Sansa Stark

Today we will be talking about Sansa Stark and where she fits in the Color Pie! Sansa is the oldest female child of Eddard Stark

He truly was a cut above the rest…

and Catelyn Tully:

Westerosi Idol is a bit crueler with its criticisms and penalties…

Sansa starts the books as a naive newcomer to King’s Landing but her character arc, while deeply unpleasant for her to go through, is one of the most interesting in the series. Some have described it as a 3-book long ‘breaking’ of a character. Lets list most of the terrible things that have happened to Sansa in roughly chronological order:

• Has her direwolf, Lady, killed off. Due to the Starks implicit warging ability (the ability to see and feel through their direwolves and later actually control them) this was likely more traumatic than losing a pet would ordinarily be for a young girl, even if Sansa never developed her gift to the extent that Bran or Jon did.
• Betrayed her father’s plans to Cersei in a misguided attempt to stay with her ‘true love’ Joffrey (Yes, THAT Joffery) which leads to…
• Joffrey deciding to have her father publicly beheaded instead of pardoned for reasons that basically boiled down to ‘for fun’.
• Her household butchered in front of her
• Consistently beaten and bullied by Joffrey and Cersei
• Suffers a near-rape experience from the Hound during the battle of the Blackwater. To his sort of credit, he can’t go through with it and leaves.
• Mother and brother killed at the Red Wedding
• Forced to marry Tyrion Lannister (partial aversion: if you’re going to be forced to marry someone in Westeros it might as well be Tyrion. He might be the only person who won’t mistreat you and treat you as a human being. Even still, being forced into a marriage before the whole realm is not pleasant.)
• Is blamed for the ‘Purple Wedding’ and while she had a tertiary part in it, was not directly to blame for Joffrey’s death.
• 

  A long time coming, but oh so deserved…

• Cersei, as usual, doesn’t make such a fine distinctions and has a price on her head as she flees the capital with…
• The worst person possible. Littlefinger. Commander of the Creepy Commandos.
• 

  100% trustworthy!

• Littlefinger, when  not  hitting on her, whisked Sansa away to her dear, mentally unstable Auntie Lysa in the Vale.
• Lysa is the poster woman for the ‘resentful, batshit aunt’ trope. If that’s not a trope yet, well then you’re welcome! Let’s add homicidal, manic-depressive and delusional to the mix, as she promptly tries to throw Sansa out of the Moon Door after engaging her to her whiny, petulant turd of a son, Robin.
• 

  The future lord of the Vale, everyone!

  Littlefinger then defenestrates Lysa and everyone briefly forgets what a slimeball he is for a whole second. Proving that you can be as evil as you want but as long as you kill someone who’s stark-raving nuts, you’ll still have your fans and defenders.

• Now Sansa is posing as Littlefinger’s bastard daughter Alayne Stone and is learning how to play the game of thrones from him. If this doesn’t sound traumatic, it’s because it isn’t, in and of itself. It’s because Littlefinger molests her when at all possible in a creepy pseudo-paternal way and is preparing her for the day when Robin ‘accidentally’ is given too much Westerosi-opiates and kicks the can.

Whew! That was harrowing. Let’s give you a picture of a kitten to make you feel better.

If George RR Martin was writing Game of Meows Sir Pounce here would be neutered before the end of the first act…

Ok, so that’s the fast version. Let’s evaluate how Sansa has changed and developed as a character throughout the books, using the Color Pie.

Sansa’s initial defining characteristic was her innocence and belief in that old bugbear ‘beauty=goodness’. Sansa is the girly-girl to Arya’s tomboy, the one who worries that she’ll never get married when she’s still a tween. She is a creature of needs, at first, before the plot really kicks it into high gear. She is, in short, the much dreaded and reviled Princess Archetype.

The face of evil!

The Princess Archetype isn’t necessarily a bad thing. However, when done sloppily they can be some of the most grating, infuriating and just plain BORING characters. Thankfully GRRM and HBO know their stuff. Yes, Sansa is preachy and intolerant at times as well as nearly willfully naive, but she doesn’t stay that way in the face of evidence to the contrary.

Sansa is a well rounded character who learns from her experiences, albeit slowly at first and is thoroughly human and not a cardboard cutout.  A key part of understanding her character is her basic assumption that life is a story.

