Saw your tags on one of my older yes man drawings and WOW TYSM,, That made my day better ✨️✌️🫂 Your art is so STELLAR I love the sharp edges you do (Even tho i haven't drawn him in a hot minute I still nearly look at Yes Man DAILY and I adore how you draw him)
cant believe that YOU. one of my fav artists came to my ask and then. leave this kind words. also this is my first ask ive ever received in tumblr so what a miracle. Wow....
thank you sooooohohohmuch.... you made my day too🙌🫂✨️
Even if i don't ship them i want to see Sansa and Jon go "You take Winterfell" "No, you take Winterfell!" Just like couples do in the phone! 😊 And then some vassal thinks "What if we marry them"? 🧚♂️
-Not same anon
Jon: I will NOT usurp you.
Sansa: By all means, usurp away!
Jon: I can’t take your birthright!
Sansa: I am begging you to take it.
Jon *on his knees*: I would never betray you this way.
Sansa *smooshing his little face*: Jon, do this and I will never ask another favor of you in my life.
Everyone else: OMFG. Just get married and put us out of our misery!
You don’t need to ship it to see why people find this a really fun scenario to play with! 😂
Sadly what they say is true: fiction is corrupting women and it makes them get ideas. 😞
Sansa ships Aemon/Naerys (incestuous sister-brother forbidden love), and look at what she's going to go and do: fall in love with her half-brother. Or cousin. Rejoice in the dragon's heir. And cancel Sansa!!!!!!
I can't forgive Ned for his utter lack of parenting when it comes to Sansa. He who showed more concern for Lady's corpse (who he killed without a fight, a few measly words in protest don't count) than his own daughter. Though I don't think GRRM sees it that way, for him it seems Sansa is somehow flawed for being distraught and not being 100% perfect. I wonder if he realises he wrote Ned as neglectful parent to Sansa, I think he'd be surprised by how some see Ned's mistakes.
When I read AGOT, Ned and Sansa’s dynamic reminded of one I’ve seen irl. Sometimes when people have a dreamy child, parents romanticize that and don’t want their child to be disillusioned, so they shield the child from reality in a way that isn’t healthy and might actually endanger the child.At times the desire to protect a child’s innocence leads parents to keep them in ignorance of things that they really need to know. It is a failure, but not for lack of care, rather, being misguided in how they care.
I don’t think the author intended us to judge it too severely, so yes, I think he would be surprised by the harshest of the criticism leveled at Ned because some of what we deem neglectful doesn’t feel like the author intended for us to view it the way we do, it just allowed him to create the necessary unraveling of Sansa’s trust in her father’s judgment to allow her to defy him.
I believe that Ned loved Sansa dearly, but when you have a “perfect” child and one that demands attention, one of those kids you begin to depend on to always be that way, to always behave, and the other soaks up a lot of energy. It is easy to overlook the emotional needs of the goody goody because they aren’t demanding anything. Ned offers Sansa less as a result of this dynamic. Less attention, less explanation, because she always did what she was supposed to do, but also, when I read the words he uses with Sansa, it makes me wonder if he and Jon share that same soft spot for Sansa’s romanticism, and he thought he didn’t want to crush her view of the world.
"Sweet one," her father said gently, "listen to me. When you're old enough, I will make you a match with a high lord who's worthy of you, someone brave and gentle and strong. This match with Joffrey was a terrible mistake. That boy is no Prince Aemon, you must believe me." (AGOT, Sansa III)
Looking at this we see an admission that he made a mistake, we see him telling Sansa she is worth far more, deserves better, than this, and a plea for her to trust him, “believe me” rather than telling her the truth. Of course, we know why he didn’t tell her the truth, she’s a child and information such as this can get you killed, and if not for all the mistakes he made earlier with Sansa, she may have done as he asked.
There’s laziness in not seeking out the “easy” kid and making sure they’re well, but there’s also...a naivete to this type of parenting that fits in with Ned’s lack of planning for the future. Almost like the desire for their child to remain a child will somehow stop other people from taking advantage of the ignorance you’ve kept them in. Even in this conversation, I still think Ned isn’t being as direct as he should have been with Sansa because while Ned is focused on everything he knows, he is ignoring what Sansa believes which is, Arya is the troublemaker, their fighting is why they’re being punished by going home, and Arya is getting the thing she wants to make going home easier, but Sansa is getting nothing. If Ned had offered to bring a singer home, I wonder if it might have been different, but as it is, he is robbing Sansa, the one who up to that point hadn’t done anything wrong but suffered by his hand when he killed Lady, to sacrifice without question. I read this, and I think the author intended for us to sympathize with her:
Sansa cried as Septa Mordane marched them down the steps. They were going to take it all away; the tournaments and the court and her prince, everything, they were going to send her back to the bleak grey walls of Winterfell and lock her up forever. Her life was over before it had begun.
