Game of Thrones: Sansa's Wariness of the New Ruler Actually Makes a Lot of Sense

Warning: Major spoilers for the Game of Thrones series finale ahead!

The game of thrones has been played and a winner has emerged, but not in the way anyone probably expected. By the time the dust (and ash) settled on the Game of Thrones series finale, a new king was on the throne. After the fall of Daenerys and the arrest of Jon, a council assembles, consisting of all the surviving heads of great houses in Westeros; their task is to figure out what to do next. Tyrion is the first to suggest who the new king should be: Bran Stark, whom he believes could unite the people and serve the kingdom well. One by one, they vote and agree to install Bran as king. But there's one unexpected holdout: Sansa, the Lady of the North and Bran's own sister.

It's not actually as bad as it sounds, though! Sansa has no real opposition to her brother becoming king. At first, she's in protective big-sister mode: she's concerned because she knows Bran doesn't actually want to be king, and his injury means he can't have children — and we've all seen what happens when kings don't have proper heirs. When it becomes apparent that those things don't matter to Bran or to the council, she seems supportive enough of the idea of her brother becoming king in general.

Her real issue is with the idea of Bran being king over a kingdom that includes the North. Sansa, who has essentially led the Northerners for the past few years (even if Jon was technically the King in the North), points out that the North has lost too much to the wars of Westeros and that they have no interest in pledging fealty to the southern crown again, even if that king is a Stark. She declares instead that the North will remain independent, as it was for centuries before. And, by the final moments of the series, we see Bran hailed as the king of the Six Kingdoms, while Sansa officially takes the crown of the seventh kingdom, formally crowned Queen in the North. With the Stark siblings ruling the realm, maybe the future of Westeros is brighter after all.