So a while back I wrote about how Sansa’s and Sandor’s interactions make for a really interesting unwriting of the typical male-gaze centered narrative because a) all of their textual interactions take place from Sansa’s perspective, b) we get to know Sandor best through the Sansa and Arya chapters, and c) Sandor is quite interested in Sansa as an active spectator, not a passive, looked-upon object.
Anyway, I was just rereading some of their passages and this struck me and I can’t believe I didn’t notice it before:
“There’s a pretty for you. Take a good long stare. You know you want to. I’ve watched you turning away all the way down the kingsroad. Piss on that. Take your look.”
-A Game of Thrones, ch. 29
First off, you can read the tonal shift here from mocking to hurt and very possibly sincere. As happens time and again, his bravado kind of falters and he ends up getting a little too raw, exposing just how damaged he is. He starts off intending to mock Sansa’s polite behavior and the courtly culture that surrounds them, but he ends up telling her about his scars.
He doesn’t say “look at me” here, which he does later in this scene and in several of their scenes together. He chooses “take your look” (the only time, I think, he says this). “Look at me” is a command with a clearly implied imbalance of power: Sandor has it, Sansa does not. ”Take your look” implies Sansa’s agency as the active spectator, and also acknowledges the weird power/semi-ownership she has over him. He wants her—and no one else—to look at him.
It also has a nice double meaning given Sandor’s later use of give/take language when he talks about the Little Bird. During his confession to Arya, he twists what he had earlier meant as a crude boast about Sansa “singing” to him, saying that he “took the song, she never gave it,” and that he should have “taken” her too.
Given the true meaning behind the ~song and the giving vs. taking of it, “take your look” takes on a whole new meaning to me. He might go about expressing it in a nasty, brutish way, but Sandor’s one of the only people who sees Sansa as a real person—not just a small cog in a large machine—who can and should be able to take whatever the fuck she wants.
(via winterfellsnowcastle)
The outer parapet came up to her chin, but along the inner edge of the walk was nothing, nothing but a long plunge to the bailey seventy or eighty feet below. All it would take was a shove, she told herself. He was standing right there, right there, smirking at her with those fat wormlips. You could do it, she told herself. You could. Do it right now. It wouldn’t even matter if she went over with him. It wouldn’t matter at all.
“Here, girl.” Sandor Clegane knelt before her, between her and Joffrey. With a delicacy surprising in such a big man, he dabbed at the blood welling from her broken lip.
The moment was gone. Sansa lowered her eyes. “Thank you,” she said when he was done. She was a good girl, and always remembered her courtesies.
So a while back I wrote about how Sansa’s and Sandor’s interactions make for a really interesting unwriting of the typical male-gaze centered narrative because a) all of their textual interactions take place from Sansa’s perspective, b) we get to know Sandor best through the Sansa and Arya chapters, and c) Sandor is quite interested in Sansa as an active spectator, not a passive, looked-upon object.
Anyway, I was just rereading some of their passages and this struck me and I can’t believe I didn’t notice it before:
“There’s a pretty for you. Take a good long stare. You know you want to. I’ve watched you turning away all the way down the kingsroad. Piss on that. Take your look.”
-A Game of Thrones, ch. 29
First off, you can read the tonal shift here from mocking to hurt and very possibly sincere. As happens time and again, his bravado kind of falters and he ends up getting a little too raw, exposing just how damaged he is. He starts off intending to mock Sansa’s polite behavior and the courtly culture that surrounds them, but he ends up telling her about his scars.
He doesn’t say “look at me” here, which he does later in this scene and in several of their scenes together. He chooses “take your look” (the only time, I think, he says this). “Look at me” is a command with a clearly implied imbalance of power: Sandor has it, Sansa does not. ”Take your look” implies Sansa’s agency as the active spectator, and also acknowledges the weird power/semi-ownership she has over him. He wants her—and no one else—to look at him.
It also has a nice double meaning given Sandor’s later use of give/take language when he talks about the Little Bird. During his confession to Arya, he twists what he had earlier meant as a crude boast about Sansa “singing” to him, saying that he “took the song, she never gave it,” and that he should have “taken” her too.
Given the true meaning behind the ~song and the giving vs. taking of it, “take your look” takes on a whole new meaning to me. He might go about expressing it in a nasty, brutish way, but Sandor’s one of the only people who sees Sansa as a real person—not just a small cog in a large machine—who can and should be able to take whatever the fuck she wants.
He is no true knight but he saved me all the same. Save him if you can, and gentle the rage inside him
(via serenade-of-a-soldier)
One of the huge ambiguities about the Blackwater scene is what the hell are Sandor’s intentions here? And it’s not clear, and even from what we can tell from Sansa’s POV… it changes. He enters the room intending to take her away with him, to rescue her. And then after she closes her eyes, and he interprets it as her being unwilling or unable to look at him, he pulls his knife on her… and demands that she sings. And after she sings the Mother’s hymn and cups his cheek, he rips off his cloak and flees.
It’s easy to discern the motives behind his first and last actions: he wants to save her. At first, he thinks that he can, that she would go with him and he would keep her safe. At the last, he realizes that he cannot keep her safe, because he a danger to her.
But what of the middle?
What was going on inside Sandor Clegane’s mind when he pinned her to her bed with a knife and demanded that she sing? In order to figure this out, we need to look at Sandor’s personal construction of mercy and how Sansa destroys it.
Strong hands grasped her by the shoulders, and for a moment Sansa thought it was her father, but when she turned, it was the burned face of Sandor Clegane looking down at her, his mouth twisted in a terrible mockery of a smile.
(Source: gameofthronesdaily, via fuckyeahsansastark)