"Stop that weeping, child," Septa Mordane said sternly. "I am certain your lord father knows what is best for you."
(AGOT, Sansa III)
Once she may have believed her father, once she may have been reassured by her Septa, but now? After Lady? Now while being denied the life she had been taught to expect and accept without question? This is what she was raised for, this is what she was brought here to do, and suddenly, nope. Her dad changed his mind and she has to leave and go back to a life that is unfulfilling and stifling? It’s too much! And nothing is offered her, not a real explanation, no true sympathy, and nothing to make returning to Winterfell less than the most grievous disappointment.
To me, it reads like a situation in which we are meant to understand both viewpoints and sympathize with both characters.
Ned isn’t the villain, and Sansa has every reason to feel as she does.
It’s a literary trope to have characters desperate to leave the small town for the big city, to escape life on the farm etc, and this reads so much like that, there is no way Martin thought fans would condemn Sansa’s desire for more. At the same time, I don’t think he wants fans to think too badly of Ned. It seems to me that the author wants to include mistakes without it being a sweeping condemnation of a character. I think of Cat who says a cruel thing to Jon and how the rest of the fandom will never forgive her, and to Martin, it was meant to be a sign of her extraordinary grief and pain, that we’re meant to understand that was not the norm which makes me think that he expects us to be far more understanding of characters than we are, generally speaking.
When I read AGOT, I don’t feel like I’m being guided to condemn Sansa or Ned. I think Martin set out to crush Sansa’s illusions, but I believe in his mind, that’s a sad thing. That Sansa is a victim of her world, not that she was wrong to have faith in the first place. And Ned made mistakes, but he remains one of the few good men in the series, and his values, are more or less correct. There’s a reason why it is his children who will rule in the end. All the same, Martin certainly intended us to find some fault with Ned, as Ned himself does!
He damned them all: Littlefinger, Janos Slynt and his gold cloaks, the queen, the Kingslayer, Pycelle and Varys and Ser Barristan, even Lord Renly, Robert's own blood, who had run when he was needed most. Yet in the end he blamed himself. "Fool," he cried to the darkness, "thrice-damned blind fool."
Cersei Lannister's face seemed to float before him in the darkness. Her hair was full of sunlight, but there was mockery in her smile. "When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die," she whispered. Ned had played and lost, and his men had paid the price of his folly with their life's blood.
When he thought of his daughters, he would have wept gladly, but the tears would not come. Even now, he was a Stark of Winterfell, and his grief and his rage froze hard inside him. (Eddard, XV)
Ned knows he failed is men and failed his daughters. He had the right motivations, the right desires, the right goals, but he fumbled it all. He underestimated his enemies, and he didn’t put his daughters’ safety above all. He also realizes that Lady’s death was not merely a crime against justice, but a rejection of the blessing of his gods:
She put a finger to his lips. "Let me tell it all, my love. It will go faster that way. Listen."
So he listened, and she told it all, from the fire in the library tower to Varys and the guardsmen and Littlefinger. And when she was done, Eddard Stark sat dazed beside the table, the dagger in his hand. Bran's wolf had saved the boy's life, he thought dully. What was it that Jon had said when they found the pups in the snow? Your children were meant to have these pups, my lord. And he had killed Sansa's, and for what? Was it guilt he was feeling? Or fear? If the gods had sent these wolves, what folly had he done? (AGOT, Eddard IV)
So, yes, I do think Martin would be a little surprised at how angry Ned’s parenting makes us, but he does intend at least some critique here. If anyone’s parent killed their pet and then that parent said, “trust me,” there is no believing them, and the death of the pet is such a big thing in American lit, I think Martin fully intended for us to understand Sansa’s inability to continue to just obey, not for us to view it as a crime. Delivering the realization of just how bad this action was in Ned’s thoughts, so much worse than killing the average pet, means Martin certainly wants us to understand the full weight of it. But there can be mistakes that don’t erase the good in a character, parenting failures that aren’t entirely damning, and that interestingly enough, arise from not quite living in the real world, and I suppose in that way, Ned and Sansa both live in a dream.
