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Sansa's age and appearance


Lady Howell

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I needed a bra at 9 I was given a 34B but seen as the idea of skinny 9 year old me would have measured 34" around my rib cage is ridiculous I'm guessing I was more a 26"DD. I got my first period at 11 and definitely had pubes armpit hair etc at 10 too.


Not unusual at all. Usually you begin to develop a couple of years before your period starts but its not weird if you start first but grow your breasts later, some girls grow boobs and get their period and then get a sudden increase in breast size a few years later. Others don't get anything until mid teens.


I was getting served in pubs at 13, so It certainly is possible for young teens to look a lot older.


And yes to use statements which imply that its outside of the realms of imagination that a 13 year old girl would look so womanly is offensive.



Its not plain sailing having big boobs and the fact so many young women feel they need to go through surgery to make them feel more normal speaks volumes about our fucked up perceptions of female bodies and what is accepted as the norm.


I know that this statement goes both ways and that those with smaller than deemed normal breasts often feel the same.



I had read memoirs of a lady of pleasure, lady chaterly's lover and the marquis de sade's Justine, by 15 and on a less high brow but equally as explicit note had ploughed through the Jilly Coopers Riders, rivals, polo etc by 13. I don't think I was too young for any of them.


I also read Henry Miller at a young age and Annais Nin. Still not a freak.


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Personally I have more trouble envisioning Dany as a pregnant 13/14 year old with a 30 year old husband and a 45 year old bear drooling over her.

It's worse than that. Dany is described as both small and slender for her age. Ser Jorah is drooling over a girl who must look a couple of years *younger* than her age.

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Concerning reading habits:

We are not native English speakers. But mother had "Lady Chatterly's Lover" , original version, hidden in her book shelf. Of course I found it, at the age of twelve when I had my first English lessons at school. And I managed to read and understand it with the help of a dictionary.

And of course my mother knew about it, she was impressed by my language skills and willing to answer my questions though I did not ask much since I was embarrassed.

This never did any harm to me. I think there is a huge difference if kids read good books or if they watch youporn, especially if a book does not build unrealistic ideas about idealised, inhuman sex and beauty ideals. Sexual violence unfortunately exists in RL. And I want my children informed about life, sexuality and contraception.

Although I do not have any illusions: my kids have watched youporn just like anyone else their age and I can only hope it did not harm them. On the other hand I never saw any reason to limit their choice of literature.

And it is the violence that can be more troubling in the books. The "mature" content is not the issue here. One of my kids had nightmares at seven after he read about killings that happened in "Harry Potter", secretly under the bedcover since here I had asked him to wait until I would read it to him.

Back to topic:

I think the choice of the actress supports the idea that Sansa looks much older than she is. In the series it is thoroughly unbelievable that the girl Sansa had her menarche at the time given in the story. The actress looks like a voluptuous, tall and broad shouldered twenty year old athlete and not like a girl in puberty. Not bad since a skinny child could hardly have tempted Tyrion and in the books Sansa was described as " everything is already there" but the actress looks no way like fourteen, sorry.

Concerning Dany: I had my menarche at barely eleven and without clothes I looked rather womanly, breasts and body hair where they should be. And yet I was petite and slim, still am, a sporty girl. And yes, it can be troubling if boys have sexual expectations towards you when you are twelve and have nice breasts.

Although I was an early starter, at fourteen, with a lot of fun and a boy of the same age, there was not the slightest little bit of abuse in it since there was no power imbalance.

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You're making some rather inflated generalizations, and you sound completely patronizing.

That's ironic given that you're attempting to communicate your ostensibly wiser and more mature perspective to somebody.

Believe it or not but your words are more likely to find purchase in someone's mind if you don't litter them with condescending rhetoric. Everybody with an age advantage thinks they hold all the answers, but that's just a natural illusion of growing up. Eventually the truth will find its way to you, it always does.

... Perhaps, you will be kind enough to point out where exactly I was trying to be offensive or where I was using crude words (unless you are talking about the word "bullshit" which I do not consider crude since there is actually an emoticon on this board to express just that). In fact I was being very polite since I didn't make any remarks on your level of maturity based on your use of capslock and your condescending tone. So, perhaps you should do a little bit of soulsearching before you accuse someone else of being offensive.

And for what it's worth the fact that my generation and the current stock of 14 and 15 year olds have a lot more experience with graphic content isn't necessarly a bad thing. If you want to be a well-informed, active participant of society you need to be prepared to confront some pretty graphic imagery and all of that is a lot less shocking then what is described in ASOIAF (e.g. Film footage of the Syrian victims of chemical attacks is a whole lot more disturbing than what you find in the novels).

