Producers Talk Changes to Sansa’s Storyline

Attention Book Readers: You, with all your books, know nothing.

Warning: SPOILERS abound for “High Sparrow” as well as for A Dance With Dragons.

That was the message last night as Littlefinger’s decision to head west, instead of east to The Fingers, led to the place we all feared it might: to Winterfell and an engagement that made Sansa’s courtship with Joffrey seem like child’s play. On the show, Sansa’s choice to reveal her true identity to the lords of the Vale back in “The Mountain and the Viper” has pulled her completely off the path the character took on the page, where she remains innocently ensconced in the Vale even to this day, pretending to be Alayne Stone while taking a second year course in playing the game of thrones.

I suppose one could at least argue that the journey she’s taking on the show, which involves getting engaged to the infamously sadistic Ramsay Bolton, is far more interesting than hanging around the Vale. Entertainment Weekly sat down with the  producers and asked them how long they’d been planning to make this change. Interestingly, executive producer David Benioff said the team had been thinking about it since before A Dance of Dragons was even released back in July of 2011.

[I]t’s because of Turner’s strength, Benioff continued, that it made sense to give Sansa a dramatic storyline this season and to use Ramsay’s engagement for that very purpose. In fact, the showrunners first thought about putting Sansa and Ramsay together back when they were writing season 2. “We really wanted Sansa to play a major part this season,” Benioff said. “If we were going to stay absolutely faithful to the book, it was going to be very hard to do that. There was as subplot we loved from the books, but it used a character that’s not in the show.” 

A subplot they loved? Let us be clear, the storyline at issue was voted one of the Most Tragic In Westeros, and that’s saying something. What Benioff is likely talking about is the “Fake Arya” storyline from A Dance with Dragons, which involves Sansa’s friend Jeyne Poole being passed off as “Arya Stark,” who hadn’t been seen since Ned’s beheading years ago. “Arya” is engaged to Ramsay Bolton so the Boltons can cement their hold on the North. After marrying her, Ramsay loses interest in using Theon as a plaything and turns his attention to his new bride, who he tries to torture and teach to become someone she is not, on pain of flaying. I suppose it’s a meaty plot, but it’s one of those weird off-shoots that’s hard to care about outside of how it affects Theon, because we aren’t that familiar with Poole. Sansa, on the other hand, ups the stakes of this game substantially.

Producer Bryan Cogman went into the logic behind the decision to merge Jeyne’s role with Sansa’s.

“You have this storyline with Ramsay. Do you have one of your leading ladies—who is an incredibly talented actor who we’ve followed for five years and viewers love and adore—do it? Or do you bring in a new character to do it? To me, the question answers itself: You use the character the audience is invested in.” 

This has been the show’s MO for many seasons now. Take, for instance, Melisandre pursuing Gendry to gain Robert’s blood, instead of introducing Edric Storm, another one of Robert’s bastards who happened to already live on Dragonstone. So on many levels, it makes sense to condense a story that isn’t going anywhere into a story that has intensely dramatic moments to play. Well, maybe the word “dramatic” doesn’t quite cover it as well as “horrific” and “internet breaking” do.

And this, as a book reader, is the part that upsets me. I understand intellectually why this change is happening. But of all the characters in all of Westeros, Sansa knows the terror of being engaged to a monster, and the helplessness of the patriarchal society that gives him the right to treat her like she’s his possession. Wasn’t one monster enough?

EW tries to comfort those of us who know the horrors Jeyne Poole faced in Ramsay’s bedroom with a reminder that “just because the writers are mining another character’s storyline for Sansa, it doesn’t mean what happens next on HBO’s series will be the same as it was for that other character in the books…. The showrunners could have more twists planned.” But that’s small comfort when we know that Sophie Turner, Iwan Rheon and Alfie Allen have all been unanimous in insisting that there will be a terrible scene this season, one Turner rated “a six on the GoT Scale,” one Rheon said he didn’t want to go through with, and one Allen said would make Theon and Ramsay the most hated men in Westeros. We can be pretty certain now that they are all referring to the same scene. And if it’s anything pulled from the Jeyne Poole storyline, it could run from the wedding night—where Jeyne is cut out of her clothes, whipped, and then sexually assaulted by both Theon and Ramsay—to some of the stuff Ramsay does to her off screen, including forcing her to copulate with a dog.

Again, I say, Wasn’t One Monster Enough?

The only hope we have for these things not to come to pass with Sansa is that, unlike Jeyne, she is *really* a Stark. Team Servants are on her side, and they, like the rest of the North, remember. And Brienne and Pod are heading to Winterfell, and may perhaps stage a rescue. Which would be good, considering that the man who rescues Jeyne, Mance Rayder, has shuffled off this mortal coil and joined the wildling choir invisible.

• Published on 04/27/2015 at 4:00 PM CDT
• Last updated on 10/21/2016 at 1:05 PM CDT