"#um say hello to the 1000th lord commander of the night's watch?" is this your head canon? tell me about it please!
:))) I see it as a bittersweet compromise between the overwhelmingly popular Jaime dying with Cersei in a murder/suicide (or dying, period) and Jaime and Brienne riding together into the sunset of Tarth and having dozens of children (not that there’s anything wrong with wanting that, but it’s a bit too cheesy for me). I’m pretty sure I’ve talked about this before, but basically I feel like the Kingsguard and the Night’s Watch are two sides of the same coin, two complementary facets of the ongoing narrative on honor and vows, heroism and commitment that is a central theme in asoiaf. Both require binding vows that last forever, both forbid marriage, both are pillars of Westeros’s society that spiraled into decline during the centuries, and both will need to be reformed heavily post endgame.
It would be darkly fitting if Jaime escapes the clutches of the Kingsguard (which he entered freely, but too young to be fully aware of what he was signing up for, not unlike Jon with the NW) only for a short while, just enough to have a brief blissful moment with Brienne in the middle of an apocalyptic winter, as the battle rages all around them—and then, when the dust settles and spring comes and he’s miraculously alive, he’s sentenced to join the newly reformed Night’s Watch as a punishment for his past crimes. Essentially trading his white cloak for a black one, vows for other vows. His narrative of honor and oaths would come full circle: he started in a prestigious but corrupt institution at the heart of the realm, ended in the extreme North, the harshest place of Westeros, doing a job that doesn’t win you any honor or glory but matters more than anything else, being a silent shadow protecting the realm when he used to be all shiny white and glittering gold hiding nothing but arrogance and empty pride.
plus I perversely like the idea of Jaime and Brienne being forever cockblocked by oaths lol, never being able to marry (though this runs counter to the tons of marriage foreshadowing in Brienne’s chapters), but hopefully, if Brienne stays in Sansa’s service at Winterfell, able to see each other every now and then. Clandestinely, perhaps.
I don’t think any of this is particularly likely canon wise, I don’t even know if there will be a Night’s Watch post war for the dawn, but hey, I enjoy the idea.
Do you think Sansa will get married on the show? There're theories that she will not get married again and I'm curious about your thoughts. If yes, do you think it'd someone we already know or someone from a small northern house they never presented?
Imo the most likely scenario is that she doesn’t marry again on screen, and that we’re left wondering if she ever will in the future. It’s almost my preferred endgame for Sansa, because you can virtually project anything you want on that blank canvas.
The other possibility is that the show ends with a time jump Rowling-style. In that time jump, I can see Sansa either ruling the North alone as a sort of queen Elizabeth figure (regardless if she’s literally queen, the king/lord of Winterfell’s trusted counselor or just lady of Winterfell) or, yes, married with someone. Whom, I don’t know. Could be someone completely random like Cley Cerwyn, the Umber boy or someone else they never introduced, in which case I don’t think it will be extremely significant from a narrative perspective, more like a footnote to tell us that Sansa’s life is okay.
If it’s a more central character, there aren’t a lot of options left. Sam is with Gilly; Dickon was a VERY viable option but Dany, in her infinite wisdom, fried him (jesus christ Dany do you have EYES). Jorah Mormont, yikes. Robert Arryn, double yikes. Gendry, TRIPLE YIKES (oh dear god, please NO, let Arya/Gendry happen, just do me a favor for once, show). Jaime… as much as I look forward to their interactions, I don’t want him anywhere near Sansa romantically (also because if he has a romantic endgame in his cards, it’s with Brienne).Podrick…. mmmmaaayybe? It’s not like it would be a politically sound match, as Pod is from a minor house, so if they marry it’s probably for love, but do the writers have time to set up a romance for Sansa from scratch? I don’t think so. Still definitely possible, but unsatisfying from a narrative standpoint, imo. (Ditto for Dolorous Edd, Hot Pie, and every other semi-major male character Sansa talked to, like, once at best).
If, on the other hand, Sansa is to end up with someone she’s already had significant interactions with, in a way that doesn’t feel like an afterthought or a footnote, imo it boils down to four characters:
Sandor
Tyrion
Theon
Jon
The show could still be going for a Sansan ending (which is a definite possibility in the books). It’s true that show!Sandor is much older than his book counterpart, but so was Littlefinger, and that didn’t stop the writers from making the romantic/sexual subtext very evident in all his interactions with Sansa. It’s also true that the show has so far done very little to advance this dynamic, even going as far as skipping important sansan scenes from the books altogether, but looking at how j0nerys went from zero to 2000 in a handful of episodes, I would definitely NOT rule Sansan out. Then again, they had many opportunities in season 7 to bring up Sansa in Sandor’s scenes, and yet they specifically chose not to (Sandor discussed Brienne with Tormund during the wight hunt, and Arya with Brienne, when both situations could have easily been used to make him talk about Sansa with people that know her). So, um. Maybe?
