#avatar is regarded as Baby's First Media Analysis for a lot of people

[lollytea]

I do love the netflix avatar in my own way because it provides me with enrichment in the same way brain puzzles do for chimps. Like something is WRONG here and it's your very special job to figure out why! And then you will get juice reward!!

#its been making me think about the cartoon a lot lately for the sake of comparing and contrasting #so thats great #it was a very good cartoon #i do actually think that its stupid to complain about how its objectively bad when an adaption makes changes to the original #because that SHOULD be the point of an adaption. to try things in a new way and somehow improve on the story #but i think its funny how this show is constantly like ''we're gonna take a DIFFERENT route with this character'' #and then the DIFFERENT ROUTE leads to them driving the car off a cliff #we will not get to our destination this way bestie #out of all the changes theyve made to the original i think the most misguided and overall dogshit is how theyre portraying Azula #it annoying when people say ''theyre ACTUALLY writing her as a victim of her father's abuse this this'' #''shes ACTUALLY sympathetic this time'' #girl i hate it here #netflix show is a COWARD for showing Azula this way in season 1 #not that its not somewhat in character. if ozai started playing mindgames with her she probably would start spiraling like this #the problem is that we shouldnt be SEEING IT!! #avatar is regarded as Baby's First Media Analysis for a lot of people #and boy oh boy there was a lot of analytic meat to Azula's character #but the netflix version? this is a skeleton!! bones!!! #like obviously if you were watching the cartoon as an adult it would be immediately apparent #that this 14 yo girl acting not only like a grown woman but a calm calculated genocidal tyrant is very concerning #and it makes her sympathetic by defualt on the grounds of being a child #but a kid isnt going to realize that!! Azula is supposed to be polarizing!! #youre meant to buy into the narrative that everything is easy for her. that no effort troubles her mind #her unflappable nature is meant to unsettle you. intimidate you. she has no weaknesses shes unstoppable and shes pure evil #as a kid who is still learning how to think deeply about things thats how youre to perceive her #and then. AND THEN!! then the show pulls the rug out from under you and makes you question everything #Azula's gradually unraveling sanity in book 3 is jarring and unnatural and it forces you to challenge your own opinion of her #you become uncomfortably aware that shes a victim too. after all this time youve spent hating her #just like zuko. just like the fire family child that you had already come to realize was ''actually good'' #after that first watch its hard to decide how you feel about her. as a kid anyway. but its sad. its all so very sad

[joannalannister]

hey lady joanna, i'm not sure if it was u or someone else who posted this, but Ive found a pie chart of the asoiaf characters that r most popular in fan fic, and sansa was number one (and i think arya was a close 2nd?? cant remember properly). Do you know why this is? I've been reading a bit of fanfic recently, and ive also found that sansa seems to be the most shipped, and written about character.

Why do people write any fanfiction, about any character? 

We write because we love it. We write because we must. I think a huge part of what makes fan fiction so singularly special is that there is no ambition in it, only passion. [x]

We all wrestle with feelings and we can recognize them in stories when we see them. We don’t need for them to be sanctioned. It doesn’t matter what the writer intended, or what the artists intended. […] One of the most radical things I tell myself about the media I consume is: fuck canon. [x]

More often than not, people write fanfiction to explore ideas that are harder to explore on their own. Themes of sexuality, queer characters, and other problems of young people that most mainstream stories barely glimpse at are laid out in full force. Are all fanfictions hugely creative stories that need to be told? Not necessarily. In fact, probably not. By their very nature they are ancillary. But if these are stories our young people are telling, and en masse as well, critics should learn to be less dismissive of them. Because the stories we tell as children lay the cornerstones of the stories we tell as adults. No matter how grammar-less and outlandish they may be. [x]

What is scary about transformative fandom is that it’s a place where young women love their media without reservation, and where they can make stories for themselves. That’s why as a culture we’ve decided that transformative fandom is weird and gross and morally wrong, and that’s why all the articles in the world explaining that transformative fandom is a totally legitimate way to interact with a text aren’t really making a dent in the never-ending stream of repulsed investigations of fandom. Because fandom is the province of young women and, culturally, we find young women terrifying. [x]

