Quora reshare: Why do some ASOIAF fans hate Dany but love Sansa?
Because they are foils. And in that respect, they have become barometers for what individual fans want the series to be.
As Frank Herbert wrote in Dune, “A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balance are correct.” This is true of all world building, and wow did GRRM ever follow this advice! Let’s look at how Sansa and Dany are balanced at the beginning of their arcs:
Dany begins the series as a frightened, impoverished, abused child who is sold by her contemptible, foolish brother Viserys to a man she doesn’t want to marry. Sansa starts the story as an overconfident, spoiled, beloved daughter of a highly respected and seemingly wise nobleman, who has agreed to a marriage Sansa herself desperately wanted.
So in the first few chapters, we are presented with two girls who are almost completely each other’s opposites. And the almost is important, because the trick is in recognizing what they have in common in this moment: they are both completely unaware of how the real world works. They are both innocents. Sansa, as we’re reminded over and over, is engrossed in songs about shining knights and beautiful maids. As Reece Ansaa alludes in his response, the stories she’s been told by Viserys, Illyrio, and others are almost the only thing Dany knows of the world outside her brother’s influence.
Over the course of the first book, Dany’s circumstances improve while Sansa’s decline. And at what should be/is their lowest moments, their separate character arcs are set for the rest of the series: Dany walks into a funeral pyre that for all purposes should kill her, and finds that magic is real after all and has her innocent faith in it confirmed; Sansa looks at her father’s severed head and begins to realize the things she believed in were not real. Dany continues to live in the illusions Viserys taught her; Sansa abandons hers.*
People who read the books and love the magic will love Dany, because she is the otherworldly, magical queen. People who read the books and come to love Sansa do so because Sansa is emblematic of GRRM’s grittier side of the series.
*There’s some speculation that Sansa may begin to warg with a bird, since Lady was killed and GRRM has said all the Stark kids are potential wargs and uses a lot of bird imagery around her. I doubt Sansa will ever warg, or at least ever become as proficient as her siblings at it, because using magic seems to go against her current arc. In many ways, magic began to die for her with Lady.
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