Robert Rodriguez
Game of Thrones, TV Yearbook

Sansa Stark Had the Sharpest Tongue of the TV Season

She told a lot of people to sit down in the HBO hit's final season

TV Yearbook

All hail Sansa Stark, First of her Name, Winner of the Battle of the Bastards, Settler of Scores, Fashion Icon, Queen in the North, and Deliverer of Hard Truths.

Game of Thrones' eighth and final season was an absolute bloodbath, with many characters losing their lives and personalities in the process of taking down the Night King and the two Mad Queens. However, Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner) remained mostly unscathed in the end, even if she didn't get as much power as she might have deserved. In fact, hers may have been the most consistent character arc of the entire season, as she spent nearly all her time doing what she does best: telling it like it is.

No one was spared from the Sansa Stark Truth Tour, either. Throughout the season, she consistently and methodically challenged those around her to rethink their perspectives, no matter their station. Neither the Mother of Dragons nor her own flesh and blood avoided getting an earful in Game of Thrones' final stretch. Like the North itself, Sansa simply refused to kneel.

She wasn't unkind, of course. Just ask Theon (Alfie Allen), Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage), and The Hound (Rory McCann). But after spending most of her childhood tormented by evil outsiders who trampled all over her homestead, Sansa was understandably wary of giving power over herself to someone who might do it again. The pack had survived thus far, and she wanted to keep it that way. Arya (Maisie Williams) and Jon had their fighting skills, and Bran (Isaac Hempstead-Wright) could see almost anything -- except what was west of Westeros, of course -- but Sansa had her words. Her careful, biting words, and she used them flawlessly this season.

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Sansa's darkest sentiments were saved for Daenerys (Emilia Clarke). In the season premiere, Dany rode into Winterfell feeling pretty good about the optics of her sprawling military parade and the gasps her dragons drew from the crowd of gobsmacked Northerners... until she met the Lady of Winterfell. Instead of returning Daenerys' flattery about her beauty, Sansa looked her up and down with that signature sneer and almost choked on the obligatory words.

Her contempt for Daenerys was laid bare from word one. Even when the Dragon Queen got her to drop her guard just a touch, by acquiescing to her decision about Jaime (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and expressing her true devotion to Jon Snow's (Kit Harington) cause, Sansa remained inflexible about her demands for freedom.

The other party to receive the bulk of her sass this season was Tyrion Lannister, whom she was almost chuffed to discover had fallen victim to Cersei's (Lena Headey) lies about dedicating Lannister troops to join the Great War.

Tyrion's been on the receiving end of a lot of insults, but that one had to hurt. That mused insult also gave Sansa the intellectual upper hand in her subsequent conversations with Tyrion. She was the one to shut down Tyrion's moment of misplaced bravado in the crypts. He would die if he joined the fight, she was sure, no matter how many battles he'd been a party to before.

And when the snow settled after the Battle of Winterfell, Sansa turned Tyrion into an unwitting conduit for information that could undermine Dany's ascension of the Iron Throne. Dany was right to surmise that by telling Tyrion of Jon's true heritage, Sansa all but ensured that word would get out. Dany recognized Sansa's shrewdness, even if no one else did.

Sansa can also be credited with sickest burn of the entire season, which says a lot considering how much dracarys action went down. At the tail end, when Edmure Tully (Tobias Menzies) tried to shoot his shot at becoming the new King of the Seven Kingdoms, Sansa interrupted his embarrassing speech with three words that were probably more painful than all his time spent in the Frey dungeons.

In the end, when Sansa's subterfuge ultimately led to a desirable result, with Daenerys out of the picture and a Stark taking the (more proverbial) throne, she finally got the chance to secure the North's independence from the rest of Westeros, and she took it, even if it meant seceding from her own brother's kingdom.

At the end of Game of Thrones' penultimate season, Sansa promised Littlefinger (Aidan Gillen) she would never forget the lessons he taught her, and as every one of her lines in the show's final episodes showed, the North remembered.

The show ended on what was probably Sansa's favorite line of all, though, even if she didn't say it herself.