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MARIE ANTOINETTE (2006) dir. Sofia Coppola

Melt with you 'til it all turns black

i love sansa stark so dearly, but this reread is really validating what i have known for a decade which is that her self-described stans have some of the poorest reading comprehension i’ve ever seen and do an active and offensive disservice to her trauma narrative. see the way they use the “little bird” epithet she is given by sandor clegane as like a cool moniker, and gush about how she will use the delicate feminine arts of courtesy to ~win the game of thrones~ - but it’s not positive! sansa learns in book one it’s not positive! sansa’s compassion and her ability to read people are positives, but they are separate from the specific brand of aristocratic femininity she has been brought up to perfectly embody which is actually a prison* that becomes downright hellish when it is her only means of survival in a situation of prolonged literal captivity. the girlbossification of this sad scared child by both fans and show is my villain origin story

what’s interesting about the heartbreaking chapter where joffrey forces sansa to look at her father’s severed head are all the tiny moments she resists, where the sheer horror of her situation (a few days ago, she was a treasured and spoiled child, now her father has been murdered in front of her and she is a hostage of the same people who killed him and would not balk at killing her) breaks through the shiny gloss of her idealized gendered role as she voices her immense pain - and she is punished for it. sansa, although she fits her society’s feminine ideal in some ways - neat and docile and pretty, loves stories and sweets and dresses, dreams of marriage and children - is realizing the falsity and obscenity of it just as arya has. it doesn’t matter what you feel or what he been done to you: you must sing and simper anyway, or it may be worth your life. and literally thousands of people have made this into a story about how like feminine women can wield power in westeros too :)

how could i forget the most iconic example…”ser meryn, teach her.” it’s such an interesting thematic thread - that sansa’s captivity in king’s landing is her education. but in martin’s actual work it’s such an ambiguous and difficult one. sansa’s accidental political tutelage (from getting a close view of the workings of power and figuring out how not to end up dead of same) is bound up with gendered violence done to her.

HOUSE OF THE DRAGON (2022-) 2.01 "A Son for a Son" 3.02 "Queen's Landing" 3.03 "Rhaenyra Triumphant"

Free Ornamentation V. This work is dedicated to the public domain 🐟

Agnese Guido

I have never made a vampire. The idea repulsed me– repulses me.

"Innamorato della Luna" (In Love with the Moon) Antonio Rubino, 1907