maidenoftheforestlight:

omgellendean:

maidenoftheforestlight:

Well I’ve reblogged quite a few metas on this subject and written a bit about it myself and I’d love to link some of that here but… how to find that stuff on my blog without slogging through months of irrelevant posting? Hmm… I really  need to organise this blog better… 

Assuming I don’t manage to find the relevant posts (or at least some of them) then I’ll just say that my issues with Sansa in AGOT have to do with how GRRM (apparently) originally conceived of her character and how much of that actually remained in the final product; that is to say, she was originally intended to be a foil to Arya and the one Stark kid who caused problems in the happy family group dynamic. This was apparently because GRRM thought it wouldn’t be realistic for all the kids to get along perfectly and for there to be no internal strife in the Stark family at all… but isn’t it odd that out of all the kids he chose the two girls to set at odds with one another? And isn’t it doubly odd that of these two girls it is the more stereotypically feminine one who was initially created to be that little “problem” in the family dynamic? Robb and Jon could easily have been the warring siblings instead, no? Or maybe Sansa could have been a boy instead and Arya could’ve had a male foil to argue with… but instead…

Sansa, despite clearly becoming a well rounded character in her own right by the final draft of AGOT, still retains quite a bit of that original character sketch. She is written to be a foil to Arya and to cause complications for her family due to her relationship with Joffrey. While with close reading – keeping in mind the social mores of her society and the way she has been raised – Sansa’s actions and beliefs about her world are quite understandable, she is not generally written in such a way that suggests the author meant to endear her to the reader… Contrast to the way Arya is written (because Sansa is her foil and GRRM wants us to compare them in this book!); introduced as a plucky underdog who challenges the status quo. We are meant to immediately identify with, like and root for Arya, and we do. We are not meant to immediately identify with, like and root for Sansa. 

We are introduced to Arya first and Sansa makes Arya feel bad about herself by being good at everything and prettier and getting her in trouble and… you get the point. Even though 9 year old Arya has biases, and we as readers should understand that, the mere fact that our introduction to Sansa comes through her POV already gives the reader a bias against Sansa on Arya’s behalf because that’s all we know about her! There’s also the fact that the quickest way to get your readership to identify with and like a character within a historical setting is to give them the values and opinions of a more modern person… and we get quite a bit of that with Arya, what with her challenging of gender norms and disregard for class and rank. We don’t get that short cut with Sansa. 

 When we actually meet Sansa in her own POV she is once again acting in her role as the foil… it’s the incident at the Trident where Sansa fails to stand up to Joffrey for Arya and Mycah the butcher’s boy and then doesn’t tell the king what really happened and “gets Lady and Mycah killed”, to hear some fans tell it (never mind her reasonable reasons for being confused about what to do and refusing to speak). It’s not a glowing moment for her here and tbh… there really is only one real glowing moment for Sansa in AGOT (before Ned’s imprisonment/death that is); the moment where she feels empathy for Sandor Clegane, overcomes her fear, and offers him the comfort he needs. 

Other than this, her POV mostly focuses in on the trivialities of her interests and concerns, on how very little she actually understands the adult world around her, and we hardly see her interact with others in a positive way. Again… other than Sandor Clegane! She and Arya bicker, her relationship with Ned is somewhat strained since the Trident, and you get the vague impression that of his children, Sansa is probably the one he is the least accustomed to spending time with or talking to (we get no scene of parental bonding with Sansa, unlike Arya) and even Jeyne – Jeyne who is supposed to be Sansa’s best friend – we get no scenes of them having fun together, braiding each other’s hair, gossiping about cute boys, playing cyvasse… nada. Oh we get scenes of them talking, but it’s mostly in scenes which, again, are there to place Sansa in her role as the foil; demonstrating her naivety and ignorance of the dangers at court. The actual fun times they have together as friends, the actual comfort and happiness they give each other, well we’re told about this in a few stray lines here and there… we don’t actually ever “see” it! 

And that’s important! That’s the stuff that makes you like a character! But GRRM didn’t want to show us Sansa being fun and a caring friend in AGOT or even showing off any of the things she is reportedly so good at (she does actually show off some of these things; she shows she is naturally apt at diplomacy and has a good memory for important persons, houses and sigils and rank in this book… but this is all quite subtly introduced. Her cleverness is not meant to be something the reader immediately picks up on). He didn’t particularly want us to start sympathizing with her until near the end of the novel… and it shows. Sansa’s more positive character traits are de-emphasized by the author for most of AGOT and this, more than anything she actually does in this particular novel, is why so many fans come away seriously disliking her as a character

(imho of course); many with the claim that she has no positive traits!

