Sansa Stark

Who is Sansa Stark?

Sansa is the elder daughter of Eddard and Catelyn Stark, sister to Robb, Arya, Bran and Rickon, and at the start of the story she wants exactly the life a lord's daughter is promised: a royal marriage, a court and the romance of the songs. She is played in Game of Thrones by Sophie Turner, and in the novels she is a major point-of-view character, so readers see her illusions from inside before they break.

That makes her one of the story's slowest-burning characters. Early readers and viewers often found her naive or irritating beside her sister, and the series appears to expect that reaction. Its long game is to show what survival looks like for someone with no sword and no army, only patience, observation and a talent for saying what powerful people want to hear.

What does the court teach her?

Everything the songs left out. Living among the Lannisters, Sansa learns that courtesy can be armour and that the people who smile at her are often the most dangerous. She has no allies she can trust and no freedom to act, so she watches, and she learns how the powerful bargain, lie and punish. It is a terrible education, and it is the one that later makes her a ruler.

The court also uses her as a piece in its own games. Tywin Lannister forces his son Tyrion to marry her, and Sansa has no say in it. The marriage is miserable for both of them, but it is not cruel in the way her later experiences are, and the story lets the two of them treat each other with a wary decency that becomes significant when they meet again.

How does she survive her second marriage?

In the show Petyr Baelish trades Sansa into a marriage with Ramsay, heir to the Boltons, the family that seized Winterfell from hers, and it is the darkest stretch of her story. What matters for the character is what she takes from it: an end to waiting for rescue and a determination to act on her own judgement.

Once free of Ramsay, she does not hide. She stands with Jon Snow in the fight to take Winterfell back from the Boltons, and from this point the show presents her as the Stark who thinks politically: wary of allies, careful with promises and willing to disagree openly with her own family when she judges them wrong.

How does the show's Sansa differ from the novels'?

The biggest difference is the second marriage. In the published novels Sansa does not marry Ramsay Bolton at all; the bride is Jeyne Poole, Sansa's handmaiden, passed off as Sansa's sister Arya. The show gave that storyline to Sansa herself, which ties her later strength directly to the worst thing that happens to her and makes her return to Winterfell personal.

As a result the two Sansas stand in different places when the published books stop. On screen she has already returned to Winterfell and become its lady by the point where the novels leave her story, which is unfinished as of the date this page was last checked, so how far the two paths will converge is still unknown.

Why does she end the series as Queen in the North?

Because by the end she is the person best suited to rule it. She governs Winterfell as its lady in practice during the war, holds the North's interests above any alliance, and distrusts the southern queens her family keeps being asked to serve. When the new king is chosen, she asks for the North's independence instead of a place on his council, and the request is granted.

Her coronation as Queen in the North closes the series' longest argument about where the North belongs, and it gives Sansa an ending few viewers predicted in the first season. The girl who wanted to be a southern queen becomes a northern one, on her own terms. In the novels her story is unfinished as of the date this page was last checked.