Has it ever happened to you that you revisit a show or something and you end up hating a character or relationship you used to love. I really liked this female character and even after I stopped watching the show she was my fave, but after rewatching it I just can’t stand her. It’s not even that retroactively I notice she was badly written or a Mary Sue she is just really annoying me for some reason. I’m not really given her the benefit of the doubt on a lot of stuff I used to look past because she was my fave but now I can’t not notice it.
Totes, I used to love Xander on BtVS and now I'm like ugh incel before incels were a thing.
Not to get depressing about US politics, but it completely boggles my mind that most polls have Trump and Biden neck and neck (with Trump having a slight edge!) when Trump is basically on trial for attempted election rigging and selling state secrets and continues to spew senile boomer grandpa shit on his social media all day every day. Like I'll get used to this absurd state of reality and then I snap out of it and it'll occur to me how batshit it actually all is...
At this point I just accept that this is the reality that I live in, but I also weirdly have faith in Dark Brandon. That post about him trying to get overdraft fees massively reduced reminded me that hey, this dude is legitimately one of the most experienced living politicians in America. He knows how to campaign for office, and now that he's actually president, he knows how to push an appealing agenda in the leadup to the election so people don't forget that he's doing good shit. It's deranged that people are even still willing to vote for Trump, but Biden actually knows what he's doing, so I'm not outrageously concerned at the possibility of Trump part 2.
Do you know those videos where it’s this character versus that character in power, IQ, strategy, etc.?
So, I saw a Daenerys vs. Sansa one where the context is: “Daenerys sails for Westeros and decides to invade the North. Sansa hears this and prepares for war.”
Daenerys got power, battle IQ, strategy, experience, feats, foreign support, elite soldiers, ruthlessness, allies (the reach, Dorne, iron islands, dragons), and army.
Sansa only got IQ and political IQ. And then “the North bends the knee or burns”
Love your metas and just wanted to know your thoughts on this and how/why you would choose which one gets which!!
I actually am not super familiar with that format, but I would say as far as GoT goes, Dany doesn't really have battle IQ or strategy, her wins almost entirely rely on her literally setting her enemies on fire and when she tries other ways to defeat them, she actually pretty consistently loses. Even if she makes headway at first with other methods, she eventually has to resort to dragons to solve her problems.
However, the armies that she has in her service do have experience, which obviously helps her, and again, in terms of the show she has a ton of advantages because everyone almost immediately throws their weight behind her anyway. I expect that won't be the case in the books. But in either situation, Sansa also had the support of the North and the Vale, which is nothing to sneeze at, and as the Dornish proved for hundreds of years, having dragons and armies doesn't mean as much as it seems to if you're dealing with people who will GENUINELY put up a fight to resist you. Like, one of the major complications of Dany's conquest beyond many of the ones we've already discussed is that the North is fucking huge and borderline unlivable (and so is the Vale in many places honestly), if they made the choice to evade Daenerys they certainly could and they probably wouldn't take heavy losses either. Dany has had a rough go of it even in Essos, and she was conquering cities with extremely centralized populations and resources. I think the show massively undercut the significance of Sansa's/the North's geographic advantage, and I think that generally book readers tend to underestimate it as well.