A Song of Sisters, Sansa Stark, & the Importance of Abuse Narratives

I’m rewatching Game of Thrones with my sister. She’s nine years older than I, has been married and divorced once already, and is an insane fantasy buff. Though we’re extremely different now, I do give her credit as being one of my biggest influences throughout my teens. She got me into Lord of the Rings, I made her read Harry Potter; she told me unicorns were real, I told her that dragons would never come back in ASOIAF-universe. I asked her about the weird blonde-man vampire on her wall when I was seven; later when I was 19, I would buy her a Buffy t-shirt and told her that the only person I saw patrolling graveyards was a younger version of her, and that watching the show made me miss her. (With the shirt, I wrapped up a nice stick I found on the ground, too, just for good measure.)

We’re both victims of abuse. We’re both survivors of abuse. We’ve shared abusers just as we’ve shared our fictional universes and it was those fictional universes that gave us a connection when she moved away and married and the nature of our respective abuse situations changed. I’m not an intensely superstitious person, but when it comes to my sister, I certainly am. We shared a womb (albeit at different times) and we’ve been known to feel what the other feels via dreamscapes. And, yes, that sounds incredibly silly, but my sister and I get each other, and whether it’s because of some Supernatural Connection or just because we’re so close, I don’t care. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that we’re there for each other, inexplicably, when we need each other most.

So, I made her watch Game of Thrones. I put the books on her Kindle. We finished s1 quickly and she had fan-favorite syndrome— she loved Daenerys because she wanted to be her, identified with Arya, and loved Tyrion and Jon and the lot of them. She made one comment about Sansa—  the one that everyone says in s1— “God, you’re such a brat! That’s your sister.”

I looked at her, just for a minute, and I told her to hush, that Sansa is only eleven years old and extremely naive. I went on my Sansa spiel and avoided spoilers. My sister considered me a moment and that was that. 

S2 rolled around and I could tell that she was warming up to Sansa. She was actively cheering Sansa on, would drop her phone for her scenes and not look at it again until it was over. She’d groan when Cersei tormented her. She’d curse Joffrey’s existence. Last Friday she finally shouted, “Please tell me Sansa ends up happy.” I looked at her and laughed, then I frowned, and I told her, “Sansa is Winter. She’ll get through it.”

Yesterday, though, was the first time we both cried while watching a Sansa scene. It was the one where Margaery and Lady Olenna were asking about Joffrey, and Sansa is frantic and is near tears and scared and oscillates between truth and her act and there’s this raw fucking energy and at the same time it got us, and we held hands and cuddled up underneath the blankets on my bed. We both understood, sort of, and while we hadn’t had any enormous Sansa-discussions, we would make comments about “being there”, about understanding, about our mutual love for Sansa-fucking-Stark. We do project ourselves onto Sansa, onto her weaknesses and strength and isolation and intelligence and moments of sassiness. 

My sister looked at me and wiped her face a little, sheepish. “I love Sansa. That just made me cry because I’ve been there.” I agreed—the first time I saw the scene I had felt overwhelming pity, but watching it with my sister and feeling that energy-connection between us, that shared understanding, that same context, it really got me. I teared up, too.

After the episode, I told her that everyone hates Sansa, especially guys. I told her that some people think Sansa brought it on herself, that she deserved everything she got. My sister was so taken aback! She couldn’t understand it, but I saw a moment of clarity for her. We had both heard similar things, internal monologues we’d tell ourselves, from the mouths and actions of our abusers. We deserved it. Finally, she shoved the thoughts away and said: “The haters won’t ever understand. They haven’t been there.”

And it kind of hit me there, how important it is to see these narratives, to see them play out and to see a young girl— a woman!— deal with her abuse in the way Sansa does. Because, yeah, that’s all very real stuff and Sansa is a young girl who has grown up far too fast. And it’s heartbreaking to watch it on screen and relive that experience, but at the same time, it’s a bittersweet heartbreak. Because while we watch the abuse on screen, we also see it from Sansa’s point of view as well. We  see her deal with it in subtle, internal ways. We see her strength, weakness, we see her raw emotion and we see her trapped in this shitty situation. And, you know, it’s nice, to be there and then to be there. To have this sense of solidarity with a version of you and to feel overwhelming sympathy for her and to feel empowered by her resilience and to see her fight on.

And yeah, it kinda dawned on me that my sister needs it and I need it and we needed it together, because Sansa fucking Stark is a perfect queen and she doesn’t owe you shit.

sleep didn’t go very well  last night

i kept panicking that i was going to somehow run into [bad person] because that is one of my greatest fears in this world, because it is impossible for me to not do what he wants when i am near him. people make jokes about being addicted to people, but it really is like that. and it’s HORRIBLE because he’s a very bad person in at least 1000 different abusive and illegal ways, so an inability to make my own decisions and control myself around him is very bad.

i’m very far away from him and the odds of me running into him are so small as to be near impossible but i still worry

and last night i kept falling asleep and dreaming that i ran into him and it never mattered that ben was right there with me because even after all of these years it feels like i’m still not me, i’m just a grossly broken extension of him

i don’t know, i hate that this is happening right now because i have important stuff that i need to do and i am all busted up inside

Hey ! I quite don't understand why Hannibal didn't tell Will about his disease ! For an experimentation or...? I don't really know ! ><

I wrote a recap on it, but generally I think that 

• he wants to form Will in his image, so it’s an experiment how far he can push him
• by giving him the real diagnosis Will would gain clarity and be able to counteract his symptoms properly, thus gaining agency, which Hannibal doesn’t want. Will is Hannibal’s personal plaything, because he is interesting and can climb up those walls unlike other people that bore and annoy him for the most part. He sees himself in Will on some level.
• He “loves” him (as confirmed by the actor) and it’s in a very dark obsessive way and not actual love in what we understand of love, it’s Hannibals’s understanding of it (mainly an imitation) but he wouldn’t hesitate to kill him the second Will poses a threat, so it’s kind of like keeping him close and seeing how Will’s illness will affect him.

fandom did you forget that time sebastian vael told a former slave there must’ve been some higher purpose in his suffering

did you forget when he suggested a young boy was abused and tortured and killed so that fenris could escape, and that was maker’s will

or all the times he tried to force his beliefs down everyone else’s throats

the times he’s been condescending to people of other cultures

that time he promised to start a war after what anders did even though that way even more innocent people would get hurt

i really don’t understand fandom’s incessant need to absolve their favourite (male) characters of all their flaws

sebastian has a fuckton of flaws

that’s what makes him interesting

you have to understand that the reason people react  negatively to him is because they’ve seen this character a thousand, if not more, times, including real life

the most amazing thing about sebastian though is that the narrative is not expecting us to side with him

he is an incredibly privileged character in a narrative about oppression (and i really don’t understand why he is only a dlc character)

taking away his flaws because of this is incomprehensible to me

you don’t have to do that to stan sebastian if he’s your favourite

he is written with such nuance and skill, and there’s definitely a discussion to be had as to how good a person he really is, but don’t excuse his shitty behaviour

in fact if you deny his negative qualities, you’re effectively rendering him absolutely bland