Season 7, however, did bring Sansa up in relation to both Tyrion and Theon. We all lol’ed at how Jon goes berserk every time a male character mentions Sansa, but it’s more likely that those scenes were supposed to remind the viewer that Tyrion and Theon HAD meaningful interactions with Sansa, and both saved or protected her in some form.
There’s the question of Tyrion and Sansa’s marriage, which was never explicitly annulled. And a Stark/Lannister endgame union could be what the realm needs to heal the wounds of the war of the five kings. And more than once the show reminded us that Tyrion and Sansa still care and have great esteem for each other. And let’s be real, Tyrion needs to be allowed to have a romantic arc of his own. So Tyrion is definitely an option.
Theon is interesting, because Sansa was given Jeyne Poole’s storyline from the books and there are definitely romantic undertones in Theon/Jeyne. Theon is also more or less Sansa’s age peer (okay, a few years older, but not someone from another generation altogether), and, if the Iron Islands remain a kindgom in their own right again post WftD, a prince (as queen Yara’s brother). Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, the show gave Theon and Sansa a few moments of physical closeness and tenderness, like:
(x)
that can absolutely count as set up for a future romantic development. Of course, show!Theon’s genital mutilation isn’t a secret for anyone in the show, and it’s really unlikely that he’s able to make little squid-Starklings with Sansa (though it’s not impossible for him to have sex, as Grey Worm and Missandei amply demonstrated). And I think ensuring a future for house Stark is a primary concern for Sansa, on top of the fact that she dreams of children in the books. Then again, Theon/Sansa might still happen if the survival of house Stark is guaranteed by Arya’s, Jon’s, or Bran’s offspring (I think nothing unequivocally proves that Bran is sterile or can’t have children).
Finally, Jon. Who is in the unique and quite ironic position of being both the LEAST likely candidate from a rational standpoint, and the male character who had the most intense, layered, sustained dynamic with show!Sansa, especially now that Littlefinger is gone.
I personally had some small hope for endgame!Jonsa BEFORE j0nerys happened. I no longer do, because I don’t see how Jon can be realistically extricated from his romance with Daenerys in a non-yikesy way (and for the record: Dany’s convenient death in the WftD or, worse, in childbirth, Dany being revealed to be “a villain”, the extreme side of the underc*ver jon spec, these are all things I consider extra yikesy). But “that would be gross” isn’t enough of a reason to rule something out in Game of Thrones. If there’s anything the Winterfell plot taught me, is that no character is immune to bad writing choices that will make him look like an arsehole. Not even Jon.
So I could, very distantly and very hypothetically, see Sansa end up marrying her now-widely-accepted-half-Targaryen-cousin Jon in a “(x) years later” time jump, if Jon’s relationship with Dany goes sideways for whatever reason (hopefully not her death, but again, not impossible, considering the sort of material we’re dealing with). And of course if Jon survives, which isn’t particularly likely either.
And that’s it. I mean, these are the options that would mean something to me. I’m sure there are other possibilities especially among the Northern lords—how old is Gawen Glover in the show?—and they can pull virtually any new character out of their asses and make him relevant enough to become Sansa’s eleventh hour love interest. As long as it’s not Gendry or fucking Euron Greyjoy and Sansa is happy, I can live with anything. But unless it’s done spectacularly well, I doubt I’m going to care.
You can't compare Suki to Sansa. Suki is the main protagonist, True Blood is based mostly on her & who will she end up with. That's why her being with some random guy sucked. But Sansa's story is about her survival, taking control of her life, reclaiming her home & her identity after being used & forced to get married twice. Which is I assume if her story involves another marriage(that's a big if imo) it'd be for her desire to have a family and someone who isn't high born who'll take her name
That’s a fair point, but why does it have to be someone whom she’s never interacted with in the narrative? These are fictional stories. What matters is how you tell them, how you convey them to the readers, what you choose to focus on and what you choose to leave aside.
Sansa ending up with a low(er) born rando who takes her name conveys well the idea that she’s marrying for the sake of having a family in itself and not for politics or prestige or other factors, and also that she’s prioritizing her agency and her goals over everything else, which I can get behind. But what about the other threads in her narrative? What about her desire to love and be loved for who she is? What narrative resonance would Complete Rando loving her have, if it’s not shown on page how he grew to love her for who she is? How do we know he does? Why should we care that he does if we don’t know him, or his interactions with Sansa prior to the endgame? What about her narrative of looking past appearances to see the real beauty and honor underneath? How would it apply to Complete Rando if we don’t know what his true beauty is and how his true honor manifested? How will a random character truly know who the real Sansa is, if they’ve never known who she was before all went to shit in her life, never had the privilege to witness her evolution, never saw how she developed her strengths and came into the person she is now? If Sansa were a real person, it would be certainly possible for her to develop an intimacy with someone she met later in her life, it happens all the time in real life. But Sansa is a fictional character in a fictional story, so why shouldn’t we see how this intimacy is born?
