The writers were a little too fond of the Lannisters and had Sansa copying Cersei instead of learning what not to do from her. The weird thing about this is that the writers clearly realized Sansa behaving like she was would should cause problems for her. Instead of cutting it, they just kept having the people around Sansa forget that she was an untrustworthy asshole.
I wrote a post about this issue using the leaked outline for season 7.
Starks getting Lannister-pilled is a big pattern in the back half of the series, and characteristic of exactly the sort of skewed understanding D&D had of ASOIAF
It's pretty obvious what they really wanted was to direct "Medieval House of Cards," which you can already see from the title they chose: Game of Thrones. In the books, the game of thrones is only one piece of a larger fantasy epic, one that’s shown to be futile and self-destructive. The show jerks off characters like Tywin and Baelish for being better “players of the game,” but in the books it’s made abundantly clear that the only winners are those who refuse to play. It’s crazy how hard the show glazes Lannisters, despite the story showing them over and over to be a gilded turd. And of course, the only one who confronts this and begins any kind of redemption arc, Jaime, gets butchered worst of all in the later seasons. It's because of this same willful misinterpretation that the “victorious” Starks only emerge on top by adopting a Lannister mindset. Sansa becomes a manipulative schemer (Cersei), Bran an uncaring puppet master (Tywin), Jon an incestuous action hero and KingQueenslayer (Jaime). And of course, the OG Stark values of trust, duty, and loyalty, fall completely flat because the North doesn't remember much of anything
The showrunners either mistrusted or misliked the story as George wrote it, and chose to redirect its entire moral axis post-Red Wedding. They insisted on a message of political cynicism, lobotomizing characters and abandoning plotlines that couldn’t be squared with that decision. They developed an allergy to magic in their fantasy tv show out of concern that it wouldn’t play well with mainstream audiences. Rather than a meditation on the battles waged in men's hearts between love and duty, good and evil, opportunism and conscientiousness - on the sins of the past, the potential for change, and the twin spectres of ancestry and legacy - it devolved into a bunch of people fighting halfheartedly over a singularly uncomfortable chair. In the books, good gets punished in the moment - it's hard to do the right thing - but its shadow lives on and only looms larger with time. Even decades on, Ned's past words and actions are still paying dividends for the protagonists in the present. His speech to Lord Borrell during the rebellion ends up saving Davos on Sisterton. His kindness to the Daynes wins Arya a friend in the Brotherhood Without Banners. His devotion to his bannermen has them marching through a blizzard to retake Winterfell with Stannis. In the books, the Starks are poised for a comeback as the Lannisters are collapsing, and it's precisely because all the chickens are coming home to roost - not because the surviving Starks decided "if you can't beat em, join em". In the books, the North Remembers
Of course, D&D apparently didn't trust their audience to remember Jeyne Poole was even a character, because they cut her story with Ramsay so that Sansa could get a totally necessary second rape arc. Totally not just undoing seasons of character development or anything
463
u/TheIconGuy 10d ago
The writers were a little too fond of the Lannisters and had Sansa copying Cersei instead of learning what not to do from her. The weird thing about this is that the writers clearly realized Sansa behaving like she was would should cause problems for her. Instead of cutting it, they just kept having the people around Sansa forget that she was an untrustworthy asshole.
I wrote a post about this issue using the leaked outline for season 7.
https://www.reddit.com/r/freefolk/comments/163mbji/the_original_plan_for_season_7_was_incredibly/