Ramsay Bolton
Roose's baseborn son, a grinning, sadistic young hunter with a pack of hounds and a taste for cruelty that even his cold father finds difficult to leash.
A soul born at The Dreadfort, sworn to House Bolton.
The fuller tale
Season Five
Littlefinger's plan lands: Sansa Stark will marry Ramsay Bolton, in Winterfell.
Where they stand. Winterfell.
Season Six
In Home ÔÇö A stepmother, a baby brother, and hungry hounds: heirs resolved. In Battle of the Bastards ÔÇö "My hounds will never harm me." Seven days unfed.
How it ends for them
On the screen. Killed at Winterfell (S6┬ÀE9)
He lost the Battle of the Bastards, his house, and his hounds' loyalty in a single afternoon. Sansa Stark watched from outside the kennel as the starved beasts he'd raised remembered they were hungry.
The show settles Ramsay's account in his own kennels. Beaten half-conscious by Jon Snow in Winterfell's yard ÔÇö Jon stopping only because beating him to death would have been a mercy Sansa outranked ÔÇö he wakes tied to a chair among the cages, and Sansa explains the arrangement: his words are going to disappear, his house is going to disappear, and his hounds have not been fed in seven days. Ramsay's last confidence ÔÇö my hounds will never harm me ÔÇö survives approximately one sniff. Sansa walks away down the corridor to the sound of his loyal beasts remembering they are hungry, and permits herself the smallest smile of the entire series. In the books Ramsay is alive, un-mauled and holding Winterfell; whatever the remaining volumes intend for him, the show's kennel door is an invention readers can only hope the author finds equally fitting.
Their chapters, book by book
A Dance with Dragons 1 chapter that name them
Where the page and the screen part
The books' Ramsay is less pretty and more feral ÔÇö fleshy, dry-skinned, dressed in dandy's velvets he wears badly, described by his own father as never truly bathing the blood off ÔÇö where the show cast a boyish charmer and let the grin do the work. His bride differs materially: not Sansa but Jeyne Poole, the steward's daughter passed off as Arya Stark, a fraud the whole northern court is forced to swallow in silence. And he is alive in the published books, holding Winterfell beside his father as Stannis closes in ÔÇö the author's infamous Pink Letter, taunting Jon Snow with claims about the battle's outcome, is either Ramsay's hand or someone impersonating him, an authorship puzzle readers have argued for decades. The show also trimmed his gang of Bastard's Boys and invented Myranda, the kennelmaster's daughter, to give his sadism a co-conspirator with dialogue. Both tellings agree on the essentials; the books just refuse to make him fun to watch.
Their journey
Where the two tellings send them to the same place the road runs whole; where they part, the screen keeps the left and the books the right.