Sansa begins the story by contradicting the Identity theme. During the Lady fiasco, Sansa betrays Arya in order to preserve her relationship with Joffrey. She’s punished for it immediately when Lady is sentenced to death, ironically in place of the direwolf of the sister that she betrayed. Symbollically, when your heritage is that of the wolf, it seems like betrayal of your pack will cost you dearly in this story.
Sansa betrays her pack again when she tries to leverage the Queen’s authority over her father’s, in order to preserve her dream of marrying the handsome prince.
Let me be clear that Sansa’s dreams of marrying a handsome prince, starting a family in a castle and having babies are all part of a very realistic and healthy dream. There is nothing naive about Sansa’s ideal.
To be fair to Sansa, a young person should be able to trust the adults around her. Especially civilized and courtly adults such as these are supposed to be.
No, Sansa’s naivety is only a crime in that it causes her to forget what is most important in life. In the vein of her Stark identity, she has betrayed the pack. In the vein of her Tully identity, family is supposed to come before all else.
To take a guess at the bigger picture of Sansa’s story, I think in order for her to survive the story and redeem herself, Sansa is forced to voluntarily corrupt her ideal. She must marry a series of undesirable men in order to climb to a position of power from which she can rescue what remains of the family that she betrayed.
Sansa begins the story believing that beautiful people are good people and ugly people are evil and/or worthless people. It’s most obvious in her relationship with the Hound, but this moral deficiency is seeded more subtly throughout AGOT. One example is Sansa’s continued trust of Cersei even after the Lady incident. Another examples is Sansa’s odd lack of sympathy for Ser Hugh. Ser Hugh’s appearance is withheld from the reader until a later book, where he is revealed to have been ugly.
This deficiency reminds me of a comment from GRRM in interviews in which he is critical of the fantasy genre for making its good guys pretty and its bad guys ugly.
I think Sansa is the least likely character to die in this story. I would love to do a Sansa only re-read because her moral deficiency is unique in its division as well as its degree. I suspect there might be a lot of hidden things to find in her chapters with that beautiful vs ugly distortion in mind.
Sansa is also really attuned to appearances like clothes and decor. She might see things in the environment that other characters miss, whether she’s aware of the implications of them or not.
Apples and Dragons 