn", and I believe it applies to Sansa especially. She doesn't suffer in order to learn or overcome. She suffers in order to indulge the viewer in a very dark place, enjoying the spectacle of pain. .
Sansa has always been my favorite. She brings a very interesting point of view of a tragic place to be amongst war. All the abuse, the beatings, the manipulation and all while having her father killed and, consecutively, hermother, and all male siblings (it's believed Theon killed Bran and Rickon), Arya is missing and could well be dead in Sansa's mind. There's only Jon, north of the wall, so far away from Kings Landing. And yet what people see is "stupid girl you killed ned how could you believe one of the most experienced person in the whole game of thrones from decades while you were 11 coming from a far country-ish northern frozen land!! its your fault!"
It's pretty sad how shallow the show portraited her and all the "cerseification" of Sansa in the later seasons. I'm excited to see how the develops in the next books! Great video, I looove Sansa content!
Making Sansa also go through Jeyne pools storyline was ridiculous especially since Jeyne exists in the show. D & D really shouldn’t have been given control of the story they bamboozled George and did everything to his story he was worried about.
If he finished the story and maintained creative control, that wouldn’t be a problem.
THANK YOU. I have so many issues with how the show wrote (but not portrayed persay, the actors were phenomenal) most of these characters for TV, and Sansa is at the top of my most wronged characters list. Especially as a victim of CSA myself, and with intimate knowledge of these books (it's one of my biggest hyperfixations) I KNOW the gratuitous amount of sexual violence was unnecessary, bordered on voyeurism, and weren't even in the books at all in the first place. It bothers me every time I see the show or hear people talk about the story while only having knowledge of the show. I think that at the end of the day, it really shows how, in my opinion, George is remarkably talented at writing characters of all genders and D&D simply do not know what to do with a young girl like Sansa.
I knew as soon as they removed Jeyne Poole they were going to have major issues later on. I didn't anticipate that they would put Sansa in Jeyne's place, but I sensed trouble coming.
Sansa is meant to be a deconstruction of the Disney fairy-tale princess. She is not a perfect person by any stretch of the imagination when we meet her. She is a selfish, petty 11-year old who - at first - has no interest in growing past her narrow frame of reference.
But so what? This is the mindset of a privileged child. It's not damning. I wouldn't have wanted her as a playmate at 11, but that doesn't mean much. It doesn't mean the whole character should be written off.
I hesitate to comment on Sansa's character arc after KL from the perspective of a reader . It's too undercooked in the books at this point. I can't be sure what will happen in the Vale. She's in a bad spot of another kind, but at least at this stage she isn't as trusting as she was. There is growth, but it is slow. But I have hope for her, because Martin has shown that he has a deft hand in developing his characters.
The show messed so many things up. It started out well...but it just *fell apart*. It's not just Sansa, but she is one of the characters it is clearest with.
(I'm looking at you, ShowTyrion. WTF were they thinking, making him this quasi-white knight character?)
*spoken word snaps in agreement* i think the showrunners and their writers were very generous to fans not interested in reading the books. book-fans were exasperated by the white-washing of some characters while even the white-washing felt brutal to those who knew nothing about the books or how cruel book westeros is. i followed George's lead and treat them as separate entities entirely. they did everyone a huge disservice castrating the series. *everyone* would've gotten a return on their 8 seasons of emotional, financial and psychological investment if they'd have just given promoted or hired new showrunners, sob.
tyrion is a white knight in the books as well, it goes right back to his first love. he is a genuinely kind and decent person who learns the game of thrones and the game of thrones requires you to be not be kind and honest. look at what happens to every completely honest person in the books.
@@kingryan69 Have you read A Dance of Dragons?
@@tsuritsa3105Right 😭. Tyrion is FAR from a white knight in a Dance with Dragons.
@@samsamdhagane7825 you understand that he has a character arc right?
I stopped watching the show immediately after the Sansa rape scene. It was complete male gratification, not at all from her point of view. It made me feel genuinely sick how they wrote a scene that wasn't even in the books about a child and didn't even focus on her pain but the camera panned to who was abusing her. Disgusting.
I was on the edge of quitting it for a while because of how they'd portrayed women and just vulnerable people in general in the past, but that was genuinely the last straw. I can't stand people who say it got worse in the last season, that the writing "spoiled" the show. No. The writing was rotten to the core and spreading starting season 2. The writers unfortunately have a certain view of the world, and that bled into their writing/directing/show running.
Absolutely spot on
16:14 Good point. I definitely agree with that. There is enough trauma in a poor young girl's life without what happened to Sansa in the story.
