“Game of Thrones”: The magic of the Starks is survival
Many of us have had our Sansa Stark moment. Perhaps it hit you in the presence of family. Maybe yours struck while in the company of friends. But we’ve all witnessed or experienced what must have washed over Lady Stark (Sophie Turner) on a recent “Game of Thrones” episode, shortly after she reunited with her younger siblings Bran (Isaac Hempstead Wright) and Arya (Maisie Williams).
It’s that feeling that dawns on a person when she realizes that, despite the ways fate has twisted her, despite the constant drone of whispered curses from those demons nestled in the memory’s crevices, compared to the rest of her relatives, she’s the Marilyn Munster of the bunch. The normal one.
The weight of that knowledge can be suffocating.
The seventh season shows Sansa Stark coming into her own, insisting on being heard and respected by Jon Snow (Kit Harrington), who she still believes to be her illegitimate half-brother. At his side Sansa has reclaimed her agency and asserts herself as a leader familiar with the enemy’s tactics. Where Jon preaches diplomacy, Sansa is not having it. And when Sansa was left in charge of Winterfell, she rose to fulfill her duty by preparing for the terrors she knew were coming. She was on top of things and in charge for the first time in her tortured life.
Then her siblings come home.
First, Bran arrives with Meera Reed (Ellie Kendrick), and soon enough everybody can see he’s not at all himself. He confirms this, announcing there is no Brandon Stark anymore, only the Three-Eyed Raven, and soon after Meera leaves in tears declaring, “You died in that cave.”
Not long afterward comes Arya, whom the dimwitted guards at the gate mistake for a waif. She gets into Winterfell anyway, and when Sansa asks her what she’s been up to she calmly replies, in so many words, “Oh, well . . . training, chillin’, killin’. You know, doing how I do. Doing me!”
Sansa has a lot to process and no time in which to do it.
This seventh season’s plots revolve around survival more intensely than those of the previous season of “Game of Thrones,” especially among key characters. When Jaime (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and Cersei (Lena Headey) reunite in the season premiere Cersei draws strength from knowing they’re all that’s left of the Lannisters — as far as the two of them know — while Jaime sees this as a warning. Daenerys (Emilia Clarke), meanwhile, makes a grand speech in the third episode enumerating all she’s endured.
“I spent my life in foreign lands. So many men have tried to kill me, I don’t even remember all of their names,” she smoothly tells Jon Snow as he stands before her in Dragonstone’s throne room. “I have been sold like brood mare. I have been . . . raped, and defiled. Do you know what kept me standing through all those years in exile? Faith. Not in any gods. Not in myths or legends. In myself. In Daenerys Targaryen.”
She speaks the truth: The Mother of Dragons suffers mightily in earlier seasons. No need to urge her on;…
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