Sansa x Jon v. Arya x Jon
As per my usual, I am just going to put some random thoughts out there and like darts at a board hope some of them stick in the wall. A while back Vanity Fair had a piece about how Sansa and Jon would end up together. Like most things I read, I was skeptical at first and became more open to the idea as I read. Though their relationship is fraught while at Winterfell, Sansa and Jon do think of one another. As many an excellent blogger has already written about at length, Sansa and Jon associate each other with family and home. Sansa is especially focused on what makes family and, by the time of her exile and assumption of the Alayne Stone identity, sees Jon as a kindred spirit. Jon does not think of Sansa as frequently, but when he does there is no ill will. Even though he remembers Sansa treating him as the bastard son, those memories are a childhood reminiscence rather than a remembered trauma.
An important factor in their possible future relationship is that they do not share the extremely strong sibling bond that Jon and Arya have. Those two are almost constantly thinking about one another. I for one do not see those recurring “stick them with the pointy end”/tousling of hair thoughts as anything other than sibling bonds. There is the sister-brother relationship that would act as a barrier to any kind of romantic connection once the two had reached sexual-psychological maturity. Arya was around ten when they parted. She is fixed at that age in Jon’s thoughts. This is not to argue that I ship Arya and Jon as anything other than siblings. If this was GRRM’s intent, I must have missed it.
There is one other factor in the Sansa x Jon dynamic. Jon appears to have a thing for redheads. In the Freudian analysis, this would make sense as Jon would be subconsciously killing his father, Ned, to marry his red-headed mother, Catelyn. That they are cousins makes it better, but still rates high on the ick factor given that he is looking Littlefinger-like in replacing Catelyn with her daughter, but this is a pretty screwy planet so maybe it is reasonable. Ygritte “kissed by fire” is Jon’s pattern and GRRM himself seems to like redheads.
As readers of my previous posts know, I do not think Sansa will end up with Jon and Jon with Sansa. First and foremost, you are going to have to convince me that Tyrion will somehow be out of the picture and that is a tough sell. Barring the High Septon annulling the marriage, Tyrion and Sansa are bound to one another. Second, GRRM likes Tyrion too much to disregard his potential as a good husband for Sansa and show too much understanding of development to not have Sansa come to adulthood with a better appreciation of Tyrion as a husband. Ableism the prejudice is not GRRM’s thing. Last, but certainly not least, I don’t see a Targaryen/Stark-Stark pairing as the political marriage likely to stabilize Westeros. Once again, on all of this, reasonable may disagree.
hi, do you remember the title of the Vanity Fair article you mention??
