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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.