When we last saw Sansa Stark on HBO's Game of Thrones, she had donned her "dark Sansa" attire and seemed committed to playing this whole "game of thrones" thing people are always blabbing on about.
It's much different from the Sansa we've read about in George R.R. Martin's books. Swept away from King's Landing by Littlefinger, book Sansa is little more than a captive, a pawn in Littlefinger's grand schemes. Show Sansa, however, looks to be moving along a much different path, one that is sure to have huge consequences in the Game of Thrones world.
Spoilers ahead for A Dance With Dragons and potentially the fifth season of the show. You've been warned!
The last couple of trailers have definitely shown Sansa and Littlefinger traveling to the former Stark stronghold of Winterfell. One shot explicitly shows Sansa in the castle's crypts, which we've seen in previous episodes of the series. Sansa has yet to return to Winterfell in the books, though it is clear Littlefinger wants to take control of Winterfell and the North for himself.
However, Littlefinger and Sansa traveling to Winterfell is more than a little problematic. In the books, the Boltons have taken control of the castle as the new wardens of the North. It is there that Ramsay Bolton marries a girl named Jeyne Poole, who the Boltons want everybody to believe is the long-lost Arya Stark, in order to solidify the Boltons' power of the northern lords.
So if the Boltons control Winterfell, how exactly is Sansa getting into Wintefell's crypt? Surely, she can't just walk in. There are a couple of possibilities: One is that Littlefinger will arrange for Sansa to marry Ramsay Bolton, replacing Jeyne Poole's storyline. This would be a major departure from the books, but the show hasn't been shy about taking plot points from minor book characters and incorporating them into the plots of major ones. Another possibility is Sansa and Littlefinger are simply attending the wedding between Ramsay and an Arya-wannabe, or maybe they just snuck in.
It has long been theorized that Littlefinger wants to use Sansa (possibly through marriage) to take control of the North. A marriage of Sansa to the Boltons would be one step toward that goal, though it is probably the worst possible thing that could happen to Sansa outside of being flat-out killed. Actually, death would probably be preferable to her spending time with Ramsay Bolton.
The fifth season of Game of Thrones will be one of the show's most interesting yet, as the showrunners begin to move ahead of Martin's own books and start to forge their own path towards a climactic conclusion. Check out the latest trailer for the show below, and be sure to read up on a major fan theory that Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss seem to keep hinting at.
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