SeanC
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Posts posted by SeanC
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Maybe she gets word that Sansa committed suicide. I mean, Ramsay could push that story and use Myranda's corpse in place of Sansa. If Sansa is dead, that makes him the widower of the last known living Stark.
I really don't see why he would do that, since:
(1) If Sansa's not in their custody, she would just be expected to re-emerge elsewhere.
(2) Pretending that she's dead would impede the task of searching for her (e.g., you wouldn't be able to put out a bounty).
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I just finished re-reading To Kill A Mockingbird for the first time since Grade 7, since the prequel/sequel/whatever is about to come out. I find I appreciated it a lot more this time around.
I've now started Robertson Davies' Tempest-Tost, which I hope to be finished with by Tuesday.
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My only problem with this is that in terms of the big picture, bringing Sansa back to the North, only to have her turn around and head right back South next season seems...weird to me. I feel like symbolically, the return of a Stark to Winterfell and the North is really momentous and should be more than just a brief diversion and a bit of filler. Particularly for Sansa, who has always felt like the Stark who is the most disconnected from her Northern roots. So seeing her return to those roots and really embrace her identity as Sansa Stark of Winterfell felt like an important step in her journey and personal character development. Even though she did leave Winterfell in the finale, it would seem a little strange to me if her next step didn't involve her staying in the North at all.
The idea that the return of a Stark to Winterfell is a significant thing was pretty comprehensively trashed this season, seeing as Sansa was more helpless than ever once she got there, and the sum total of "the North remembers" was an old serving lady and an innkeep, neither of whom did anything.
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Well I don't think the Vale Lords count as "friends." Lyssa Arryn was an actual relative and we know how that ended. All she had to go on was Lord Royce saying he hunted with Ned and he was a "good man." That's all she has and that's hardly a sign of allegiance, certainly not call to assume ANY of the Vale would raise an army unless it's for Lord Robin, which is how LF maneuvers them, Sansa seems to be incidental. She had no reason to distrust them, but she had no reason to trust them either.
And I maintain she followed LF's lead in the show just like she did in the book. He told her to lie to the Vale Lords in AFFC and she did, he told her to babysit Robin, done. As of now she is the monkey to LF's Organ Grinder and she's willing to do such because of his past success rate. She escaped a trial for regicide (though he helped set it in motion) because of Littlefinger.
She certainly considers them friends. She banks on them all keeping her secret.
The comparison you make doesn't work, because Sansa in the book has no choice but to follow Littlefinger's lead. TV!Sansa was placed in a position of security independent of Littlefinger that the book version has never come close to.
Did she? Were these "powerful friends" she'd known for about five minutes, going to keep Robin Arryn under control, or were they going to do whatever he, as Lord of the Vale, ordered them to do, such as perhaps pitch Sansa out the moon door the first time he lost his temper with her?
Robin Arryn has never demonstrated any inclination to do that. He's treated as a basically comic figure on the show. Those powerful friends were entrusted with the very secret of her survival.
I don't see the potential for either girl to raise an army. I'm not sure where you're getting that. Littlefinger has the Vale army because he is Lord Protector of the Vale. Sansa is not. The Vale army follows him, not her.
Nope, very much the opposite. The Vale lords disliked and distrusted Littlefinger; they're only working with him because Sansa vouched for him, meaning that she is the more significant and trustworthy figure, as far as they're concerned.
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They say the price is how important the person is, and we don't see any important people being killed by them (that we know of i guess)
Well, Balon, but it's implied that Euron paid for that with a stupendously rare (and, given the FM's current preoccupation, possibly useful for other reasons) dragon egg.
In general, this is one of the reasons I don't really care for the Faceless Men as part of the worldbuilding. They're an amazingly powerful organization whose rules seem primarily organized in order to explain why they don't do anything to affect the plot too much (or at all).
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How is it any indication of Arya's personality or character that she was NOT rejected, beaten up, or raped?