After reading the books and watching the show I found Sansa to be one of the most relatable and heart breaking. The rigidity of the gender roles she was brought up in promised her a life with a prince that was beautiful and full of honour, but the reality of her situation was the opposite. It’s heartbreaking to watch her try to cling to some sense of normalcy or to return to the rigidity of her imposes gender roles because MAYBE if she did the world would go back to normal and she would get her happily ever after. It feels like her story mirrors that of so many young women who are promised a beautiful happy life with a husband and kids if they just follow orders and do what they’ve be told only to be smacked in the face with the cold reality of that promise way to late in life to do anything to change it.
I didn't make it to that scene of Sansa talking to Sandor, as i quit the show after her wedding to Ramsay. I can't imagine book Sansa saying those words at all. It's crazy to look back and think of how initially I was excited for Sansa to go to Winterfell, as I thought, "wow this is going to be so different. the northern lords are going to react very differently to actual Sansa Stark being there than fake Arya in Jeyne Poole. Sansa will have a much higher leg up. She doesn't need to marry Ramsay at all." All throughout the eps leading up to the wedding and the wedding ep itself I kept expecting the northmen to turn on the Boltons and put their weight behind Sansa, even thought at the wedding they were going to be killed there in a similar payback to the red wedding that the boltons helped orchestrate, but of course none of that happened. They gave us Sansa's earlier storyline as you said, dialed up to 10, and had her act like Jeyne does in the books throughout the whole thing, and not how Sansa, a highborn lady would have reacted. I cant tell you how disappointed I was.
Thank you! This is the line I was hoping you were going to criticize!
It absolutely burns me up when abuse is portrayed as having been needed, or on some level, a good thing. The attempt to justify it in this way sends very unhealthy messages to victims and perpetrators alike!
THANK YOU!!! That "I would have stayed a little bird" was so upsetting and disturbing. And that's without taking into consideration the way Sandor speak to her, the words he uses. THE ICKS!!! 😖
They also made Littlefinger appear incompetent because he wouldn't just give her to the Boltons unless it served him in some way it didn't. So it made more sense to send her to the only place she would be most protected, which is... House Mormont. Even though they have a very small army. They are honorable and knowing the best means to protect Sansa is to keep her identity a secret, it is very likely no one would transmit her wherabouts to the Boltons so long as Littlefinger cleverly disquises her and only reveals her identity to the Mormonts who again are an honorably people and had proudly served the Starks.
And to have her grow into her own character, you could have it be an issue for Mormont to house her because their forces are so small in number. If work came out, they wouldn't be able to protect her for long and they would be putting themselves in danger especially since she isn't the next in line to the throne at Winterfell. This gives Sansa the opportunity to stand up for herself and show she has agency by being the commanding personality necessary for the Mormonts to maintain their pledge of honor towards the Starks. They are not just honoring their pledge to the Starks, they are honoring her as the rightful Stark.
Excellent analysis. The wedding night scenes were when it was clear that the two Dave’s were lost and out of control.
Just subbed due to coming across your tywin video, ended up devouring the cersei one all this morning. Loved that i got this early
There's also the fact book! Sansa actively wants to marry Willas Tyrell (Margaery's eldest brother, who had a bad leg and a passion for falconry) because it would give her a way out of King's Landing and she doesn't care if he's a cripple. Show! Sansa also wants to escape but it looks like she's still swooning over Loras' pretty face and is oblivious to what is going on. I understand they had to cut Willas and Garlan because it would have made the show too intricate (still a shame, I liked Garlan the Gallant), but it led to a huge mischaracterisation of Sansa.
In essence, the argument the show is making is that Lady Catelyn was a little bird for the entirety of her life until maybe the last few chapters of it because for all that time, until maybe the last few chapters of it, she didn't go through anything half so traumatic as Sansa.
I believe D&D wrote that line, whether consciously or subconsciously, to excuses what they ended up putting her through unnecessarily, as if to say, _"Look, everyone, what we did was actually great, because we made her into a Queen! Can we get a, 'Hell yeah'"?_
How the show treated Sansa made me stop watching it and took a long time to begin again. Your video is 10/10 cause that's exactly how I thought about what happened to her character.
Girlboss Salsa was such a disappointment. Each Stark child is supposed to find a different sort of strength, and Salsa's arc in the books is about her learning to be subtle, to fight from a position of weakness and make a difference by taking advantage of people seeing her as weak and stupid. But I guess that's just too hard to write. So instead we just get smug, emotionless Salsa. She becomes so boring. Her chapters are so great in the books, and Sophie Turner did such a great job showing the subtlety of her character. I wish she would've gotten the opportunity to play a better end-game Salsa, I think she would've done a great job of it.
In the books she is a sweet and kind, sheltered young girl who is slowly shown the realities of the world.
