My name is junie b jones and the B stands for back on my bullshit.
but im not tryna derail at all from op because @bastardofharrenhal is spitting straight fire AGAIN. but I would like to hop this train and add to the discussion because disability as a whole when it comes to analysis of this series is severely lacking and the ableism within this community is astronomical. (mine included bc i deadass forgor to mention tyrion in my discussion of physical disability in the series yikes dawg)
Sansa Starkās loss of Lady, and with that, her ability to warg, operates as a thinly veiled metaphor for the experience of the onset of an invisible disability in a world that puts your physical capabilities at the top of the list of your valuation as a human. A sudden, violent, and isolating disconnection from an integral sense of embodiment, autonomy and belonging that people who possess it naturally take for granted because it's never been challenged.
There's something to be said about how the only visibly-identified-as-disabled starkling is Bran and the violent and visual (we literally watch it happen repeatedly in aching detail) onset of his loss of mobility and autonomy is essentially what awakened his conscious ability to warg (that, and Jojen + Meera as guidance who are also part of the visible disability narrative but this is about sansa ok)
I've talked alot about how Sansa is the only starkling who was physically severed from her culture and her identity and -- for the most part -- barred in the narrative from ever getting in touch with it again. Being disabled is part of her culture, part of her identity, and she can't even look that fact in the face. To me, sansa reads on page as suuuuuuuuch a neurodivergent queer disabled theatre kid that it's so difficult to see her as anything else. The justice complex? The obsession with doing things right? The insistence on clarification? Fixations on routines and predictability? The almost sterile repetition of courtesies and social reciprocity? Baby girl is neurospicy, removed from any support system, abused and beaten and sexually assaulted, othered in a foreign land with different customs and cultures, and she has no say in it.
When someone becomes disabled, specifically through an invisible condition like chronic pain conditions, sensory loss, or a neurological difference, they often experience a fracture in their sense of embodiment. The body (or mind) ceases to respond in the way it once did. The world continues to move around them as if nothing has changed, while inside everything has.
Sansaās separation from Lady reflects this feeling of isolation. Her siblings still feel their wolves with those instinctive connections and heightened senses, while Sansa moves through life missing something she cannot name but gravely still feels.
This is a sort of mental texture of invisible disability: a constant estrangement from what everyone else around you seems to experience effortlessly. Itās not inherently visible, so others rarely acknowledge it even when we force them to look directly at it, but it shapes our every interaction with the world.
i mean think of the social aftermath of Ladyās death. Sheās marked by absence of so much, even among her own family. Others view her as lesser, softer, more naive, when really!!! sheās simply trying to survive without the naturally occurring anchor everyone else still has. It's overwhelmingly alienating, and that's without adding the contributing factors of her physical loss of family and the abuse she endures at the hands of the lannisters.
how sansa exists in this world after the loss of Lady shows how invisible disabilities are often perceived socially as a failure of will, or a personal flaw, or a burden on others who can just get over it or always willing to offer a "Well, have you tried [xyz]?" treatments, rather than an integral or existential loss of a necessary portion of the human existence. If you can't be exceptional in your disability, then you're useless in the eyes of a society that focuses inherently on what your body can offer in profit, not what you can contribute to community. ("Even Helen Keller could fly a plane! Why do you need preferred seating?" - actual quote from someone i used to work for when I reminded them that I am deaf)
Sansa is expected to perform normalcy in a world that has violently stripped away all of her core supports.
Thereās also a vicious irony here: Ladyās death is imposed upon her as punishment-- just like Yeva said above! It wasn't fate. What killed Lady was a corruption of power, and cersei's sick obsession with her lack of a penis and therefore power in an overwhelmingly male-centric society (Freud has entered the chat but I have already banned him and his sock puppets don't worry about it) Itās a patriarchal act of enforced docility. That too sheds some light on the experience of disability in a society where your autonomy is often curtailed by systems or people who claim to āknow best.ā (In this sense, an argument can be made that sansa could also act as an analog for the intersex experience, I would love to see that write-up and I am grossly inexperienced and uneducated on the intersex-lens, so if anyone does that tag me!!!)
What makes Sansaās arc within the narrative so remarkable 2 me as a disabled person is that she learns to live through her loss, not by regaining what was taken-- Not by any means!!! She doesn't replace her loss of a limb so to speak, but transforms herself around it.
She becomes delicately attuned to the subtleties of human behavior through her abuse, reading tone, power dynamics, and social complications with preternatural precision. Where her siblings rely on instinct, she cultivates social intelligence as survival.
This adaptation 2 me reflects how many people with invisible disabilities can develop heightened sensitivities [sic], awareness, and creative adaptation strategies to cope and navigate a world not built for them-- and most the time vehemently against them. (For example, being deaf has made me more visually aware of my surroundings. I cannot rely on my lack of a sense for survival, so I have adapted to the best of my ability through experience and practice to rely in the same way on another, easier-to-access-for-me sense!) Her warging is not gone in the literal sense (but I agree with Yeva that if we ever see her warg into another animal sansa's arc would feel cheapened to some degree) itās transmuted. She learns to āwargā into her environment instead of an animal.
To live politically, socially, and emotionally with a sharpened inner sight.
If branās story is about transcendence through connection, Sansaās is about transcendence through disconnection. Now, i use the term transcendence loosely here because we shouldn't be putting pressure on disabled people to be exceptional. You can be disabled and just...a dude. a guy, if you will.
And that's exactly what sansa is doing. She's just being a little guy. a little dude. living with the trauma of her abuse, her disability, the violence of it all on top of being removed from her culture and forced into a different idenity that metaphorically hacked off her limbs so she could fit in that perfect little box that was premade for her generations prior to her birth simply by the nature of her birth status by gender, by lineage, and by ableist expectations.
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