What do you think of the Sansa bullied Arya take if you don’t mind me asking (just don’t answer if you don’t want to haha)
per my usual practice on Controversial Topics im putting this under a cut
At the real risk of that lot showing up in my notes again, I think this ‘Sansa bullies Arya’ pins their pre AGOT dynamic squarely on Sansa herself, rather than the way they are both being raised by the adults around them to behave towards one another. Sure, Sansa is mean to Arya sometimes during their childhood! We don’t have a lot of examples besides the oft-mentioned ‘horseface’ insults, but I think it’s fair to assume that more often than not, Sansa was looking down on Arya. Meanwhile, Arya herself feels inadequate and like she just can’t do anything right. She resents Sansa, but also worries that Sansa’s opinion of her may be true.
Fine. But where has Sansa’s opinion of Arya come from? Is it her cold black heart? Fucking no, it’s come from Septa Mordane, Catelyn, and whoever else surrounds them growing up. The men don’t seem to really give much of a shit how Arya acts because it’s not their business and she’s just a kid anyhow, but the women pointedly give many shits. In our first scene with Arya, Septa Mordane scolds her for not being good at ‘women’s work’, and there’s plenty to suggest that this is just another day in the life for Arya. Meanwhile, Sansa gets the carrot for excelling. Both Arya and Sansa are learning their own worth in this chapter, and the worth of one another. Sansa internalises the praise whilst learning that Arya is bad, and everything she mustn’t be. Arya internalises the criticisms whilst learning that Sansa is good, and everything she can never be.
They’ll be getting this from Catelyn as well. Catelyn clearly adores both her daughters, and will move heaven and earth to get them back in ACOK. But one good adjective for Catelyn is ‘dutiful’ - it’s in her house words, and it’s how she’s lived her life up to AGOT. Doing as she’s told, even when it pains her. She expects the same of her daughters, and finds those expectations satisfied in Sansa’s case, and apparently flouted in Arya’s. So again, from their own mother, Sansa internalises that Arya is bad, and that she, Sansa, is good. Arya internalises the same. If societal standards were reversed, perhaps it would be Arya lording over Sansa, but such as it is, it’s Sansa over Arya.
Now, Sansa is a child. When children are told over and over that X is good and Y is bad, they generally don’t question it, at least until they're older and more experienced in the world. They will also parrot what they hear, often in graceless ways. Because they’re children. Sansa is told that Arya wilfully misbehaves because she’s bad, and so Sansa thinks: then I should look down on Arya. It sounds like Sansa mostly keeps her distance from her sister pre AGOT. Not always - they play together sometimes - but a lot of the time. She has internalised the teaching that Arya is an aberration, and as she herself knows the adults value obedience in girls, and she wants to please them so badly, the distance between her and Arya demonstrates to them just how good she is - she won’t descend to Arya’s behaviour.
When Sansa does interact with Arya (pre Darry), we see her being a bit bossy - telling Arya what to do, etc. Sansa is replicating what she has seen the adults do with Arya, and is mimicking them to assert her own position as the good, obedient child. If Arya ever doesn’t want to do something, it can only be because she’s bad.
[sidenote, it all really reminds me of these short stories me and my sister used to get read a lot as kids, called My Naughty Little Sister (lmao) by Dorothy Edwards. They're pretty old and I don’t think they ever got major circulation outside Britain, but for anyone unfamiliar, you can probably guess how these stories go. There’s an elder sister, good and obedient, who narrates short tales of her ‘naughty little sister’ doing terrible things like idk, making a terrible mess etc, and going ‘now I’m sure you [the child audience] wouldn’t do a thing like that!’ They’re supposed to be short morality tales for the children, and amuse the parent reading them aloud, who recognises the mischievous behaviour of the younger and is charmed by the haughtiness of the elder sister, who you can hear is narrating the incidents of her sister’s mischief with the disdain that she’s heard the adults do so, and is asserting her own good behaviour over said sister. And the whole fucking reason we were read these stories was because my younger sister was precisely the kind of kid who got up to all kinds of shit as a little kid (which now all of us find hilarious but DIDN’T AT THE TIME), and I was the elder sister like ‘my goodness how could she do such things as these!!’ (e.g. paint an entire bookcase with grout). It amused us both to see ourselves in the stories. You could say this was life imitating art, but I think this is simply an age old dynamic, familiar to many people with siblings: you would see how the adults spoke to another child in your family, and replicate their manner in an effort to come across as an adult. Except you weren’t an adult, so you weren’t always as graceful about it as they were. That is pre AGOT Sansa, to a T. And I’m sure that’s what GRRM, a child of three who had two sisters of his own, is replicating here.]