Well, first, with Sansa we're primarily talking about skill development, where she comprehensively regressed. But it's also different because Arya was placed in a situation where she had no particularly good options but to seek a fresh start in Braavos and see where that took her (not to mention, of course, that Jaqen had told her to come if she wanted). Sansa (supposedly) went voluntarily there to "avenge them" in a colossally stupid manner and completely failed, and left a very safe place to do it, where she had powerful friends and the potential to raise an army (which Littlefinger, unlike her, actually notices and makes plans for).
What Sansa DID do, is talk Theon Greyjoy into being Theon again. She tricked him into revealing that Bran and Rickon are still alive.
No, she didn't. She had basically four scenes with Theon (plus a few group scenes where they don't interact) -- she attempted to win him over in exactly one of those scenes, and when that didn't work, she gave up and went back to her former posture of telling him how much she hates him. She did not "trick him" into anything; that would require her to have some inkling he had secret information that she could then form a strategy to acquire. She just yelled at him and he blurted out the answer to a question she wasn't asking, because she had no reason to ask it. That's completely accidental.
Sansa started out with the idea of avenging her family, but very quickly had to change her goal to just surviving, and I think that actually is the measure of success in this story.
Surviving is what she's been doing in King's Landing. Her story when she leaves King's Landing is supposed to be about moving beyond that. Instead of moving from naif to player, she's actually more naive in Season 5 than she was in Season 1, seeing she apparently believes sitting around doing nothing and glowering at people she's supposed to be charming constitutes playing the game.
Jaime was imprisoned for a year, lost a hand, was tortured and beaten and would have been raped had anyone had the time, but nobody said "wow, look at the complete loss of character development there." I see a terrible double standard here, frankly.
It's not a double-standard, because Sansa and Jaime's stories are completely different, and in completely different places. Jaime is a phenomenally-skilled warrior whose story in ACOK/ASOS is about his newfound moral development and coping with being brought low.
Sansa's arc in the first three books is about having her existing view of the world completely torn down, being imprisoned, and dealing with the helplessness and trying to find a way to survive and get away. Once she's out, it's about moving past that and having the room to become an active player rather than a victim and pawn trying to survive. The show just threw her back into a complete re-run of her King's Landing story where she is, if anything, less effective than she was in King's Landing -- she was able to manipulate Joffrey a few times, she never comes close with Ramsay; and, of course, she voluntarily went to Winterfell to accomplish something and completely fails. It's no big accomplishment to "survive" a situation when you yourself are the sole reason you're in the situation to begin with. By the end of the season, all she's done is run away from a situation she should never have been in to begin with, if she had a brain.
All of the younger Stark POVs have broadly parallel arcs at this point in the story. AFFC/ADWD is where they get their mentors and, in a place of relative security, begin the training that will allow them to take center-stage in the coming struggles (whenever GRRM gets around to releasing them). Arya gets that. Bran...well, he wasn't in this season, but from what the writers have said he'll come back with a serious boost in abilities. Sansa just gets tortured more, and worse than ever before, with no sign of any skill development (indeed, based on where she started the season, she's gotten dumber).
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Yeah, that sucks majorly if you don't want the comic pardon graphic novel version but I think a compilation of the three has been finally released in English or will be soon.
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms will be released in October. You can preorder it on Amazon now.
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But that's true of everyone on this show. Cersei's goal was bringing about the fall of Margaery Tyrell/maintaining power. Margaery and House Tyrell's goal was to gain influencial control over the Iron Throne. One could go on about how these character never reach their REAL goal, circumstances usually fall into a place where everyone whom survives is greatful for doing so and they go back to the drawing board in pursuit of power, influence and etc.
First, Cersei did bring about the fall of House Tyrell, before things went sour on her. But more to the point, Cersei is a character whose arc is descending after being in the upper echelons of the roost. Sansa is supposed to be on an upward trajectory after seasons of getting non-stop kicked around -- but that's all she does this season.
Her arc in AFFC is deliberately paralleled with Bran and Arya's training arcs, as she struggles with identity (a theme that's completely lost) and, in a place of greater security, learns to play the game of thrones and begin to make contributions to plans, implement them, etc.
