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***Warning: This post contains spoilers from the HBO series Game of Thrones, and you know how I feel about spoilers – consider yourself warned.***
The Game of Thrones fourth season opener was fantastic. It had the all of the blood and boobs that we’ve come to expect. But it also had something else that I loved: strong girls.
Yes, girls. I’m not talking about Cersei or Shae or Brienne, all of them grown women (though, strong? The first two are up for debate). And not Daenerys either. She’s got dragons. She’s a whole other story.
No, I’m talking about the Stark sisters, Arya and Sansa.
We all think of Arya as strong. From the beginning we saw her as a tomboy who would rather play with swords than sew with her sister. She looked down on anything remotely girly, and so far that has probably kept her alive.
The cathartic feelings that ran through me in the last few minutes of the episode, when Arya gets the ultimate revenge on Polliver, were epic. I knew it was coming – I’ve read the books. But seeing it happen…perfection.
It was as if Arya had finally found herself, had become whole. Had become the warrior she’d always wanted to be, but thought she never could be. If her family hadn’t been torn apart, she’d have been stuck with a life as a wife and mother. Tragedy freed her from a different kind of hell than she’s in now. (I wonder, in her quietest moments, which she would pick if she had the choice: her family alive and whole, or her freedom from female bondage?)
On the other hand we have Sansa. Polite, proper, and some would say timid. But as much as I would love to see Sansa scream hatred at everyone around her, there is not a doubt in my mind that her head would be on a spike next to her father’s within ten minutes . She’s not timid, she’s smart.
She fights the only way she knows how, by being a lady. She knows that only by being perfect, by not offending, will she survive. She can’t lash out like Arya, she wouldn’t know how. She had dreamed her whole life of being a wife, not a warrior. She doesn’t have the tools.
Instead, she hurts with coldness, and with (very few) words.
Tyrion could be a wonderful companion for Sansa if she’d let him in, but she can’t see past his family’s actions. She’s blind to his kindness. And since she can’t hurt the people she really wants to hurt, she hurts poor Tyrion. By shutting him out. By shutting out everything.
And I ask you, who is stronger? Arya, for becoming her destiny, or Sansa, for surviving when by all rights she should have thrown herself out of a window?
When in trouble, both girls turned to their training, to what they wanted most of all, to what came the most naturally.
Arya has it easy – she has Needle.
Sansa only has herself, what’s inside her own head.
This post has also been syndicated on BlogHer.com.
Toni says
Sheesh. GoT nerd. :)
I don’t know where you are in the books, but IMHO Sansa is a bit different, show vs book. In the book, her foolishness over Joffrey lasts well past the point of being reasonable. She bleats to Joffrey and Cersei about Eddard’s plans, which leads to his downfall. Then, she gets stupid about Sir Loras (oh, honey). She has chances to escape King’s Landing and doesn’t, for him. And so on. Anyhow, I wish Sansa in the books was half as strong as HBO is writing her, but at least someone is. And for that matter, that’s kind of cool too. TV writers, after all, don’t tend to do that.
I think Arya is brilliant, and Danaerys is too — but both of them, and Sansa too, make poor or even childish decisions at times, because they *are* children. That’s the cool part that makes them believable. They’re strong girls, but they have WAY too much horrible crap thrown at them for their age. They don’t always choose wisely. Sansa still wants to be rescued, Arya gets too focused on petty revenge, Danaerys — well, it hasn’t happened yet. But they’re not wise, after all, how could they be, so it works.
Amy Oztan says
@Toni: All from the TV show. (I finished the last book over the weekend, and I feel like a child has moved out – I don’t know what to do with all of the extra time I have on my hands!) The major plot points have been basically the same, although yeah, there have been some interesting differences (I think that’s what BlogHer wants me to write about next). It seems to me that most of the kids in the show are several years older than in the book, incidentally. That could account for a lot of the more childlike behavior. All in all I think I’m enjoying the TV series better, mainly because the TV writers are better at writing dialogue.