We Know No King But The King In The North

lmao pressed much?

I don’t really have a stance on Jonsa happening in the books. I enjoyed the idea in the show because Kit Harrington and Sophie Turner have really good chemistry and it seemed like the show was intentionally playing that up.

Jon and Sansa have not interacted in the books so GRRM could take that dynamic any number of ways. I like the hypothetical idea of two people like Jon and Sansa being a romantic pairing because they’re extremely similar and want the same things out of life. But I don’t read ASOIAF for any particular ship or theory. I trust GRRM and more than anything just want to get to read his story.

I don’t want to condemn all SanSan shippers, because there are some whose content I really enjoy as long as it’s not about Sandor, but the ship is inherently abusive. Most of the tolerable ones always make it clear that they don’t ship the current cannon, just a version of the characters many years in the future, but that doesn’t change the fact that Sandor was making sexual advances at Sansa before she even had her first period. (I’ve also noticed that some SanSan shippers were victims of a similar dynamic in their real life, and everyone processes that trauma different.)

Trying to unpack the psychology of SanSan shippers is a whole mess.

Part of it is definitely the ingrained response readers have to tropes. The instinctive part of a reader’s brain goes “Beauty and the Beast = Romantic” because that narrative has been told hundreds of times. Sansa’s clearly a beauty and Sandor is clearly a beast, so your brain on autopilot does a lot of work to get you to romance.

Then there’s the fundamental reason that Beauty and the Beast is such an enduring trope to begin with - the empathy response to an outcast. As long as the narrative frames an outsider sympathetically, people want to root for them. GRRM’s narrative wants you to sympathize with Sandor, so people go 10 steps further and turn him into the hero. In general, popular fiction is absolute trash at giving readers shades of grey - every character is either Good Guy or Bad Guy. But GRRM’s story exist solely in grey and readers aren’t used to that. Because he’s asking you to sympathize with Sandor, people’s brain consuming fiction on autopilot goes “that means he’s Good Guy” and warp the narrative around that. 

People also mistake Sansa’s empathy for romantic feeling. Part of that is GRRM’s fault because he’s intentionally tying trauma to romance in Sansa’s story for Thematic™ reasons. But fans of SanSan intentionally take their relationship out of the broader context of Sansa’s narrative. If taken alone, it may seem like there’s romantic coding in their interactions. But Sandor exists to perpetuate a pattern - he’s just one in a long line of Joffrey, Dontos, and Littlefinger. 

It’s impossible to ignore the misogyny at play as well. The Lolita narrative is weirdly appealing and enduring to a lot of people (the Hollywood bastardized version anyway, not Nabokov’s). So many pop culture “love stories” are just shitty old men abusing young girls, so I guess SanSan doesn’t feel out of place.