As I wrote in one of the other threads, the equivalent would be if Arya's arc this season was changed to her getting rejected by the House of Black and White, getting mugged by those street toughs she encountered and losing Needle again, then spending the remainder of the season begging in the streets and getting beaten and raped, before getting on a boat and fleeing Braavos.
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Jon did not "betray his NW's vows"; he pretended to betray them for the express purpose of surviving and bringing key information to the Watch.Well, uh...Jon isn't a "good" character. He's likable and I wanted (sort of) for him to come out on top, but he betrayed his NW's vows and then turned around and betrayed Ygritte and the Wildlings only to unbetray them later and betray his brothers in the NW. That's a lot of betrayal and flipflopping for a "good" character. I understand his motivations, but that doesn't make him good.
Likewise, he did not betray the Wildlings. He was never loyal to them in the first place. They captured him, and he said what he needed to say to escape, much like Sansa in KL -- nobody seriously argues she "betrayed" the Lannisters.
As for the Bolton issue, that represents the great conflict between duty and the urge to do good.
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Except Sansa's goal was not survival. Her goal was to "avenge them", and she failed at that so comprehensively (indeed, she didn't even mildly inconvenience them) and suffered so enormously in so doing that it's basically comical.Could not agree more. ESPECIALLY with your first sentence. I'm now confident that Sansa can survive ANYTHING inwardly. I don't think she'll go mad or turn evil. She'll do what she always does, figure out a way to survive if she can. Myranda's down, so that's yet another enemy she's managed to outlive. She may not have killed Myranda herself and all the better I say. I think survival is the mark of success in this "game".
The equivalent of this season for Arya would be if she'd gotten rejected by the House of Black and White, those thugs she ran into stole Needle again, and she spent the rest of the season getting mugged, beaten up and raped in the streets of Braavos, before getting on a boat and leaving.
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Which she stupidly abandoned and did not contemplate making any use of, which is what any intelligent person would do.Well, sticking to Season 5, Sansa did make relationships in the Vale,
By waltzing in to become their prisoner and then doing nothing.and tried to find a power spot with the Boltons,
There is nothing to suggest she made any such inroads. Ramsay glowered for a second, but then moved on to rubbing in her face that he foiled her escape, and in his subsequent appearances that season is entirely unbothered by it.She DID get inroads though to put father against son, especially once Walda was with child. She just happened to split before that went anywhere.
No, she did not. Her one attempt to persuade Theon to help her failed completely and got her only ally in the castle killed, at which point she completely abandoned any notion of manipulating Theon and went back to venting her anger at him. Theon subsequently rescued her entirely on his own initiative, in response to Myranda saying Ramsay was going to torture her into she-Reek.She did succeed in manipulating Theon/Reek to get out and to discover that her brothers were alive. SHE did that.
Likewise, the information about Bran and Rickon was something she stumbled across by complete accident. She was ranting at Theon, without any notion that he had any valuable information. If I go to yell at my neighbour for their dog digging up my garden and they immediately blurt out that they are a pedophile, that doesn't make me a manipulator or master interrogator.
First, she "discovered" that because the old lady walked up and announced she was in her team, at which point she made not the slightest attempt to do anything with this information, and from all indicators had not been planning to look into this at all. It's yet another thing she stumbled into through no act of her own.She also discovered through the old lady that there were people in the North who care about her and her family. Her ability to recruit help from the Northern Houses and possibly leverage the Vale Army to get Winterfell back is what we might be looking at for Season 6. Getting people to risk their lives and positions is the essence of politics in Westeros. She may well be on her way with what we see thus far.
Second, some random serving lady says nothing about other Northern houses (particularly as even in Winterfell itself she appears to have been completely alone).
Third, that Northerners still love the Starks was the whole basis for them going to Winterfell --it's why the Boltons and Stannis are assumed to want her. That's not new information. She just stupidly decides to go to a place where she has no allies instead of seeking out these Northern friends, which is, again, what anyone with a functioning brain would have done.
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I'm actually wondering if he's undercover for MCC.
