sansa and arya are not the villains of each other’s stories, sansa and arya are a reminder that there are no winners in a world that hates women and girls on principle. sansa conforms to the patriarchy and they hate her. arya rebels against the patriarchy and they hate her. sansa embodies the ideal westerosi highborn woman, so she is labeled as “stupid” and too naive for the real world. arya refuses to perform westeros’s narrow definition of femininity, so she is labeled as “willful” and unfit for highborn society. sansa and arya perceive their gender in relation to each other, identities that are built on not being like the other - sansa is “the good girl, the obedient girl” and arya is the “wicked” girl. on one hand, sansa gains a false sense of security from not being like arya, believing that following the rules will keep her safe (it doesn’t), and even if she slips up and is “bad”…well she might hate herself for it, but at least she’s not as bad as arya! on the other hand, arya believes that anything “traditionally feminine” is reserved for girls like sansa and is off-limits for her, that she is inherently less than and wrong and ugly because she is not like sansa. both sisters have been raised to compete for approval, for the status of being “real” girls, they are not allowed to coexist because there is only one way to be a highborn woman in westeros. nobody wins, they both lose their wolves, they both lose their home, their family, each other. and what are they punished for? the crime of being little girls.

gonna restart asoiaf idk how i'll get through daenerys's agot chapters without wanting to kms.

all these authors trying to replicate daenerys and failing horribly, will always be funny to me because it's so obvious that they fell for the “vibes” and the cool titles without understanding that grrm de-centering all the men from daenerys's story is what makes it empowering! if khal drogo hadn't been killed, she would've sailed to westeros and probably gotten that throne by now. but as the khal's wife and not as the breaker of chains and the symbol of hope & radical change that she has become within the story's narrative because then, she would've had to constantly compromise her morals and watch her husband's armies burn, rape and pillage their way to KL. sure she would've tried to fix the damage to “balance” it out but with him still in the picture, her arc would not have reached to it's full potential. george makes it clear in the very first book that the story is not about him or them. it is daenerys and daenerys's alone. current fantasy authors with their so-called feminist themes literally do the opposite of this. they absolutely can't handle letting the story actually be about the protagonist, nope. the story starts with the underdog heroine with some hidden powers but as soon as the love interest appears, it'll become all about him. she will completely become a part of His Gang and he will be the one to elevate her position by sharing his power/status with his wife/gf who'll get some epic titles thrown her way for doing nothing lol. it's beyond pathetic atp.