saturno knows best

Check it here on AO3.

yet when sansa reflects on her relationship with arya (who she thinks is dead) with similar resentment, when she thinks back to how she and arya never understood each other and could never be the sister the other wanted…somehow that means that sansa hates her dead sister and that they’re incapable of ever reconciling and healing. it’s weird how sisterhood never gets to be as complex and messy and loving as brotherhood. it’s weird how it’s either “sansa and arya are going to forget all about their shared trauma and hold hands and braid each other’s hair because they’re just girls 🥰” or it’s “sansa and arya are going to hate each other and never be close so there’s no value in them even reuniting” as if there’s no room for middle ground or nuance or complexity. it’s so boring and reductive like just say that you don’t care to engage with their relationship or the gender politics surrounding it when you can’t squeeze it into a neat little box. we have one single sisterhood among the starklings, and there’s just much going on with them as there is with any of the stark brotherhoods or brother-sister relationships (especially considering that we spend more time with sansa and arya on-page than we do with any other starkling relationship). if you can understand how love and resentment can coexist between jon and robb, how larger social systems can fracture relationships, then surely you can extend the same understanding to sansa and arya! but of course that would require people to engage with female characters with the same level of empathy and compassion that they give to male characters. bit of a challenge for some people.