A Jon and Sansa Marriage

I’ve seen countless posts talking about a Jonsa marriage. I’m not opposed to it, I think it makes sense especially after the Parental Reveal and the fact the Northern Lords do NOT trust Targs.

I’m more concerned by how it happens and specifically who suggests it. Sansa has been through hell, growing up in KL where she had no agency. She was told she was to marry Tyrion and that was that, her consent was inconsequential. Her betrothal to Ramsay was even worse, and once again, she had no real say in the matter. I want the Jonsa marriage to be her idea. I need it to be something she wants.

I’ve seen posts speculating that it could be Tyrion or even Varys who suggests the marriage between Jon and Sansa, and while both of those candidates are more than capable of coming up with the suggestion, it doesn’t make it any different from her earlier betrothals, with a bunch of men making decisions about her life, still treating less as a human being and more like a pawn.

I don’t hold Tyrion in high regard and I think he’s going more grey and morally ambiguous in the final season (more so than what we’ve seen in the past) Varys may be smart but he’s not familiar with the North, Sansa or Jon, he doesn’t know this particular political landscape.

Sansa is finally in a position of power, she’s home, she’s with her people, and for the first time, she has agency, over her life, her body and I’ll be damned if it’s yet another guy who thinks he knows best about what she should do next. Sansa is the Lady of Winterfell, and while she may not be the Queen in the North (debatable) she most certainly holds some amount of power. The Northern Lords are already teetering where support to Jon is concerned and I’m guessing that the knowledge that he bent the knee to D will come as an additional blow. The parental reveal will likely be the last straw. Sansa is an astute political player and she knows that the lords are fickle with their display of loyalty. The only way to hold power and keep the armies loyal to the North is to proclaim Jon a Stark and the only way of doing that is by marriage.

Also, once Jon learns that he’s a Targ, it will put throw a wrench in his carefully executed plans. He knows that D is paranoid and convinced that she’s the only surviving Targ and realising that she has competition for the IT will not endear Jon to her. However, it will cause even more turmoil for him internally, everything he thought he was will turn out to be a lie. He will share this knowledge with Sansa and Arya.

It would also kind of mirror Ned and Cat where they got married first then slowly fell in love, for Jon and Sansa, it will be inverted, they’re already in love, the parental reveal finally let’s them acknowledge their feelings and gives them the freedom to get married.

Now, I did wonder if it could be Jon who suggests a marriage but I immediately rejected that notion. Jon would never suggest it even he knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Sansa was in love with him for precisely the reasons I outlined earlier in the post, he’d be the last person to suggest such a thing. He would also reject similar ideas from Davos and pretty much anyone else. The only person who could convince him is Sansa, with certainty that she suggests it not because she feels bullied or coerced but because she genuinely wants to marry him.

The Refrigerator Monologues by Catherynne M. Valente Review

“What matters is entertainment. Eternity takes forever. The infinite expanse of time just does not know when to quit. The dead fear boredom the way mortals fear death.”

Where do I even start? If you read comics, especially the Marvel and DC variety, then chances are, you’re familiar with names like Gwen Stacy, Jean Grey, Harley Quinn, Barbara Gordon, Mera, Karen Page to name just a few (the list is disappointingly long). What’s the one thing all of these characters have in common? They were unceremoniously dumped in favour of the main male characters’ narrative, their growth. Gail Simone first gave this trope a name, The Woman in Refrigerator (she actually started a website by this name). I can’t talk about this book without talking about this trope. There is literally a comic where the male protagonist’s girl friend is stuffed into the refrigerator and left for him to find.

“I belong in the refrigerator. Because the truth is, I’m just food for a superhero. He’ll eat up my death and get the energy he needs to become a legend.”

I can’t even begin to sum up all of the reason why this trope infuriates me. The women in most superhero comics, films, television shows are reduced to side plots, actually, they’re plot devices, their only reason to exist is to move the plot forward and they do this even with their deaths. It didn’t matter that a vast majority of women consuming this media were uncomfortable with the underlying message; a woman is disposable and is only useful in propping up the man in her life. The rage is justified and it’s not just limited to comics. How many times have you seen a female character die or suffer some horrible fate in a film or TV show but it’s all about the impact on the man. The most recent and well known example I can think of is the rape of Sansa Stark by Ramsay Bolton. It wasn’t about what was happening to her, it was about finally giving Theon the necessary motivation to break free of Ramsay‘s grip.

If you’re someone who was infuriated at the treatment of these women, then The Refrigerator Monologues is exactly what the doctor recommended! Like many of us, Valente was sickened by the trope and the last straw was the death of Gwen Stacy in The Amazing Spider-man 2 (that one still makes me see red) The film sets out to lull the audience into a sense of security. They’ve built up her character, they already killed her father in the first film, she’s brilliant in her own right, the makers of the film know that her death wasn’t appreciated in its comicbook version. All of these things told the audience, that Gwen Stacy is safe, she’ll make it out alive. We saw the film only to have our hope ripped out with her death in the final act of the film, and it felt cheap.

Well, unlike the vast majority of us, Valente actually did something about it. She couldn’t redo Gwen Stacy’s story or any of the women who had been treated so harshly by comicbook writers (copyright problems), so she wrote about characters who bore eerie similarities to them and told their stories and told it from their perspective.

“We call ourselves the hell hath club. There’s a lot of us. We’re mostly very beautiful and very well-read and very angry. We have seen some shit.”

The Hell Hath Club is an exclusive club with limited members, they meet at the local club run by a gargoyle called Neil and they share their stories. They are the protagonists of their own stories and they tell you about that superhero you’re so impressed with. They paint a different picture than the one you’re used to seeing. That superhero, you’re so impressed by, he’s insecure, he’s vain, hes full of himself and sees nothing beyond his own ambition. These women were the cautionary tales, these were the mistakes, these were the women who set them on their path, with their names reduced to being a footnote. You perhaps knew their names, but you didn’t know them, their dreams and their ambitions. There was no place for it.

While reading about the various women, Valente puts enough clues, that if you’re familiar with comics and characters, you’d be able to identify them. There’s Paige Embry (Gwen Stacy), Julia Ash (Jean Grey), Pauine Ketch (Herleen Quinzel, aka Harley Quinn), Blue Bayou (Mera, Queen of Atlantis), Daisy Green (Karen Page) and finally Samantha Dane (Alexandra DeWitt, she has the dubious honour of literally being the woman in the refrigerator) In Deadtown, these women finally have a space for their own lives, their stories. They’re done being pawns, they’re done being used, they’re done playing second fiddle. Most importantly, they find each other, a sisterhood of women of understanding and acceptance.

“What’s the difference between being dead and having a boyfriend? Death sticks around.”

This book is so engaging and well written that it’s close to impossible to set it aside. It’s incredibly clever especially with some of the names. Case in point, a character called Retcon. Retcon is a fairly common term in comics, it refers to when writers change the character, their appearance or their powers, their origin or their narrative arc. Valente creates a character called Retcon to call out those times when a character is changed so that they fit neatly into a box. I especially appreciated this.

It’s also a short read, so it doesn’t take long to get through it. Despite it’s length (or lack thereof) Valente does a brilliant job of really putting you inside the story that the women are narrating, she makes sure that you share in their anger, frustration and heartbreak. And more than that, she gives a fitting conclusion to these amazing characters who were so callously used and then dumped. As someone who read and loved comics for as long as I can remember, I didn’t know just how much I needed this book till I actually read it.

“Never give up your voice for a man, you fucking guppy.”