#my queue has turned to porcelain to ivory to steel

[thelegendofclarke]

Just venting I need to get this out:I firmly believe that there are Key 6, not 5, players in ASOIAF. And Sansa is one of them. GRRM has himself named Sansa as one of his key protagonists (there were 6 in total inc Sansa) and also that Sansa,Arya and Bran's journeys were paramount for him. I know this subject has been done to death &I'm really sorry for imposing on you but yeah to me,based on all this,Sansa is one of the Key 6. (you dont have to post it. Just venting. Thanks for reading)

Hi! Sorry to bother you again. I’m the Key 6 players anon. You don’t have to post my initial ask. I know the whole thing has been done to death. I was just venting and getting it out of my system. I hope I didn;t offend. Thanks for understanding.

Hi Anonny!

Oh gosh please DON’T apologize, you didn’t offend me at all in the slightest! I am just slow af and take forever to answer things and am generally The Worst… But my Ask is always open for venting! Especially venting about people who don’t ~recognize, respect, and appreciate~ the Noble and Poetic Land Mermaid that is Sansa Stark.

Yeah, the Key Players debate does continue to be a kind of ~weird bone of contention~ in the fandom for some reason. I think (and like to hope) that a lot of the time when people talk about or make fanart for the Five Key Players, that they aren’t excluding Sansa or leaving her out maliciously. I think they might just be going off of, or wanting to acknowledge, the five main characters GRRM listed in his original outline for the series in 1993.

But you’re right, I have definitely seen people who insist that Sansa is not a main character or key player in the story, which simply isn’t true. GRRM even identified her as a main character himself in 2016:

I’d thought the whole story could be told in three books, and that it would take me three years to write them, a year per book. That picture was taken just a few weeks after I blew my first (bot not my last, oh no) deadline on the series. Ah, how innocent I was… little did that guy in the picture imagine that he would be spending most of the next two decades in the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros with Tyrion, Daenerys, Arya, Sansa, Jon Snow, Bran, and all the rest. (x)

And even if GRRM’s word alone weren’t enough, Sansa’s character is vastly different from how she was originally planned. In the original outline GRRM basically had the Arya character involved in plot lines that now belong to Arya, Sansa, and Meera Reed (homegirl would have been BUSY AF); and the original Sansa character was basically who we would now identify as Margaery Tyrell if you are looking for a comparison. The original Sansa character ended up marrying Joffrey and bearing him a son and then choosing him over her family and ultimately paying the price. It was always ~super obvious~ to me that GRRM figured out that it just wasn’t going to be logistically possible to have the Arya character do everything she needed to do. I mean she was basically going to have to be in a minimum of two places at once: fleeing North beyond the wall with Bran AND in KL/WF getting entangled in a love triangle with Jon and Tyrion. So he ended up splitting and then modifying Arya’s storylines for the characters we now know as Arya, Sansa, and Meera.

The Sansy Pants as we now know (and love) her does start out a lot like the original Sansa, with dreams of marrying the prince and having his babies ect. She also does play a big part in what some people see as the betrayal and downfall of her family. But unlike the Sansa in the original outline, our Sansa learns. Her observations and inner dialogue become more and more keen and shrewd and move further and further away from the romantic fantasies and naivety that characterized her original POV. The romantic and fanciful AGoT!Sansa does make appearances throughout the series as Sansa wistfully, and sometimes resentfully, recalls the girl she used to be. But AGoT!Sansa’s memory is consistently suppressed and rejected in favor of a sharper, smarter, more cunning, and more guarded perspective (She hasn’t left her romanticism behind completely though as we know, just like she hasn’t forgotten her true identity. She is still Sansa Stark; “Lord Eddard’s daughter and Lady Catelyn’s, the blood of Winterfell”). 

If anything, this proves to me she’s going to be a Key Player and central to the story’s endgame. Like her siblings Sansa has lived through extreme atrocities and incredible adversity and come out the other side stronger and smarter, but still kind an noble. And like Bran has been honing his supernatural abilities and Arya has been honing her physical abilities, Sansa has been honing her own intellectual abilities. Her growing political savvy and transition from Pawn to Player is incredibly similar to Bran’s growing confidence in his magical abilities. Just like Bran is gradually becoming one of the central characters for the magical endgame of the series, Sansa is transitioning into her role as a key player in the pragmatic and political endgame of the series.

