Pretentious and Poor

benioff and weiss have treated neither stark sister fairly.  for seasons.  and it’s coming home to roost right now.

in sansa’s case, i state the obvious: they crafted a plotline for her that required that she be raped.  there were ways to have a similar plotline–one which focuses on her retaking the north, reclaiming her identity as a stark after multiple seasons of captivity–without her being raped and throwing their worldbuilding out of the window, but they did not do that.  even without the justifiable critique of that choice, they’ve been unable to consistently characterize sansa for three seasons now.  furthermore, they have thrown her under the bus to make jon look good and smart on a narrative level; they have had her family members belittle her experience as a rape victim to her face; they have underutilized her as a stark of winterfell who has been a political fixture in the north since season five beyond ramsay bolton’s wife and rape victim because they have been so consistently focused on her rape.  they have on many counts reduced her to this trauma because they have yet to justify it narratively, and in doing so they have hamstrung her as a character and made her development inconsistent at best and have simply forgotten what they’ve written for her at worst.  

in arya’s case: they’ve never let this girl feel her feelings.  she has rarely been written to show fear, and what compassion she shows is frequently overwritten in a way to force a narrative of ~~dark~~ that is at odds with williams’ portrayal, the direction that she’s given in episodes and, frequently, the way that arya stark has been written.  and while her motivations have been given weight that are well framed, i think, the degree that she takes them–frequently–is so intense that it’s frequently removed from its motivation, or, when it’s not, they make arya laugh at her own trauma.  indeed, it’s clear from the interactions in s7e6 that benioff and weiss don’t actually consider the fact that arya has witnessed the deaths of three family members, has been threatened with rape, has been beaten multiple times–at times while blind–has been stabbed through the gut (something that should have killed her but, you know, plot armor) and has had her life directly threatened by an assassin’s guild to be traumatic at all–as if the fact of being forced to murder for your own survival isn’t traumatic either.  

they’ve caught themselves between a rock and a hard place with these two characters.  the delicacy with which they’ve handled jon’s and daenerys’ interactions this season–allowing for conflict, allowing for each character to ruminate on why the conflict is there at length, allowing them to grow–is not allowed to either girl when they are confronted with conflict in their childhood home and the place that both have longed to return to now for seasons.

as @gendry put it following the last episode: 

they made sansa wrong in the first episode so jon can look good and now they’re making arya wrong so sansa can look good

sansa wouldn’t have wanted alys and ned to lose their homes and arya wouldn’t have wanted to behead the lords who “insulted” jon (x)

The old man…no one would think of him as comely. She had seen scarecrows with more flesh. His face was a skull with skin, his hair bone-white and filthy. And he stank. Just the sight of him filled Asha with revulsion. 

He raised his eyes. “Sister. See. This time I knew you.”

Asha’s heart skipped a beat, “Theon?”