A fanvid to cheer me

[annwfyn]

Oh darling darling Sansa. You so overwhelmingly deserve a knight and it is a cruel cruel world that does not give you one.

~mournful sally face~

I am looking for Branson/Sibyl vids as well. Goodness, I don't know how I'd live without youtube.

Comments

[suave-steve.livejournal.com]

Nice

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

But she doesn't deserve a knight. She just spends all her time sitting round waiting for one.

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

I see! Another who does not appreciate Sansa.

My basic love for Sansa comes from the fact that she feels like the most realistic of those characters to me. She is a girl who is raised to act like a girl - to be pretty, to be gentle, to be courteous, to be the perfect wife. And, like most real people in the world, she ends up a product of that conditioning.

As a result she goes along with a lot in the first book that she shouldn't, because she is blinded by the dream she's been sold.

And then by the end she is screwed. She is trapped in a hellish and abusive situation, basically a hostage, being regularly beaten, humiliated and hurt by Joffrey. She has no way of getting out of that situation. None.

And yet from that hopeless situation she does actually keep working at trying to get a way out, and more than that, offers a great deal of defiance that is actually much more risky in some ways that the more overt defiance offered by others. Yes, Robb Stark launches a war. You know, with his stinking great army and ancestral right to the title of king, from a position of freedom where he is only in direct physical danger when he puts himself into it. Dany gets an army. With the dragons she has already been given by the plot.

Sansa has nothing - she is absolutely in a position of weakness. Yet she consistently works to defy Joffrey, she saves the poor drunken knight, for example, and she repeatedly, after the first book, holds desperately on to what she believes is the right thing to do when really it would be easier for her to not.

She isn't a hugely strong or dramatic hero. She is an abused teenage girl who feels very real to me, and who's strength in holding on to who she is, to doing what she can do, is in its own way impressive and I think should be allowed to mean more.

Plus, one day she's going to grow up and destroy them all.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

I've not read much after the first book or two as the series got slow and repetitive very quickly; once he'd played his ace in unexpectedly killing a major character or two then there were no more surprises to come, it was just soap opera. I'll take your word for it that she gets less irritating as the series continues, though?

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

I think she does. I will admit, I liked her from the word 'go', mostly because she wasn't Arya, who is so much the 'spunky young girlchild' who I gorged myself on as a youngling (she is really Alanna of Tortall, cloaked in grit, I suspect) and because I appreciated seeing an actual fallible and normal human being in a fantasy novel, as opposed to heroes who main fault is being a little too awesome. So you may not like her.

Having said that, she does grow up and she does get a lot more proactive and politically useful.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

It's not so much that; it's more I just don't think George RR Martin is that great a writer and I couldn't summon up the interest to read more. Utterly ace first book, but shot his bolt quickly and should have just written one standalone before doing something else. A reason I like China Mieville is because he knew when to stop.

Have you read any of the Gentlemen Bastards books? They're rather good.

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

Ooooh...no. Are they?

I can totally accept that people may not like GRRM. His books are heavy, and I have a dark suspicion that he's actually writing traditional epic fantasy, and is just smearing a veneer of grit over the top. I like his stuff, but then, I have traditionally never been afraid of very very long slow soap operas.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

I think they're very good, to the extent that I've taken the unusual step of asking amazon to let me know when the next one is released.

Very rare I do that.

[seph-hazard.livejournal.com]

I'm torn, really. I'm only 400-odd pages in so she's only about nine yet (assuming time speeds up at some point between books and they all get older) and I just keep wanting to punch her in the face for the way she treats poor Arya, who is clearly The One Who Grows Up To Be A Writer (aka Jo in Little Women, amongst many others). But on the other hand, I'd be much more of a Sansa than an Arya myself, I think.

Not that I'd be a Stark at all. I'm not nearly grim or noble enough. I have a horrible feeling I'd actually wind up a Lannister, if only because Lannisters is where you get to be louche and sit around in silks and be fed grapes and listen to nice music. And I'm much better at that sort of thing than I am at, you know, axe fighting.

[riksowden.livejournal.com]

I haven't read the latest book but...I can sort of agree. I disliked her in the first book quite a lot, and only partially because of her poor choices, more for her poor behaviour (though I could understand it).

As things progressed she did get better and better, developed some backbone and became interesting. Which is nice.