As most would have seen by now, a new interview with GRRM was published on January 15th, 2026. The interview contained a number of revelations, but perhaps the most shocking one concerned Sansa’s arc in his ASOIAF series. During the interview, he casually dropped the following comment:
“I was going to kill more people,” he muses. “Not the ones they killed [in the show]. They made it more of a happy ending. I don’t see a happy ending for Tyrion. His whole arc has been tragic from the first. I was going to have Sansa die, but she’s been so appealing in the show, maybe I’ll let her live …”
Many people have been shocked by this comment; by the notion that GRRM could so casually remark on killing off a major POV character like Sansa, especially after the abuse she has suffered and the tragedies that have already befallen her family in the books. Some have suggested that GRRM was trolling, but the remark may be far more revealing than it first appears. Not because it is cruel or flippant, but because it may expose a fundamental tension between how GRRM imagined Sansa’s story functioning in the books and how it was ultimately resolved on television.
That tension becomes visible in a leaked draft of a later-season script, which offers a rare window into how the show initially conceived of Jon and Sansa as ideological opposites before retreating from that framing.
In the draft script from season 7 (quoted directly):
“Jon and Sansa have a private discussion in Jon’s office. Jon ask’s Sansa what she’s doing. he’s the King in the North, she needs to respect his authority. They skirt around the true tension between them, all is subtext. But her resentment about Jon’s ascendency and her own sidelining come into the fore here. Who won the Battle of the Bastards? A premature cavalry charge? No. She won the Battle of the Bastards, via her connections.
The Northern Lords might choose to reward the foolhardy, but reckless bravery will not win the wars to come. Robb was brave. Ned was brave. Now both of them are shorter by a head. Jon and Sansa need to be smarter.
Like most older brothers, Jon doesn't take his little sister seriously. But not taking Sansa Stark seriously is a grave mistake.
Sansa warns Jon not to underestimate Cersei.”
As viewers will remember, the version of this exchange that ultimately appeared in season 7, episode 1, differs in important ways from this draft. While traces of tension remain, the sharper subtext preserved here, particularly the idea that “Sansa resents Jon’s ascendancy”, was significantly softened, perhaps even eliminated, in the finished episode.
The leaked draft also reveals other significant differences, the most startling of which is that Sansa was, at one point, prepared to kill Arya at Littlefinger’s instigation. Only at the last possible moment do the sisters realize that they are being manipulated and turn against him instead. In the version that ultimately aired, these scenes were edited to suggest - if ambiguously - that Sansa and Arya had been working together to expose Littlefinger from a much earlier point in the plot. This retroactive softening fundamentally alters the nature of the conflict, transforming what was originally conceived as a near-tragic rupture between the sisters into a misdirection aimed at the audience. It is likely for this reason that the Sansa/Arya storyline in season 7 was met with such widespread criticism and ridicule: the tension it depicts is never fully owned or clarified.
Taken together, these revisions help explain why GRRM’s comment lands with such force now. Across multiple episodes, the show walked back a different version of Sansa that was more morally compromising, more politically aggressive, and more sympathetic to Littlefinger. A conflict with Arya that might have ended in tragedy was reframed as a misunderstanding or a performance; ruthless calculations were explained as defensive instincts, and moments of genuine ethical danger were rewritten to preserve Sansa’s essential sympathy. The result is a character whose survival comes to feel more narratively assured (and deserved). When GRRM then suggests that Sansa’s death was once on the table, it clashes not so much with the unknown trajectory of her arc in the books, but with a television version that was seemingly reshaped to make such an ending seem less like mere tragedy and more like gratuitous cruelty.
It’s also worth considering that GRRM himself may not have been entirely settled on Sansa’s fate when he was discussing the story with D&D. Some things must have still been in flux, and Sansa’s arc could have been one of them. At some point, though, the show made a choice to step away from the politically darker version of Sansa in the draft, and lean into a version that was more sympathetic. That choice has shaped how audiences understand her - and why Martin’s comment now feels so surprising.
It is not entirely clear why this darker version of Sansa was ultimately scaled back, but it is clear that it was.
In the final season, Sansa’s actions are consistently framed as protective rather than acquisitive. Her decision to reveal Jon Snow’s Targaryen parentage is presented not as a bid for power, but as a defensive measure; an attempt to shield Jon and the North from Dany’s growing ruthlessness. At no point does Sansa articulate a desire to rule in Jon’s place.
That framing persists through the series’ final sequences. Sansa travels to King’s Landing for the great council and pointedly demands to know why Jon is absent from the summit that will determine the future of the realm. When Jon is ultimately exiled, she apologizes to him, casting the decision not as a political outcome she engineered, but as an unavoidable loss imposed by circumstances beyond her control. “They lost their king,” she says of the North, a line that emphasizes mourning rather than calculation. Her grief is positioned as sincere, not performative; she is shown absorbing the cost of events rather than benefiting from them.
Most tellingly, Jon’s decision to kill Daenerys is explicitly tethered to the fates of Sansa and Arya. The final push does not come from a reckoning with tyranny (though that factors in), but from the immediate threat Daenerys poses to his sisters. The act is framed as an act of protection, and in this sense Jon is preserving the moral integrity he was taught by Ned Stark.
Taken together, these choices represent a decisive softening of Sansa’s earlier proposed trajectory. The version of Sansa hinted at in the season 7 draft - politically ruthless, willing to challenge Jon’s legitimacy, and capable of acting decisively even against her own blood - has been replaced by a figure whose intelligence functions primarily to preserve others rather than to advance herself.
This difference matters. For viewers who read the nuances of Sansa’s final television arc sympathetically, her survival comes to feel like one of the story’s few genuine bright spots, a reassurance that, amid loss and exile, something decent has endured. Set against Jon’s choice and his removal from the world of power, Sansa’s ending can even read as a kind of moral counterweight. In that context, her survival begins to feel not merely earned, but in quiet accord with the bittersweet ending GRRM has long said he wanted to achieve.
