I’m not judging you, but I’m honestly wondering how you can read this series (assuming you’ve read the series) and actively dislike her. I honestly think that that’s crazy. What I’ve found with people who dislike Sansa is that they don’t understand what the context of ASOIAF means for her as a character. Allow me to explain:
Westeros is a medieval world. In the Seven Kingdoms, women have virtually no rights and belong to the men they marry. It’s rare amongst the highborn to marry for love, but some couples come to love one another, like Ned and Catelyn. Sansa is raised in Winterfell, virtually cut off from the rest of the world, and the only marriage she really knows and understands is her parents’, which is very happy and successful. Everyone she’s ever met is friendly with her, and she’s a very trusting person. She’s raised on songs about heroes and knights and true love, and she has no idea that they’re not real - how would she? Sansa’s never left the north, and the south is as foreign to her as the worlds in songs and stories.
From when she’s very young Sansa is taught to be a lady, to sing and dance and be curteous - she enjoys these things both because she’s good at them and because they make her happy. That’s the world she knows and she’s comfortable with it.
Then the series begins and the king comes to Winterfell. This is pretty much the biggest thing to happen in Sansa’s whole life, and when she meets Joffrey and then finds out she’s going to marry him, why wouldn’t she be happy? It’s what she expects of her life from the way she’s been raised, and she projects her idea of brave knights and heroes onto him because he’s a prince and he’s handsome and he fits the description.
When she’s called to speak against Joffrey in episode 2, Sansa is put in an impossible position. On one hand, she knows that Arya is telling the truth and she doesn’t want to lie - but on the other, Joffrey is going to be her husband. He is literally going to own her. If she speaks against him he can do anything to her when he’s king and she won’t be able to stop him. She doesn’t know that her direwolf is going to be killed. She thinks that her father will handle Arya and that will be the end of it.
Sansa is the only Stark who loses a direwolf, and it’s incredibly painful for her. The direwolves are such a large part of who the Starks are, their connection to their home and to each other, and Sansa loses that - and she didn’t even do anything wrong! She’s harsh with Arya and her father because she sees them as responsible (which, to be fair, they are to an extent) and because she feels alone and sad at a time she thought would be happy and joyful. It’s the start of a long road down which Sansa’s naivety and innocence is shattered and it’s all she can do to hold her head up and survive, let alone try to be happy.
A lot of people throw Sansa to the street because they compare her to Arya and somehow find her wanting. This is because Arya is in a position of constant activity, compared to Sansa being in a poisition of passivity. The thing is, this doesn’t mean that one is “better” than the other: Sansa and Arya mirror each other textually, as they always have done, and GRRM passes no judgement on either except to say that they’re different. Arya is not a better character because she has the opportunity to kill people she doesn’t like, whereas Sansa is not even able to speak her mind without the threat of being beaten, sexually assaulted or killed being held over her head.
It is a sign of Sansa’s remarkable strength that even when she is kept in a position of powerlessness, she tries as much as she is able to spare others pain and to help them (saving Ser Dontos’ life, anyone?). You also have to remember just how young she is. In the show she’s thirteen and in the books she’s eleven. ELEVEN. Can you imagine trying to handle everything Sansa goes through at eleven? I would die tbh
So yeah - I love Sansa and I honestly don’t think that there’s any part of the series that shows her as selfish or vain or spoiled, as many of her critics claim. I respect your right to dislike her, but I don’t get where you’re coming from, no.
- download something
- put it on a DvD
- sell it
- make profit
not what most of us do:
- download something
- like it
- go out and buy it
- give money to rich people
