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naïve in her assumptions, are incredibly affecting and sympathetic. At the core of it, all she wants is to be safe and with her family. The care Martin puts into characterising this young girl as she is put through increasingly traumatic events after the death of her father, including being forced by Joffrey to look at Ned’s head mounted on a spike on the walls of the Red Keep, is a powerful start, delivering a character whose nuances go underappreciated by most audience members.
own wedding, Sansa has little choice but to follow the direction of whoever she thinks has the best chance of getting her back to her family. But even in this limited capacity, Sansa still exercises soft power when she can. For instance, whilst in hiding at the Eyrie under the alias Alayne Stone, she makes the active decision to aid her ward and only living protector Petyr Baelish in becoming regent to the heir of the Vale, the sickly child Sweetrobin Arryn. In the books, she tells Lord Nestor Royce that the attempted rapist Marillion was the one to push her aunt Lysa to her death, and in possibly my favourite Sansa-centric scene on the show, she tells Lord Yohn Royce that Lysa committed suicide in a
In my opinion, this is only strengthened by how Sansa adapts to the newly hostile atmosphere of King’s Landing. She begins to use her ladies’ courtesies to her advantage, gaining an understanding of the double meanings and duplicity of court after the Lannisters and Baratheons she thought she could trust turned her into their hostage at the onset of the War of the Five Kings. She feigns loyalty to her captors, continuing to profess her love of Joffrey even as she begins to hate him. The best exemplification of Sansa’s subtle agency in her new position of knowledge, is her saving of the knight Ser Dontos Hollard, who embarrasses himself by showing up to a tourney drunk and is nearly killed by Joffrey. It is Sansa’s clever suggestion that execution would not be as good of a punishment as being turned into Joffrey’s fool, sparing the man’s life. This is both an illustration of Sansa’s intelligence, that she’s able to play on her knowledge of Joffrey’s love of humiliating people, and her genuine kindness, making her one of the few characters to go out of her way to save people she has no benefit in saving. Similar acts of kindness such as her singing to calm the panicked women of King’s Landing during the siege of the Battle of Blackwater highlight this trait. In this way, Sansa is thematically allied with Jaime Lannister and Brienne of Tarth; knights who, despite their disillusionment with storybook chivalry, resolve to fulfil the values of the noble protector even in a land as harsh as Westeros. These characters incidentally also find themselves at the top of my list of favourite characters. Part of Martin’s craft is in creating a world that may seem needlessly dark but conveying an effective message through the characters that make the active decision to help those that cannot help themselves.
fit of self-hatred. This is a direct parallel to the first instance where Sansa was asked to corroborate a story in the first book – only now she is wiser, not caught in indecision but instead deciding to throw in her lot with Petyr, at the same time subtly demonstrating the power she coud hold over him. Altogether, an important reflection on Sansa’s growth, fully aware of the political implications of her actions. This is the point at which we leave Sansa in the books, hidden in the Vale, learning more about who to trust and how to manipulate things for her own ends. As it is, I am very excited to see how Sansa’s arc is expanded on with the (hopefully) impending release of the Winds of Winter, as I hope I’ve communicated here how
The accusation has also been levelled against Martin that Sansa remains a political pawn, simply playing into the hands of the larger figures like Cersei or Petyr Baelish. Certainly, in the cases of both her marriage to Tyrion Lannister and her escape from King’s Landing after Joffrey’s dramatic death at his
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