I think it is very, very obvious why Little Finger made the deal with Roose to marry her to Ramsey in the show. It is the same reason he seems to want her to marry Harry the Heir in the books. Petyr Baelish has one goal, power; he is climbing a ladder. He is not conquering with armies. He it doing it with diplomacy and influence.
He married Lysa, (though he killed her when she became a liability). This made him stepfather to the next High Lord of the Aerie. He sent Sansa to the Boltons to marry Ramsay who is a psychopath (which he definitely knows about). She is reestablished and accepted as lady of the North. Little Finger then goes to the Aerie and convinced her cousin to send the army to rescue her from the Boltons. He expected to show up and have Sansa be a totally traumatized basket case who would welcome his rescue and come to be totally dependent on him. Instead she has become stronger and mistrusts him. He is lord of Harrenhall in the Riverland and I imagine has somehow managed to make ties with the Fryes and maybe get influence over the baby of Edmure Tully conceived during the Red Wedding. And I think in the show Harrenhall was made top house in Riverlands when the Tullys in revolt. Not sure who is officially the High Lord anymore.
Little Finger in the books is loaning out tons to money to people and everyone owes him favors. He stockpiled a lot of grain before The War of the Five Kings, which he started, and is making a ton of money selling that grain. He is slowly behind the scenes building power to get himself into position to claim the throne. More like have people ask him to be king, and he will humbly accept. I think this is where the books are going. There are so many more conspiracies (Great Northern Conspiracy, Dornish Master Plan, whatever Varys is plotting with Aegon), and they are so better plotted out in the books.
Yes, thank you! A video that was much-needed! Yeah, Sansa is a great underrated character, and I can't wait to know what happens next to her in the books. While yeah, she starts perhaps a little annoying in the books, later, as her story progresses, and we see and understand where her story and character arc is going, you realize she has and will have an amazing story and that yeah, she's a fantastic character and well developed. And yeah, I especially love that Martin didn't make her into a bad-ass fighting boyish girl, but made her a smart feminine character that knows how to make people follow her due to her kindness, unlike Cersei who just uses and manipulates men, so Sansa and her type of character, is something we don't get much in these type of series, and which sadly isn't liked very much by a lot of the male audience.
She's learning to manipulate Harry the heir and Littlefinger. I hope she gets just what she needs from each. I agree she's becoming a smart feminine character, but she'll do it with manipulation as well as kindness. The right mix.
4. Little bird. I think D&D wanted to say something like she would not be the same person today without the trauma, the wizened skin, the cynicism etc. This is undoubtedly true, and for believers in standpoint theory she could now relate to the hound and other abused commoners now she had her own experiences. I do think D&D fluffed it with poor writing, which maybe cheapened the line, and minimized the abuse, maybe it was Sophie's delivery, but even so someone relating their own story down in the pub, without the expectation of a team of pro writers would also definitely fluff these sorts of stories, minimize bits, need longer to explain others and it would depend on the patience and skill of the listener as much as the storyteller (and when I disclosed that I was studying psych undergrad, I heard all the abuse tales and every one was surprisingly honest and blunt if not 100% articulate and fully formed). From this perspective, if we imagine Sansa had not prepared any speech for the hound, we could likely imagine she would give an unthoughtful brush-off or face-saving BS answer. He is not the therapist after all, and she may not have worked through her trauma with a therapist guiding her into the correct lingo to use or framing to see the world.
That's something along the lines of what I was thinking. There's every reason she could have reached an imperfect conclusion about it all and also every reason she wouldn't have a profound response in that situation. I suppose that goes in hand with there being no exploration of her inner life in a way. And on the topic of her repeated traumatic experiences, not having read the books it just struck me as awful but entirely plausible she could end up in multiple situations as such, hell, plenty of women in this day and age can experience multiple abusive encounters and relationships. And actually, I think it's pretty common for people to armour up and see their tragic experiences as battle scars so that doesn't ring as untrue to me. I'm not overly keen on her arc but those little bits just don't strike me as big problems
I remember hearing or reading Martin comment on why he created the character of Sansa. The other Stark children were all decent likable kids and Martin felt they needed to have at least one child who was less likable, so he created Sansa. She was also not supposed to survive the story.
You read WAAAY more into the "little bird" conversation. What I took away from it was that Sansa recognizes, at this point, that she was a VERY sheltered and protected child who would likely STILL be as sheltered, naïve and foolish at that point if she hadn't been forced to learn the harsh lessons of misplaced trust. She was telling the hound that WITHOUT experiencing those traumas, she might have never understood the dark side of human nature and would likely still be a "foolish little girl" in a young woman's body. THAT is the "little bird" she referenced. I, like you, suspect that this impression was left accidentally by these two showrunners because I don't believe they are clever enough to have formed such a complex thought. At least by the poor writing they showed as soon as the show past the point that the author had written to.
