Please stop discounting female characters who aren’t manipulative or cruel as inherently weak, and stop defining female characters who are manipulative or cruel as inherently strong.
I’ve seen too many posts on my dash where people idolize Cersei as the “cruel manipulator” they aspire to be (also way to reduce the complexity of her character in order to idolize her for a terrible trait, but whatever).
This happens to an even greater extent with Margaery and Sansa.
I love watching Margaery; we don’t truly know where her motivations lie, or where her boundaries are, and it’s likely that a mixture of ruthless ambition and actual generosity spurs her behavior… So why would you want to reduce her to an echo of herself by calling her nothing but a political schemer? And what does it say that the only way you can respect this female character is if she doesn’t have integrity?
Sansa is compassionate, brave, kind, and emotionally strong in a world that has done everything possible to rob her of those traits, but half the people who claim to love Sansa on this website feel they need to paint her as only a cunning political mind and future destroyer/vengeful assassin type in order to like her. Like, is there a reason we can’t accept her compassion as actual compassion, but a constant political play? This attitude reeks of internalized misogyny: a woman can’t be perceived as simultaneously honorable and strong the way a man can. In order to be powerful she must be cruel or amoral. (Side note: same problem in the way the media portrays Black Widow. In the MCU quite a few of the other Avengers have that same confused morality but they get to be called heroes, while she can only be an antihero. Because we can’t have women as heroes, can we?)
One character I haven’t seen this done with is Dany (it better stay that way), but the cynical side of me says this is just because she fits the “badass” archetype and is therefore exempt from the same gross treatment.
I get that the moral code of Game of Thrones is screwed up, and I love quite a few characters I wouldn’t consider moral. I love Cersei, Margaery, Sansa, and Daenerys in all their complexity. But there’s a problem when we equate kindness and decency with weakness and blandness (see: people’s attitudes on Captain America), and it’s no coincidence that this happens most often with female characters, who we can apparently only respect if they hurt, manipulate, or intimidate other people.