Sometimes Canon is Broken and I Need to Fix It. Anyone who is a fan of … well, anything, knows that there are certain moments when you’re reading along or watching a series or movie when you stop and shout, “Wait! What?” (one word: midiclorians) Sometimes when that’s happened I feel the desire to “fix” canon by writing my own version of “the truth” (known as ‘head canon’ or, if it gets widely accepted, ‘fanon,’ which is an abbreviated word for ‘fan canon.’) Also, people like myself write fanfic because the story they’re involved in is, on some level, really important to them. Characters become more than just fiction and what happens to them becomes very personal. The world becomes very real, and you start to want to explore every single nook and cranny, especially where you sense an inconsistency—something that makes you want to fill in the gaps. So, there are big and little “fixes” that call to fan writers. [x]

And why do people read fanfiction?

But every so often I find a fanfic I can’t keep my eyes off.  It might capture the feeling of the original source, or attack the premise from an interesting and new point of view.  I get to see my favorite characters come back to life through the power of words.  The puppeteer might be different, but, in the best fics, anyway, my beloved puppets are back and better than ever. [x]

Fanfiction is born of love, from both the writers and the readers. And the Stark sisters are widely loved. People naturally want more of these girls’ stories, to visit them again, to hear their voices again, to recapture whatever resonated with them the first time around. 

Regarding Sansa in particular … well, we haven’t had a book published with a Sansa pov in it since AFFC was published in 2005. 

(I do not count snippets from the still unpublished TWOW.) 

(2005 was a loooong time ago. I had a flip phone in 2005.) 

People want more content with Sansa so they’re making it themselves. 

Also, a lot of fanfiction is about shipping, and Sansa is very shippable. One of the central questions of Sansa’s narrative is who she will marry, from the very beginning of AGOT. GRRM teases so many possibilities for a potential partner for Sansa (some more likely than others), and people latch on to these various possibilities and generate a lot of fic for the things they love. Great fandom debates rage around who Sansa will ultimately be married to (assuming she marries) at the end of the series. Most (most!) people want Sansa to be happy in the end, but everyone (everyone!!) has different ideas about what (or who) would make Sansa happy.

And sometimes people don’t care about the endgame, they just want to explore vibrant alternate universes, since the ASOIAF canon has come to a standstill. For example, what would have happened to Sansa if Robert had never come to Winterfell? Personally I don’t particularly like alternate universes (most of the time), but lots of other people do, and they like exploring them in fic. 

And sometimes fanfiction isn’t even about the roads not taken in canon, it’s about the roads GRRM would never take, because LBR, he’s an old Baby Boomer. Fanfiction offers stories that aren’t necessarily heteronormative. 

Sansa is a fandom bicycle. She resonates with a lot of people. Sansa’s own story parallels the meta**-narrative disillusionment of the reader, but instead of a bitter awakening, it’s a hopeful one, because ASOIAF is a story about hope despite the darkness. (If you want to read more about this topic, @poorquentyn and @nobodysuspectsthebutterfly have spoken about this at length.)

**I don’t mean “meta” the way fandom uses this word to mean “literary criticism & analysis”. I mean “meta” in terms of being self-referential, or from a perspective above the work itself. GRRM is writing a fantasy story, but his fantasy story is about fantasy (the genre). 

So this resonance, this ~reader avatar~ quality - it makes people want to explore the world with Sansa even more, and so they write fic. 

You might want to pose this question to someone who writes a lot of Sansa fic tho, to get a better answer, because I don’t write a lot of Sansa fic. (I’ve written some, but not very much, and not often.) I typically like … darker … themes in the fanfiction I write. One of the fanfic stories I’ve been telling to myself (and only myself) for over twenty years would have the Purity Police up in arms. I’m so glad tumblr didn’t exist when I was a child cuz y’all would’ve fucked me up. This website isn’t healthy. 

#liashara-river #replies #fanfiction #sansa stark #lannister thoughts