I have not payed attention to that conversation, but when you pointed it out, I completely agree. It seems that the implication is that all the horrible things she endured made her the strong woman she is and then in retrospect "may be they were not so bad" - a concept that I totally disagree. What a good catch, I guess this is the "therapist eye". You are right, Sansa in the books is much more interesting. Recently I was rereading them and one thing jumped at me - how much she equates physical beauty with everything that is good in a person. She is offered at one point a marriage with the heir of Higarden, which at that point is the only way out for her, but the only thing that she can think about is "how much better would be to marry Loras, sincere is so pretty and his brother has only on leg", Same with Tyrion - her biggest concern is his looks, not that he is a Lanister and/or possibly a horrible person. Of course in that society the value of a woman is put in her beauty, so it is understandable, but still shallow. Her mother Catlyn is the same way - when she talks with Brianne, in her head she thinks "there is nothing worse for a woman than being ugly" - and this is after all the bad things in her life, really woman - how about your husband being abusive, how about your kid dying, how about not being able to have kids, ... I was thinking also that the way Aria grew up such a rebel and wanting to do things no woman usually does may be due to her understanding that she is not pretty. I mean the fact that she knows from her mother (not that Catlyn would ever do that intentionally, but for a smart kid there are ways to get things that are never said) the importance of it, shaped her to become this person.
Her first thoughts are of physical beauty, then the next are of other things pretty quickly, like how kind Willas sounds, and how she looks so pretty in her new gown she'll make him want her for herself, not her claim!
She's a teen. She'd like someone a little good looking, while aware that looks are deceiving.
Of course she thinks Tyrion is ugly - he IS, and all she wants is to get AWAY from court, she has realized that Joffrey can and will abuse her any time, just as he says.
As for Catelyn, I read that thought as one of sympathy for Brienne - " gee that's a rough start in life for her" sentiment - and she tells Arya she'd be pretty if she brushed her hair. She was trying to get the kid to clean up some and brush her hair - using the wrong incentive! Arya is not gorgeous, but she's not ugly either.
I think that your problems with Tyrion in the show is colored by the relationship that they have in the books. I didn’t see any romantic feelings that show Tyrion had for Sansa.
I actually really like Sansa. She was just a naive girl that dreamt of what she had been told she must dream. She slowly started go see the real world and how she was more capable of doing things and using power. By the end of the war, after many deaths, assaults etc, she just wants peace for HER people, the north. She is queen and wants to rule peacefully. As I see it, the series just starts her story. Now she must rule and go through all the trauma she endured, let love inside her again, as we all know she desires and grow.
I like what you said in the end of this video. How Sansa could have been the beating heart of the show if David and Dan bothered to understand Sansa as a character and what the overall point is of the book series, because chances are that is what GRRM is setting her up to be. Sansa is introduced as someone who loves stories and songs and has a very black-white view of the world. She is supposed to be like the reader who reads A Game of Thrones for the first time and expects things to go in a specific way. Sansa, just like the reader, is suprised by the Ned's death and now has to relearn how the world works - JUST LIKE THE READER. While Sansa has many storylines to her name: a political arc, an autonomy arc, and a romance, but the number storyline is what lesson Sansa will learn by the end of this book series when it pertains to songs, truth and lies. In the beginning Sansa said, "All she wanted was for things to be nice and pretty, the way they were in the songs." We all know how this isn't true but what many in this fandom fail to realize is that Littlefinger's line: "Life is not a song, sweetling. You may learn that one day to your sorrow." Is as equally inaccurate. Thinking everything in the worlds is pretty, rainbows and amazing is wrong, but by the same extent thinking there is no hope, only monsters win, and if you wish to succeed you need to lose your moral compass is just as wrong. What Sansa will learn in the end will be something more in the middle of these two extreme takes. It will be a bittersweet lesson. And that will be no doubt one of the core message of the Song of Ice and Fire book series. Very few characters have a storyline that pertains to the title of the book series, but Sansa being one of them, shows just how important she is to the book series. In my opinion GRRM is setting Sansa up as the heart of the story.
If it weren't for season 7 and 8, we would have stayed little birds forever.
It seems like Sansa was born too late. She would have been much happier growing up during the reign of Jaehaerys and Alysanne.
IMAGINE if Sansa and Ramsei got along and actually became friends.