So in a nutshell, supposedly the Targs invaded Westeros to stop the long night thinking their progeny where the key to saving the world. Only for it to be the Starks who save everyone from the long night and from the Targs themselves. And they built all this up in their minds to justify their inbreeding, their unjustified conquest and years of bloodshed and bad rule. My god they really are the most pathetic family in the series. That’s saying something! HotD is one long Targ mocking lol.
Dany had handmaid/slaves since AGOT and she had exploited Irri. So how come she is not considered classist?
I’m going to assume fans believe Dany genuinely seeks abolition as a humanitarian end, so her failures along the way are brushed aside as gritty writing? However, when AGOT ends with her burning a slave alive, I think we have to call into question how she balances what she wants against what it costs others.
As in, once she claimed women as her own to try to save them, but then, a few chapters later, she tells one of these women,
“... but it is not your screams I want, only your life.” (AGOT, Daenerys X)
To her fans, they may allow Dany’s feelings, the fact that she does try to intervene, outweigh the rest. They’re looking at the miracle of dragons, not the charred bones.
When you read the first scene with Irri, the focus is on Dany’s feelings, the fact that she is sexually frustrated, and since she doesn’t ask Irri to do anything and later tells Irri she doesn’t have to, fans don’t believe it’s exploitation.
"No. Irri, you do not need to do that. What happened that night, when you woke . . . you're no bed slave, I freed you, remember? You . . ." (ASOS, Daenarys II)
which allows fans to focus on that, see things from Dany’s perspective, and ignore what follows, what Irri believes to be true, and what Dany does later, because later, Dany does take initiative,
Later, when the time came for sleep, Dany took Irri into bed with her, for the first time since the ship. (ASOS, Daenerys, VI)
I’ve mentioned before there’s a funny two step thing with Dany that allows readers to miss how words and actions may align at one point, but eventually, they diverge.
I assume her fans buy into her conquest so when they read this,
She wanted to cry, but she told herself that she must be strong. This is war, this is what it looks like, this is the price of the Iron Throne. (AGOT, Daenerys VII)
they over sympathize with Dany’s feelings rather than realize this is the author condemning her path:
She wanted to cry, but she told herself that she must be strong. This is war, this is what it looks like, this is the price of the Iron Throne.
Dany and the audience is being shown there is no avoiding massive suffering when one goes to war, but, if you think the point is to feel sorry for Dany, rather than analyze her actions, then you gloss over the second part. All the bad fades into the background because fans believe it’s part of achieving the greater good.
I’m guessing that buy-in prevents them from reacting the way we do, accepting Dany’s pain as absolution and Dany’s desire as worthwhile, and since we see her protect certain people and free others, they ignore that second part, the fact that she murders someone she was meant to protect, that people she freed reenter slavery and she profits from it. I think the context in which she lives allows her to have morals and sensibilities that seem good in contrast to those who surround her, and since Westeros has already rejected slavery, Dany feels like a revolutionary, where our other mains don’t? She is seemingly progressive, but mainly because of context? And she seems that way only if you fail to realize that in spite of her feelings that these things are wrong, she ends up participating anyway?
That’s my guess as to why criticism isn’t leveled at her the same way it is at other POV characters, anon.
I am a Jonsa, but there's a popularly accepted opinion about it that I don't share, which is that Jonsa solves the problem of Catelyn's fears regarding her children being supplanted by Jon or his children, because this way, Jon's children ARE Catelyn's grandchildren.
I don't believe this would be much of a comfort for Catelyn. There would be relief, certainly, in knowing that her grandchildren couldn't be supplanted, but I still think there would be something very bitter for her in knowing that Jon was the father of her grandchildren. She intensely disliked, possibly even hated, his existence for 20ish years. That is not something that goes away easily. Even if she learned about his true parentage and knew, on a logical level, that she no longer had any reason to hate him, he would still always be associated in her mind with a painful aspect of her life that had lasted for years. I think there would always be something distasteful to her about her beloved daughter being married to, and her beloved grandchildren being fathered by, this person she had resented and disliked for so long. I think his presence, and even the presence of her grandchildren who now exist because of him, would always be a painful reminder for her. Honestly, and I say this without any judgment of her, I think she would hate the idea of Sansa being married to Jon, because I don't think she's ever going to be okay with Jon as a person.
