Sarah McGill

In the third Game of Thrones book, A Storm of Swords, Jamie Lannister’s hand is cut off. I love this moment because it is very simple and it requires Jamie to reconstruct his entire identity.

Even if you’ve never read the series, most of what you need to know about who Jamie is is present in the chapter leading up to his mutilation. At this point, Jamie has been captured by Brienne, his hands are chained, and they are traveling. The chapter starts:

They are ambushed by archers and even though Jamie is a chained prisoner, he takes command, pinpointing where the archers are and telling Brienne to charge them. They do and the archers scatter.

Jamie acquires a sword and fights Brienne in an attempt to escape. The most telling line during the exchange is, “Jamie’s blood was singing. This was what he was meant for; he never felt so alive as when he was fighting, with death balanced on every stroke.”

They both cut each other and eventually Jamie falls and Brienne nearly drowns him. However, they are ambushed again and captured, Jamie attempting to make bargains and promises of gold all the way. However Jamie’s word isn’t worth much because once upon a time Jamie swore an oath to the king and then killed him and his family.

So here’s what we know about Jamie.

-He won’t show fear. Upon walking into a recently ravaged town, while chained up and unarmed, he is so cocksure and proud he starts singing a bawdy song.

-He is constantly fighting to gain the upper hand in conversation through wit and bribery. Normally, he is successful.

-He doesn’t respect Brienne and though he acknowledges toward the end of the fight that she is strong, he openly insults her skill, makes excuses about being out of practice in his head, and continues to degrade her afterwards.

-He is ashamed of being the Kingslayer.

-He is an amazing fighter. Specifically, this is who he is. This is what everyone knows him for and almost no one is better than him.

And then: “Sunlight ran silver along the edge of the arakh as it came shivering down, almost too fast to see. And Jamie screamed.”

Jamie’s sword hand is cut off. Both practically and symbolically, he has lost what makes him who he is.

He is ridiculed and made ridiculous when he picks up a sword with his left hand and fails utterly, his opponent “hopping from leg to leg” before he “planted a wet kiss atop [Jamie’s] head.”

He has lost his pride, his skill, himself.

When Brienne calls him craven for wanting to die, something no one has ever, ever called him, Jamie wonders, “They took my sword hand. Was that all I was, a sword hand? Gods be good, is it true?”

Hey, look, it’s the question that will drive his internal arc for the rest of the book.

So who will Jamie be now?

Jamie wants to remake himself in his old image. All he can possibly imagine being is who he used to be. He motivates himself to live with the thought of revenge and replacing his hand with a golden one. He reminds himself, “I am stronger than they know…I am still a knight of the Kingsguard.”

He retains his wit:

When a doctor cleans his wound, he refuses pain killers:

But returning to who he was is impossible, which is part of why this arc is so compelling. On a surface level, Jamie desperately wants to regain his old identity and he will fight for that for a long time. But really, as soon as he lost his hand that is no longer an option. Not only does this make his struggle all the more difficult and compelling, but the character arc stronger because everything is pointing to him changing.

As he begins to recover, Jamie is unable to maintain his derision for Brienne. When the men holding them captive try to rape her, he gives her advice, tells her to wall herself off, as he has done (also a great hint at Jamie’s suppressed emotions, which is going to be really important). When she insists on fighting and the men are about to mutilate her too, he protects her by reminding them that if she is raped, her father won’t pay for her ransom. The men are forced to back off. Jamie makes light of it, jokes again at Brienne’s expense, “You’re hard enough to look at with a nose. Besides, I wanted to make the goat say ‘thapphiteth.’” But we know this isn’t true. They’re in this together and she saved him from his suicidal thoughts.

Later, after insulting Brienne’s loyalty, he actually apologizes, “Are you as a thick as a castle wall? That was an apology. I am tired of fighting with you. What say we make a truce?”