Going to be honest, I never saw her statement of without the trauma she wouldn't have grown up as a wholesome ending. I saw it as relatable, real, sad, but true to those who have been through trauma. It's a real mindset that most of us go through when we're really starting to face what we've been through and question "who would I have been if I didn't go through this? What would have changed?" As someone who grew up in a cult, as someone who almost killed someone in self defence and justified rage at 15, as someone who was sexualized starting at age 11 and wasn't pulled out, saved, shown what normal was til the age of 20/21, I related to this. This spoke to me not because it was wholesome. But because it was real. It was something that showed where she was in healing, and it pushed me to answer the questions I'd already been asking myself a long the exact same lines. I agree that the show ruined Sansa. It ruined all of the characters. But while we didn't get to see the emotional internal story, we got to see what she was outwardly put through. Those of us that her part of the story is supposed to resonate with didn't need much more, we could easily infur the rest because on various levels, we were there. It was triggering, it wasn't an okay place to be, but being able to watch her come out the other side, helped some of us come out the other side. Book is still better, but this sticks with me.
Think you missed that in part a fictional SA or abuse of women is there for the white knight to contrast with. In this story the two most scarred people, Tyrion and the Hound, have not given in to their trauma, retain their humanity for it's own sake, and are subtly (or not) guiding her to safety, which Sansa is not quite ready to accept. Sansa wedding night was in the books, it wasn't a creation of D&D, it was Jayne Poole, so having made the choice to put Sansa in there she is simply following the Jayne storyline. In the books, she is manipulating littlefinger to get her to safety, and he is happy she is creating this obligation that he can later call on, ie the death of Aunt Lysa.
I thought Sansa's character in the show was very important. Cersei called her "little dove" and although the dove doesn't fly as high or strong as fast as the Eagle or Hawk, the dove is the mirror that shows us how horrible we all really are.
Wait a minute, if Sansa started the series as 11, and is currently 14 at the Eyrie, does that mean all the ASOIAF books only cover a period of less than 5 years????!!!
Yes the time between ned and Joffrey death is only 1 year
I find it so creepy the way all these older men think they have the right to creep on this child, just because they were each a little bit nice or in the case of the Hound or Dontos, honest with her about her predicament.
Her rank and her lady's armor is not really protecting her.
I'd love to sit down with you and discuss Sansa because, whilst i agree with most of what you say, i actually love her story, she's my favourite character.
I interpret that 'i would still be the little bird' line differently to you. What would be her impetus to change if she'd just continued to rely on the kindness of others? Maybe something else would have happened but there's a chance it wouldn't either.
Is the 'going through hell made me who i am ' so unrealistic? I think she had to go through two hells because, in the first, she thought she might be rescued, she then was only to end up in hell again. It was at this point that she realised the only way out of hell was to drag herself out.
I'm also ok with the depiction of violence, in so much media violence is portrayed as something heroic (Logan and Deadpool are major examples of this), to have a site portray how horrific violence really is isn't a bad thing.
Was Sansa singled out for violence? She was paired with Theon who was just as much a victim as she was but, whilst Theon found some kind of peace, he never escaped being a victim, Sansa did.
Ultimately I love Sansa's character because she (and maybe Arya) are the only charecters in the entire show that learn anything, i don't think that Sansa learning due to get treatment diminishes hey achievement.
I took what Sansa said to the hound more and something she said is a coping mechanism for herself, in her own head. I'm just speaking as someone who's gone through similar traumas and have told myself that I'm okay with it because it's made me who I am today. I've told myself that obviously to make myself feel better about it. I can look back and understand that's what I was doing now but that's how I saw the character doing it in the show, not a glorifying of what she had been through.
I also kind of took it as her saying it to the hound to make him feel less guilty for possibly "abandoning her" to such a fate.
Basically they rushed to finish the series.
They should've aimed for at least 15 seasons.
And it annoyed me how the North was given independence but the Iron islands weren't in the show, yes piss off the guys who are known for rebellion and ruthless tactics.
That's a good point 😂
I watched this scene as it aired and cringed at it immediatly, exactly for the reason you described. Watching her character state something so twisted and cruel about herself saddened me so much.
I dont agree with the part of 'little bird'.
She started a naive joung girl that tried to please people (lanisters) to adapt.
And was mistreated and exploited for that.
If she never left kingslanding, she would have never rebelt/learned to stand her ground/ self-worth/or build an army.
And would have stayed a little bird.
Although she could have had many roads to season 8, this was her path.
In stead of acting like a victim, she used trauma as her weapon to make her stronger.
Every person that hurt her in the past, she learned from and used it next to protect herself.
I think of all tv characters, sansa is 1 of the best portrayed. Her character is immense complex, but mayby not for everyone to be understood.
Her character feels natural, shes a survivor from the start and as she gets older and more traumatized, she adapts en empowers herself.
I've always really liked Sansa since the show, but came to like her even more after reading the books. I got so, so sick of the show audience seeming to dismiss Sansa for her femineity and perceived softness. She's just as much a young wolf as Arya.
