Who deserves to advance to the Sweet 16?

Did you vote in round one? If you're reading this you most likely filled out a bracket, but now it's time to go back in and enter your selects. These additional round one votes add points to whatever picks you prefer. And if you missed the window to fill out a bracket, you get to weigh in now and have your say and drive the end-results.

A weird thing happens when a bracketeer goes back in to vote, though. You may find that your mind has changed re this or that pick, even in the space of the few days since you submitted your bracket. And then you have to decide whether to stick with your original call, or negate that call in order to go with what your gut is currently telling you.

Case in point: Sansa versus Melisandre. My initial reaction was Sansa, hands down. I was texting with a friend before I submitted my bracket and he wrote, "Who the hell would vote for Sansa over Mellsandre?" I wrote back, "Me, before you just texted that." His questions threw me into a tailspin of indecision. I had put my finger on the scale of Sansa's intangibles so heavily that her rating had become warped. First off, she's a Stark kid. Plus, any character who was there in the pilot when they found those direwolf pups, let alone one who RECEIVED one of those direwolf pups, looms pretty large. And of course, she gets lots of screen time and has big moments of driving the overall narrative. Whether not you find the actor talented and appealing is subjective, but as it happens, Connington is a big fan.

But is all this enough to make her the hands-down victor over Melisandre in this battle? For much of the narrative, Sansa is a weak, simpering character. (This is even more the case in the books.) Not a very powerful or dynamic person. Not cunning.  Loves lemon cakes. Loves to sew. A victim. Her role in the melodrama is to be threatened and pushed around, first by Cersei and Joffrey. It is a compelling situation that she's made to marry into the family who murdered her father, but her role there is solely that of a victim. She is further victimized by Littlefinger, eventually in the worst possible way when he sells her off to the Boltons for a period of rape and torture at the hands of Ramsay. Yes, she manipulates the Littlefinger relationship to save the day in the Battle of the Bastards, and yes she has Ramsay's own hounds eat him for a snack, and yes she conspires with Arya to give Littlefinger a new mouth, right there in the middle of his throat. But you could argue that all of her big moments were REactive. Not ACTIVE, but in complete reaction to the events that had pushed her around like a pawn.

In her defense we could say that she learns Cunning, and grows into a very effective player of the Game. But we could also say that it was a hell of a long learning curve.

Melisandre, for her part, is a wizard for Christ sakes. The genre is fantasy, after all, and she is one of the only characters to literally wield superpowers. She's a hugely influential agent of change in terms of the plot, as her support volleys from one major character to another. She is single-minded of purpose, to defeat the dark in favor of the light, to serve her God, even if her idea of the Chosen One fluctuates wildly.

But she is undeniably a powerful character. When she convinced Stannis to kill Renly, this is a woman who birthed a murderous golem-demon-monster-thing from her very loins to take care of the murder. She delivered it STANDING UP, no less, and sent it off to carry out the task. She was a major player all the way up through the recent Battle of Winterfell, as her magical fires kept the humans in the fight, and were pretty much the only thing that allowed us viewers to actually see any of the events transpire. And she had a full arc, dying there in the snow in Westeros as she had prophesied, and with Davos watching, the same man who witnessed her delivering the homunculus on the beach. All in all a pretty quintessential G.O.T. arc.

That is why I went with the sorceress over the Lady in my initial bracket. But Sansa is still alive and kicking, up in Winterfell, with two eps left. And she has grown, in a way more akin to Drama than Drama's poor cousin Melodrama. So will I reverse my decision and up-vote Lady Lemon Cake in my Round 1 voting? Not sure yet. We have a day left to decide.

BE SURE TO CAST YOUR VOTE IN ROUND 1!  MAKE YOUR VOICE HEARD! SWEET 16 ANNOUNCED SUNDAY AT 5pm EST!