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From Pawn to Player: Rethinking Sansa XVI


brashcandy

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If you think about it Sansa is potentially a very powerful character.

She is the oldest daughter of Ned Stark and the Granddaughter of Hoster Tully , this gives her the loyalty of a lot of the Northern and Riverland people.

The lord of the Vale considers her a mother figure.

Her half-brother is the Lord Commander of the Nights Watch.

One of her little brothers is a super powerful warg and the other may become the new Lord of Winterfell.

Her sister is training to be a super assassin.

She is married to the heir (sort of ) of Casterly Rock who now has a mercenary company working for him and may become the advisor to the Queen of Dragons.

She is smart and very beautiful and is learning how to play the Game of Thrones from Littlefinger who is a master.

By the end of these books she could be one of the most powerful characters in the Seven Kingdoms

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As you were so kind is to invite a heretical thought the other day I thought you might appreciate this one as well. It was mentioned (in text) that warging is a two-way business and that just as a warg goes into its familiar, so a part of the familiar goes into the warg. Thus, it is suggested, Arya's readiness to kill may be down to having a part in Nymeria inside her, that in turn raised the question of what Ghost has done to Jon...

... and the question was answered by the last Jon chapter in Storm of Swords. He's gone for a walk outside, pondering Stannis offer to make him Lord of Winterfell, when Ghost re-appears at last:

Red eyes, Jon realized, but not like Melisandre’s. He had a weirwood’s eyes. Red eyes, red mouth, white fur. Blood and bone, like a heart tree. He belongs to the old gods, this one. And he alone of all the direwolves was white. Six pups they’d found in the late summer snows, him and Robb; five that were grey, and black and brown, for the five Starks, and one white, as white as snow.

Jon Targaryen First of his name - nah

Azor Ahai! - don't make me laugh, he's on the other side, "He belongs to the old gods, this one"

He's Jon Snow, he's the King of Winter.

And funnily enough (well its not funny at all) the very next chapter is the one which starts off with Sansa's taking a communion of snow.

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This almost, ALMOST makes me want to ship Jon and Sansa (which is heresy in this thread ; -) ).

What could be wrong with that...they could be first cousins...which is legal in some places...or so I've heard.

It would make a certain kind of sense of the parallels that Tze pointed out as existing between young Master Snow and Mistress Stark!

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What could be wrong with that...they could be first cousins...which is legal in some places...or so I've heard.

Britain wouldn't have an aristocracy if cousins weren't allowed to marry cousins. :lol:

To expand the Sansa and Jon theory. Is it possible that Arya will at some point meet up with Sansa and then assume Sansa's identity?

This is based on the conversation Ned and Arya have, where Ned tells Arya, she'll marry a King and Arya responds that that's Sansa. It would also involve Sansa choosing to remain Alyane Stone (I know it's my Alyane Clegane on the Fingers theory again).

A bit too Crackpot? :rolleyes:

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This almost, ALMOST makes me want to ship Jon and Sansa (which is heresy in this thread ; -) ).

Would you think it just a tad childish if I told you my first reaction to reading your post was to stick my fingers in my ear and shake my head from side to side whilst saying "no,no,no,no" repeatedly? :P Heresy indeed. I can easily see Sansa and Jon working together... but the actual relationship aspect is still very "iffy" for me.

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FWIW, I think it's mentioned in the Land of Ice and Fire that Aegon spent much more time with Rhaenys than Visenya... at least at night.

I don't think that's foreshadowing anything sexual (or even romantic), actually. Aegon the Conqueror spent more nights with Rhaenys than he did with Visenya, but . . . Jon is of course centered with the Night's Watch, and we have the specter of a new Long Night approaching, so Aegon specifically spending more nights with Rhaenys than with Visenya could, for example, actually foreshadow Sansa spending more time with Jon at the Wall in the future than Arya would. Or, if a new Long Night falls, it could foreshadow Sansa spending more time in general with Jon than Arya would, perhaps in the sense of Sansa and Jon simply being "based" in the same place while Arya is away (brutally slaughtering House Stark's enemies).

This almost, ALMOST makes me want to ship Jon and Sansa (which is heresy in this thread ; -) ).

Honestly, I don't think this connection is building to Jon/Sansa. :) Not only were Jon and Sansa raised as siblings, but Ghost and Lady are brother and sister, and since the Stark kids "are" their direwolves (even though Lady is dead, she and Sansa were still bonded), that means that Jon and Sansa are siblings on two distinct levels. I don't think GRRM has "incest really is fabulous and leads to awesome things!" as any of his literary themes, so though we have Jon associated with a King and Sansa with a Queen, I think the "Kingship/Queenship" idea is going to play out in a non-traditional way vis a vis the Starks.