Sansa was ruined the moment they wanted to make her a 'girlboss' who was unfeeling and jaded. Because apparently D&D believed that a woman must go through r*pe and let go of idealism and kindness to be strong. It's so infuriating because Sansa's story was one of a victim of abuse who struggles to remain kind and caring and loving while also toughing up in a world that wants to eat her up. Turning her into an icelady girlboss only pushes the narrative that 'pain' makes people stronger, that in the end you will become your abusers, and it's a bleak and depressing story to give to people who have gone through similar things to what Sansa did.
I think for the little bird scene, it isnt attempting to say that one cannot grow up without experiencing trauma.
I think it's trying to express that in Sansa's eyes, the world is full of horrors beyond the imagining of most. And she believes being unaware of these horrors is itself a type of childish naivety. Her point I think is that in her opinion she needed to experience these horrors to be fully aware of their existence and their true nature. She sees this knowledge and awareness as being a strength that she has come to value.
As for why she might think these things, it could be that shes right considering the particular world in which the story takes place. Or it could be as simple as a coping mechanism. Refusing to see herself as a victim because doing so would only invite more predation from the evil and the Ill intentioned.
The latter of those actually has real world study back it up. Victims are more likely to become repeat victims because they present as easy targets for predators. And a good way to avoid that is to consciously try to give the opposite impression.
The perspective that Sansa gives where she talks about Ramsey and Little Finger and how she wouldn't be who she is without them is something that people often do who experience trauma. It's sort of a way to cope. I don't think we're supposed to view it as the writers glorifying trauma (at least that's not how I take it), but more of a glimpse into Sansa's mind and how she deals with the horrible things that have happened to her. When people have been through terrible things, they often ask "Why me?". This is just to show one way that those feelings are handled and how Sansa views them.
That's what I would hope because, as I said, it does make realistic sense but there is also zero exploration of it, just the statement as part of an empowering conclusion to her character whilst at the same time kinda turning her into Cersei. If they're gonna that, it needs exploring and they just don't
A lot of survivors have written in to this COMMENTS section to say no, that is not it, it was the healing that made them the strong people they are now. So NO.
Sansa's chapter in the book always woke in me the desire to smack catelyn and the Septa, because those stupid ideas of knightly knights, pretty equals good came from somewhere!
But the moments where i liked the character was when she was kind to others despite her own pain.
I think in the books her lesson will not be as in the show: might is right, kill or be killed (or as others said here cersei 2.0) but: it's what people DO that matters, not their speeches or their looks or titles!
Sansa is a child, and I feel that modern George has placed her in what is supposed to be an adult setting, but through Sansa (but not Arya) shows the self-absorption and not knowing how to act and relate to others as independent adults, and this is why she cannot reciprocate kindness when offered and maybe the men are portrayed as pining but really they are looking for simple acknowledgment, respect or an adult understanding that we are bound together and need to make this work, much the way you don't often choose your workmates, but still the company needs you to fulfill your goals together.
There is a feeling that Sansa may become more important in proceeding books, for example she maybe lined up to marry the not dead afterall Prince Aegon Targaryen. Personally Im still hoping for Ned Stark and his ancestors to come back as white walkers....
I think for the people who do positively grow from their trauma, it is common to view the trauma as a sort of catalyst for positive change in their life. It is common to say, “though what has happened to me was awful, I am thankful that I have become who I am. I could not be who I am now without these traumatic experiences.” It is not to say that the trauma is good. It is affirmation that the traumatized person is good, and has grown from to be better. I feel that we can invalidate the experiences of people who grow through trauma if we insist on saying that their trauma shouldn’t have happened and saying that they should also wish that it never happened. No matter how awful the trauma was, if they have embraced who the trauma has made them then to wish the trauma never happened is also to wish who they are now never existed.
I like your analysis overall though. I just got a bit triggered by your final point.
The problem is that's not what's being said. Sansa is saying that without it, she'd have forever been a pathetic little bird. The difference is subtle but massively important, plus the framing of all of it is as a good thing without any exploration of actual healing taking place, so it just becomes that the trauma, in and of itself, transformed her from someone we should see as pathetic, into someone we should admire
@@mylittlethoughttree It makes sense when you put it like that. I guess that’s not how I understood it, but I can see what he is saying now. Thanks
I think what also ruined her for me was unfortunately her portrayal. I don't think Sophie Turner is a particularly good actress (I also didn't like her as Jean Grey) and she comes across as having no feelings at all and robotic instead of childlike und full of dreams (earlier seasons) and traumatized (later seasons). So her whole arch is more like "gatekeep gaslight girlboss" instead of a girl/woman who's coming into herself.
