Were we supposed to blame Sansa for Lady?

[Bippy]

What happened after that is that Cersei insisted on killing Lady even though Lady had absolutely nothing to do with the trial or the attack on Joffrey, it was Robert who was fed up with the trial and decided to give her what she wants.

Oops. So it wasn't such a great outcome after all?

[direwienerdog]

Is anyone really trying to say she lies on purpose to protect her sister here?

The bottom part of your paragraph above seems like the more likely answer: scared little girl in a terrible situation.

Nope we are not saying that. We are saying a scared girl put into a bad situation refuses to tell the same story she told her father hanging her sister and father out to dry.

[purrl1]

Rapsie,

If you look at my post #250 on pg. 13 of this thread, I do speculate that Sansa's refusal to testify is, in effect, covering for Arya, rather than for Joff.

YMMV.

[The Ash Tree]

Oops. So it wasn't such a great outcome after all?

The trial and what happened after the trial ended are two different things. Sansa's testimony had an effect on the trial that ended with nothing more than discipline your and I'll do the same with mine.

Cersei insisting that Lady be killed has nothing to do with the trial, or Sansa, or Lady.

[1234567]

Rapsie,

If you look at my post #250 on pg. 13 of this thread, I do speculate that Sansa's refusal to testify is, in effect, covering for Arya, rather than for Joff.

YMMV.

Sorry, I missed that in your post.

While I agree that her telling the truth may actually have made the situation worse (due to the Hedge Knight example), I don't think she stayed neutral to protect Arya or Joff. She seemed intimidated and scared and just didn't want to be there or have to be involved, one way or the other.

[Okaythen]

Well "that pet" wasn't the one that bit him, and if there was evidence that my son was lying about the incident, and actually provoked the attack, then I might feel differently.

I wouldn't feel differently as far as letting in my house went. I would certainly punish my child and have stern words about the incident but I wouldn't let them near the animal again without heavy adult supervision (and that's if it's a little dog, not a mythical wild animal).

I know that this stuff is a matter of opinion but I would imagine that the general consensus would consider this the responsible course of action for a parent.

[purrl1]

I don't want to keep repeating myself, but actually the text does set up a pattern of behavior prior to the Trident incident of Sansa covering for Arya. Yes, during the "trial" she was scared and confused--but when one is scared and confused, falling back into familiar patterns of behavior is a natural tendency.

[direwienerdog]

The trial and what happened after the trial ended are two different things. Sansa's testimony had an effect on the trial that ended with nothing more than discipline your and I'll do the same with mine.

Cersei insisting that Lady be killed has nothing to do with the trial, or Sansa, or Lady.

Sure it does. It puts Ned in an untenable position. He can't say, well that's not the story Sansa told me before. He is left with no choice after this. Robert says so be it and turns his back.

[Bippy]

Cersei insisting that Lady be killed has nothing to do with the trial, or Sansa, or Lady.

Cersei is most likely the prime mover of the "trial" to begin with. She's the who was arguing for Arya's maiming, she was in the "trial" speaking against Arya and Nymeria from start to finish. Sansa's alleged strategy worked great... except that it had no effect at all on the one person who was an actual danger to her family. Yes, that's very effective. Not.

[ShadowCat Rivers]

While I agree that her telling the truth may actually have made the situation worse (due to the Hedge Knight example), I don't think she stayed neutral to protect Arya or Joff. She seemed intimidated and scared and just didn't want to be there or have to be involved, one way or the other.

On the bolded part only:

I think there is absolutely no doubt, by anyone in that room, that Arya had, indeed, hit Joffrey. Sansa's confirmation would not add anything to this. It could only, possibly, change things for Mycah. And this is where the Hedge Knight example is relevent:

Yes, no one cares about a peasant, but for very few exceptions. In the Hedge Knight, there is a wise good prince who does care, and believes that the purpose, to protect an innocent girl, was noble, and gives that "nobody" who hurt a member of the royal family the opportunity of a (fair) trial.

The sad thing is that Ned wanted to believe that Robert would be such a king... I think this parallel was intended by the author, to highlight the contrast between a king like Robert and a (never was) king like Baelor Breakspear.

[Mikeygigs]

Hmm, I thought it was pretty obvious that it was Sansa's lie that ended up being the deciding factor that killed Lady.

Had she told the court that Jeoffrey tried to mutilate Mycah, then tried to KILL Arya, and then Nymeria came to her sister's aid, who knows what would have happened? Would Ned have killed the wolf? Would Robert allow the wolf to be killed after his son was accused of trying to kill a nobleman's daughter? I'm not sure if it would have happened in the same way.