After riding away from Brienne soon after, Jamie puts himself at a great deal of risk by returning to her and saving her in a bear pit. He begins biting back his cruel comments and acknowledges not only her skill, but why she has chosen to become a knight and suffer the brunt of the world. Being a more traditional lady is something she simply can’t be. That recognition requires a lot of respect and introspection.

Jamie’s loss of identity slowly brings something else to the forefront: a large part of his old identity is being the Kingslayer and of this he is deeply ashamed. If he wants to regain his old identity, he will have to accept being the Kingslayer rather than just stumbling into it. He can’t do that. He’s too ashamed. While his respect for Brienne arises subtly and unconsciously, Jamie has to face this actively.

When Jamie’s hand is cut off, he doesn’t quite realize how much he doesn’t want to be the Kingslayer. That comes out when he begins to confide in Brienne, telling her what happened the day he killed the king. He has suppressed his emotional turmoil, but by talking about it, he has to confront his past choices and how it has made everyone treat him. Later, he has horrible dreams and agonizes over his decisions and guilt. In other words, he becomes more empathetic and emotionally intelligent. When at one point Brienne calls him Kingslayer, “Jamie, he thought, my name is Jamie.”

When Jamie reaches Kingslanding, the external forces set in. He has hoped to regain stability when he gets home. With his family, he knows who he is. No longer will he be wandering the woods, agonizing over his choices. At home, he is the commander of the kingsguard, Tywin’s son, and Cersei’s brother and lover.

But everything is just a little off. His son is dead, supposedly killed by Jamie’s own brother. He and Cersei are still physically attracted to each other, but she’s distant. She avoids him because she’s afraid of being caught and, unbeknownst to Jamie, is sleeping with someone else. Being in the kingsguard is meant to be a position for life, but while he was away, one of the guards was replaced due to old age. So even Jamie’s position is uncertain. His father tells him that he should give up his position and when Jamie refuses, flying into a rage, his father says, “‘You are not my son.’ Lord Tywin turned his face away. ‘You said you are the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, and only that. Very well, ser. Go do your duty.’” A little while later, Jamie thinks, “I am a stranger in my own House.” Jamie has lost his entire family, his entire house. He is barely a Lannister anymore.

Of course, it’s not a straight line and there are many smaller moments I’m not covering here. Jamie still wallows in his shame at being a kingslayer, renaming himself that several times. His wit is still aggressive and cruel. He and Brienne still clash. He respects her, but they’re never going to be friends. He has another encounter with Cersei that effectively ends their relationship because their desires have gone different ways. He struggles with the physical weight of his sword on his right side and the clumsiness of his left hand. He claims to be as good a swordsman with his left hand, but when he trains in secret, he is roundly defeated.

But at the end of the book, his new budding identity culminates when he sends Brienne to find Sansa. Brienne swore an oath to find and protect the girl. Cersei wants Sansa dead and by sending Brienne away, Jamie is betraying Cersei. Jamie’s father gives him a beautiful, mocking sword, which he gives to Brienne, effectively giving up on his identity of the best swordsman in the land. He also asks Brienne to name it Oathkeeper and keep Sansa safe with it, an attempt to redeem himself vicariously through her.

Jamie’s arc after this book is beyond the scope of this essay, but I want to mention one moment that happens later, because it is so vivid and painful. Jamie begins to train using his left hand with Ilyn Payne, a man without a tongue. The reason for the choice is obvious, as he can’t tell anyone about the beating he gives Jamie every night. But there’s a wonderful moment where Payne smiles at Jamie because even though he can’t tell anyone, he knows Jamie’s shame. It’s a great moment of vulnerability and heartache.

