《The Northen girl, Winterfell's daughter》

Ned chose to sacrifice his honor and the integrity of his relationships (i.e his wife, considering the marriage-long deception of his ‘infidelity’) in order to protect Jon.  He had a choice.  Keep his honor, or hold to the lie.

But that must beg the question, ‘What is honor?’  Well, here’s one definition for you:  Honor is the idea of a bond between an individual and a society as a quality of a person that is both of social teaching and of personal ethos, that manifests itself as a code of conduct, and has various elements such as valour, chivalry, honesty, and compassion.

In Ned’s view, honor doesn’t mean keeping his reputation as a one-woman man when an innocent babe is in danger, when his sister’s dying wish is for him to protect her child.  It doesn’t mean putting his own image above an actual human life.  Making the honorable choice meant sacrificing this perceived idea of ‘honor’, and in the process, the chance of reconciliation with his wife, which he had no guarantee of upon first bringing a bastard infant home to Winterfell.  It didn’t matter what people said about him, or even what his own wife thought about him, because keeping that oath, and keeping Jon safe, was the right thing to do.  The honorable thing to do.  Damn whatever personal consequences came of it.

Sansa does exactly the same in her decision to reveal Jon’s secret.  She risked her own relationship with him (and possibly with her siblings as well) and this ‘perceived idea of honor’, as well as her very life, in order to protect Jon.  She had a choice.  Faced with knowing what Daenerys was capable of, and what consequences laid ahead should she truly come to power, not only for Jon but for the North and all of Westeros - faced with that - she had a choice.  Keep her honor, or expose the lie.

Looking at it as ‘Ned kept his word vs Sansa broke hers’, is a grossly narrow-minded view of what each of those decisions is actually trying to accomplish, and that’s to protect Jon.  If valor, chivalry, honesty, and compassion are benchmarks of honor, then Sansa made just as honorable a decision as her father did.  Different means, same motives.  But you’re too busy missing the forest for all the trees.  It’s not about blind devotion to a string of promised words, its about choosing what is right and worth protecting, even at the cost of those promised words, or at the cost of more.

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GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: Joffrey is a classic thirteen-year-old bully. Do you know many thirteen-year-old kids you’d like to give absolute power to? There’s a cruelty in children, especially children of a certain age, that you see in junior high and middle school.

GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: I based it a little on the death of Eustace, the son of King Stephen of England [who reigned during the twelfth century]. Stephen had usurped the crown from his cousin, the empress Maude. They fought a long civil war. Their anarchy was going to be passed onto the second generation, because Maude had a son and Stephen had a son. But Eustace choked to death at a feast. People are still debating one thousand years later: Did he choke to death, or was he poisoned? Because by removing Eustace, it brought about a peace that ended the English civil war.

Eustace’s death was accepted [as accidental], and I think that’s what the murderers here were hoping for—that the whole realm would see Joffrey choke to death on a piece of pie or something. What they didn’t count on was Cersei’s immediate assumption that it was murder. Cersei wasn’t fooled for a second.

GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: There’s a moment there where he knows that he’s dying and he can’t get a breath and looking at his mother and at the other people in the hall with just terror and appeal in his eyes—“Help me, Mommy.” So I didn’t want it to be entirely, “Hey-ho, the witch is dead.” I wanted perhaps more complex feelings on the part of the audience. I don’t know that we should be cheering deaths in real life. We don’t want thirteen-year-old bullies to be put to death; sometimes people do regret their actions. But Joffrey will never get that chance, so we don’t know what he would have become. Probably nothing good, but still… .

The episode ended with Cersei accusing Tyrion of killing her son and having him arrested. Yet there was another twist that took place off camera: Gleeson publicly revealed on the set that day that he was quitting acting.

JACK GLEESON: The answer isn’t interesting or long-winded. I’ve been acting since age eight. I just stopped enjoying it as much as I did. It was the prospect of doing it for a living whereas up until then it was always something I did for recreation with my friends or in the summer for fun. [Acting as a career] changes your relationship with it. It’s not like I hate it; it’s just not what I want to do. I also found it slightly uncomfortable to see my face on a bus or a poster. I like just being known by my friends and family.

GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: I felt a little guilty that he quit acting. I hope that playing Joffrey didn’t make him want to retire from the profession, because he did have quite a gift for it.

Also- the Scynthian and Samaritan tribes were known for equality between genders. Where women were renouned hunters and archers. They are where the greeks got the idea for Amazons.