I wondered about that too for a moment, since it seemed like these flashbacks might be leading up to Caputo deciding to break with the past practices that haven't gotten him anywhere in favour of looking out for #1, but I don't really know that he could accomplish all that much undercover. The scene reads far more like Caputo getting sucked back into his old habit -- albeit, in this case the people were clearly asking for his help (though the wrestling kid was asking to fight somebody, if not him specifically).
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The show certainly made him more willing than the books, but he was willing to burn his nephew and allowed Mel to kill his brother. He could have beheaded who he thought was Mance rather than burning him. But you're correct, the show certainly made him so much worse than who he was in the books.
The book is actually ambiguous about exactly what Stannis knows about Mel, but regardless, Renly had raised up an army to take the throne that was rightfully his, and was equally prepared to kill him. The thing with Edric is definitely his darkest moment, post-Blackwater.
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The writers did an interview where they said Stannis has been allowing Mel to burn/kill people for a long time and now fans are suddenly upset because it happened to someone they cared about.
That reflects on their own complete misunderstanding of Stannis' character. Stannis in the books never burnt anyone for heresy; the only executions he ordered were for secular crimes against him.
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I also had a very different interpretation of the final encounter with Myranda. It seems like people saw that scene as one more example of Sansa being weak and passive and to me it was anything but. If she'd tried to jump Myranda and tried to struggle with her she might have died because Myranda would have been unlikely to be able to control her aim. It would have been very different if Sansa had been cowering, begging, pleading to Myranda for mercy. I can see how that would be weak and disappointing to see from Sansa. Instead, what I saw was Sansa looking pain, torture, and possibly even death right in the face and she refused to let it shake her. She told Myranda that if this was her time that she was going to stand up and face it but she isn't just going to hang around anymore while they wear her down to the point where there isn't anymore of the real Sansa left. I thought Sansa was totally strong here. I certainly don't know how ballsy I would be if I were staring in the face of a crazy bitch that I know hates me because I ended up getting married to her crazy-eyed boyfriend.
To the bolded: But she wanted to die, at that point.
Consider the order of events here:
- Sansa is caught, and Myranda orders her to go back to her chambers.
- Sansa grimly says she just wants to die rather than continue to be raped and tortured indefinitely. I've seen some argument that this is a moment of maturation/character strength, but it's really not. Quite apart from this being an admission of total defeat, it's hardly unusual that a person would prefer to die rather than be raped and tortured indefinitely.
- Myranda then laughs and, in a moment that really tells you the tenor of this conversation, throws in Sansa's face what was supposedly Sansa's earlier coup-de-grace in her verbal exchange with Myranda in episode 506. There, Sansa stated that unlike all the girls Myranda tried to scare her with, Sansa's father was Warden of the North, and she can't be frightened in Winterfell. The subsequent events have proved all of that to be completely wrong, and here Myranda ironically turns her own line around on her and informs her that the ancestry she boasted of just means she's going to be raped and tortured indefinitely, rather than killed.
- Sansa stands there, waiting for Myranda to decide where she's going to shoot her.
- Then Theon, who Sansa had not even looked at in the course of this scene and clearly considered a non-factor, intervenes due to his own decision-making and saves her.
Sure, she's not weeping or begging, but that's just a change in demeanour, not a change in her actual role (much the same as could be said for "Darth Sansa", where an amazing number of viewers fell for the idea that Sansa wearing a cool dress and glowering more meant that she was a player now, even though she was doing nothing). She's still helpless and utterly defeated.
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TL;DR?: Ned screwed up, was a bad dad, Sansa going to Cersei shows off her will and courage, and it only falls apart because of information that was deliberately kept from Sansa by her father.
I don't think it's quite that far -- Sansa is willfully blind, to a great degree; she has a very strong mental inclination to see what she wants or thinks she's expected to see.