I love this character arc because it begins with a simple act and then unfurls into a complex and beautiful shift in character. He is still fighting to be who he is and there are parts of him that will remain the same, such as his military skill and biting humor. But the core of who he was isn’t sustainable. The change is not radical. Large changes of character often feel ingenuine and impossible. Jamie’s arc turns on one small idea: he wants to be someone who keep his word. He grows close to a woman whose defining trait is loyalty. He becomes a stranger in the Lannister house, a house of liars. He acknowledges and turns away from his past misdeeds. In the end, he sends a loyal woman to keep her word with a sword named Oathkeeper. And that choice is not a choice he ever would have made before.

In the Game of Thrones series, Sansa Stark is one of the more disliked character. Let me begin by saying I understand. We inherently like characters who are active, competent, and clever; Sansa is none of these things. Littlefinger and the Hound are unquestionably worse than Sansa, but they’re good at what they do and passionately pursue their desires, so we like them more. Someone recently said to me, “In fiction, it matters a lot less if someone does terrible things as long as they can deliver a good quip,” which says a lot for why people like Jamie Lannister.

We’re also primed not to like Sansa because of the way she’s framed (note, I haven’t seen the show, so I’m speaking exclusively about the book here). Sansa falls depressingly into the snooty, preppy, mean girl stereotype in the first book. We’re supposed to hate her complacent femininity and love Arya’s rebellious masculinity. Sansa does dull needlepoint, pretends to like horses to impress Joffrey (all while refusing to ride in order to please her sister), and her love of pretty dresses and tournaments comes off as foolish given the world she lives in. Ultimately, I think there are a lot of missed opportunities with her character. Despite everything, Sansa retains an (arguably misguided) optimism and I think that’s very admirable. Later in the series Sansa begins to rely heavily on her courtesy to save her from physical and mental abuse, but there isn’t much discussion of the issue beyond pointing it out. Sansa could have engaged with this defense mechanism, learning how to use it and progressing through an arc of armored kindness – something no one else in the series is doing. But that hasn’t been forthcoming.

As the Starks scatter further and further across Westeros, they frequently draw strength from thinking about their family, especially what they admire about and miss from them. It’s odd that Sansa never draws strength from her father’s unshakable loyalty, especially as it would have served as a perfect way for her to continue engaging with her father’s death – which was the first moment that really shook her worldview. This would allow her to be introspective as she simultaneously draws strength from and is torn down by the same event. Ultimately Sansa goes in none of these directions, which is a shame. But despite that, Sansa’s character on a thematic level is incredibly compelling and even necessary. By having Sansa clash with the cruelty of the world of Game of Thrones, she drives home the themes and worldview of the entire series.

Game of Thrones is about a world that is incredibly cruel. It mocks and casts down those who can’t trick, lie, or murder their way through life. Death, rape, mutilation, and torture are the everyday. This is expressed in numerous ways, from the casual cruelty of people like Gregor Clegane to the obliteration of the countryside during the war after Robert Baratheon’s death to the creeping corruption and greed in Kingslanding. But the best way to convey a worldview is to bring it into conversation with an opposing worldview.

Let me take a moment to say that Sansa is not the only character who brings about this conversation. Catelyn Stark’s arc is a descent into grief and an acceptance of the world’s cruelty. She begins a loving, kind, if hard, woman. But as she loses her family one by one, the world drives her into crippling grief, manifested most cruelly after her death when she becomes the undead Lady Stoneheart, who can do nothing but think of avenging her family.¹ Ned Stark’s arc is also one of a descent into hopelessness, although ultimately Ned’s arc is less about the character learning something than the audience learning something. Ned’s death is the moment that drives home to the audience that this world is malicious and it will hurt you. Robb Stark and Jon Snow follow a similar descent. They remain good people to their deaths and that is ultimately their downfall. Brienne of Tarth is one of the few standing counter examples to the worldview of Game of Thrones. She is heinously naïve, but thus far her bullheaded loyalty has weather her, even winning her some modicum of respect from Jamie Lannister. However, Brienne doesn’t show up until the second book and isn’t a POV character until the fourth, so she doesn’t embody a contrasting worldview out of the gate like Sansa does.²