But I think there’s also a loneliness in being the ‘obedient child’. Doing as you’re told all the time can be boring, and living up to expectations is a lot of pressure. Sansa wants a companion in all that, but Arya has no interest in sharing in it. Arya is offering friendship, but from a place Sansa believes she can’t reach her sister - Sansa thinks she’d have to ‘descend to Arya’s level’ to accept it, and she can’t do that. You get a sense of Sansa thrilling in trying Arya’s ‘misbehaviours’ for herself when she quietly delights in behaving ‘as wicked as Arya’, but you see in this that she has to condemn such behaviours and herself for exhibiting them, all in the same breath. And in the end, I can easily imagine Sansa resents that Arya has more fun with their brothers than she ever does with Sansa herself: that the one sister she has is one she has nothing in common with. Sansa can’t find a like mind amongst her siblings, and so clings to Jeyne Poole, and the praise of the adults around her.
So with all that in mind, YES! Sansa is sometimes mean to Arya, and calls her horseface. That is because Sansa is a child, nobody is correcting her behaviour, and she understands that Arya is bad, and the way she behaves is frustrating to Sansa herself, so really what does it matter if she’s a little mean sometimes? She knows that she is good, because everyone says so. Even if she calls her sister a name now and then, she’s still the good child.
AND THEN we get to Darry. And Sansa starts to see that society isn’t a song, and sometimes it doesn’t matter how good you are, horrible things can happen to you anyway. But she doesn’t want to believe that, because it would turn her world upside down, and her future would look a lot darker, too - Ned has not ended her engagement to Joffrey, and Sansa has to live for the foreseeable in KL. So when Arya doing the thing she ‘wasn’t supposed to’ (playing with Mycah) snowballs into a terrible miscarriage of justice where Sansa’s wolf is killed, Sansa rejects the notion that the songs could be wrong about beautiful princes, and shifts the blame onto Arya for that original 'misdemeanour'. The grief at losing Lady is terrible too (the wolves are meant to have a soul deep bond with the Stark children), and so the target of that grief likewise becomes Arya. What was previously a normal, childishly complicated sibling relationship gets twisted into something else.
This is where I think Sansa becomes different level of unpleasant towards her sister. She’s cruel about Arya’s loss of Mycah, tells Arya she wishes she were dead instead of Lady, etc etc. Arya is not giving as good as she gets here - she even tries to make amends with Sansa, but Sansa throws the offer in her face.
The reasons for Sansa’s behaviour are complicated, but not that complicated. She’s been raised to slot perfectly into this world, without ever being told what that world is really like. And when abruptly it turns out that what she’s being raised for is essentially the slaughter, she rejects it. She can’t see Joffrey as he truly is: she’s been told that princes are charming, that Kings are just, Queens are kind, and she herself will be a Queen. Sansa is going to be handed over to the Lannisters, and she’s going to live the song of her dreams, and the only thing between Sansa and the realisation of those is the thing that’s always been wrong: Bad Arya. Because again, if Arya isn't bad, then everything else is, and Sansa is in terrible danger.
No one is sitting Sansa down and explaining to her that Arya is not bad, just different from her, and that they should love one another - that there are dark forces here far stronger than them that could tear them apart, that the Lannisters are the greatest of them, and they have to fight together, not each other. Arya gets this talk, funnily enough, but not Sansa. Arya is asked to understand that Sansa is different from her, but Sansa is only ever taught to abhor that her sister as different from her. Where Arya is told to be wary of the court of King’s Landing, Ned leaves Sansa to continue her fantasies, and then, when he abruptly tries to put an end to them, he doesn’t bother to explain why. I’m not saying this is unforgivable on Ned’s part - he has a lot on his mind lol - but it’s quite obviously a major failing. Ned leaves Sansa in a fantasy world. It’s fucking Joffrey who has to step in and clarify for Sansa that actually, she’s been dreaming.
