I used to find Sansa dull and annoying, but her adventures with Littlefinger have changed my mind. I like what an unconventional fantasy heroine she is. Arya is a more typical character of the genre, but Sansa has ended up being surprisingly complex.
This reminds me of how all of my expectations were turned on their head with regard to Jaime, too. He was so loathsome at first, and he’s still pretty much a total jerk, but he’s a great character.
Too bad we’ll never know how the fucking story ends.
It drives me nuts when people are mean about Sansa. Jesus fuck, she’s practically a little kid! You never made any dumb decisions when you were 13? You weren’t, you know, a little ignorant of world politics?
Sansa brings all the “ew, girls are stupid and yucky!” boys and girls to the yard.
I started liking her when I saw that she was reacting to all the trauma and horror around her in the same way I would: by getting depressed. I’m so sorry I’m not a badass from birth like apparently 99% of the other readers of this series are.*
*my exposure to ASOIAF fans is mostly through the Westeros board, which I had to stop reading to preserve my blood pressure.
True but she was also drinking lots of wine (it seemed to hint she was becoming a wino). May be just hangovers… Of course there are the other hints to consider as well. Maybe she’s pregnant, maybe not.
Zsofia & gallows fodder: Sansa might not have been able to understand politics that well (although, I suspect many noble 13-year-old girls in Medieval times had a pretty good understanding of politics – they had to), but she should have been able to see that Geoffrey was a monster, a coward, bully, and liar.
However, Sansa is a great character. I suspect that Littlefinger will corrupt her and she will turn on the other Starks.
She figured it out soon enough, though. I mean, I’d have noticed a little earlier, but I’m 30. Also, she’d grown up knowing she was going to have to do this whole political marriage thing, but, maybe to make it easier, she’d been spoonfed all this courtly romance stuff about it. She’d never really left Winterfell her whole life, so when she met, omg, the royal family, who are, like, her dad’s friends and all! And she’s going to marry a prince! And he looks just like a prince is supposed to look! Can you blame her for being dazzled? And for being defensive and in denial when it turns out that everything’s really, really awful?
I just don’t understand why people are looking at her through the lens of what she should have done and then hating her for not doing that. I mean, Scarlett O’Hara shouldn’t have been such a self-centered bitch who chased after another woman’s husband, but…that’s the story. There would be no story if she wasn’t like that. There would be no story if Sansa wasn’t a perfectly average young pre-teen girl who let her crush on an unsuitable boy blind her.
Ned shouldn’t have been so stuck on honor. Robert Baratheon shouldn’t have been such a boorish drunk. Gregor should stop raping and murdering all those innocent people. So what? That’s the way the story goes.
I don’t think the series will be completed, but if it was, I bet the throne will be won by some character Martin introduces in the last 700 pages of the last book.
Admittedly I’ have to go and I missed the middle of this thread…but isn’t Jon the obvious choice here?
Assuming he doesn’t get killed by Martin in a fit of "hhahaha fuck you, audience!), it seems like he’s the one to beat. He’s a true heir, I believe, and he’s well on his way to being a Big Hero.
I think Sansa Stark is probably Martin’s third best creation after Jaime and Tyrion Lannister, in that the writing for her chapters is uniformly gold. We get a truly wonderful perspective from a character who is in wayyyyy over her head in almost every sense. I actually hope her character gets a shred of redemption by the end, though knowing Martin my wishes on the matter are probably a particularly sordid death sentence.
I did have a bit of an argument in an earlier long thread on the series ( back in…wow, 2006 - how depressing ) over whether she was written as being natively a bit dim as well as young and naive ( my stance ) or just young and naive ( others ). I still say she’s not terribly bright, relative to her siblings at least. But that’s one of the things I like best about Martin’s characterization of her - it’s so rare that we get such a subtle, well-done portrayal of that type of person in epic fantasy of all things.
Martin will probably never finish. But I gotta give him credit - he’s still achieved a lot with what he has produced so far.
This is how I see her: when you’re being physically and emotionally abused by people who could kill you with a word, when you’re isolated from your family, when you have no autonomy, people make huge decisions about your life without any input from you, nobody cares about you for who you are as a human being but just for who you are as a pawn, and when you react to all this not by fighting but by getting depressed as hell…it’s hard to muster the energy to work on deciphering the machinations of those around you. Some people (like Arya) are naturally combative and react to pressure by pressing back. Sansa is not one of these people.
My feeling is (in the faintest chance that GRRM ever writes about her again) once she’s in a position where her life is more stable and more in her control, she’ll start caring about making her own decisions, figuring out everyone’s weakness, and bringing her enemies down.
Remember that she naturally reads people very well, knows just what to say to put people at ease, and, being female and gentle-tempered, is easily underestimated. She’s a budding wolf (heh) in sheep’s clothing, one of my favorite character tropes.
It’s not like Arya is a shining intellectual star either. Sansa’s just normal - normal intellect, normal reactions, just normal. She isn’t exceptionally smart like Tyrion or exceptionally, um, Mary Sue like Jon or exceptionally superpowered like Bran - she’s frankly the most like you or I. Which makes her uncomfortable to read about. Because if we had the information she had, we’d end up being caught in the same traps she got caught in. She doesn’t know Littlefinger’s nature from other stories like we do. She didn’t know that there’s a very deadly purple crystal poison, like we did. She didn’t know Tyrion’s actually a pretty decent guy like we did. She hasn’t read the rest of the books. We don’t like the idea of being trapped in an awful situation like that without this third person omnipotent thing going on.
Eh. [del]Dudley DoRight[/del] Eddard was probably more at fault for that than Sansa was. His rigid adherence to honor and his naive expectations that everyone thought the way about honor that he did made him warn Cersei before he moved against her, leading to the playing out of her plans for Robert and Ned before Ned could take action against her. If Ned had just told Robert what was actually going on, he could have had Cersei and Jaime dead for treason and those kids bastardized before Cersei knew what hit her.
Sansa’s just normal - normal intellect, normal reactions, just normal. She isn’t exceptionally smart like Tyrion or exceptionally, um, Mary Sue like Jon or exceptionally superpowered like Bran - she’s frankly the most like you or I. Which makes her uncomfortable to read about. Because if we had the information she had, we’d end up being caught in the same traps she got caught in. She doesn’t know Littlefinger’s nature from other stories like we do. She didn’t know that there’s a very deadly purple crystal poison, like we did. She didn’t know Tyrion’s actually a pretty decent guy like we did. She hasn’t read the rest of the books. We don’t like the idea of being trapped in an awful situation like that without this third person omnipotent thing going on.