Sansa believes in heroic knights and happy endings. She believes it more strongly than anyone else in the series. This, however, is not how the world is and learning this fact comprises most of Sansa’s arc throughout the series. The first time her belief in truth and justice is shaken is when her dire wolf Lady is killed for the crimes of Arya’s dire wolf Nymeria. In this encounter, Joffrey (whom Sansa is deeply infatuated with) threatens and insults one of Arya’s friends, so Arya hits him and Nymeria bites him. Because of Joffrey’s hyperbolic tale of the encounter to his mother Cersei, Cersei demands the wolf be killed. However, the wolf is already gone and so Lady is killed in Nymeria’s place. Sansa never really lets go of this moment because it’s the first time the world shows her its ugly colors. The event further strains Sansa’s worldview because really it’s Joffrey’s fault Lady is dead. But she’s too infatuated with him to see his cruelty (and thus the world’s cruelty), so she blames Arya.

The midpoint of Sansa’s arc in the first book is during the Hand’s tourney. Sansa loves tourneys. She loves the roses and the knights and the valor, honor, and glory that she’s attached to the event. The tourney appears to reflect everything Sansa holds dear. However, the reality of the world is lurking underneath. In the middle of the tourney, Gregor Clegane’s lance catches a young boy under the armor and the boy dies. Sansa fails to grasp the implications of this until later that night when the Hound escorts her back to her bed.

So, the Hound. The Hound embodies the worldview of Game of Thrones. He understands how the world really is perhaps better than anyone in the series.³ He refuses to be a knight because he knows that all the vows and gestures of honor are a sham. Rather, he adopts the world’s cruelty and stoicism and spits at any attempt to see the world through rose-colored glasses. He is the world telling Sansa how it is.

When the Hound takes Sansa back to her bedchamber after the tourney, she is quite literally forced to face the ugly nature of the world through the scars on his face and the carelessly painful way he got them (his brother Gregor pushed him against a brazier).⁴ He bluntly points out that Gregor killing that boy was no mistake. It was undoubtedly deliberate. This is the second death Sansa must face and it is hardly the honorable death her father gave her wolf. This is a devious, malicious death and it stains the whole tourney. When Sansa attempts to offer the Hound platitudes, complementing his fighting and agreeing that Gregor is no true knight, the Hound spits on that too. These are just songs she’s learned to sing, he says. They aren’t true and, he suggests, she doesn’t even believe them. Her understanding of the world has been mercilessly attacked and she must know decide if she will accept or reject this new ideology.

Sansa does her best to reject it, but there is still one more blow coming her way: the death of her father. This is the real blow, the moment that tears the veil from her (and our) eyes. The reason I say that thematically Sansa is important is because of this moment. We, the readers, along with all the characters in the book have been led to believe that if Ned admits he’s a traitor, he will be allowed to live. His death states loud and clear how this story is going to go: in pain, blood, and death. It will not be fair. Hundreds if not thousands will die and most of the time the deaths will be unsettling unjust. In this moment, Sansa is our eyes into the world. Sansa is us believing Ned will live and then being utterly crushed. Arya, Jon, Bran, and especially Catelyn have their own moments of grief, but it is not as immediately devastating for them and, more importantly, they were already aware that this world was unfair. It is through Sansa that we feel the blow most intensely.

The third death is, like the first, perpetrated by Joffrey, if much more explicitly this time. Sansa’s disillusionment with Joffrey represents her greater disillusionment, while also allowing for the scope of that disillusionment to stay small and relatable to the audience. As I mentioned in my essay on Jamie Lannister, George R.R. Martin is great at small shifts in character. Sansa doesn’t radically change who she is. In the second book she’s still chasing the ideas of honorable knights and has begun to use her pleasantries as an armor. But in this moment she sees Joffrey for who he is. That is a small, but also effective and very telling change in character.