That said, yes, she is ultimately a child, and it's her father's responsibility to, y'know, parent her. Ned's handling of Sansa in AGOT really jarred me on re-reading it. The show added a bit of dialogue to his scene with Arya where he says Sansa basically had to say what she did at the Kingsroad, which, whatever you think about it, is him expressing an opinion on the matter. When I re-read that point for comparison, Book!Ned's thoughts on the matter are...non-existent. He never for a moment considers that Sansa is clearly seriously misapprehending the situation they're in, nor does anything about it. It seems like he just banks on her doing what he says at all times (presumably because she's always done so in the past, even though in this case he knows she lied after telling him the truth), and I think it's telling that GRRM has the daughter Ned takes for granted end up being the one who doesn't do what he says.
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Episode 1 - she didn't do it because she wanted his help. She did it because it was the right thing to do. And there is no finite amount of manipulation she's alotted in-universe, so how is that a bad decision?Episode 1 - Shoots manipulation wad on someone who can't help her in the future.
Episode 3 - Trusts untrustworthy maid on the basis of ...nothing.
Episode 4 - Has faith in unreliable drunk.
Episode 6 - Not touching that one.
Episode 7 - Fails. Yep.
Episode 9 - Widens her rift with the ruling Queen who is drunk and has a man with a sword standing there ready to do her bidding. Trusts drunken Dontos (according to you in E2) over the man who actually protected her and who has at least the physical wherewithal to keep her safe and who is volunteering to do so.
Episode 10 - Begins to develop trust for a supercreeper.
Episode 3 - Shae is trustworthy; the show just didn't feel any need to explain why she trusted her beyond that they're both nice characters and thus they're expected to recognize each other. Bad writing, but not a bad decision.
Episode 4 - First, that didn't happen in the show; second, her other option is to sit around and do nothing. She bravely banks on trying to escape. And as a consequence, she does escape. How is that a bad decision?
Episode 7 - please identify the bad decision?
Episode 9 - I'm not sure what rift she widened there; Cersei already hates her. And, since you're talking about the books regarding the Hound, the Hound was a violent drunk who then threatened to kill her, and left immediately afterward without giving her any further space. Seems far from a bad decision to not want to go with him (though, again, the show's writing choices make the whole scenario make far less sense).
Episode 10 - we're back to talking about the show now, where she does not "begin to develop trust". She turns him down flat.
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Theon's story is a bit weird for me, because the character work with Theon is excellent -- some of Martin's best stuff. But it's also occurred within what is easily the most contrived plotting in the first three books, as the Ironborn function as GRRM's thumb-on-the-scale to screw over House Stark. On rereards, Balon Greyjoy, especially, comes across as a gigantic plot device who exists only to make incredibly irrational strategic decisions to defeat the Starks, a house it doesn't even really make sense for him to hate in preferment to everybody else on the continent. Made all the more obvious by the fact that he dies off-screen immediately after fulfilling this function.
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I really hope people haven't been too horrible to Sophie Turner.
There was, unfortunately, a lot of jerks who had no problem insulting her over that. She's talked about in the past, things like finding the level of vitriol directed at her character really disconcerting, and having people come up to her on the street and tell her how much they hate her character (in at least one instance, she was hanging out with Maisie Williams -- they're best friends in real life -- and told Williams that she was her favourite, while Turner was her least favourite).
On the subject of Sansa's arc, I agree it's not the strongest point of the first book (and while the show cutting Sansa's journey to Cersei was probably a good thing, I think they also made a huge mistake by omitting her big scene with the Hound, which is the most interesting bit of characterization she gets in the first one) -- in particular, it feels like Martin includes two different moments that should have soured her on the Lannisters individually, when there should only have been logically room for one. Sansa is my favourite character in the series in subsequent books, in large part because I think she's the most realistically-written of the child characters (which is also one of the things some fans hate about her), but I've never found it plausible that a child would ever trust Cersei again after the Kingsroad incident and the death of Lady (not that her blaming Arya for what happened doesn't also make sense). But she does, seemingly just because Martin needed to include her subsequent going to Cersei at the climax.
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I have a question about a character who is not (yet, maybe) on the show, but shows up in spec a lot:
Lady Stoneheart. Is she "mostly" the same as Cat? Would she recognize Arya or Sansa if she saw them again, or is she mostly someone else in Cat's body?
