the reason sansa antis will always insist that she should be grateful/happy/get over herself that tyrion/sandor/whichever rapey gross old man they’re shipping her with now wants her is because they think that is the direction her character’s arc has taken her -
- from a girl with impossible dreams
- to a woman who has had every good thing ripped from her life,
- had everything, everyone she loved taken and twisted and used against her.
sansa antis think that her not loving tyrion, when they do, is a failure on sansa’s part. they want her to see beyond the face and value the man.
when they can see tyrion for the strategist, the underdog, the cleverest lannister that he is, why can’t this spoiled little brat-child see it too?
(this adult, grown man, who looks at a child and desires.)
(this same man who pledges himself to daenerys’ cause for permission to rape his sister if dany takes her stupid, pointless bloody throne.)
sansa antis think that her falling in love with sandor is the natural culmination of a child - a child who has been routinely abused by male authority figures - rewriting a traumatic event to be - here’s a shocker - less traumatic.
(“i took the bloody song, she never gave it. i meant to take her too. i should have. i should have fucked her bloody and ripped her heart out before leaving her for that dwarf.”)
(the point of beauty and the beast was that they both were outcasts, that they both needed a little bit of saving. women are not rehabilitation centers for damaged men. we are our own person first - we are the title character of our stories - we do not exist just to save somebody else.)
antis think sansa stark started off an essentially worthless character - the cookie-cutter princess figure, the boring-vapid-shallow-high-school-bitch.
antis think sansa’s dreaming, sansa’s naïveté, sansa’s innocence was the problem.
antis think the trauma heaped on this girl was what made her worthwhile, made her relevant, made her interesting.
this girl, who had been taught her whole life to be a certain way, who trusted the parents she loved, who upheld their values because she admired them, who dared to look at her beautiful, endless world and demand from it the fulfillment of her dreams -
antis think this is the first crime.
(the gall of her. the nerve of her. how dare she DEMAND.)
so they rejoice, when her dreams crumble, turn to ash in her mouth.
but the terrible things that happen to sansa are not an indictment of her dreams.
her dreams are honest and harmless and good - she is allowed all her dreams, and more.
these terrible things that the world heaps on sansa, that she is forced to survive, that turn her eyes cold, that turn her spine to steel - they are not an indictment of her innocence.
there can never be an indictment of innocence.
her innocence was precious, and it should have been saved. it deserved saving. innocence always deserves saving; that is its function in a terrible world - to serve as a reminder that in the darkest night, there is always one thing worth saving.