Sansa’s arc of disillusionment is strongest in the first book, but I do want to touch on how it plays out in A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords. In these books, the narrative of the heroic knight saving the damsel is turned on its head.

The drunken knight-made-fool Dontos Hollard arrives to be save Sansa. It seems she will be saved by a valorous knight, who frequently compares himself to the legendary hero Florian. But his appearance immediately makes clear that this will not be beautiful or grand. He’s an incompetent drunk with no respect for Sansa’s bodily autonomy. Before the death of her father, Sansa would have rejected the offer out of hand because Dontos is, to her, a mockery of knighthood. Instead, she garbs herself in her courtesies and accepts the offer, all while being heartbroken on the inside.

This farce plays out until Joffrey’s wedding. During the wedding Joffrey is poisoned and Sansa must face yet another death – the death of the one who was the cause of her initial and final disillusionment. She rejoices. Sansa of all people finds delight in death. After Dontos takes her from Kingslanding to Littlefinger, Littlefinger kills Dontos and explains to Sansa that he planned all of this. Dontos’s apparent good intentions were all bought. He didn’t even really care about her that much. Sansa’s attempt to read her rescue in the conventional narrative of heroic knight saving damsel is shattered.

At this point in the series, Sansa (like her father) generally serves as an example of how she is wrong about the world. Hers is a classic Disillusionment Arc – wherein a character learns a cold, hard truth about the world to their sorrow. Despite this, she does manage to survive. When Brienne shows up in A Clash of Kings, we see an example of someone who is passionately loyal and good and manages not only to survive but thrive. Brienne’s bullheaded determination to see her mission through and remain loyal to a dead woman is exactly the kind of thing that shouldn’t survive in this world. But Brienne keeps fighting, smashing her way through walls to ensure that she keeps her word. And it seems very appropriate that Brienne should be trying to save Sansa, as if a glimmer of hope is trying to save the one person struggling to remember the good things about the world.

1. What? This essay has footnotes? So fancy. Anyway, note that as of this writing, only five books are published. If Jon is in fact alive or Brienne dead, I may remember to come back and edit this.
2. This is not to say the world must be or always is this way. Part of what makes any world interesting is that it is not static. Jamie Lannister is incredibly cruel, but he gets a small redeeming arc in A Storm of Swords. Tyrion Lannister is generally pretty decent. Brienne and Sansa are still trekking and the Starks, who are easily the most morally upright characters, are the heart and protagonists of the first two books. It seems like since the first book is ostensibly about the audience losing its innocence and realizing the horror of the world through Ned’s death, the last book could be about a shift in worldview that would bring us to a hopeful and thematically satisfying close.
3. Despite the fact that Sandor Clegane, the Hound, stands in for the world and it’s cruelty, he is not unchanging. Fascinatingly, he has something of a positive arc, unlike his brother Gregor who is nothing but an obedient monster. This appears almost immediately when he opens up to Sansa about the origin of his scarring – something he has never told anyone. He often protects Sansa from Joffrey and saves her during the riot in A Clash of Kings, cutting his way through the crowd in a gesture that is clearly born out of his need to keep her safe. After he flees Kingslanding, he spends a good deal of time with Arya, which seems like it should provide great contrast to his relationship with Sansa, but honestly it’s never done much for me. Arya is already willing to be brutal and she’s too defiant to allow Sandor to corrupt her toward cruelty. But he does have a kind of affection for her, I guess, and if anything he does end up giving up his warlike lifestyle for a simpler, melancholic one. Sandor is not in the end redeemed or worthy of forgiveness and his acts of kindness always come off as kind of wrong. To follow the metaphor of him as the world, it is as if the world wants to be good and strives hard to save what hope exists, but is so broken and scarred that it’s unable to be truly vulnerable and kind. And this has thus far been a pretty good reflection of the world – there are glimmers of hope, but the world doesn’t know how to nurture them.