Another popular mythological aspect of the books that was pared back was the direwolves, which play a larger role in Martin’s novels. The issue with the direwolves wasn’t a storytelling problem, or a lack of interest by the writers, but purely a technical challenge. Once the wolves became larger than ordinary wolves, the show struggled to find ways to portray them in a convincing manner. After using dogs in the first season, the production subsequently filmed real wolves and used CG to make them larger. Even so, there was a degree of uncanniness to their shots that became difficult to disguise.

DAN WEISS: We did some testing, and at a certain point they look unreal. We reached a nice balance with them.

DAVID BENIOFF: With dragons you get some leeway. You don’t say, “Well, that doesn’t look like a real dragon.” And dragons are easier to animate since they don’t have fur.

DAN WEISS: With a wolf you have a million years of evolution telling you what they’re supposed to act like.

BRYAN COGMAN: The show had constraints and the wolves were very challenging to pull off in a way that looked good.

So what, then, did the direwolves mean? Their fates seemed loosely connected to that of each Stark. Jon Snow’s direwolf was Ghost, which was appropriate for a man who rose from the dead. Bran’s direwolf was Summer, the opposite of the supernatural winter force that Bran was destined to confront. Sansa’s direwolf, Lady, was killed by the Lannisters and then she was ensnared by them as well. Robb Stark’s Grey Wind was trapped and shot with crossbows just like his master. Rickon Stark’s Shaggydog was slain by men loyal to Ramsay Bolton, then the boy died by Ramsay’s arrow shortly thereafter. And Arya’s Nymeria was chased into the wild, where she found her strength and independence. (“That’s not you,” Arya told Nymeria when she was reunited with her wolf in season seven, echoing her own line—“That’s not me”—to her father in season one.)

BRYAN COGMAN: [Arya and Nymeria are] lone wolves. They can’t go back to the way things were. It was also a foreshadow for what Arya was going to encounter when she reunited with her family.

MAISIE WILLIAMS (Arya Stark): Nymeria has created her own world and created her own pack and wasn’t ready to be Arya’s pet. To be someone’s pet would reverse everything she’s learned. So they just regard each other and go their separate ways.

BRYAN COGMAN: The direwolves were supposed to mean more than they ended up meaning. A lot of plans for the direwolves ended up not coming to fruition. Even in the first season, there were a lot of direwolf scenes we had to cut even though we were just using dogs because the dogs couldn’t execute the scenes; it would just take too long.

That aside, I think the direwolves represent the spirit of the North and the soul of House Stark and the soul of those characters. It’s no accident Lady was killed and Sansa was left on her own, and it was no accident that Grey Wind was put in a cage, and it was no accident Nymeria found her independence and went her own way. But we never really wanted to lean too heavily into the spirit-animal trope of it all. And certainly in the books, the direwolves function in a different way. Arya and Jon are wargs in the books, and Sansa and Robb would have been except their wolves died—I don’t know that for a fact, but I assume so.

Then twelve-year-old English actress Maisie Williams, in her second audition for a role ever, recorded a tape playing Arya during her lunch break at school.

GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: Holy hell. Her facial features weren’t at all what I had described in the books, but she was perfect. She was Arya! She was alive!

GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: The first finished thing I saw was the scene between Arya and Ned. He’s saying, “You’ll grow up and you’ll marry a lord and bear sons and live in a castle.” And she says, “No, that’s not me.” It was straight out of my imagination, and it was perfect. The dialogue was wonderful. It’s not a hugely important scene, but it was important to me emotionally. I thought that I could relax, they were going to do a great job on this. It was my book come to life.

Sneak Peek of Kit’s cover shoot for Sunday Telegraph  Men’s out

I especially like the part of this Twitter thread where it’s mentioned that men’s fantasies are often trotted out in mainstream media as common tropes. Women, on the other hand, are relegated to sharing our fantasies in fandom and in erotica - areas where some puritanical assholes are now trying to drag women back, kicking and screaming, to a past where the only “acceptable” fantasies to have involve rainbows, unicorns and your all-powerful husband. FUCK THAT.

Honestly, my thing with the things I write while at the same time hating it when it happens in media is the warnings. Like, I always warn about what things I write. This thing happens here, so you’re free to nope out if you don’t like reading that stuff, while mainstream media throws that stuff here and there without a single warning (or care) about people who consume those.