This ties into my larger issues with GRRM’s writing of women in general. He definitely treats his POV female characters like people who deserve to be just as well developed and complex as his male characters, and I appreciate that! However, he seems to have problems with depicting women’s relationships with other women. That is to say, if he can avoid female friendships, he does… at least in the early novels (things may be looking up based on more recent stuff). We get great male friendships, and male/female friendships, but when it came  to showing women who genuinely like each other interacting, GRRM just… didn’t go there at the beginning. Yeah, you’ve got Arya and Sansa not getting along, and Sansa and Jeyne’s friendship happening mostly offscreen but surely there must be more women who can be getting along… right? Well… no. 

Catelyn seems to have no female friends or companions at all, even from memory (which is ridiculous!) and her relationship with Lysa is extremely strained. Later she meets Brienne and while their relationship is a positive one for them both, it is more that of a Lady and her sworn shield than of friends. Cersei has no real friends at all, let alone female ones… she actually killed her childhood “bestfriend”. Margaery and the Tyrell cousins were not real friends to Sansa, Arya’s best friends and travelling companions are all male (albeit she does have a brief but very sweet interaction with Lady Smallwood) and Dany’s female companions are all servants to her. All in all, the situation with regards to sisterhood and female friendship in ASOIAF ain’t great. 

Topping this off, there’s also the fact that while GRRM’s understanding of what medieval noblewomen actually got up to in a day’s work is better than GOT’s, there are yet still some suggestions that feminine gendered activities are quite trivial and frivolous, and these suggestions are, again, most evident in Sansa and Arya’s AGOT chapters where they, again, serve to highlight Sansa as the silly, blinkered, girly-girl, to Arya’s rebellious, open-minded tom boy. 

To sum it up, it is of great significance that Arya, who we are meant to identify with and like, is a tom boy and Sansa, her foil, is extremely feminine. The negative aspects of Sansa’s personality, the ones being highlighted above her more positive qualities in AGOT, are therefore associated with that femininity because her negative traits are framed in contrast to Arya’s positive ones, and Arya’s interests and behaviour are more stereotypically masculine. I liked Sansa despite all of this because, paying attention while reading her chapters and fed up with trope of cool tomboys vs annoying girly girls, I was actually able to see the subtle allusions to there being more to Sansa than what the author was choosing to place on the surface. However, I understand how a reader who has no inclination to pay such close attention while reading her chapters could easily be put off from her character. GRRM did that on purpose… and I just don’t think it’s fair to the character who otherwise might have been given more of a chance by so many readers who, even now, still disregard her value to the story. 

I always felt that Arianne and her relationships with Tyene and Elia were GRRM’s attempt to introduce extremely feminine female character in positive light since the start as well as to write more fleshed out female friendship. 

I mean, a noble girl, very pretty, very invested into finding a proper husband, who is childhood friends with another feminine girl of lesser status, and they really care for each other and spend all the time together, and whose storyline is mainly political. And then there is her tomboy-ish “little sister”, who loves horses and ignores rules and is definitely not a lady. But this time it’s girly girl who is portrayed more sympathetically and from whose PoV we see everything from the start. Of course, Arianne is older than Sansa, and is more open and bold, but still, I see some parallels there.

I would say he did a better work this time, despite some problems staying here too (GRRM clearly doesn’t know how write girls spending their time if they are not  with boys, and by gods, he really overly sexualises his Dornish characters). Though Arianne is still dismissed as stupid, boring and “100% going to die next book” by a big chunk of auditory, and I wonder if it is a writing’s problem or a reader bias, too.