And going along with that, I think another reason people have a hard time believing that Sansa is going to be a Key Player is because she isn’t magical. All the other five Key Players (Bran, Arya, Jon, Dany, and Tyrion) have some sort of magical ability that’s central to their arc. Whether it’s dragon riding or blood magic or warging or being brought back from the dead, they all have some sort of magical skill and/or experience. There is, of course, the fact that Sansa could have been a warg or a skin changer, but her ability to do so essentially died with Lady. But honestly I think that’s kind of beside the point…

In the end I don’t think it matters that Sansa doesn’t have any significant magical abilities, because I don’t think GRRM is trying to write a story solely about magic where the magical storylines and characters are the only important ones. I think he is more writing a story that is set in a world where magic exists. ASoIaF isn’t divided into magical storylines vs. political storylines, the two co-exist and are of equal importance. Whether you want to view ASoIaF as a political world where there’s magic or a magical world where there’s politics, it still stands to reason that the lives of the characters are going to be affected by both. Just like the magically inclined Dany is driven by royal aspirations and entangled in political endeavors, the politically savvy Sansa does interact with and has been affected by magic. 

Both these things occur simply based on the fact that both exist and are pervasive over arching themes in the universe GRRM has created. Even though Sansa doesn’t have any obvious magical skills like Arya and Jon, she has interacted with magic and it has been a prevalent theme in her arc. Here are just a few examples:

The name Sansa actually means “invocation and charm” in Sanskrit. And while yes, this could just be a play on words with Sansa’s power to charm others, it gets brought up again in he advices Petyr gives her to seduce Harry the Heir: “Charm him. Entrance him. Bewitch him.” Seduction is described here like a spell. 

The Ghost of High Heart Prophecy- “I dreamt a wolf howling in the rain, but no one heard his grief. I dreamt such a clangor I thought my head might burst, drums and horns and pipes and screams, but the saddest sound was the little bells. I dreamt of a maid at a feast with purple serpents in her hair, venom dripping from their fangs. And later I dreamt that maid again, slaying a savage giant in a castle built of snow.” The bolded part is pretty clearly speaking of Sansa at Joffrey’s wedding. The purple serpents in her hair with blood dripping from their veins is referring to the silver hair net with purple amethysts given to Sansa by the Tyrells which they used to smuggle poison into the wedding feast. The “serpents in her hair” also really strongly parallels the myth of Medusa, who could turn men to stone with just one look.   

The smallfolk also talk about Sansa and the Purple Wedding in terms of magic and legend when telling the story to Arya and The Hound: “The northern girl. Winterfell’s daughter. We heard she killed the king with a spell, and afterward changed into a wolf with big leather wings like a bat, and flew out a tower window.” (Arya XII, ASoS) Not only do they say Sansa preforms a spell, but also that she skin-changes into a bat-wolf, all references to the dark arts. 

The remaining direwolves often think of think of “the sister they had lost”, which is obviously Lady. And it’s significant that because Sansa lost Lady, her brothers can’t track her the way they do their other siblings. This indicates that there is in fact a magical bond/connection between each Stark and their wolf allowing them to connect with and track each other as a pack, and that with Lady’s death Sansa’s magical connection was severed. 

GRRM has also explicitly stated that all the Stark children have warging abilities: “[On whether the trait of being a warg ran in the Stark family] I don’t know if I want to get into genetics - this is fantasy, not scifi… I don’t think this is necessarily a ‘Stark’ ability, though all the children have it to one extent or another. They also realize it to one extent or another.’

Her presence in Bran’s dream in AGoT (Bran III) where she is surrounded by shadows, each representing characters she has and possibly will interact with (The Hound, Jaime Lannister, and possibly Robert Strong)- “One shadow was dark as ash, with the terrible face of a hound. Another was armored like the sun, golden and beautiful. Over them both loomed a giant in armor made of stone, but when he opened his visor, there was nothing inside but darkness and thick black blood.”

Maggy’s Prophecy- Sansa is also potentially the “younger and more beautiful” queen in Maggy the Frog’s prophecy about Cersei. And while she might not ~actually~ end up being the younger and more beautiful queen, Cersei believes she could. This is significant because it shapes Sansa and Cersei relationship and fuels Cersei’s hatred of Sansa from the first time they meet. It’s the same reason Cersei hates Margaery, they are a threat not only to “all she holds dear” but also to her power. 

SO tl;dr Sansa Stark is ~important af~ and DEFINITELY a Key Player in ASoIaF. I know you already knew this haha, but just take comfort in the fact that there is a gd mountain of evidence against anyone who claims differently. So they can just sit there in their Wrongness and be Wrong :)

[assasscience-blog]

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