I find it concerning to neglect or deride Sansa's association with birds as if it's something that diminishes her and that she needs to outgrow. Yes, most of the time when she gets called "little bird" in the text is usually as a mockering assessment of her being someone who repeats what she's told and also of her being trapped. But the bird motif goes way beyond that. Birds are commonly associated with song, dreaming, beauty, gentleness and freedom, all elements that are prevalent in Sansa's character. There's this quote from the adwd prologue that I find very appropriate for the point I'm trying to make:
"Some skins you never want to wear, boy. You won't like what you'd become." Birds were the worst, to hear him tell it. “Men were not meant to leave the earth. Spend too much time in the clouds and you never want to come back down again. […] Even in their own skins, they sit moony, staring up at the bloody blue".
The context of this quote was warging, an ability which, as far as we know, has been stripped from Sansa due to the death of her direwolf. Having the ability to fly means birds can see the world in a way other earthly creatures cannot, that is, from above. Here we also see that birds are associated with worldliness and imagination. If flight is in a bird's nature, then the prospect of being limited to the ground would be very jarring to them. Sansa is often getting called out by other characters for not being grounded in reality, a way of saying that she's got her head in the clouds, "a head full of songs" and fantasies. And it is true Sansa uses songs as the standard to which she compares real life, and that causes her immense frustration because reality can never be as magic as the songs.
Furthermore, eventually even Sansa begins to associate birds with freedom and even wishes to be one with them:
So lovely. The snow-clad summit of the Giant's Lance loomed above her, an immensity of stone and ice that dwarfed the castle perched upon its shoulder. Icicles twenty feet long draped the lip of the precipice where Alyssa's Tears fell in summer. A falcon soared above the frozen waterfall, blue wings spread wide against the morning sky. Would that I had wings as well. (Alayne I, AFFC)
So as we can see, there are many facets to being a bird in this world, positive and negative: it's both constraint and freedom, imagination and regurgitation. All these facets seem to be woven into Sansa's storyline. That's why I think that deriding the bird motif as lesser than her wolf identity just because wolves are seen as great predators and therefore better associated with power is a mistake. Aside from the fact that birds can also be predators, it's a mistake because it ignores the core of Sansa's character, and worst of all it was precisely this derisive attitude that led to the show giving us oh-so-wonderful lines like the one in S8 where Sansa is thankful for being ABUSED or else she "would've remained a little bird" all her life. The association of Sansa with birds is about her imagination, her idealism, her gentleness, about her delighting others with song and the possibility to fly away from her cage eventually.
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