It doesn't make me ship Jonsa any less, but I don't see it as the perfect solution to Catelyn's fears. I think it would cause her pain, even as it brought some measure of relief.
"There would be relief, certainly, in knowing that her grandchildren couldn't be supplanted, but I still think there would be something very bitter for her in knowing that Jon was the father of her grandchildren."
I agree with this statement, and I think that's the kind of emotion Martin likes. Not wholly sweet, bittersweet.
There's always a strong current of pain in the good thing he presents, as you point out, Jon's presence in Winterfell, the secret of his mother in Cat's marriage, the secret of his father haunting Ned. Martin's preoccupation with injecting turmoil into people and situations is why I think something like Jonsa is very in-character for him. If they didn't grow up thinking they were siblings, it would be too nice and wholesome, no mixed feelings, no internal conflict, no external conflict (cousin marriage is normal in Westeros).
So, the statement that a hundred of us have made, that Jon’s children being Cat’s grandchildren is a solution, is not claiming that it is a solution Cat would choose or one that she would be happy about, it is saying that the audience is presented with a problem via Cat's concerns (Jon is a threat to her children) and that by the end of the series, the audience will be presented with an unexpected, ironic answer to that problem. The threat is a means of securing her children’s/grandchildren’s safety. I suppose any other solution, Sansa marrying a rando might be too nice, normal, and happy for Martin. That solution too untainted, and since this is an ongoing issue, the introduction to it in AGOT, the conversation about it in ASOS, Jon refusing Winterfell in spite of how desperately he wants it, the inevitability of Jon facing an even greater temptation when faced with legitimization from Robb, it’s winding Cat’s fear and the obvious --kinda devious-- solution tighter and tighter together.
Acknowledging that, how it’s logical if a little twisted, isn’t synonymous with claiming Cat would be pleased, although, as I’ve written this and thought about Cat’s love for her children, and what Jon has already tried to do for them, what I believe he will do for them, would go a long way in changing her feelings about him. To me, Cat didn’t know Jon as a person, she chose not to. She only saw him as the threat that he was, not by virtue of his character, by virtue of his birth. Knowing his parentage and knowing that he tried to save Arya, knowing that he’d refused Winterfell to honor the claim of her Sansa, or in the end, knowing that he killed his aunt to save her children (if that is the way it will go, and I believe it is), I think it would move her deeply. Because Jon chose her children, her daughters, in ways her first born son could not.
The parentage reveal would alleviate her interpretation of Ned’s secrecy, he wasn’t more loyal to the woman he had an affair with, he was committing treason to save his nephew. Considering what Cat is willing to do for family, as much as it would have terrified her to know the truth if Ned had confessed when she asked all those years ago, I think it’s something she would understand, so the truth imo would make her feel better about her marriage and reassure her of Ned’s love and loyalty which might soften her feelings about Jon, especially when paired with his own actions.
Even so, even though Jon’s actions make him the only man in Westeros who she could know wasn’t marrying Sansa or having children with her just to get Winterfell (as he already refused it), who she could trust would protect them and honor their rights, I think the fact that Jon and Sansa were raised believing they were siblings and that there would always be whispers about that would worry her.
Relief, bitterness. Love, hate. Martin likes his conflicted emotions. I guess that means I basically agree with you about Cat’s feelings, although I think a fic writer could lean much more into Cat’s relief, and it would be believable. It’s a solution for us, one we might like, but our feelings are not the same as any given character’s. If I’m being really honest with myself and not thinking happy, shippy, fic-y things, I don’t know that Martin would write any Stark being truly at peace with Jonsa per his interest in emotional turmoil.
On a personal note, often when people disagree with me/other Jonsas they come into my inbox pretty hot, so I’m very grateful you’re so calm and focused on character interpretation rather than attacking me/other fans. I appreciate the opportunity to reiterate, that this is a POV story, and often when discussing things from certain perspectives, that is a distinct thing from how the next POV may feel or how we, the audience, may feel. I’m glad you took the time to look at this from Cat’s perspective because I love her, and also that you wanted to engage with me about it rather than assuming I said something/meant something I didn’t. I’m happy to acknowledge that this solution that works for the audience, that works for Sansa, would cause other characters pain. Multiple things can be true, even if I don’t take the time to acknowledge each reality in any given post.
Thank you so much for this thoughtful message, anon! <3
