Sunflower by Julie de Grag (1919)
Queen Sansa theory
A sizable portion of the GOT fandom seem to believe that Sansa will die and that Jon/Dany will rule the seven kingdoms. A lot of these “Sansa will die” theorists have trouble separating speculation from feelings of dislike for the character. It would make zero sense to kill her off given what her arc is about - Sansa is going to become Queen.
On Narrative Arcs, or a case for why Jon and Dany won’t make it.
Every character serves a purpose to the story, and GRRM doesn’t kill off characters at random. He kills a character when A) they’ve served their purpose and B) death makes sense as an end result.
Jon Snow’s purpose is clear; he’s there to save the world from the White Walker threat. He has the perfect skillset needed to accomplish this, mainly he’s a great warrior whose leadership style brings warring factions together. He’s the conventional fantasy hero: brave, heroic, loyal, kinda bland. Once he’s served his purpose of defeating the walkers, will the narrative still need him in peacetime? Jon’s a wartime hero, but not necessarily a peacetime ruler. Personality wise, Jon Snow is very close to Ned Stark. Ned wasn’t able to adapt to the Game and it got him killed. In season 7, Jon refused to lie to Cersei, to the detriment of his own cause. Jon has the qualities to defeat the walker threat, but he doesn’t have the qualities to survive the cutthroat world of King's Landing politics.
“Only death can pay for life.” Melisandre says these words and then goes on to resurrect Jon. Jon Snow owes a life debt to the ASOIAF universe. Would it make sense for that debt to go unpaid by the end of the series?
Daenerys’ purpose is as a conquerer and a mother of dragons. She’s there to bring massive weapons to the white walker war. She brings fire to fight ice. "You're a conquerer," Daario tells Dany. Not a ruler, a conquerer. Dany was able to conquer Meereen, but she never really learned how to effectively rule it. And when she wasn't able to keep hold of the city, she abandoned it to pursue Westeros. Not a great sign if Dany's narrative purpose is to become the permanent queen of Westeros. Dany’s own visions tell her that she isn’t destined for the throne. She reaches for it, but never touches it.
“She has a good heart,” Jon says about Dany. Curious choice of words, given that the prophesized Azor Ahai needs a sacrificed lover’s heart to defeat the enemy. Mother roles are known for sacrifice for the children. Dany's good heart compelled her to put off Westeros to free the Essosi slaves. She wants to pursue power and restore her family’s legacy, but her compassion will compell her to save the realm and even die for it. Dany giving up her ambition to save the world fits in perfectly with GRRM’s intended message of the series - people should push aside their petty wars to fight the real enemy, death.
Alternatively, Dany could die by childbirth to complete the Azor Ahai prophecy. I’m not a fan of this outcome, but it’s definitely a possibility, given the Dany pregnancy foreshadowing.
So what’s Sansa’s purpose? Sansa’s arc has nothing to do with fantasy; it’s all about building her up from pawn to player. Her arc revolves around surviving vicious Westerosi politics. Tyrion literally tells her, “you may survive us all.” And that’s exactly what’s she’s going to do. What would be the point of showing her character growth from naive, prince obsessed girl to adept player, only to kill her off in the end? Sansa has been groomed to survive the political world, and she’s been mentored by some of the biggest players (Littlefinger, Margaery, Cersei).
The show also goes out of its way to depict Sansa as a competent ruler, organizing grain stores and offering Jon sound advice. Sansa warns Jon that Ramsey likes to play mind games, and then Ramsey sets a trap that Jon falls for on the battlefield. Sansa warns Jon that he will lose support if he leaves the North; later we see a Northern lord telling Sansa that they should’ve chosen her instead. Interesting how people in their world already want her as queen.
She isn’t perfect, but she’s learning. ”I’m a slow learner, that’s true. But I learn.” All of this is leading somewhere - at the very least, she’ll end up in a powerful position. She’s the most likely to succeed if both Jon and Dany die. She could potentially end up queen regent, raising the child of Jonerys.
On Trope Subversion.
The series became infamous for subverting the expectations that we came to expect in a typical fantasy. The series killed Ned Stark, the hero and apparent lead of season 1. It then went on to kill Robb Stark, the next hero in line. If we go by this pattern, Dany and Jon will not come out unscathed. Sansa is the dark horse candidate for the iron throne: she’s not the conventional hero, nobody expects her to win, but she would make for an effective peacetime ruler, rebuilding society in the aftermath.