 

I really can’t resist the bad puns today. Stop me before I pun again!

In short: that most dangerous of notions, that life is fair.

What color cares the most about fairness now?

White is the color for non-rebellious princesses. No word yet on their stance on unicorns, or whether in fact friendship is Magic…

FEAR THE BRONZE SCALES OF LANDSCREWING!

 

White is the color of established order, of hierarchy and laws. Sansa has a lawful side that is slowly eaten away at throughout the series as she realizes that all the nobility in the world is just a facade, a mask for selfishness and savagery. But like any good Stark (There isn’t a Stark that doesn’t have Green or White in their cost in some way or another) she clings to her beliefs and heritage. She believes, at first, that everyone has their place and not to fulfill your duty is to fail, see below:

Yeah, think you dodged a bullet there…

Sansa believes every story has a happy ending, up until Ned’s head rolls and Joffrey unmasks himself in full. .She is left alone among enemies, forced to deal with Joffery’s constant humiliations, the queens pettiness and the Tyrells desperately trying to marry her into their family. While the Tyrells are arguably a lighter shade of black than the Lannisters, they are by no means good people, a safe assumption for any non-Stark great house of Westeros.

She can snark with the best of them…

It is through her interactions with the Lannisters and Tyrells that Sansa begins to reform her worldview, to see the world as something other than a story, as something that she can actively shape and influence.

Sansa falls under the dubious and decidedly ambivalent ‘protection’ of Littlefinger, a person who it is better not to be noticed by for good or ill. After orchestrating Joffrey’s assassination, he whisks her away and begins teaching her the basics of manipulation and ‘climbing the ladder to power’ while brainwashing her into her role as his ‘bastard daughter’ Alayne Stone.

…He’s that guy…

What color do we know that is more concerned with acquiring power than any other?

Black mana. Black is chiefly concerned with two things: ambition and self-preservation. Black-aligned cards will pay any price to meet their goals: discarding cards, sacrificing creatures, paying life to fuel an effect…nothing is off the table. Black lives to accrue power and honors for itself, it enjoys power for power’s sake.

At the same time, Black utterly shuns any sense of morality. It is proudly independent and amoral. It believes that everyone is fundamentally selfish and in it only for itself. It sees any other worldview as inherently hypocritical.

Littlefinger is a Black-aligned character: he has even less rules and scruples than Varys, a man noted for his lack of boundaries. He has clearly imparted some of Black’s outlook to Sansa in teaching her the basics of politics.

Very Orzhovian…

It is unclear what direction Sansa’s character arc will go, but as it stands now she’s clearly a black-white character. Mark Rosewater once said in his articles on color-pairs that being Black-White is like playing Diplomacy: Only one person can win, but nobody gets anywhere without allies. There is always the conflict between what you want, and what’s good for your ally (and keep them appeased).

 

Go for the butcher knife…the fork is hilarious, but impractical.

As a Diplomacy player, I can attest to this. Knowing who to betray and when is something approaching an art form. Westeros is no different than our world when treaties are being brokered and broken, thusly all highly politically powerful characters are likely to have either Black or White mana, if not both in their alignment somewhere.

I feel it’s important to note that all color combinations come in shades. Tywin Lannister was a Black/White character, but a very different personality from Sansa. Tywin is a domineering magnificent bastard, Sansa believes that a woman’s armor is her courtesy. Tywin submits his own children to horrific punishments while Sansa has largely been a victim of circumstance.

You’ll have to imagine the entirely justified crossbow bolt(s).

Sansa is losing her sense of self the more the stories go on, immersing herself more and more into a fictional life to gain power and influence. GRRM said in a recent blog that ‘Sansa may not even exist, there might only be Alayne’. What higher price can one pay for power than their sense of of self, their soul, in service to gaining power? Its implied that Sansa holds on to Littlefinger both out of a sense of gratitude (very Stark) and because it is better to stick with the devil she knows. Anyone else might sell her back to Cersei for a title.

Once that leverage is gone, though (Cersei has been merrily skipping down the Batshit Insane Expressway for the past two books and is effectively isolated from any position of power at the moment) what is to stop Sansa from turning on Littlefinger when she’s solidified her power-base? It’s a common fan theory, one that is gaining steam alongside Jon Snow’s parentage (more on that next blog).

THAT would be a backstab to remember.

Westerosi Road Signs