I don't wanna blame Sophie Turner alone, the character in the show was also badly written with horrendous dialogue, but taking everything into account, her arch of becoming queen of the North didn't feel justified or right at all.
Thank you so much for the new ASOIAF video! Hope to see a character analysis for the next! ❤
While I did enjoy earlier seasons Sansa, my two main complaints are 1: she's rude "Oh, I just remembered, I don't care." Book Sansa would NEVER. And 2: that Shae got protective of her. The whole point of her arc is that Sansa has NO ONE who genuinely is on her side. Giving her any ally, especially one willing to kill for her is fundamentally misunderstanding her arc.
I can understand being upset by Sansa saying without her trauma she would not have grown, but as a therapist you must know this is a narrative trauma survivors create for themselves often as a way to see themselves as stronger and not have to face just how damaging their trauma was. Sansa is still not far removed from her trauma and has not had much time to process that. She is still very young and coping the best she can with shouldering a lot of power while trying to move past her pain. It makes perfect t sense to me that she would say this, especially in a public setting where she has to maintain her aura of strength in front of people who look to her for their own strength.
Perhaps in time she will be able to process her trauma more and realize, at least in private, that she could have grown into a powerful woman without that trauma. As a survivor of trauma myself, that sentiment made perfect sense to me given the context in which she said it, her age, and the freshness of her trauma. I said very similar things before processing my own trauma more deeply than congratulating myself for surviving it.
Absolutely! The development does make rational sense. My concern is more the context and the way it is framed as a positive conclusion to her character, rather than something worth deeper exploration. It makes perfect sense...but then explore that, not paint it all as empowerment
Unfortunately trauma often does make you stronger and this world was cruel. As a trauma survivor, I unfortunately had to grow up quickly but in a few ways it had benefited me by erasing most of my naivety and protected me from certain situations. It has genetically changed me and would never want that used just for a hollow plot point but it is reality.
My view tends to be that if you come out of it stronger, then that's your victory and your power and something to be proud of. Unfortunately there are a lot of people it definitely does not make stronger, not initially anyway, and if they are able to grow gradually from the experience then I see that more as humanity's power to learn from even bad things. Either way, the point the show says isn't "as awful and damaging as trauma can be, it is possible to come out of it a stronger person" the point is "Sansa would've forever been a naive little bird without it" it might make her stronger but to say it was needed? To say a 14 year old girl would've never grown up unless she was abused? There is almost a point in what they're saying, they just get a bit lost in their own message
Amazing analysis. You really get the Sansa of the books.
I have not read the books (but I will) so my thoughts on Sansa in the HBO adaptation (upon seeing this title) were that it would have been nice if she had a ladies’ maid/companion so that there would have been a vehicle for us to learn more about her. I had completely forgotten about Jeyn! The show got so bad towards the last seasons, that I have not rewatched it. I wish I had ditched it after Season 3 in favor of the books.
Thank-you for your analysis.
There's nothing wrong with being a little bird. Some little birds are very important. Hummingbirds, for example, are pollinators.
I see so few examples in tv or film of strong feminine characters, who have a happy ending. We love Arya, but she isn’t a feminine character. Shay dies after betraying Tyrion, Margery is killed in an explosion. They let Sansa live but only after she becomes a bitch.
I hated Sansa in the show, but once I started the books she became one of my favourite characters. The thing is, in the show she is 13, but even though she is said to still be a child in the beginning, she looks 15-16 to me (which is the actress's age, I think). And when you see a 15-year old in the world of game of thrones as naive as Sansa, they just seem childish and spoiled and offputting. But in the books I actually picture her as a child, and get to read her thoughts, and she is just a sweet naive little girl who was raised in a loving home, her worldview shaped by fairitales.
Actually... Sophie was 13 when she started to film GoT. She literally grew up along with Sansa. Maisie was 12 when she first started to film GoT. When S1 premiered on TV that's when Sophie was 15 and they were filming S2.
From the beginning, and I hadn’t read any of the books when the show first came out, Sansa was the person who fascinated me the most, as hers was the epitome of the life a young, noble girl in a feudal kingdom faced, often traded to her enemies to keep some veneer of peace, forced to walk on eggshells in front of everyone, until ultimately either surrendering to that fate, or taking control of it, as many feudal women did, though they’re scorned now by history with names like “She-wolf,” etc. I disagree that that scene glorifies abuse. That’s a scene created in the very-rushed last season to try and get across to the audience that always waiting to be rescued is not a good life-plan. Most of history’s she-wolves didn’t become who they were because they dreamed of it, they were usually forced to it out of some necessity - often violent. But the show had gotten into such a big hurry in the last season that the proper time couldn’t be devoted to allowing the audience to subtly come to that understanding. That’s why it feels so cringy, I think.