The positive representation of female friendship with the Dornish characters was somewhat soured for me by how overtly sexualised they are… (And after hearing the prejudiced stereotypes about wanton dornish women I was rather hoping GRRM would actually prove them wrong… He didn’t…).
I think he’s doing a bit better with Sansa and Myranda’s developing friendship, but of course that is also dampened by us not quite knowing whether Myranda is friend or foe to Sansa yet. I hope she is, and that Mya is too, because them all being friends would be a great addition to the novels. A group of female friends, made up of well developed characters, including a main POV, where we actually see them interacting in a positive way and being supportive of each other despite their differences in ASOIAF? Sign me up.
I also have hopes for cool friendships when Sansa and Arya meet Brienne (not sure who’ll meet her first at this point…I once thought it would be Sansa, but now I’m actually leaning towards Arya), and of course, I think the Sansa and Arya reunion and the development of their relationship from there should be great.
Reader bias is definitely an issue but it is exacerbated by the author in this case. GRRM, especially writing AGOT in the time he was, would’ve known the misogynistic mentality that a lot of readers would come to his books with (whether they intended to or not) and therefore known that they would take many of the casually misogynistic attitudes of his characters at face value, especially when he, as the author, does not do much to prove them wrong in his framing of feminine female characters.
It’s a very similar situation to what is going on with the Dornish… Racist Westerosi from other parts of the seven kingdoms claim that they are libidinous and have very “exotic” views on sexuality (and there’s definitely a lot of exotic erotic fetishization going on with the Dornish), but it’s hard to say GRRM is criticizing this kind of stereotyping when he engages in exotic erotic with his writing of the Dornish himself!
Think how different it would’ve been if the Dornish actually had a very conservative culture and thought that other Westerosi were the oversexed animalistic ones…
That actually would have better mirrored the medieval/Renaissance world GRRM is drawing from as Western Europeans often thought of Eastern and Southern peoples as having fiery passions and unusual sexual appetites but foreign travelers into Europe often thought european cultures were more sexually permissive. It’s all perspective and bias. Authors can do great things with challenging the readers’ biases… But here GRRM sometimes falters and leans into old stereotypes himself.

And the problem actually surpasses the limited presence of positive
female friendship in the text to being the overwhelmingly negative
female relationships in the text. GRRM tends to frame most of the
female/female relationships in his story in a really negative light which, combined by the very few examples of good female/female relationships, makes it as if GRRM doesn’t know how to write female relationships that isn’t immersed in jealousy and conflict, and hits too close to the “catty women” stereotype for my taste. As discussed above, the only two girl Starklings are the ones in direct conflict with one another, and it’s specially peculiar when compared to how the text deals with Jon’s relationship with Robb. The latter has its share of conflict and tension at its core but Martin goes to great lengths to frame it as a positive affectionate relationship that is very important to both Jon and Robb. Jon repeatedly describes Robb as his best friend and his thoughts on his brother are mostly loving and warm, while Robb demonstrates absolute trust in Jon in defiance of society’s dominating prejudice and distrust of bastard. Robb is constantly present on Jon’s mind in a way that screams affection. Sansa and Arya, on the other hand, mostly think of each other while thinking of the Stark family as a whole, and more often than not their thoughts are accompanied by “even Sansa” or “even Arya” tacked at the end like an afterthought. Their positive memories of each other are rare and clipped, and often goes to frame the warmth of their childhood at Winterfell more than their specific relationship.

That contrast goes to frame how different GRRM handles feelings of jealousy in male vs female friendships. Jon is jealous of Robb but that jealousy never defines their relationship, but look at how jealousy defines Lysa’s relationship with Catelyn, or Cersei’s with Melara Hetherspoon, both of which boiled down to jealousy over a boy, which is another maddening tendency of Martin – to have a male presence as the source of the tension. Cersei and Margaery’s conflict is a fight over control of Tommen, which Marg lays out explicitly. Hell, that goes back historically to Visenya and Rhaenys Targaryen and their marriage to Aegon. Even Sansa’s budding friendship with Myranda Royce (which I have hopes for) introduces a potential conflict in Myranda’s jealousy of Sansa over Harry Hardyng before the text even builds the relationships. Martin quite literally introduced the conflict before he did anything with the relationship. It’s like two women can not be friends without fighting over a guy in some capacity in Martin’s world. 

