Hiya, I'm not a new follower per se, but I wanted ask you stuff anyway. What's one character that you grew to love over the course of the series that you didn't initially like? What about their character/journey won you over? Also, who's your favorite ASOIAF villain and why? Love your meta btw
I’m going to answer this in two separate posts because Tywin Lannister is my favourite ASOIAF villain, but I’ve been dying to really write about him and you’ve given me an excuse, so I’ll do that separately.
I regret to say I was one of the people who couldn’t stand Sansa Stark for most of AGOT. Initially, I really struggled to get past Sansa’s treatment of Arya. I hated how horrible she was to her sister, the fact she let Jeyne sneer at Arya for her sewing while acting “above it all”, let her call her Arya Horseface, etc. I didn’t blame her for what happened after the Nymeria incident and in fact sympathised with her for the impossible position she was put in by Cersei, but I did dislike how she continued to distort the situation afterwards when it was just her and Arya - “your butcher boy attacked the prince.” And then lording her future position as queen over her. I’d have thrown an orange at her too. I also found her acting as if she were living in a storybook immensely frustrating, and I wanted to grab and shake her. It’s very easy to forget she’s an eleven year old girl who is only thinking and behaving in the way her society teaches young girls to think and behave, and I’ll be honest, I did.
But then Ned is thrown in prison, and this is when Sansa begins to enter survival mode and her concern for her loved ones asserts itself. As her household is slaughtered outside the tower where she’s being confined, she looks to comfort Jeyne by sharing a bed and cuddling her and tries to stop her from being taken away. Sansa’s naivety and idealism no longer come across as irritating, they’re now actively heartbreaking, especially during her interrogation by Cersei and the Small Council, where she honestly thinks she can get Joffrey to merely exile him and then pardon him years later because she is that desperate to believe she can both save her father and marry Joffrey. Alas, as Littlefinger says, this is when she brutally discovers life is not a song and her father is executed.
Sansa in the immediate aftermath is just devastating:
Sometimes her sleep was leaden and dreamless, and she woke from it more tired than when she had closed her eyes. Yet those were the best times, for when she dreamed, she dreamed of Father.
She misses her father so badly but she can’t bear dreaming of him, because she can only dream of his execution. Let’s just say my throat was very tight while reading this.
And then she begins, with a solid core of defiance, to stick it to Joffrey. She tells him flat out that she doesn’t want to marry him, because he killed her father and she hates him. Not wise, perhaps, and possibly she’s only able to say this because she still hasn’t fully grasped Joffrey is the King now (she has to be reminded to call him Your Grace, my king etc) but it requires an incredible amount of courage to stand up to a capricious little tyrant who just killed your dad, and refuse to be broken. After getting a beating from Ser Meryn for this, she defies Joff again when he torments her by forcing her to look the heads of her father and septa:
Joffrey gave a petulant shrug. “Your brother defeated my uncle Jaime. My mother says it was treachery and deceit. She wept when she heard. Women are all weak, even her, though she pretends she isn’t. She says we need to stay in King’s Landing in case my other uncles attack, but I don’t care. After my name day feast, I’m going to raise a host and kill your brother myself. That’s what I’ll give you, Lady Sansa. Your brother’s head.”
A kind of madness took over her then, and she heard herself say, “Maybe my brother will give me your head.”
HELL YEAH SANSA. She receives another nasty couple of blows across the face for this, but instead of breaking her, this only makes her want to literally kill Joffrey. Girl has got a fiery spirit,in her, which no one will ever be able to put out, as hard as some try to do so. It’s the foundation for her arc in ACOK, where among other things, she manipulates Joffrey into sparing a life, she comforts a chamber full of much older women by singing a hymn during a battle with a far from certain outcome, attempts to trick Joffrey into leading the vanguard and therefore increasing the chance he’ll be killed, and survives as a hostage in a hostile court where everyone will try to catch her out and a king is abusing her and her only allies or protectors are a bitter, cynical and violent member of the Kingsguard, and the most despised of the Lannisters, but still a Lannister.
I began thinking Sansa badly needed to discover the real world works. By the end, I thought of this quote from the 1995 adaptation of Sense and Sensibility:
Elinor: Rather too unspoilt, in my view. The sooner she becomes acquainted with the ways of the world, the better
Colonel Brandon: I knew a lady very like your sister - the same impulsive sweetness of temper -who was forced into, as you put it, a better acquaintance of the world. The result was only ruination and despair. Do not desire it, Miss Dashwood.
Fortunately, Sansa’s ultimate outcome is going to be far from ruination and despair, but I felt so bad for ever wishing she had to learn the harsh reality of her world after she did it in this fashion. And our reaction to Sansa’s story should be to seek to encourage innocence and idealism and simply temper it with common sense and realism, instead of cultivating cynicism and telling children to gird their loins and just accept the world’s a shitty place for them. Because these are things which make the world a better place.