So as long as they’re together, Sansa is never able to come to terms with the fact that Arya was not the aberration, but rather, everything else was. In the absence of one another, they cannot reconcile over that fact. So yes, GRRM says they’ll have deep issues to sort through when they meet again, but those aren’t going to be the times that Sansa called her ‘horseface’ - they’re going to be about what happened since they left Winterfell, when their relationship was twisted by forces much darker than Septa Mordane.
So no, I think the ‘Sansa is a bully’ diatribes are seriously tedious, because even if you want to insist that calling your sister ‘horseface’ a few times even qualifies, you can still accept such wrongs without deciding that that makes Sansa a fundamentally unkind person who cannot be reconciled with Arya and doesn’t deserve to be. It is on the page that the two of them miss each other. Like I genuinely cannot imagine going through everything Arya does in the story and then, upon reuniting with a sister I thought lost forever, deciding I’m actually still mad about the things she got wrong as a child that she herself has paid dearly for, both physically and emotionally. Like jesus fucking christ man. By all means let them talk about it!! But who do you think Arya is lmao
Tl;dr: Sansa is a kid in a society. She is not the arbiter of Arya’s place in society. She is not mean because she’s cruel, but because she has internalised the exact same things that Arya has, based on the example of the adults surrounding them. It just happens that those things were a carrot for Sansa and a stick for Arya. But then in the end, they weren’t a carrot for Sansa either.
tl;dr 2: clarifying once again - i am a jaime stan. i find the stark sister relationship interesting bc I have experience of a similar sisterly dynamic and find it interesting to see a version of that explored on the page. so if you think one has to be a sansa stan to observe all this then that kind of just demonstrates how dichotomous you've become on this issue lol like if I'm talking about takes I dislike re JB I don't generally feel the need to attribute them to JC fandom. let's all grow up x
tl;dr 3: no i don't hate sansa or arya, since i know these are both conclusions various people reach whenever i even mention these two. in fact i think they are both great girls! imagine
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hi here are some accounts to follow if you're barely getting into the dead poets society fandom !! this is a veryyyyy long post im so sorry. if anyone wants to be removed from the list please tell me !! @kylacxie
first on the list !! @desire-mona (they/them). mona is everything and I love them. makes the absolute best posts ever and is just so fucking funny. you will see rsl posts very frequently. also posts about house md frequently. one of the best mutuals ever !! their tags under stuff they reblog are the best okay, they're either agreeing with you or it's something like "hey. *leans up against my anxiety diagnosis*" that's an actual tag I've gotten from one of their reblogs btw.
and now @i-am-in-love-with-todd-anderson (she/her). ania is one of the sweetest people ever and is so supportive. also very smart !! her analysis posts over the movie make so much sense and are mostly things I would've never thought of but still make so much sense. (those posts are either so depressing or are just a nice little experience.) also, she's like in love with Meeks. do I need to say any more.
@askthedeadpoetssociety (she/her). also just such a nice person. makes beautiful fan art and takes requests !! pretty sure she barely joined herself so there's not much else to say but I am very excited to see what her blog leads to !!
@pinksnail55 (she/her). everyone knows pinksnail55. we've only recently learned her name is Caroline !! her account is mainly reblogs, which I think is absolutely perfect. you would never miss a single amazing post.
@cimacally (I don't know pronouns, sorry). is also pretty new to the fandom ! comes on every once on a while to post the most accurate headcanons you will ever read in your entire life, reblog a thing or two, goes away (?), and then repeats. blog is still definitely worth checking out !!