... And tell me where exactly did I speak against this? Of course wisdom and other intelectual capacities increase when you get older, but that doesn't change the fact that some people are a lot quicker in picking these things up then others. We are all different and thus we should all make out for ourselves whether or not we are able to read and comprehend these novels. Generic statements like the one you made in your first post are therefore uncalled for and plainly wrong.

And by the way you'll never win an argument by being offensive. So, take care of not being condescending towards other people. A "wise" poster once told me that.

So, basically what you're saying is, if I wasn't ready for it at that age then nobody is. Completely ignoring the fact that we all have separate identities and backgrounds, which might make some of us more capable of taking on the daunting task of trying to sift some deeper meaning from out of these books.

Oh, and for what it's worth look at this series. There are loads of young characters who are clearly shown to be wise. Often even wiser than some of the older characters (Young Maester Aemon, Bran, Jojen, Sansa,...). Of course the opposite is also found and we have young characters making less than wise decisions, but that yet again shows that wisdom and intellectual maturity does not manifest in each of us in the same way. Some never achieve it, others almost immediatly get it.

Maybe I do sound patronizing, it doesn't matter. And I do not or ever will think that I hold all the answers because I don't. But what my gut tells me from these two posts is that this is something that I would have wrote about 10 years ago. And that is what makes me stop discussing this beyond this post.

There is an age restriction on consuming alcohol for a reason, or R rated movies. ASOIAF is full of very graphic violence, sex and other disturbing stuff like decomposing of Tywin in Jaime's chapter. These things are not something that a 14 year girl should be reading, LOTR is more appropriate at that age

Peace, and I'm out as I'm clearly the only one with this opinion here.

p.s. and as I wrote before, I did read stuff like this when I was a teen (Crime and Punishment from Dostoevsky at age 12 the first time I think) and it didn't mess me up at all, so I understand the position all of you here are taking.

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be it male or female , some people just mature faster than others (i did , several posters according to their posts here did ) so i don't see it as that uncommon or alarming in anyway .

i recall sansa as womanly ,tall and graceful not sure where these curves come from (randa's statement regards the comparison between herself and sansa ,thus the talk of curves )

as to the average reading age , well ,i am sorry but Mr snow's statement is simply ridiculous (we have had a thread a while back about this very subject but i can't seem to find it )

i first read the series in 2007 (i was 12) asoiaf was not the first mature or graphic piece of work I've read, not even close

and people should realize that each mind develops differently compared to others according to many valuables (culture ,parents , school , and personal orientations ,etc )

it's very narrow minded to think that one's age determines one's understanding and one's grasp of a subject

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I don't think I'd recommend the series to anyone aged under 16. It's not the sex, but some of the violence would have upset me as a young teenager - particularly things like the Reek chapters, or Chyswyck laughing about raping the innkeeper's daughter. While one can see far more graphic violence on visual media, it tends to be depicted in cartoonish ways. What makes the violence of ASOIAF disturbing is that it is well-written.


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as to the average reading age , well ,i am sorry but Mr snow's statement is simply ridiculous (we have had a thread a while back about this very subject but i can't seem to find it )

i first read the series in 2007 (i was 12) asoiaf was not the first mature or graphic piece of work I've read, not even close

and people should realize that each mind develops differently compared to others according to many valuables (culture ,parents , school , and personal orientations ,etc )

it's very narrow minded to think that one's age determines one's understanding and one's grasp of a subject

:agree: I was 14 in 2007 when I started reading them and for me to it wasn't the first work that dealt with some more mature content.

I don't think I'd recommend the series to anyone aged under 16. It's not the sex, but some of the violence would have upset me as a young teenager - particularly things like the Reek chapters, or Chyswyck laughing about raping the innkeeper's daughter. While one can see far more graphic violence on visual media, it tends to be depicted in cartoonish ways. What makes the violence of ASOIAF disturbing is that it is well-written.

It isn't just visual media (I'm assuming your talking about fiction here). There is plenty of graphic violence in documentaries and in the news, and non of it is cartoonish since all of the things you see on there are real as opposed to the things depicted in ASOIAF (e.g. footage of dead children in Syria, of concentration camps, ...).

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it's very narrow minded to think that one's age determines one's understanding and one's grasp of a subject

But I DO NOT think that at all! I read stuff like that at 12, I understood it perfectly. I speak 7 different languages, 3 of them when I was 12. That does not mean anything regarding the needed maturity to completely understand and take something as emotionally complex as ASOIAF is. Actually, I read GOT when I was 15 and I thought I got it, but it doesn't mean I really did at every level possible. I'm 27 now and I'm still filling in some of the stuff that I missed. This topic alone proves my point, just read what the OP posted in the opening post. Or every other thread that goes I hate this character or that one, it speaks volumes of maturity and age of those members.