Tormund: “How many queens are there now?" He isn’t just asking Jon this, he’s asking the audience. Cersei, Dany, and the one who has the least likelihood of dying - Sansa.
Rey in The Last Jedi - A Visual Timeline
I’ve put together images of Rey in The Last Jedi that I have attempted to put into chronological order. There are obvious spoiler-y implications to this, so please only click read more if you’re okay with getting a sense for the film’s structure/progression.
This post does not incorporate every single image of Rey we have from The Last Jedi so far, for the simple reason that it would have been difficult to identify when certain shots come in the film (just knowing that a shot shows Rey on Ahch-To wasn’t enough for me to include it). If I wasn’t at least 50% sure of where a shot should go, I left it out.
Rey is probably the only character I will do this for, since her costume changes make it most straightforward to identify where things come in the film.
In the 1960′s Legally a woman couldn’t
- Open a bank account or get a credit card without signed permission from her father or hr husband.
- Serve on a jury - because it might inconvenience the family not to have the woman at home being her husband’s helpmate.
- Obtain any form of birth control without her husband’s permission. You had to be married, and your hub and had to agree to postpone having children.
- Get an Ivy League education. Ivy League schools were men’s colleges ntil the 70′s and 80′s. When they opened their doors to women it was agree that women went there for their MRS. Degee.
- Experience equality in the workplace: Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women produced a report in 1963 that revealed, among other things, that women earned 59 cents for every dollar that men earned and were kept out of the more lucrative professional positions.
- Keep her job if she was pregnant.Until the Pregnancy Discrimination Act in 1978, women were regularly fired from their workplace for being pregnant.
- Refuse to have sex with her husband.The mid 70s saw most states recognize marital rape and in 1993 it became criminalized in all 50 states. Nevertheless, marital rape is still often treated differently to other forms of rape in some states even today.
- Get a divorce with some degree of ease.Before the No Fault Divorce law in 1969, spouses had to show the faults of the other party, such as adultery, and could easily be overturned by recrimination.
- Have a legal abortion in most states.The Roe v. Wade case in 1973 protected a woman’s right to abortion until viability.
- Take legal action against workplace sexual harassment. According to The Week, the first time a court recognized office sexual harassment as grounds for legal action was in 1977.
- Play college sports Title IX of the Education Amendments of protects people from discrimination based on sex in education programs or activities that receive Federal financial assistance It was nt until this statute that colleges had teams for women’s sports
- Apply for men’s Jobs The EEOC rules that sex-segregated help wanted ads in newspapers are illegal. This ruling is upheld in 1973 by the Supreme Court, opening the way for women to apply for higher-paying jobs hitherto open only to men.
This is why we needed feminism - this is why we know that feminism works
I just want to reiterate this stuff, because I legit get the feeling there are a lot of younger women for whom it hasn’t really sunk in what it is today’s GOP is actively trying to return to.
Did you go to a good college? Shame on you, you took a college placement that could have gone to a man who deserves and needs it to support or prepare for his wife & children. But if you really must attend college, well, some men like that, you can still get married if you focus on finding the right man.
Got a job? Why? A man could be doing that job. You should be at home caring for a family. You shouldn’t be taking that job away from a man who needs it (see college, above). You definitely don’t have a career – you’ll be pregnant and raising children soon, so no need to worry about promoting you.
This shit was within living memory. I’M A MILLENIAL and my mother was in the second class that allowed women at an Ivy League school. Men who are alive today either personally remember shit like this or have parents/family who have raised them into thinking this was the way America functioned back in the blissful Good Old Days. There are literally dudes in the GOP old enough to remember when it was like this and yearn for those days to return.
When people talk about resisting conservativism and the GOP, we’re not just talking about whether the wage gap is a myth or not. We’re talking about whether women even have the fundamental right to exist as individuals, to run their own households and compete for jobs and be considered on an equal footing with men in any arena at all in the first place.