FANFIC WRITERSS
@cowboylexapro (he/him). I've read a few of his pics and they're absolutely amazing and I would definitely check them out !!! his blog is also cool so that would be something to check out. (AO3 user: cowboylexapro)
@gayfandomnerd225 (it/kit/mae). absolutely had to include mae. has fifteen works so far and they're great !! writes both angst and fluff btw so choose your fav idk. also. please check out fog's blog !! especially the "queerdads duo" tag. (AO3 user: GayFandomNerd)
@aguyinthepubliceye (he/him). had to include the other half of my queerdads. porto. hello. he has two works and they're some of my favorites still !! also please check out his blog too ! he's funny as fuck and loves to traumatize my brother and I ( @amorisastrum ). though I wouldn't give him too much credit, user gayfandomnerd225 has those days too. (AO3 user: guyinthepubliceye)
I know @perksofbeingpoet (she/her) is a fanfic write too ! I'm just not sure if there are any works in this fandom yet. (AO3 user: perksofbeingpoet)
@chrisginny (she/her). if you're a chris x ginny enjoyer, then her blog is the place to go !! mainly only writes for that ship but it's great ! it would be nice to check out her blog as well just saying !!:) (AO3 user: ecarte)
@good--merits-accumulated (he/him). I read one of his pics the other day and it was one soo good. (Un Dernier Verre (Pour La Route) is what it's called. I highly recommend it !! is a fantastic writer and seems like a really nice person !! (AO3 user: mistermerit)
if I'm missing anyone, go ahead and reblog with people !! the list was getting long but here you go !!
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sorry i dont have anyone to talk to this about lol so it's going in your inbox but i'm in my mid-20s and only now for the first time in my life have i changed my mind on rpf specifically because of phanfic. i'm a returning phannie but like.... the last time i watched them was all the way back in 2012. and was very ani-rpf then and have continued to be through the years. and i think in a lot of cases i maintain that position. but after falling back in love with dnp and the phandom and caving into the urge to read some phanfic knowing that dnp themselves encourage and respect it im kind of shocked to find it's actually a really beautiful, metatextual, interactive creative outlet. i think youve talked a bit about how phanfic isnt really rpf to you and i kind of agree, because dan and phil to me are like.... an idea, a mythology, a narrative, that theyre aware of and have built as well as being aware that we're aware of. like the idea of dan and phil has been constructed by them and their fans hand in hand for over a decade. and i find that phanfic itself is very aware of this and exists to expand upon those ideas. lol. yeah that's it sorry for this ramble. i just find it surprising that something could change my mind on that in this day and age but it's been a very cool experience.
hello welcome youve come to the right place for this yap because i COMPLETELY understand you. like genuinely i am not this attached to any other "rpf" content like this? ok i had an egobang phase but honestly arin and danny have grown to share a similar but not exact same connection as dnp BUT I DIGRESS
but yeah i think a lot of it is due to the contrastive relationships between the brand of Dan and Phil™, their separate individual brands Daniel Howell and AmazingPhil (particularly dan), the Phanon dnp, and the actual real people dan and phil. i always go back to the fanfiction segment of tatinof but its just such a perfect example of what i mean. like, the entire idea to have a fanfic scene was ofc the real people's idea, and they used tropes they would see in the phanon to convey the audience interactive story, but at the same time had to keep it at least Somewhat appropriate for the Brand™ at the time being very pre-teen and teen focused. honestly idk how much you've gone back and watched of what you missed, but i would suggest doing that not just cuz theres some incredible stuff from those eras, but also seeing the intersection of the brand, fanon, and real people and when they split apart. you see it a lot especially in gaming videos imo where theyre unscripted, and once they got more comfortable in the gaming channel roles the energy shifting away from Brand but never too far... until ofc now where what even is their brand anymore just Chaos and Queerness i guess
OH ALSO go read some old fic and compare to newer ones like its not just that writing styles changed or that dnp themselves have changed, but the like. energy and intent put into fic has changed. i would say in the past it was more exploratory, putting dnp in AU's and imagines, or exploring what Could have happened. whereas now, yes ofc there are au's and fic for the purpose of exploring a concept or world, but also its a lot more introspective. exploring the inner world a bit more. idk i just thijk dnp are funny lil guys and they accidentally created some freaky lil creatures in a lab somewhere...
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