Do you think Sansa and Arya’s relationship is uneven in terms of love?
Let me start this off by saying this isn’t Sansa hate, I like her a lot more than I do Arya.
But because of their society and the adults that surround them, both sisters are lead to believe that Sansa is better than Arya. She’s the good one. She’s beautiful. She can sing and sew. She never disobeys. She’s the perfect lady. And because Sansa agrees with this sentiment, she also believes that Arya doesn’t have much value. She’s ugly, improper, and has a tendency for ruining good things, which is why it would’ve been easier if she was a bastard like Jon, so she wouldn’t have to put up with her.
I don’t blame her at all for anything she’s said to Arya in aGoT, where she’s mean to Arya while she tries to better their relationship, as much as she can. My annoyance is that this continues after they’re separated. She does mention missing her sister in the form of dreams, which are subconscious, and memories, which are all idealised but then she doesn’t think of her often at all. She thinks of her as unsatisfactory even after Cersei had confirmed she was dead. Meanwhile Arya wants to see her a dress to make amends with her for ruining her dress, although she hates sewing. She doesn’t want King’s Landing to be drowned because Sansa is still there. She wants to see Sansa again and apologise like a proper lady. She wants the place where Lady was unjustly killed burned while Sansa still blames Arya for Lady’s death in aCoK. She’s reminded of her by little things, like drinking something that tastes like lemons.
She seems to care a lot more about Sansa than Sansa does about her. And I don’t really understand why. Sansa is a sweet, kindhearted girl. She feels empathy and is genuinely kind to the worst people. Yet she doesn’t seem to care about her own sister.
Please tell me I’m wrong and misrepresenting something! Because it makes me so sad how indifferent Sansa is towards Arya throughout the books.
no i don't think you are, i can't give you a good answer for why she doesn't think of arya very much outside of like, it's probably a painful subject to dwell on, but there's something going on with “arya had been entirely unsatisfactory as sisters went” i can talk about that. so i would not call it a question of love, you can love someone and then not like them very much, it's about why sansa dislikes arya and i don't feel the kind of resentment sansa feels for arya in agot is supposed to be “normal sibling rivalry”, it's a narrative choice that reveals something about the sisters, sansa resents arya for reasons that are pretty central to her storyline, it's like you said: a consequence of her investment in social codes. arya does not meet the standard of femininity that their mother and sansa and sansa's peers have been raised to meet, arya is therefore inadequate. her response to the trident incident is the same as cersei and robert's, that it's arya's fault for having been there in the first place and for having acted in an unladylike manner. i said once that the trident is arya's defining character moment, as a character arya exists to problematise the ideal of aristocratic femininity that sansa fully buys into at the beginning of agot so i guess my reading here is that the state of her relationship with her sister is in some ways symbolic of sansa's relation to authority.
in acok, sansa's a hostage and free of most of her illusions about the lannisters but has to play nice with them to survive life at court, “she was a good girl who remembered all her courtesies” — in her final agot chapter vs “Arya was safe back in Winterfell, dancing and sewing, playing with Bran…” — in her first acok chapter is perhaps, also revealing of her annoyance (and envy) at how willing arya is to break rules (which is an inverse of arya’s own insecurity/envy at sansa’s performance of aristocratic femininity), so the way it looks to sansa is that once again, she’s the sister who has to mind her courtesies while arya gets to do whatever she wants.
He’d owned a sword named Lion’s Tooth once, Sansa remembered. Arya had taken it from him and thrown it in a river. I hope Stannis does the same with this one.
this is halfway through acok, i think, and this is significant to me. the sansa from agot would never applaud her sister for doing that, sansa understands enough now to see arya was not the one at fault that day. after that, asos, which is an interesting one. it takes place during the start of autumn and the major theme there is disavowal of oaths and promises, old world (a fifteen year long summer / “in the songs it's always summer”) decaying as winter gets closer, so the shared thread for arya and sansa’s storylines in that one is false hope. that's what the tyrells are representative of. margaery is a sister substitute, sansa's just lost her sister and is being told she can have another one, she's an outcast at court and isolated from her family but the tyrells are inviting her into theirs. this is around the time she thinks -
Sister. Sansa had once dreamt of having a sister like Margaery; beautiful and gentle, with all the world’s graces at her command. Arya had been entirely unsatisfactory as sisters went. How can I let my sister marry Joffrey? she thought, and suddenly her eyes were full of tears.