I guess I also dislike the idea of heroine x random guy because it focuses more on the performance of normalcy (i.e. conveying the idea that Sansa has healed enough to perform a “normal” life and a “normal” marriage, regardless who her partner is) than on the existence of a real bond, of real feelings; it wouldn’t be a convincing HEA to me if I’m not shown that these feelings exist and how they were born in the first place, as I deeply dislike the idea of “settling” (romantically).
However, I definitely agree with you that Sookie’s narrative is a different kind of narrative—it belongs to a wholly different genre, even. While romance plays a big part in Sansa’s story, Sansa is not a romantic heroine, and her endgame isn’t bound to be romantically satisfying for the reader. So while I’m not a fan of her ending up with a complete random guy for my own individual emotional reasons, I agree this is an entirely possible outcome both in the show and in the books, especially in light of the “bittersweet” ending we were promised.
If Dany ends up surviving the whole thing, what I could see is a similar thing to Frodo from LOTR especially if she gets pregnant. Dany deciding that she is too exhausted from all that's happened and either goes back to the house with the red door in Braavos or sails west of westeros to raise her child with a simple life and tells Tyrion to enact their dream to break the wheel in her place since she shared it with him and we've heard him mention it multiple times that it's his dream as well now.
Yes, I think if the three heroes survive the WftD, they won’t go back to what they were doing when the war started as if never happened—that they’ll come back exhausted and in desperate need of a place to heal. I think the house with the red door is more like a metaphor for “home” (a place that Dany has never really known, but which she longs for all the same, so she might want to go back not to that house specifically, but to wherever her heart feels at home). Dany sailing west of Westeros, whatever she finds there (Valinor?) is also intriguing, as it’s the idea teased by the show that Westeros might turn into an elective monarchy if not an actual democracy.
In any case I can live with a “bittersweet” ending that doesn’t involve the 3 heads actually dying, but rather stepping back and sort of retiring while the even younger generation organizes a new world following their steps.
I’ve always thought it likely. I think Terros or whatever you want to call it is going through a resurgence of magic (both the ice and the fire kind), but it’s going to be temporary. The dragons came back as their natural enemy, the Others, are stirring beyond the Wall. It’s like nature spontaneously seeking balance. Once the Others will be defeated again, the dragons will also have to cease to exist to maintain the balance. They’re too dangerous, too lethal, and their existence gives an unfair amount of power to those who are able to control them, as shown by the history of the Targaryen dynasty in Westeros (and the dragonlords of Valyria before them).
But I’m not 100% committed to it. I think the Others will be stopped, but not completely defeated, so they’ll come back again, be it in a hundred or a thousand years. By the same logic it’s possible that at least a dragon survives. Or lives long enough to lay an egg or more, and that these eggs, if not Dany’s dragons themselves, will represent hope for the future.
So everyone, me included, just assumes that Tyrion will be the third head of the dragon, but what will happen in s7e6 has got me thinking. Does a character have to ride a dragon in order to be one of the three heads? Grrm has said the third head in not necessarily a Targ, but how can there be a third dragon rider if that thing happens?
No, I don’t think you need to ride a dragon in order to *be* a head of the dragon.
to expand on that old post, Show!Dany—unlike book!Dany—seems to be in perfect control of all the dragons, not just Drogon whom she rides. They all answer to her dracarys! like perfectly trained puppies, which pretty much removes the need for other dragonriders. It’s still possible that show!Jon will eventually ride a dragon (especially since HIS magical creature seems to have gone M.I.A. without any logical reason), but I can just as well see Dany remaining the only actual dragonrider of the lot. I think the show simplified things a lot here, probably for budget reasons (note how there hasn’t been any mention of the 3HotD in the show that I can recall, whereas the concept of TPTWP was introduced).
In the books, though, how will Dany get her dragons under control is a pressing matter. She finally bonded with Drogon, but the other two have grown wild, and she’s going to have to find a rider for each if she wants to control them—even more so when Euron’s dragonbinder comes into the picture. Maybe the people who will actually end up riding Viserion and Rhaegal will be the same who are the heads of the dragon; maybe not. I can picture Dany be the actual dragonrider, Jon the one who leads humanity on the field, Ghost at his side, and Tyrion the political/military mastermind behind them.
do you think when everyone is fighting the others beyond the wall, sansa will also be there? i don't see the point of her staying in WF since most people will go to fight but i also don't know what she'll do at the wall in terms of fighting
hey, have a look at the post I’ve just reblogged.
(I don’t think the fight against the Others will be limited to the land beyond the Wall; I think the Wall will either fall or be breached and the Others will invade which means the entire continent—at least the region north of the Neck—will be in serious danger. If that’s the case, then Sansa will be relatively close to the fighting even if she stays in Winterfell. Winterfell in itself is extra relevant because its thick walls and hot springs are the perfect place to gather as many people as you can, protect them from the cold and from the Others, and organize a defense. Sansa won’t do any actual fighting because she isn’t trained to do so, but she can inspire people—especially women, children, the sick and the old and everyone who can’t fight—to hold on and stay alive and buy time until the three heads defeat the enemy.)