And if that element is not present, other sources of conflict that define the relationship exist. Alysane Mormont and Asha Greyjoy have some vague friendly vibes that I very much enjoy but that are still immersed in a long historical conflict, especially for a Mormont of Bear Island who grew up with the threat of the ironborn. There is a distinct vibe of Melisandre replacing Selyse as Stannis’ true queen, and their relationship is permeated by fanaticism. Cersei is a case study in negative female-female interactions which dominate her narrative. There’s a built-in feeling of jealousy and competitiveness in the YMBQ prophecy. She kills the girl she describes as a friend for having feelings for Jaime at the tender age of ten (ffs, GRRM.) She is condescending and cruel to Sansa. She is in a perpetual fight with Margaery and Olenna. The way she talks about Lysa Arryn drips with disdain (she repeatedly refers to her as a “cow”) Her thoughts on pretty much every single woman she deigns to think about are appalling. Even the two not-glaringly-hostile somewhat-friendly relationships she has with Taena Merryweather and Falyse Stokeworth are completely fucked up: she rapes the first in an imitation of the abuse of power Robert constantly subjected her to, and the entire relationship is a lie because Taena is a double-agent who has been playing her from the start, and she sends the second to a fate worse than death by giving her to Qyburn. That’s a long list of awful relationships that only get intercepted by some good ones like Sansa and Jeyne Poole (which still has its problems), or the one between Margaery and her cousins (which has shades of the Tyrell Family Unit’s approach to politics but that remains genuine enough, though we only get to hear some scattered reporting on it.), or the short friendly anecdotes like the ones between Arya and Lady Smallwood, or Catelyn and Dacey and Maege Mormont.

And of course, there is the glaring contrast in how Martin fleshes out female relationships vs male relationships, which intersects with the problem of the Dead Ladies Club in some places. We know a lot about the relationship between Aerys and Steffon, and Aerys and Tywin, but nothing about Rhaella’s relationship with the Unnamed Princess of Dorne or Joanna Lannister. Arthur Dayne is Rhaegar’s bestest friend and confidant but we have no idea what relationship Elia had with Ashara Dayne. To go back in history, Jaehaerys I had a fruitful and long friendship with Septon Barth but we hear nothing about a similar female friend for Alysanne. Orys Baratheon was Aegon’s right hand but Visenya and Rhaenys have no significant female friends (and a bitter rivalry between them). Ned and Robert are friends, and Oberyn and Willas Tyrell are pen-pals, but Ellaria and Catelyn are alone. It goes on and on.

In the case of Arianne and her cousins, I have to say that I also do not like how Martin’s framing of Dorne as an outlier in the text also gives the implication that good female relationships are also an outlier in Westeros. I mean, it’s a positive view of Dorne (and god knows that I’ll take every positive attribute to Dorne in the face of the excessive exotic-eroticism of Martin’s text), but I also do not like how that frames positive female relationships as something unusual to the ordinary Westerosi woman outside of Dorne. I agree with what’s been said above about the treatment of the Dornish characters and it’s something that I can’t even give Martin the benefit of the doubt for, or argue that maybe he meant to criticize the stereotyping of Dorne when he is the one who fueled it in the first place. I’m not about to wave away reader bias but I do agree that Martin is culpable. The dismissal of Elia in fandom? Has roots in how GRRM dismisses her in the text. The stereotyping of the Dornish characters? Well, our first introduction to a Dornish character (which happened in book 3) is Oberyn Martell, and Martin infuses it with references to threesomes and brothels and has Oberyn describe Ellaria as a lusty wench. Our overall view of Oberyn is colored by Tyrion’s own opinions since he is our POV character which is not ideal at all, but that gets exacerbated when we meet Arianna through the incredibly racist Arys Oakheart and his “she is Dornish” before we hear from Arianne herself. And though the relationship between Arianne and her cousins is strong, Martin chooses to inject a sexual vibe in the tidbit about Tyene and Arianne having a sexual encounter with Drey at a young age while at the same time having Arianne reflect on how Tyene was her almost sister (and I just can’t with how that builds a connection to Cersei here, the one sleeping with her brother and who also had a sexually-tinged friendship with Taena in the very same book. The dreadfulness and dysfunction of Cersei’s experiences gives an unavoidable negative attachment to Arianne’s own.) Nym was in bed with the Fowler twins (both girls, which along with the TyeneArianne thing, makes this more of a “oooh, women having sex with each other” than a positive handling of polyamory) when the news about Oberyn arrived, Elia Sand is so sexualized it’s ridiculous, it’s all just very uncomfortable and stereotypical and lazy.

And of course, while all this goes on, we are introduced to the 18 years old virgin Quentyn and his unsexualized friendship with his companions. Just to hammer the point home.

So to sum up, the state of female relationships in the text is:

1. Don’t exist/don’t warrant mentioning.
2. Are built on competitiveness and jealousy often over a guy.
3. If they do exist, they either have a needless sexual component with negative associations,
4. Or are very brief andor not properly fleshed out.