We've had Jon associated with Kingship, Sansa and Arya both associated with Queenship, Bran has repeatedly been emphasized as being a Prince and potentially a King as well (and Rickon hasn't been onscreen enough to make a call as to what he's associated with). Honestly, I'm curious how direwolf packs operate in the wild: real wolf packs are basically family units in the wild, but Roose Bolton mentioned once that direwolves supposedly ran in huge packs in the wild, and though we've seen Nymeria create a giant pack, she's the only direwolf in it, so we don't know how other direwolves would operate vis a vis her. I'd be curious to see how an actual direwolf pack operates, and I wonder if perhaps the "rulership structure" is somewhat different than in an "ordinary" wolf pack, and that might have some bearing on the Stark children's future roles.

And one way to have multiple Kings/Queens without going the incest route is to introduce an idea that has heretofore been absent from ASOIAF: the title of Emperor. (The empires we've seen, the Valyrian Freehold and the Ghiscari Empire, never seemed to have an actual Emperor, and I wonder if GRRM has left that idea out intentionally because he plans on introducing it later.) The traditional title of House Stark is King IN the North, not King OF the North, and as GRRM is a European history buff, he might very well have drawn this idea from the historical example of the King in Prussia, who used that title within the bounds of Prussia itself, but was actually under the authority of the Holy Roman Emperor (and within that Empire, but outside of Prussia's own borders, he did not use the title of King). Which is a long way of saying that perhaps House Stark is going to end up expanding its reach quite significantly, and the individual Stark children might all end up with the title of King and Queen---but with the caveat that while each might be a King or Queen of Winter, the question we should be asking isn't "Who will be the King or the Queen?", but rather "Who will be the Emperor that the individual Kings bow to?"

ETA: And honestly, we still don't know 100% what "King of Winter" originally referred to, so the association between Sansa and winter-based Queenship might not refer to ruling in the sense we usually understand it. The term "Magnar", in the Old Tongue of the First Men, seems to be translated as either lord or, possibly, king (Jon translates it as "lord", but according to the Citadel there's a House on Skagos called House Magnar of Kinghouse, and Styr's status among the Thenns seemed more kingly than lordly). It's entirely possible that in the Old Tongue lordship or kingship had some additional connotations that were lost during the switch to the Common Tongue, and the "King of Winter" aspect of House Stark might have had less to do with them literally ruling a place and instead had more to do with them having mastery over some winter-based power (for example, "King of Winter" might have referred to certain ice-based magical abilities found in the House of Stark, like Brandon the Builder's apparent ability to somehow create a giant wall out of ice). In that sense, we could have multiple Kings and Queens of Winter, but only one King/Queen in the North.

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Sansa and Jon, what?

No way, Jon is destinated to marry Daenerys Stormborn, a triple-couple (Aegon, Dany and Jon), Three Dragons Head, hello?

Nah. Jon, Dany, and Val. His birthfather had two wives, why not he? Not by his choice mind you: he swore a vow...

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But I believe that her lost of faith is kind of desillusion about life. And all the people telling her that songs are lies, and that she doesn´t need more songs, and after finding Marillion that used the songs for his own purposes as Petyr.

Also as a proof of her desillusion about love. As if life and love is connected to her.

Well, she plainly has not heard the right songs. :) Maybe she should have heard Dover Beach... Yes there will be more "poetical and musical illustrations of Sansa". I had one in mind for Arya too, but I can't find any of the settings on You Tube. ("I'm Nobody" by Emily Dickenson).

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Poetical and Musical Illustrations of Sansa, Part 2

Part 1 was Dover Beach (back link fortcoming).

This song is for Sansa when she is older and when, disabused of the idea that life is a song, and having buried memories of a murdered singer, she takes up singing again. For dancing, as we know from her last chapter in Feast, she has not lost her love. But she has to be older to be stately in the way the poem insists.

The poem is by Richard Lovelace, from the first half of the 17th century, and the music by W. Dennis Browne, killed in the battle of Gallipoli in 1915 at age 27, one of a number of promising young artists slain in the Great War. I truely and deeply wish the generals and politicians of England, France, and Germany from that terrible war could be brought back and be tried for crimes against humanity. Browne was just starting out as a composer and there are but three good songs that are his legacy of which I warrant you this is the best.

The music is a stately dance the which seems altogether appropriate for these words.

See! with what constant motion

Even, and glorious, as the sun,

Gratiana steers that noble frame,

Soft as her breast, sweet as her voice

That gave each winding law and poise,

And swifter than the wings of Fame.

Each step trod out a lover's thought

And the ambitious hopes he brought,

Chain'd to her brave feet with such arts;

Such sweet command, and gentle awe,

As when she ceas'd, we sighing saw

The floor lay pav'd with broken hearts.

So did she move; so did she sing

Like the harmonious spheres that bring

Unto their rounds their music's aid;

Which she performed such a way,

As all th' enamoured world will say:

The Graces danced, and Apollo play'd.

There are three performances on You Tube, but this one seems the most satisfying.

Ian Bostridge, Tenor

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FuONgkBDBPc

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