#my dreaded neutrality manifests in me despising the guts on all of you

[whentheynameyoujoy]

Sometimes I wonder how people manage to acknowledge the canonical ship between Sansa Stark and Sandor Clegane while also producing one essay after another about how Sansa isn’t actually kind, isn’t actually intelligent, isn’t actually perceptive, isn’t actually compassionate, isn’t actually intuitive, isn’t actually quick-thinking, isn’t actually associated with motherhood, isn’t actually missed by her family, that must have been another character’s POV you’ve read, champ. Like that’s some impressive pretzel stans are bending themselves into. For all the (justified) talk about how show!stans/jo*nsas like to ignore Sansa’s flaws (the bullying or the classist way in which she applies the better parts of her personality come to mind) or how they need to siphon more flattering traits off other, more popular characters with more epic political storylines in order to appreciate her at all, some segments of the fandom appear to be really, really invested in stripping Sansa of her canonical positive attributes, lobbing them off to others, and turning the story into a competition where one character earns the good gurl award while the other gets to be the shallow one-note cunt.

Because I’m sure that’s what GRRM had in mind when he began writing this shit.

I mean, if you read Sansa’s story as this sleight of hand to reveal ladydom as an irreparably empty idea pursued only by the shallow and then bend Sansa’s canonical arc as either not there or insufficient in order to justify your dismissal of the character’s positive traits, then how the fuck do you square SanSan in the first place? How in the shit do you deal with the canonical pairing that’s all about rebuilding the knight and his lady trope if the female party has been a Cersei in the making this whole time? How do you explain a knightly romantic-turned-embittered cynic falling for what he comes to see as a lady from the songs if his love interest doesn’t actually possess any of the valued aspects that define the idealized notion of a lady?

Srsly, at this point I see no difference between the john*lock jo*nsa stans treating Sansa as basically a perfected Dany in a red wig, and people who obsess over the ugly AGOT aspects of her character on the eve of book six, as though she has underwent no development at all, as if her entire story isn’t centred around internal correction of her established flaws, around her seeing through the lies and opportunism of courtly society, around her finding beauty and worth in what she used to despise, around her trying to be a good person even in situations where it’s detrimental to her, by relying on the good parts of ladydom. Both sides have turned Sansa into this flat arc of either “always was perfect” or “always will be worthless”, the stumbles on her journey either don’t exist or are a capital crime, and I have no strength to entertain this triangular firing squad of horseshit anymore.

When it comes to values ASOIAF has one fucking theme, and that’s “honour, love, bravery, loyalty, all these things that we take as a matter-of-fact marker of a good person are complex, a lot of times inherently contradictory and impossible to achieve in any kind of pure form, but nevertheless should be strived for because they contain a kernel of truth and it’s that kernel of truth that’s necessary for the world to be a place worth living in, for it to even function.” How stans, the pro or anti, believe Sansa and the theme of ladydom are in any way exempt from that I’ll never understand. Just like Jaime or Brienne or Sandor are about exploring knightly honour, not rejecting it, just like Arya is a deconstruction of the worldly prince who’s one with the commoners, not a justification of class divides, just like Dany is a challenge to the wise despot trope, not a personified case for slavery, so’s Sansa an exploration of the feudal underpinnings of the lady concept, not a 2010 reddit bro revelation of what a horrible person a Disney princess would be in real life. It’s really not that fucking deep.

Fuck me, WoW can’t come soon enough.