you can't really talk about “arya had been unsatisfactory as sisters went” without this surrounding context. at this point she knows arya is dead and they'll never get to repair their relationship but margaery is here and she's going to be her sister now, this is as close to it she’ll get. how can i let my sister marry joffrey? to me, is also evoking what happened that day on the trident, that the last time sansa was made to choose between joffrey and her sister, she did not pick her sister. immediately after this she pleads with margaery that she mustn't marry him which is, again, pretty significant and brave admission because during their first meeting she's worried about what punishment will befall her should olenna call off the wedding after hearing her account of joffrey's character -
Oh, gods, thought Sansa, horrified. If Margaery won’t marry him, Joff will know that I’m to blame. “Please,” she blurted, “don’t stop the wedding …”
then she's married off to tyrion and margaery never speaks to her again. sansa’s conception of the perfect sister who, unlike arya, can perform aristocratic femininity, has failed her and the unspoken bit is that sansa’s investment in authority will never be rewarding, the sister she drove away because of it and who’s dead now is the only true sister she ever had. my point here is that she might not be confessing outright wow i have misjudged arya my whole life but her chapters are not entirely disinterested in the subject of arya, having to work through her feelings for her sister is a big part of her arc. and i would guess, for anything more direct than this you'll just have to wait for the sisters to reunite.
it’s kind of shocking to see how many people in this fandom take sansa’s lack of directness about arya’s “death” as a sign that she doesn’t care about her sister? sansa has always dealt with trauma through repression and distraction, we see this so clearly in agot when she tries to make sense of the violence of the trident incident by reframing it until it fits back into her safe/familiar worldview (princes are always gallant and defend the innocent, nothing bad would happen if arya would just be a “good girl”, etc.). it’s incredibly in character for her to think of arya through dreams and memories, if anything her inability to directly confront her grief shows how deeply arya’s “death” affected her. their abrupt separation, the lack of closure, being robbed of the chance to heal/forgive, it’s unthinkable. she may try to push it down and think of her brothers instead (because no matter how deep her grief for them is, at least they didn’t end with “they should have killed you instead of lady!”), but arya makes her way into her subconsciousness anyway. sansa is a child and was never equipped to look unpleasant truths in the face to start with, why would she suddenly be able to cope when she thinks that her baby sister is dead? tbh I don’t think that she’ll ever be able to truly face those feelings until she either 1) finds out that “arya” is alive and has been married off to ramsay or 2) reunites with arya and sees her sister with her own eyes.
that being said, the margaery passage has always bothered me because I never quite knew what to do with it, but this post makes some fantastic points about contextualizing it within sansa’s broader grief/regret over arya. a whole new way of thinking about sansa attaching herself to margaery!
I would add the deeper context surrounding Sansa’s disappointment with Arya is systemic and tied to Arya’s inability to perform femininity appropriately, but there’s also a much simpler and more conscious motivation that parallels Arya’s— the girls are lonely. Regardless of the existence of their brothers, Sansa and Arya, as girls, are distinctly marginalized within the family structure and then further isolated from each other by their opposing personalities and interests. Yes, Sansa has Jeyne Poole but friendships, even close ones, do not erase the inherent desire to have a strong bond with your actual blood relative. I think it’s important to make this distinction in Sansa’s case because lines like “Arya had been entirely unsatisfactory as far as sisters went” is more than just an expression of Sansa’s disappointment in Arya’s lack of femininity, it’s also an expression of her disappointment in their lack of sisterly bond. Sansa’s ultimate desire, like Arya’s, is for both of them to be similar and bond in that similarity. Shared interests are often a shortcut for intimacy as Sansa discovers with Margaery. This desire manifests in their POVs differently because one of them has the “correct” interests and the other doesn’t so Arya wishes to be like Sansa in a way Sansa doesn’t exactly wish to be like Arya, but the core desire is truly the same: I want to be close to my sister.