Age is needed to properly put things into place no matter how mature some of you think you are, and that is something every kid thinks, including me just a decade+ - earlier. But life teaches us stuff, gives us perspective (well, most of us). Sure we are all different and some are definitely completely able to take in ASOIAF both emotionally and intellectually at an early age, but the same number of kids or more are not, so I'd always choose a conservative side rather then one potentially damaging to a young psyche.

p.s. Age demographic of the board I posted earlier was something I roughly estimated on a certain study from a friend about this issue, i.e. age of ASOIAF readers. He made a poll, there were about 30000 people that voted there and the numbers suggested the biggest portion of demos was 12-15. But it is to be expected on the internet, where majority posters are young people.

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But I DO NOT think that at all! I read stuff like that at 12, I understood it perfectly. I speak 7 different languages, 3 of them when I was 12. That does not mean anything regarding the needed maturity to completely understand and take something as emotionally complex as ASOIAF is. Actually, I read GOT when I was 15 and I thought I got it, but it doesn't mean I really did at every level possible. I'm 27 now and I'm still filling in some of the stuff that I missed. This topic alone proves my point, just read what the OP posted in the opening post.

Age is needed to properly put things into place no matter how mature some of you think you are, and that is something every kid thinks, including me just a decade+ earlier. But life teaches us stuff, gives us perspective (well, most of us). Sure we are all different and some are definitely completely able to take ASOIAF emotionally and intellectually at an early age, but the same number of kids or more are not, so I'd always choose a conservative side rather then one potentially damaging to a young psyche.

i understand your points good sir and they are valid but what i personally advocate is that parents should treat with each child individually without comparison to others (don't get me wrong , experience helps make diagnosing a problem much easier , as a med student i should know) but just because something is generally correct doesn't make it true .

parents should get to know their kids and understand these variables that i mentioned and not try to establish a bar for their kids to reach or a social norm that is expected of a certain age , these bars and norms that parents and society set open a very wide door for stigmas and general rejection

so as i said at the beginning ,treat each kid according to what this kid is like

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i understand your points good sir and they are valid but what i personally advocate is that parents should treat with each child individually without comparison to others (don't get me wrong , experience helps make diagnosing a problem much easier , as a med student i should know) but just because something is generally correct doesn't make it true .

parents should get to know their kids and understand these variables that i mentioned and not try to establish a bar for their kids to reach or a social norm that is expected of a certain age , these bars and norms that parents and society set open a very wide door for stigmas and general rejection

so as i said at the beginning ,treat each kid according to what this kid is like

Absolutely! But that opens another can of worms: parenting. Not all parents are good parents and in today's busy world some just don't have the time to properly be involved in their children's lives, sadly.

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I was continuously confused for a fifteen/sixteen year old when I was twelve. My mother has a larger than average butt, noticeable curves, and my grandmother has large breasts. They didn't get their womanly features until their twenties, a fact which scares them since I had their twenty year old body features at twelve. By the time I was thirteen, I had C'Cups and a women's body. Most of the time, if I left my house and walked around the block, some older man would have called me "beautiful" or said "nice ass" as I walked by. It's not out of this world for a younger girl to be developed before they hit 15/16. I remember being in the seventh grade and looking around me at all the girls, I saw girls who were 5'11, girls with double D cups, girls who ginormous butts, and girls with no breasts or butt -- they looked like walking sticks. Body shapes varies, especially with age.



Sansa happens to be one of those girls who developed quick. *shrugs* It's not like GRRM has a twisted fantasy and imagines all younger women had busty and looked like real women at eleven/twelve. Look at Arya. She isn't developed and she's eleven almost twelve by DwD. ^_^

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are we discussing our puberty experiences ? :P

Seems like, although given that the OP took issue with Sansa's curves at that age being "unrealistic," other posters pointing out that it isn't necessarily unrealistic with reference to their own or other experiences seems like it's fair game.

oh god i read berserk when i was 12-13 is that why i am so messed up today?

Probably. :D The events of the Eclipse in Berserk make the Red Wedding look like a picnic.

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People grow differently and some develop physically faster than others. It doesn't matter to me how mature looking a person is, if that person is only 14. This is the reason why I can understand Sansa's current naivety when it comes to a lot of things. There's a world of difference in the way someone thinks and reasons out when they're in their teens as opposed to how they become when they reach their twenties, thirties, etc. 17, 18, 19...that's still pretty young and I have nieces of that age. It's not reasonable to expect the maturity of a 26 year old from a 17 year old (although in some instances, people also grow up faster depending on the circumstances); Sansa's appearance means little and it's really how she matures and comes out of situations that I look forward to.





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