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Jack Graham

Jack Graham writes and podcasts about culture and politics from a Gothic Marxist-Humanist perspective. He co-hosts the I Don't Speak German podcast with Daniel Harper. Support Jack on Patreon.

2 Comments

  1. SpaceSquid
    May 22, 2015 @ 3:13 am

    "Well, at least it told us stuff we didn’t know about the characters, like Ramsey’s a sadist and a misogynist, and Sansa can put up with cruel treatment.

    Um…"

    This is the point at which we diverge. It seems to me that it really does demonstrate something about Sansa. Ramsay isn't Joffrey; she agreed to go inside Winterfell. She decided to walk through the Godswood instead of lighting a beacon in the Broken Tower to be whisked away by the loyalist Northerners. She makes it perfectly clear in her scene with Myranda that she's not operating out of fear this time. Ramsay and Joffrey might be horribly similar, but season two Sansa and season five Sansa most definitely aren't.

    So no. I don't think the problem is that we learn nothing new about Sansa. I think the problem is that what we learn about Sansa is that she is willing to become complicit in her own rape. In a world as suffused and corrupted by rape culture as our is, that's obviously a horrifically ugly and damaging idea. I wouldn't want to go within a thousand miles of even appearing to defend it. There were a million other ways they could demonstrate Sansa's resolve in the face of hideousness that wouldn't come close to being so unjustifiable (Dr Sandifer' suggestion of Sansa being forced to help Ramsay flay someone is a good one, I think). But that, as I read the episode, was the intent of Sansa's story over the season so far.

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  2. SpaceSquid
    May 29, 2015 @ 9:52 am

    Having seen the following episode, I think I can safely scrap everything I said above. It was a theory that required the show stick the landing, and instead they crashed at full speed into a mountain shaped like an extended middle finger. Whatever aesthetic and functional purpose the scene itself could be argued to have, it seems clear B&W were so keen to include it they didn't really need to make sure it made sense as part of the larger narrative. Which is a pretty fucking damning state of affairs.

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