Sansa Stark
The elder Stark daughter, courteous and dreaming of songs and southern knights, betrothed young to a prince. Her direwolf was named Lady.
A soul of House Stark, born at Winterfell.
The fuller tale
Season One
The realm's best student of a curriculum that turns out to be a lie ÔÇö songs, courtesy, tourneys, and a golden prince. Her betrothal to Joffrey delivers her into the truth at the worst possible address, by way of the Trident, a butcher's boy, and her own direwolf killed in her father's place. She begs for Ned's life and is given his execution instead, watched from a platform in a crowd.
Season Two
A hostage in silk with the manners of a hostage. She is beaten in open court on the king's word and saved from worse by the Hound; she learns from Cersei that tears are a woman's weapon and there is a better one between her legs; and she learns, on her own, that a perfect curtsy is armour.
Season Three
Married to Tyrion Lannister on Tywin's order, to keep the North's claim inside Lannister hands. It is the second time in a year that she is handed to a family as an instrument, and she has by now stopped expecting anybody to ask.
Season Four
Out of the city in the confusion of a poisoning, into Littlefinger's boat and then the Vale ÔÇö and there, at Lysa Arryn's inquest, she tells the first lie she has ever told for her own reasons, and it works. It is the moment the apprenticeship turns into a trade.
Season Five
Married to Ramsay Bolton in her own home, in her mother's sept, and everything the North was supposed to mean to her is used against her in her own bedchamber. She gets out over the wall of Winterfell in the snow with Theon Greyjoy, who is the last person on earth she would have chosen and the only one there.
Season Six
She finds Jon at Castle Black and pushes him into a war he does not think he can win ÔÇö then raises the Vale's knights herself, tells nobody, and brings them onto the field at the exact hour. Afterwards she leaves Ramsay in his own kennels with his own dogs and does not raise her voice once.
Season Seven
Rules Winterfell while her brother is south, competently and to some resentment, while Littlefinger spends the autumn whispering that her sister is a threat. She ends it in the great hall by turning the trial around on the man who taught her how trials work.
Season Eight
Holds the North through the Long Night and the peace after it, and refuses at the last council to hand her country back to a king in the south. She is crowned Queen in the North in the castle she survived ÔÇö the girl who wanted to marry a king, corrected by experience into the person the kings should have been.
How it ends for them
The chronicle records no death for this soul ÔÇö they are living when the tale leaves them, or their ending is a page the maesters have yet to turn.
Their chapters, book by book
A Game of Thrones 6 chapters of their own, and 2 more that name them
Eddard I
Robert comes to Winterfell; in the crypts before Lyanna's statue he asks Ned to be his Hand and offers Joffrey for Sansa.
Sansa I
By the Trident, Joffrey's cruelty and Arya's temper collide; Nymeria bites the prince and is driven off with stones, and the lie begins.
Sansa II
The Hand's tourney: Ser Hugh dies on the Mountain's lance, the Hound saves Loras from his brother, and tells Sansa the true story of his burns.
Sansa III
Sansa dreams of golden-haired princes; told they are going home, she runs weeping to the queen ÔÇö carrying more than she knows.
Sansa IV
Summoned before the queen, Sansa writes the letters they dictate and pleads for her father's life on her knees before Joffrey's court.
Sansa V
Joffrey's first court: Barristan Selmy is stripped of his cloak, Janos Slynt is raised, and Sansa is promised mercy for her father ÔÇö if he confesses.
Eddard XV
In the black cells Varys comes disguised with water and arithmetic: confess, take the black, and Sansa lives. ÔÇ£The realm bleeds, Lord Eddard.ÔÇØ
Sansa VI
Joffrey shows Sansa her father's head on the walls and promises her Robb's next; the Hound's rough counsel keeps her alive on the battlements.A Clash of Kings 8 chapters of their own, and 1 more that name them
A Storm of Swords 7 chapters of their own, and 3 more that name them
A Feast for Crows 3 chapters of their own
A Dance with Dragons 1 chapter that name them
Where the page and the screen part
The deepest divergence in all the Stark children is here: book Sansa has never set foot in Winterfell since the first volume. Her published-books story ends in the Vale, still Alayne Stone, managing Littlefinger's game among the lords declarant and a sickly little lord cousin ÔÇö the entire Ramsay marriage belongs to the show, which reassigned the books' 'false Arya' plot (poor Jeyne Poole's) to Sansa to keep a beloved actress central. The change remains the adaptation's most argued-over decision: it bought the Battle of the Bastards its emotional engine at the cost of subjecting Sansa to horrors her book counterpart has so far been spared.
The books also age her down ÔÇö eleven when the story begins ÔÇö and give her one of the saga's great unreliable-narrator threads: the memory of the Hound's kiss that never happened, growing more real each time she recalls it. Small inventions ripple outward too: her snow-castle scene in the Eyrie, rebuilding Winterfell in miniature, is book-only and beloved; her dyed hair and false name make espionage of chapters the show compressed into a single season of black dresses. Two versions, one direction of travel ÔÇö but readers genuinely do not know yet whether the books will walk her the show's road home.
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.