It’s convention in GoT that you aren’t married without consummation.
It’s stated multiple times that the purpose of marriage is to build alliances, but the wife’s job is to bear an heir.
The Bolton sigil is the Skinned Man. Sansa is told how Ramsey enjoys hunting his former lovers with dogs. She saw what he did to Reek (she may not know the totality).
She’s given at least 4 opportunities to back out of the marriage with no consequences other than her revenge fails. Including once just minutes beforehand.
Bottom line is she knew she was going to have sex with a renowned sadist. Opinions on Sansa’s agency and naivete may vary, but I think it’s a safe bet that she wasn’t expecting rose petals and Barry White.
Opinions that she “deserved” it are just silly. But I do believe she was expecting it. And worse to come.
As for Reek, I had a peek at next week’s plot description on my DVR, and I suspect I was right. The scene served as his tipping point.
But Baelish leaves her in the shadow of a coming battle and then betrays her position to a woman seeking to kill her and asks her to raise an army to kill whomever wins the battle. All of which could likely mean her death in the near future.
The question is not if sansa thinks she is doing something smart, but if she actually is. And she isn’t.
Why isn’t anyone mentioning the hypocrisy of the High Sparrow?
Here we have Cersei smugly watching the Tyrells get attacked, and yet it seems to be common knowledge that Cersei and Jaime have fathered a king through incest.
And why does Lancel get to arrest anyone? How many times did he sleep with his first cousin Cersei?
This is driving me nuts!
From what I understand, they are going to veer from now on, but they’ll end at the same conclusion. They’ve cut out tons of characters who are POV in the books, because they felt it would have been too unwieldy to keep them all.
I don’t really understand how this change with Sansa is going to fit in at all. I guess we’ll see.
I suspect that it was all about keeping the cast smaller and soon things will play out in a way similar to the books again. I think that she will flee with Theon just like Jeyne did and they will be found by a different faction, likely Brienne instead of Mors Umber (again recycling familiar characters.)
I have a feeling Baelish’s machinations may not be as simple as they appear at first glance. Your protest relies on the assumption that Baelish is loyal to anyone but Baelish. He may not be loyal to Sansa just as he may not be loyal to Cersei. He is loyal to Baelish. Sansa may still be useful to him…or someone else.
Given the story arc, Theon needs to be shocked enough to get out of his Stockholm Syndrome with Roose Bolton. I can accept the rape as part of the narrative – I do not understand why the showrunners needed to put it on camera. They could have just as easily closed the door on the camera leaving Bolton and Reek and Sansa in the room and advanced the narrative in just the same way.
That’s a discussion worth having. Ratings perhaps? If we remove the naked women, rape, prostitution, murder, adultery, addiction from GOT would it really get watched? Would it really be GOT? When the Viper got his head crushed no one was very upset. Why do people enjoy this stuff? I don’t know. I’ll be watching next week though.
I dunno… I really think this isn’t a good show for some people to watch. I mean, given the link that @FoolishOwl put in upthread a bit:
Last night, they raped an underage girl and, even in the midst of that trauma, the camera focused on Theon and how painful it was for him to watch it.
I respectfully remind everyone that Daenerys was similarly raped on her wedding night back in Season One, only that one happened on-camera, nudity and all. Is that somehow a better way to portray it? I don’t think anyone’s trying to imply that Theon’s discomfort is in any way comparable to Sansa’s; rather last night’s scene was shot in a way that was far less exploitative than the earlier one with Daenerys. I suspect Director Jeremy Podeswa was handed fairly specific guidelines for how to shoot the scene. Sophie Turner’s contract undoubtedly has specific language regarding nudity (even her bath last night was remarkably modest by GoT standards) and the pushback regarding previous rape scenes means HBO’s trying to handle such material differently… though not to the point of excluding rapes altogether, since the last time consensual sex on GoT didn’t result in a prison (or death) sentence was… well, long ago enough that I can’t remember it.
Would there be any advantage in closing the door so discreetly, as if Rhett Butler had just carried Scarlett O’Hara upstairs to her boudoir? The show and the books are about power wielded through violence, and not really about magic and dragons and blue-eyed zombies. These scenes are upsetting and are meant to be so. On many levels, Game of Thrones operates like a horror movie. The horror retains its visceral power through the use of viscera, and implied horrors carry much less weight in this world as established by the past 45 episodes.
I tellya, you won’t be sorry. It’s an eyeful. And its exhilarating flavor of feminine power makes me want to make it required viewing for 8th graders across our fine nation.
I don’t wanna derail, so I’ll point you to my earlier comment here.
In short, violent as it is, I think it’s just about right for 13-year-olds. (YMMV with one who’s genuinely sensitive to violence, though. Know thine audience.)