In the third book in the Game of Thrones series, due to broken promises and general vindictiveness, Walder Frey schemes to kill Catelyn Stark and her son Robb at a wedding held in his household. During the fight, Robb is wounded. Before he’s killed, Catelyn grabs a knife and holds one of the Freys captive, hoping Walder will let her son go. Walder Frey is unmoved and Catelyn kills her captive before being killed herself. In the book, her captive is Walder Frey’s grandson Jinglebell. In the show, it’s Walder Frey’s wife Joyeuse. It’s a small change, but one that shifts the culmination of Catelyn’s arc enough to be noteworthy.

Catelyn Stark’s arc is one of a descent into grief. After Ned’s death, she strives to hold her depression at bay by advising Robb and taking care of her father. But the hits keep coming – Bran and Rickon, her father, Arya probably, and Sansa, who seems well and truly lost. When Robb’s death becomes eminent, she succumbs to her grief. In the book, she’s brought back to life as Lady Stoneheart, a being of vengeance and death. George R.R. Martin often uses death to punctuate an important character moment and so it is with Catelyn. The Frey she kills is the first life she takes and a symbol of her new view of the world – which skews more toward cruelty in the book and hopelessness in the show. Before, Catelyn argued heatedly against the war because it wouldn’t avenge Ned and only ensure more death. But in her final moment, after Robb has been run through, she kills her captive, even though it has no purpose.

So let us speak of the choice of captive. There are logistical explanations for the show choosing Lady Frey, a character we’ve already had dealings with, rather than introducing a new character just to kill him. But I’m more interested in examining it as a deliberate choice that resonates in a specific way.

In the book, Catelyn kills Jinglebell. Jinglebell, as Walder’s grandson, is a reflection of Robb. Catelyn specifically entreats Walder Frey to spare her son for the life of his grandson. The focus then is on Catelyn’s relationship with her children. It makes her choice even crueler because after everything she’s done to save her children, she’s willing to kill a child (Jinglebell is about 50, but the symbolic parallel stands).

The choice is desperate because Walder has a lot of children and Jinglebell is framed more as fool than family. Walder’s disinterest in his grandson’s life stands in stark contrast to Catelyn’s frantic bid for her son’s life. At the same time, it serves as a chilling parallel between Catelyn and Walder because Catelyn ultimately only values Jinglebell’s life as a tool to save her child. When she loses her child and kills Jinglebell, it is a declaration that she has given up on family, life, and redemption, becoming as cruel as Walder Frey.

In the show, Catelyn kills Joyeuse. Joyeuse is Catelyn’s mirror because she is a wife and (presumably) mother, the same as Catelyn. By killing Joyeuse, she’s killing herself. The show has no intention of bringing Catelyn back as Lady Stoneheart, so the murder is less a climax leading to a dramatic character change and more the culmination of Catelyn’s grief. By killing Joyeuse, the focus is turned onto Catelyn and allows us in our last moments to look hard at Catelyn and see her utter hopelessness.

Threatening to kill Joyeuse is a less desperate bid than threatening to kill Jinglebell, but it’s still a last-ditch effort. Joyeuse is Walder Frey’s eighth wife and to rub salt in the wound, he marries again soon after. Walder’s disregard for Joyeuse and Catelyn’s decision to murder the woman still compares and contrasts Walder and Catelyn’s vindictiveness in the same way as Jinglebell’s death, but it’s not quite as heartbreaking. It’s a murder of herself, which is more an act of hopelessness than an act of cruelty. But maybe that’s best because it gives us a greater sense of closure. Catelyn progressing from kind mother to hopeless widow with no family is a satisfying arc. The book, on the other hand, progresses from kind mother to vindictive monster and it would be a shame to not explore that monstrousness. Since the show doesn’t plan on using Lady Stoneheart, it’s more satisfying to end with the focus on Catelyn breaking under her despair, numbly killing a woman and thus herself.