That said, remaining neutral only helps Jeoffrey's case so its easy to see how Sansa's lying is actually a cover for Jeoffrey's actions. As for Arya hitting a prince, it clearly wasn't a big deal as Robert washed his hands of the whole thing before Cersei demanded a direwolf pelt.

[The Ash Tree]

For god's sake people, read the entire thread before repeating the same old posts almost word for word.

[Bippy]

Go eat a mouse.

[The Mother of The Others]

When Sansa quailed and chose not to contribute to the trial, it was with Robert glowering at her as if to communicate, "Don't tell the truth, girl, don't do it, don't put me through that, don't you dare." This is precisely because things would have turned out differently if she had dared to. That's why Robert really didn't want to hear it from her, because such testimony would have forced him to side with his old friend over his current family. The Old Robert would have been forced to come out of retirement and dust himself off and join the procedings, now treating his wife as a hostile witness to be dealt with. Sansa sensed the crushing weight of that mountain slide she was about to unleash on everyone and backed off. This however wasn't a great virtue on her part, nor on Robert's.

What she did was to continue to act civilized in the face of Joff's inhumanity. Arya the wild and her wild pet had the proper response of the wolf, they did what would keep an animal alive in the wild--because they were in the wilderness, having to deal with an angry Lioness, and they recognized it. Whereas Sansa continued to stand there all civilized like, not having the natural reaction but the courtly one, expecting good treatment from the Lions as if not in harm's way--this made her and Lady the low-hanging fruit, the most easily picked off, and so that's what she got as an outcome--her pet got taken out behind the woodshed. All these things are related--how everyone acted determined the results they got from it. Let's stop claiming that stuff had nothing to do with other stuff when we should know better, living as we do in a universe where stuff does result in other stuff happening as a result.

For example, Joffy had already proven he wasn't worthy of trust of ANY KIND, wasn't someone she should have wanted to be alone with at all let alone married to, and certainly not someone to lie for in a crucial moment. Yet she held on to that romanticized future in her head by choosing the course which kept her in his good graces as much as possible. So on the sliding scale of things she's not, it would start off with: Innocent --> an imbecile ---> Youthfully Naive (because it was a knowing lie) --> and then we arrive at what she was: not a pawn at that moment but a Player (the fulcrum upon which everything turned). Chose a faction that was not the wolf faction. Is it forgivable, that a child would falter under the weight of the world and not have the strength to stare the king in the eye and tell him what he clearly didn't want to hear? Yes. Forgivable. Because almost all of us would have done the same. Tell the truth there and the wedding is probably off, along with perhaps an end to Cersei's wedded bliss, as the king would have rebuilt his old BFF status with Ned in a way that never happened in the books, at Cersie's expense. And the king, if fully enraged at the behavior of wife and son, would NOT have allowed the wolf to be killed upon Cersei's now-tainted demands. And the boy Joff would of course have been unsalvageable, but an attempt would have been made if the truth had come out about such powerfully disgraceful behavior in a future king. This would have shamed Robert into parenting: Joff would have been removed from full Lannister custody and switched to kingly custody, sent to their equivalent of Rehab to see if kingly qualities might yet be instilled in him in place of the rot that'd grown up in that terrible soul. Ned would have been given the keys to the kingdom for real, now that Cersei was taking a back seat to the old men's alliance renewed, and Ned would have had the full authority to clear house and make the kind of changes Lannister wouldn't allow in the text. So to say nothing could have turned out any differently is absurd. But it would have required the best version of everyone to come to the fore, consistently, during the time of crisis. And they'd have been lucky to live through it without being assassinated. The point of the incident with Lady's death is that, one way or another, things were doomed to go badly, because the royals were rotted through and Ned's soul was yet worthy, yet he was in a weak position, out-of-the-loop compared to the dug-in Lannisters, so conflict was inevitable, along with Stark suffering, and this wolf business is what popped up first. But that doesn't mean this first flare-up of trouble couldn't have been whackamoled back down and brought under control better. It's just that not everyone's best self rose to the occasion. Forgivable, yet also deeply regrettable.

Hmm, I thought it was pretty obvious that it was Sansa's lie that ended up being the deciding factor that killed Lady.

The docile wolf, sitting there waiting for the cleaver, is the one that got cleaved. And this was "somehow related" to the docile response from the daughter at the trial.