Lady Stoneheart has, as far as we know, all of Catelyn's memories. It's just her personality that is different.
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Robert's reasons for fighting for the throne were no more noble than Renly's.
Robert rose in rebellion because his bride-to-be had been abducted and raped (as far as he knew), allies had been murdered, and his life was threatened without any cause, and then he was offered the crown as the person with the best lineage amongst the rebels, despite his own offers to decline in favour of others. Don't get me wrong, Robert was a bad king at the end of the day, but that has nothing to do with how he got it in the first place.
Renly rose in rebellion because he wanted to be king.
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No. Just no. That's a complete misinterpretation of the scene.
What do you think she's trying to do, then? She wants to be in Winterfell, because she's deluded herself into thinking she can do something there.
Dude, watch S2. Make a list. It's one after another. Take off the "precious Sansa/D&D are evil" glasses. I can't beat this dead horse anymore.All of Sansa's appearances in season 2:
Episode 1 - saves Dontos, showing her cleverness and ability to manipulate a psychopath without being obvious about it.
Episode 3 - no decisions to speak of here. She sits through an insulting dinner party, and is confounded by a sucktastic maid who she has every reason to believe is probably a spy, but decides to trust offscreen for seasons we're never told. Other than that subsequent thing, no decisions to speak of.
Episode 4 - gets beaten up by Joffrey's knights. Tyrion offers to break her betrothal, which she sensibly refuses on the basis that she has no reason to trust Tyrion and it could easily be some kind of trap [and because she needs to remain in a place to contact Dontos in order to effect her escape and therefore weighs her options and picks escape over temporary safety...oh wait, the show cut all that]
Episode 6 - almost gets raped. No decisions to speak of.
Episode 7 - fails at hiding evidence of her period. Gets lectured to by Cersei. No decisions to speak of.
Episode 9 - shows some leadership potential, then declines to go with the Hound, who she has no reason to trust [because he's a raving drunkard who had just put a knife to her throat and comes across like a would-be rapist...oh right, the show cut all that]
Episode 10 - Plays along with her betrothal being broken off, and then wisely declines the help of Littlefinger, who is transparently a gigantic creep and who she has no reason to trust.
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Season 2 Sansa is superior by far to season 5 Sansa, who acted like a complete idiot despite being older and more experienced.
The weirdest defence I've seen some people mount of Sansa's portrayal this season is that it's a positive development that she was more confident than before...even though that confidence was completely unwarranted.
If anything, Sansa was more naive this season that she was in season 1; Season 1 Sansa thought that life was a fairy tale, whereas Season 5 Sansa knows it isn't and yet stakes everything on the idea that she's 'playing the game' and working to defeat her enemies by sitting around doing nothing (apart from glowering and occasionally snarking at them), which even Season 1 Sansa would have thought was ridiculous.
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What, SeanC? What? Sansa's line to Baelish couldn't have been more of a sledgehammer. That line basically smacked us in the face of "I know you want me, you're about to lose me, are you sure you want that?"
Um, why would she be doing that? At that point in the story, she wants to be in Winterfell. That's why she agreed to go there. There's no reason for her to be manipulating him like that. That line is meant to signal her acquiescence to his plans.
But well...it does seem that there is consensus that Sansa does mostly suck. (YES!) Even if she's beloved by some.
She has vocal haters, but plenty of vocal fans (she made #11 on Tower of the Hand's most recent fan-voted character counterdown, for instance).
You can disagree SeanC, sure, but S2 Sansa was a total and complete bore with all that sniffling and moping and bad decisionmaking.
First, I should think one is entitled to be sad when one is trapped in King's Landing being pummeled regularly. And what "bad decisionmaking"? Due to the writers' gutting of her season 2 material, she hardly made any decisions at all that season, let alone bad ones.
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Television Vs. Book: Why'd They Make [Spoiler] Such A [Spoiler]?
in Game Of Thrones
Like I said, until she's actually dead there's no point in doing that, since it would impede the search and would make him look bad if she got away.