CVS is the worst possible distance from my dorm
far enough that I don’t want to get out of bed to walk there
close enough that it would be laughable to take the T
“
(Reblogged from ancient-amateur)
With disability justice, we want to move away from the “myth of independence,” that everyone can and should be able to do everything on their own. I am not fighting for independence, as much of the disability rights movement rallies behind. I am fighting for an interdependence that embraces need and tells the truth: no one does it on their own and the myth of independence is just that, a myth.
So I’ve seen a lot of people talking about Arya’s “most girls are stupid” line and the fact that it’s consistent with her character because she’s disdainful of Sansa’s traditional femininity. I kind of want to talk about this because it makes me feel like I’m reading their relationship really differently.
Arya I
Arya, Sansa, Jeyne, and Myrcella are doing needlework. Arya is on the outside looking in at this group of girls who are good at domestic skills and therefore are good at what their culture values in young women. Arya is not good at these things. To my understanding, Arya kinda wishes she were.
The septa examined the fabric. “Arya, Arya, Arya,” she said. “This will not do. This will not do at all.”
Everyone was looking at her. It was too much. Sansa was too well bred to smile at her sister’s disgrace, but Jeyne was smirking on her behalf. Even Princess Myrcella looked sorry for her. Arya felt tears filling up her eyes.
…
It wasn’t fair. Sansa had everything. Sansa was two years older; maybe by the time Arya had been born, there had been nothing left.
Sansa enumerated skills involve sewing, dancing, singing, playing instruments, and looking beautiful. These are all performance tasks; they demonstrate Sansa’s aptitude at fulfilling the social expectations of highborn women. Sansa is good at performance because she’s embraced a culture that uses courtesy to cloak atrocity; Arya is bad at it because it feels disingenuous to her. She doesn’t see performance as a means, she sees it as something that is itself false. Arya isn’t good at pretending to be other than her nature, and she’s not good at tasks that present her as such. Arya’s outlook is at odds with her culture. But the thing that stands out to me in this chapter is that Arya isn’t disdainful of the other girls for, I guess we would say, conforming. She is the object of disdain, not its perpetrator. It’s not that “other girls are stupid,” it’s that she is the other, and it bothers her. It embarrasses her enough to cry about it.
Sansa I
One day she came back grinning her horsey grin, her hair all tangled and her clothes covered in mud, clutching a raggedy bunch of purple and green flowers for Father. Sansa kept hoping he would tell Arya to behave herself and act like the highborn lady she was supposed to be, but he never did, he only hugged her and thanked her for the flowers. That just made her worse.
i think it’s easy to forget that Sansa has also worked to perfect her courtesies. Her behavior is learned. She’s done everything her mentors, parents, and culture have asked her to, and yet all this work hasn’t made her exceptional; it’s only allowed her to live up to expectations. In Sansa’s eyes, Arya has put in minimal effort to fulfill her family’s expectations of her, and yet shares equally in their love. Arya has achieved by bucking the rules what Sansa has achieved through painstakingly adhering to them, and that, to her, feels profoundly unfair.
Sansa knew all about the sorts of people Arya liked to talk to: squires and grooms and serving girls, old men and naked children, rough-spoken freeriders of uncertain birth. Arya would make friends with anybody. This Mycah was the worst; a butcher’s boy, thirteen and wild, he slept in the meat wagon and smelled of the slaughtering block. Just the sight of him was enough to make Sansa feel sick, but Arya seemed to prefer his company to hers.
When Arya refuses to accompany her to the wheelhouse, Sansa feels “alone and humiliated.” She is, I think, frustrated that for all her devotion to learning social niceties, it hasn’t made her family any more uniquely devoted to her. Arya sees her sister as smugly perfect and doted upon, but Sansa feels deprived of special affection that should be her reward for learning her lessons so well (which is why she’s so susceptible to the idea of an attentive Prince—at last, her reward of affection).
Arya feels unable to behave the way she’s expected to, and therefore is constantly removing herself from the scene of those expectations. While to Sansa it may seem like Arya is gallivanting around with confidence, Arya’s exits are often a product of feeling ashamed and out of place. To me, her chapters never exude confident or particular anger at more socially normative girls. They involve resentment, but it’s directed toward the expectations themselves and the extent to which she feels marginalized because she can’t fulfill them.
For me, that’s why “other girls are stupid” isn’t a good choice. Can you argue that it’s consistent with Arya’s worldview? I mean, I guess you could claim that she resents girls who are able to learn those social niceties because she’s jealous of the relative privilege gained by their ability to do so. Arya’s character is an interesting critique of gender and social norms, no doubt. But what gets lost in HBO’s adaptation is that she’s never totally comfortable with that. She isn’t anti-feminine or intentionally anti-normative, she’s just trying to be genuine to her sense of self.
The show’s assertion that she regards other girls as vapid and stupid simply because they act like they’re expected to is a misrepresentation, in my eyes. It attempts to give her an agenda that I don’t really think she has in the books, and furthermore seems to expect us to applaud that agenda, which, really, I’m not sure we should.
Basically, I just think HBO is imposing its own commentary over these characters by tweaking their personalities and motivations, and none of it is very nuanced or revolutionary and feels like a step backward from what’s in the text.
can someone explain to me why that whole rebecca logan might like girls storyline went the way it did because I just watched those episodes like two days ago and I am still really annoyed
like clearly the greek writers knew what they were doing with calvin
but why couldn’t they conclude that storyline with “yes rebecca likes girls”
as opposed to
hahaha look rebecca and casey kissed to see if guys would stare at them!!1!11!!!!
bah humbug & etc
FACT: every time a Strong Female Character™ describes her fellow female inhabitants of an extremely patriarchal society as “frivolous”, “stupid”, etc. for fulfilling the gender role proscribed to them by the status quo a men’s rights activist is born
Usually I come in and sit down at roundtables in America and they look at me like ‘what is wrong with you?’ Just because I don’t fit…nobody fits into the frame that typical Hollywood young actresses do, but they try to. They try to be this thing. Try to memorize answers and make everybody happy. That’s so horrifying and scary to me. So when you’re not that, you get criticized for it. You get criticized for being honest and criticized for being nervous. So that’s kind of annoying. I do a whole day of press and then I get calls from publicity people that are like, ‘you might want to be a little bit more bubbly’. And I’m like, ‘no’. People get very upset in the States. It’s weird. Fans of the book especially. They don’t understand me. Which is fine. I guess it doesn’t really matter who I am, it just matters that they like the movie.
(Source: iheartrobandkristen)
(Source: itsa-wonder)