I was a child in the 1960s, a teenager in the 1970s, a young adult in the 1980s. This is what it was like: When I was growing up, it was considered unfortunate if a girl was good at sports. Girls were not allowed in Little League. Girls’ teams didn’t exist in high school, except at all-girls’ high schools. Boys played sports, and girls were the cheerleaders. People used to ask me as a child what I wanted to be when I grew up. I said I wanted to be a brain surgeon or the first woman justice on the Supreme Court. Everyone told me it was impossible–those just weren’t realistic goals for a girl–the latter, especially, because you couldn’t trust women to judge fairly and rationally, after all. In the 1960s and 1970s, all women were identified by their marital status, even in arrest reports and obituaries. In elementary school, my science teacher referred to Pierre Curie as DOCTOR Curie and Marie Curie as MRS. Curie…because, as he put it, “she was just his wife.” (Both had doctorates and both were Nobel prize winners, so you would think that both would be accorded respect.) Companies could and did require women to wear dresses and skirts. Failure to do could and did get women fired. And it was legal. It was also legal to fire women for getting married or getting pregnant. The rationale was that a woman who was married or who had a child had no business working; that was what her husband was for. Aetna Insurance, the biggest insurance company in America, fired women for all of the above. A man could rape his wife. Legally. I can remember being twelve years old and reading about legal experts actually debating whether or not a man could actually be said to coerce his wife into having sex. This was a serious debate in 1974. The debate about marital rape came up in my law school, too, in 1984. Could a woman be raped by her husband? The guys all said no–a woman got married, so she was consenting to sex at all times. So I turned it around. I asked them if, since a man had gotten married, that meant that his wife could shove a dildo or a stick or something up his ass any time she wanted to for HER sexual pleasure. (Hey, I thought it was reasonable. If one gender was legally entitled to force sex on the other, then obviously the reverse should also be true.) The male law students didn’t like the idea. Interestingly, they commented that being treated like that would make them feel like a woman. My reaction was, “Thank you for proving my point…” The concept of date rape, when first proposed, was considered laughable. If a woman went out on a date, the argument of legal experts ran, sexual consent was implied. Even more sickening was the fact that in some states–even in the early 1980s–a man could rape his daughter…and it was no worse than a misdemeanor. Women taking self-defense classes in the 1970s and 1980s were frequently described in books and on TV as “cute.” The implication was that it was absurd for a woman to attempt to defend herself, but wasn’t it just adorable for her to try? I was expressly forbidden to take computer classes in junior and senior years of high school–1978-79 and 1979-80–because, as the principal told me, “Only boys have to know that kind of thing. You girls are going to get married, and you won’t use it.” When I was in college–from 1980 to 1984–there were no womens’ studies. The idea hadn’t occurred in many places because the presumption was that there was nothing TO study. My history professor–a man who had a doctorate in history–informed me quite seriously that women had never produced a noted painter, sculptor, composer, architect or scientist because…wait for it…womens’ brains were too small. (He was very surprised when I came up with a list of fifty women gifted in the arts and science, most of whom he had never heard of before.) When Walter Mondale picked Geraldine Ferraro as a running mate in 1984, the press hailed it as a disaster. What would happen, they asked fearfully, if Mondale died and Ferraro became president? What if an international crisis arose and she was menstruating? She could push the nuclear button in a fit of PMS! It would be the end of the WORLD!! …No, they WEREN’T kidding. On the surface, things are very different now than they were when I was a child, a teen and a young adult. But I’m afraid that people now do not realize what it was like then. I’ve read a lot of posts from young women who say that they are not feminists. If the only exposure to feminism they have is the work of extremists, I cannot blame them overmuch. I wish that I could tell them what feminism was like when it was new–when the dream of legal equality was just a dream, and hadn’t even begun to come true. When “woman’s work” was a sneer–and an overt putdown. When people tut-tutted over bright and athletic girls with the words, “Really, it’s a shame she’s not a boy.” That lack of feminism wasn’t all men opening doors and picking up checks. A lot of it was an attitude of patronizing contempt that hasn’t entirely died out, but which has become less publicly acceptable. I wish I could make them feel what it was like…when grown men were called “men” and grown women were “girls.”
Know your history.
So this, too, is what they mean saying “make America great again” and/or the good old days.
REBLOG FOREVER.
I’m beginning to understand why lesbian feminists in the 1970’s and 80’s were so rabidly aggressive, I’d probably be arrested if I were living back then…
Knowledge is power my pals. This is why history repeats itself, because some dumb fucks in power don’t have the will or brains to learn from it.