What an excellent analysis. I too absolutely hated that conversation in Season 8 between Sansa and Sandor. I look forward to exploring some of your other ASOIAF videos that explore the various characters. I am one of those self described annoying people who absolutely adore the book series, and as such have some very specific complaints about the television show. At the same time I also recognize that I still love the television show in spite of what I see as where it failed to grasp and thus portray some of the primary themes of the book series. For instance, one example is that I feel that the book series is doing an excellent job of exploring the downside of revenge, where the television show glorified it. A good example of this was the portrayal of Ellaria Sand. In the books she is calling out the Sand Snakes for wanting to perpetuate a cycle of revenge. While on the television show they had her wanting to cut Myrcella Baratheon up into little pieces for revenge over Oberyn’s death. Or the badass way they showed Arya taking out her revenge on the Freys, while it feels like her training as a Faceless Man in the books will take her into some dark places that she will be confronted with by the end. In general I loved the show and even felt that there were times that they made some improvements over the books in specific scenes. But I do think that spectacle and shock won over the deeper meanings of many aspects of what the books are trying to do.
Sansa is my favorite character less so for her characterization in the books or tv show but by the possibilities that lie in her character. If done right she has so much narrative potential. I feel like so many characters in Game of Thrones are very stereo typical archetypes of hero vs villain but her character is so different and therefore more interesting.
Jeyne is important in her own right because GRRM uses her to scold the audience for not caring about what happens to non-POV/"important" to the plot characters.Theon's redemption comes from him deciding that Jeyne deserves to be safe and that no one deserves to be tortured BECAUSE she's a human being. THAT is the theme. And Jeyne needing to lie and say she's Arya in order for non-Theon people to decide she's worth saving is a major CRITIQUE of Westerosi society and the audience.
Replacing her with Sansa just enforces the bullshit behavior that GRRM was critiquing against.
Yeah so Sansa is actually my favorite character now (in the books).
Mine too!
Interesting because none of the stuff with the direwolves, culminating in Lady’s death would have happened. I suppose we’re swapping Sansa and Arya, and Sansa is very by the books, who would have stayed with the Queen at that time. But then, what would Joff and Arya gotten up to.
Sansa didn’t believe what she said to Sandor. She was consoling him.
Good analysis I do think ppl miss that due to Ned seeing how his father, Rickard’s, Southern Ambitions ultimately led to devastation to the Starks + his PTSD from Robert’s Rebellion and falling out with Robert over Elia Martell’s and her childrens’ murders + his promise to hide/protect Jon, lead to Ned overcorrecting and hiding his family from the world.
Unlike how he was sent to the Eyrie for fostering, Ned did not do that with any of his children- Bran and Jon should have been sent (or in the process of arranging fostering) to at least other Northern Houses by the time GOT starts (yes, even noble bastards would be fostered). This contributes to all the Stark children being woefully unprepared to deal with political maneuvering compared to their peers like Margery, Joeffrey (yes he’s a little shit and ineffective, but J’s at least suspicious), and Danny. Danny often raised points to Viserys that the people who took them in did so because they wanted something not because they believed V was the true king of Westeros. And throughout her journey in the books she does display caution and shrewdness born from a child who has been on the run for all of her life.
But the Stark kids? Ned did not prepare them to be on their toes, did not instill reasons to distrust others and stick close to their family.
This is why Sansa is so naive in the beginning due to her seeing KL as the fantasies sung in songs. And why it takes her some time to shake off the rose color glasses to become more astute in self-preservation and maneuvering. And it’s why Cersei and LF are big influences for her because she starts to learn how to play the game, with hints that she’ll move from pawn to a piece that absolutely will dominate/remove C and LF from the board.
It’s why Arya, despite being more distrusting, still blunders by not reporting to Ned what she overheard in the dragon crypt in KL because she lacked the information gathering/connections she’d eventually learn in Bravvos.
It’s why Robb has extreme anxiety over leading the North in his father’s stead, not because he’s 15 but because he is stressed about managing all of the nuances between the Northmen (Ubers won’t march behind Glovers, etc.) in a way that will make them respect him. It’s why he decides to send Theon away from him despite protests and it’s why he failed to see the growing plot of the Red Wedding.
I’m over simplifying a lot but Ned did his kids dirty by not prepping them to be politically motivated and keeping them removed from anything outside of the Winterfell bubble.
We were robbed of much in GoT, but I mourn for Sansa’s arc in the Vale. We could have had Sansa learning to run circles around LF and ultimately gain power over the Vale through her manipulating Sweet Robin and getting rid of LF .
Because then if everything played our the same, minus the Ramsey storyline, Sansa’s ending would have felt more earned